I'm Laying On a Table, Mike

Two years ago I took a friend by the hand, looked her in the eye and said, "I think you should prepare yourself for the possibility that Justin might not make it."

I felt unspeakably cruel.

I regretted it immediately even though I knew it needed to be said. Treatments had been exhausted and options had run out—he was at home, resting comfortably, and my friend believed he was simply gaining strength so he could return for more chemo. She is a perpetual optimist—naive, as well—and sometimes I ache to be that sort of person.

I'm the cruel one, if that's what that means. I'm the realist. I see everything coming—and I knew the time had come to stop pretending and begin mentally preparing for the worst.

Few know this about me, but my first job after college was editing obituaries. No, it was not the most sunny job I've ever had, but it taught me more about communicating with and relating to people than I learned in four years of college.

But it was because of that job that I discovered, alone at my desk, that a friend of mine had passed away. I clicked on a Word document from a funeral home expecting a brief biography and survivor list for a cherished grandfather—not the swiftly written announcement of death for a beloved 20-something I'd never seen without a smile.

I was laying on top of a picnic table in a red sundress drinking a stella when I last saw him. "What are you doing, Fifield?" "I'm laying on a table, Mike." "Well you look good." When I sat up on my elbows he was walking away so I just shouted that I'd see him later.

Nobody took me by the hand and gave me the news slowly.

I've never been afforded the courtesy of finding out bad news in a controlled sort of way.

But I suppose if you want people to treat you like a delicate little tea cup, you have to act like one.

Somebody that you used to know.

I only have 2 more weeks of commuting back and forth from Alexandria until I can move into our lovely row house in Eastern Market.

I've been commuting this way for just under a year and never really minded so much until now. It seems the universe has decided it will make me feel each one of these remaining days as painfully and frustratingly as possible. The trains will be delayed, the gym bags will feel heavier and heavier, the happy hours will be harder to resist. It will rain when I'm wearing suede pumps.

Strangely, most everything that I love in this city is in a 6 block radius of my new house—yes, I have made a collection of favorite places—my bookstore, coffee shop, gym, church, brunch spot, and office are all right here. Marines run through the neighborhood like sweating American Apollos. Bartenders know my name and drink. This is my neighborhood—Del Ray, I am so over you.

This morning I stood on the platform with all the other sleepy hill staffers and Pentagon types. I stopped to put on my pearl studs and adjust my skirt and knew I was being watched by the man standing beside me. We stand beside each other almost every day with a regularity that is almost depressing—our morning routines are so buttoned down. We stand at the same spot because we both get off at L'Enfant and know exactly what car we should enter if we don't want to fight a current of people to make our transfer.

He'll probably wonder where I've gone in a few weeks.

Yes, these are the things that go through my head.

Wintering

I can't remember when I first started trying to find a city, but it was at some point in college. I hated Atlanta, felt out of place in New Orleans, and found nothing attractive about New York—every city was fun to visit, perhaps, but never enough to move. And as much as I love traveling to foreign countries and experiencing local cultures I'd never said "oh, I want to live here" or felt a sort of cosmic tug at my heartstrings.

The first time I came to DC I had a sort of ineffable sensation that I'd just arrived home. Everything fit.

I know, I know, we're all supposed to haaaate DC because it's sooo establishment and beltway and corrupt and blah blah blah—no. I love DC. I walk these streets and I feel alive and part of something bigger than myself. I adore our idiosyncrasies and even our flaws—watching CSPAN in bars, complaining about the metro, rolling our eyes about how hill interns dress inappropriately, brazenly jogging in congressional campaign t-shirts. After years of feeling like I was perpetually trying to change myself to suit my setting and my friends, I finally found them—my happy family of wonks. A whole small town of them.

My liberal college friends are quietly (and some not so quietly) unfriending me on Facebook. Most of my friends are here now. Many of us communicate almost exclusively by cutting each other off mid-sentence as if we're constantly practicing for our debut on Hardball. There is something thrilling about knowing I can have endless conversations about tax reform or congressional races and nobody will be bored to tears or confused. And we drink a lot.

So then I landed in St. Thomas.

I've been to places like this before. It was a sort of mix between Guyana and Puerto Rico but not anything like either. We got out on the tarmac and piled into a doorless jeep with two locals and sped off. I felt it again. It was that same feeling I had when I first came to DC… and it made no sense. Sure, it's paradise, but why would I want to live here? I love my city. I love my life and my friends and my adult milkshakes at Ted's Bulletin and spin classes with gossipy hill staffers. I don't want to get skin cancer or look like leather when I'm 40. I like having wifi and access to 5 Starbucks in a mile radius. I like seasons.

Nevertheless, I can't change that I had that same sort of clairvoyant feeling that I'm going to live there one day. The astonishing bit is that I felt it as we were driving past roadside chickens and rundown buildings—before Virgin Gorda and beachside bars, before snorkeling or taking a ferry to another island and drinking too much—I felt it from the start. I'm only writing this now so I can look back and know I was right.

I'm not one for major plans. My theory is that if I'm constantly aiming to improve my narrative, my life will be amazing. So far, I've been totally right. But if I had to have a plan, I'd say it's to work in DC for another few years and then move to a place where I can work in a bikini.

Because winter.

I'm Surrounded

Making plans to return home for Christmas involves finally tying up loose ends I left in Montgomery years ago.

There is a steamer trunk in Rosemary's attic, a bookshelf of books at Robin & Joe's, and I left my grandmother's writing desk with a friend I've since cut out of my life like a cancer. I thought I had coordinated for someone to pick up the desk and move it after I moved (I don't know how many of you have been suddenly hired to work on-location for political campaigns, but you just sort of throw things in your car and go), but apparently it was left behind.

There was also a mobile of origami goldfish my Nana made for me, an antique terrarium, a purple lamp I'm fond of, a green clock I adore, and a few paintings and mirrors. I'm almost certain those things have been trashed, but really all I want is the desk.

Since my attempt to reach her was unsuccessful, I reached out to a friend and asked if he would inquire about it. He too has cut contact. I asked another friend... she too would prefer not to have to speak to her if it could be avoided.

This is a girl I tried countless times to pull from the ashes. Some people go through life in perpetual need of being rescued.

But this girl is a toxic vortex. The narrative of her life is riddled with self-inflicted bullet holes and countless burned bridges, but she always manages to consider herself a victim.

I've thought long and hard about all the good choices I've made in my life that have put me where I am. I made bad choices, too—and I paid for them in spades.

But the most important choice I made was to stop surrounding myself with bad influences. Where I used to gravitate toward and attempt to fix, I now I step away from those who are complacent, complaining, self-important, life-long victims.

Surround yourself with people who make you want to be better. People who are creative, motivating, joyful, and—most importantly—who hold you accountable when you're being less than you should be.

Everything after that is cake.

The War On Christmas... Tree... Sellers.

I was going to write a blog post about Christmas Trees and this new 15 cent tax tree sellers are now burdened with. I was going to write about it because I have a bit of firsthand experience in the industry and I thought my insights would prove helpful. Then I started crying at my desk.

Like most people, my best childhood memories are related to Christmas-time and the holidays, but my childhood was a little unique.

Unlike most kids, I was the daughter of nursery owners—the kind with plants, not babies—and our house was actually on the same property with the greenhouses, gardens, and tree beds. My childhood was awesome. I was homeschooled so I spent a lot of time outside, helping clear weeds from flats of pansies or rake a never-ending torrent of leaves that fell from the hickory trees.

Every December, my dad would take a big, white work truck and drive up to Tennessee to buy Christmas trees—live ones. That was my parents' deal: they hated the very idea of cutting down a beautiful tree just to decorate a home for a month. They had to be living trees with burlap-covered bulbs of soil at the base. They were more expensive but, my mom argued, they didn't lose needles, they didn't dry out, and they could be planted in a yard after Christmas was over. My grandmother's property is lined with just such trees.

When I was 11, I drove up to Tennessee with my dad. This meant that my mom put my Precious Moments sleeping bag and a few puffy, pink pillows in the truck and filled the passenger side door storage with notebooks and school work. We woke up while it was still dark and my mom filled two Stanley thermoses with the kind of coffee that, after years of cultivating snobbery, I'd never dream of drinking.

I failed to mention this sooner: we were poor.

I don't know if my mother intended for my brothers and I to be as painfully aware of it as we were, because it helped structure my financial ideology, but we certainly never forgot it. I did schoolwork alongside my mom as she sent out invoices and handled the accounting. When I went to college and got my first phone it took me a week to stop answering it "Hickory Grove Nursery, how can I help you?" as I'd done my whole life. In that office I got to hear it all—what customers hadn't paid, who my dad hadn't billed, how much money was in each account. I learned to hear the fear in my mom's voice when things weren't good. It sounded like a slow moving panic attack—the words sort of caught at the back of her throat as if she was always just about to cry.

During the winter months, when people don't really care about how their gardens look, things were hard. Christmas Tree sales mattered—a lot.

Confession: this is making me cry at my desk just writing it.

Anyway, back to the trip.

I was thrilled. My dad and I listened to the radio and blew the horn at anyone who gave us The Universal Truck Horn Blowing Signal that all children gleefully make on car trips. It took forever. Even back then when gas was somewhere around a dollar, my mom had carefully calculated the cost of gas and marked stations on the map (this is the age before GPS and cell phones). We had packed food for the trip, but my dad bought us honey buns.

Sometime around noon we pulled up to a wholesaler and I waited in the truck while my dad handled the sale. The truck began to shake as young men started loading trees into the bed, so I got out to help (the trees were about a foot taller than me, but I was tough).

"Leave that, Lyndsey, get back in the truck" my dad said as I started to pick up my first tree. "This is all we're getting."

I balked at the almost-empty truck bed. I was a kid and I didn't understand a lot of things, but I knew this was bad.

While my mom wore her financial burdens on her face, my dad never seemed scared or upset in the slightest. Back then I thought it was just his way of keeping calm under pressure, but looking back I see it as arrogance—he knew if things got too tough, his parents would bail the business out of trouble; my mother, on the other hand, would have rather eaten glass.

I ate the rest of my honey bun as we pulled the truck out of the driveway. I thought we were heading home until we pulled into another, bigger wholesaler. I was horrified to see workers filling up the rest of the truck bed with cut trees. Not my parents. Not at our nursery. Cut trees were for those over-priced, roadside stands.

The drive home took even longer—and it didn't just feel that way, my dad had to drive more slowly to keep the wind from bruising the trees. We didn't have any insightful conversations—I didn't ask why he bought cut trees. I knew. Live trees were simply too expensive and cut trees were within their budget.

So now I'm reflecting on this new tax.

I know it's not much.

I've written about the tanning tax and other seemingly innocuous taxes and I haven't gotten emotional. But now I'm thinking about small business owners (read: families) stretching their dollars as far as possible, using cheaper supplies and products just to stay afloat. I am thinking of pre-teen girls reading Nancy Drew, bringing home Christmas trees with their dads.

And I'm angry.