34. Working life.
You remember, don’t you?
How you left school early every day your senior year to go to work at the flower shop in the strip mall, spiraling green metal wires down the stems of roses, hundreds upon hundreds of roses, one at a time? How you cut green floral foam into cubes that you nested into white ceramic pots and rainbow coffee mugs; how you wove invisible lattice grids of tape over the tops of crystal vases and lined the shelves with them, filled the rooms with them, floor to ceiling?
You remember your friend there, the florist, a man, the one who taught you to wire the roses and tape the vases, who taught you words like delphinium and alstroemeria, and how to remove the anthers from the stargazer lilies before they set pollen and stain the flowers, who had an apartment in the city and a life in the city, who you thought was gay, but turns out was just an artist, how he kissed you rough over the sink, next to the rose thorn stripper machine, a hundred heavy rubber fingers whirring and thudding the thorns off the rose stems while his stubble chafed your chin, your lips? And how you liked it, and you started sneaking around with him, and how he took you to see Johnny Cash and Nick Cave and Laurie Anderson (you had never seen anything like Laurie Anderson), how you would lay in his bed looking out over the ribbons of light from the I-85/I-75 downtown connector and listen to the traffic like the ocean, how he opened up worlds?
He made the most exquisite gardenia corsage for you to wear to the prom.
You didn’t tell your actual boyfriend, who, turns out, actually was gay, and wouldn’t touch you, no matter how much you threw yourself at him, even in that hotel room in Daytona Beach that you rented for a whole week at spring break.
Yeah, you remember the job at the florist, and the other ones too, the coffeeshops, the casino parties, the retro cocktail bar. And how many summer camps? Seven? How many pizza joints? At least that many. Brunch places: three, so far. You were a nanny, dogsitter, housesitter, horsesitter, a baker; there was that whole situation with the cakes. You cut up fish and poultry and wrapped the butcher’s cuts at the Jamaica Plain Food Co-op ten years into being a vegetarian. You cleaned houses, weeded gardens, mucked stables and bathed horses. You picked apples in Nova Scotia, picked squash in Michigan, picked carrots in San Luis Obispo, then rode a rickety bike down a two-lane farm highway to the Pacific ocean to watch the sun set under a gnarled tree, so tiny, at the edge of the earth.
And those were just the jobs you did for money.
And what did you do for free?
Once a week you went to an office downtown to sit on dumpstered couches and proofread the radical newspaper before it went to print. In the mornings you made the grits and bleached the bathrooms at the Haley House soup kitchen. You wrote grants to shut down the Julia Tutwiler women’s prison and did data entry for the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. You started gardens at the school in Mission Hill. You slept in a converted school bus in Little Haiti, inside a city block that looked like all the other city blocks from the street, but in the back, a sanctuary village of treehouses, rescued and rehabilitated wildlife, a dream; peacocks and capuchin monkeys and pet raccoons, another world.
The point is, babe, you’re resourceful, and you will find a way. The point is, your real life is not your job, your real life is here, with your people.1 The point is, don’t worry about what might come, just speak your truth, be yourself, say it, say it, say it, be unbeholden.
And babe, it’s OK to leave if you need to, to leave and to leave and to leave again. You have had a thousand jobs and if that’s what it takes to keep the lights on in your mind, to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair,2 if that’s what keeps you intact, then you can have a thousand more. But it’s also OK, and maybe the harder and braver and more rewarding measure, to stay. And you can do that too, if you want.
There’s a freedom that comes from being estranged: when you’ve already squandered your most precious social capital, and withstood the most venomous things that could be said against you, in the service of your own veracity; when you’ve walked away and let them have the last word, how can anyone else’s ill will find purchase? You have your self, intact, babe, your most precious treasure, and no man can put that asunder. Nobody has you by the balls, babe, you’re unfuckwithable, you’re sucker-free.3
Last week you had COVID: one minute you’re planning to bake for the fall potluck at work, cook for your friend’s halloween party in Reading, do costume shit and Ultimate Frisbee mom shit and college applications and thank you notes, and the next minute you’re shivering and sweating in the same spot in the same room for three days, watching the light move across the room from dawn to dusk, watching the cat watch the birds out the window, without enough cognitive power to finish a single game of solitaire. You were kind of relieved to get a break, and then alarmed at how relieved you were.
You watched in horror while a war continued to unfold on your phone.
Then you watched people, like mycelium, like magnets, slowly at first, and then quicker; start to build, start to coalesce and to mobilize and to organize, and take to the streets, and you yourself began to build, to coalesce, and to mobilize, and to organize, and a part of you reawakened, and remembered who you are, who you were, who you were born to be.
The secret is, babe, the beautiful secret all along: while you thought you were busy trying to build the future world you wanted to live in, you built a life worth living in the here and now. The secret is that the work of building worlds is also, in fact, a world unto itself, a world of gardens, and food, and singing, in the way that doing the things you have to do to make a home and a life fit for a child can give your own life legs to stand on, feet to stand with, ground on which to stand.
So get back to work babe, because the fact is, you’re unfuckwithable and sucker-free, and you’ve got a job to do.
The World
I’m proud to join thousands of fellow writers as a signatory on this statement of solidarity:
Writers Against the War on Gaza rejects [the] perversion of meaning, wherein a nuclear state can declare itself a victim in perpetuity while openly enacting genocide. We condemn those in our industries who continue to enable apartheid and genocide. We cannot write a free Palestine into existence, but together we must do all we possibly can to reject narratives that soothe Western complicity in ethnic cleansing.
To read the full statement and add your name, visit Writers Against the War on Gaza.
Essential (humane, cogent) reading from Sarah Schulman in New York Magazine October 16th: Explanations are not excuses: The Israel Hamas War and the Manufacturing of Consent. Schulman is the author of the seminal book “Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair,” the basic premise of which is that often, traumatized people and groups misinterpret normative conflict as abuse, and then react abusively in defense, which ultimately just empowers and consolidates the power and violence of the state. She uses Israel as one of the examples of this in the book, which came out in 2016, and her thinking on this topic has really shaped my own, so I was really grateful to read this article she wrote of the present moment.
Home
It’s ancestor season, my friends. I hope you find time to sit with, honor, feed, and listen to the wisdom of the beloveds, personal and collective, in this narrow passageway through history that we are currently traversing. I wish you love, courage, and a safe journey.
Home + The World is a weekly newsletter by Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. All content is free; the paid subscriber option is a tip jar. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.
⚔️❤️ Jodi
Annie Dillard
my beloved client, this week
Wonderful writing & an important message. So good
Beautiful writing!