A friend who knows you before you were a “Mrs.,” before you were a mama, before you used words like “vocation,” and “time management” comes to visit, and it’s not that all these titles and concerns go away, but who you used to be, a laughing girl, a bit of a careless, reckless girl, wakes up. And well, she joins the conversation.
Stories are told. There’s one about getting accidentally on purpose locked in the Calvin College library and the trouble that escalated from there. There’s another in the same setting about a perfectly executed copy machine prank.
“A group of people heard about that,” your friend tells you. “They couldn’t believe that was me.”
It’s a sad statement, or maybe it’s nostalgic, this remembrance of who one once was. How do you get her back?
//
The end of February always annoys me with its 60 degree days, teasing me with Spring. “I can do whatever I want,” Spring seems to say. “I can make you yearn for barbecues and t-shirts with each inhale. I can lull you into laziness with my longer days and ever slowing darkening sky. I can make you remember what you did years ago when I turned the last days of February into 70 degrees and sunshine and you drove to Lake Michigan and stood on frozen waves. You silly girl.”
February’s weather taunts me and I start having dreams that I am Super Slacker – doing whatever I want whenever I want. My big, loud laugh echoes behind me like a cape.
So we take the girls we have, the girls we once were, and the girls we are now, and we walk them around campus. They trample through the melting snow mounds, laughing at themselves and making the college kids laugh. We show them the law quad and they call it Hogwarts, and we whisper, “Yeah,” and everyone’s quiet looking at these buildings like cathedrals and standing in a cloud from the snow that’s melting upward and breathing in the battle Spring and Winter are having with each other.
We go to something called the Creature Conservatory, and there’s a Shire horse whose owner didn’t want him anymore because when he grew up to be who he was, his owners decided he wasn’t enough, so they gave him away. We feed him carrots and he looks like something Hagrid would ride. I’m sure Harper’s hand will get lost in his mouth.
There are two porcupines named Bed Head and Lady Gaga, and there’s a hedgehog, and at least four sloths that live in open crates on the ceiling. On the ceiling! They move upside down, scaling the walls with their long fingers in no hurry to go anywhere. They literally hang out.
We take the crew to Literati where the girls type and read and ask us to read to them. Jesse asks the lady at the front desk if they have a local author section while I’m reading The Book with No Pictures to Harper. “This is her,” he tells the book clerk when I come downstairs with all the girls. “You wrote a book?” she says, “Congratulations!”
She tells me how to go about having an event at their store, and I smile, and say thank you, but it’s time for lunch and someday it might be fun to read at Literati and I hope I can, but standing there, my stomach growling, the girls tired and getting uppity, writing a book feels like something I did, and this – helping girls type words they don’t know how to spell, reading to them, helping them find the next Percy Jackson book – feels like something I’m doing now.
Writing feels reckless. It feels a little careless. I don’t mind. Actually, I’m probably addicted to it. “How much can I get away with?” I think as I open a notebook and start in on a memory when I know I should be doing something else. Writing helps me remember myself. It helps me keep the shape of some things. In some more important pieces, I hope it helps my friends remember who they were (and who I still believe them to be). But it also feels like a battle between who I am and who I was, or who I want to be, and who I think I can be.
So we get sandwiches and we walk in the pouring rain and we say, “It’s not so bad! It could be colder. It’s actually kind of warm!” We corral the children, amazed that (some) don’t cry when they fall in puddles dropping candy and other treasures as they fall. We break up fights, and we hold their hands. We laugh at our inside jokes from years ago, and we laugh at the new jokes made in this short 72 hour visit.
Because every year, Spring and Winter might battle, and indeed, Spring will win, but Winter will arrive again, and be glorious in her own right. These seasons come and they go. They are familiar and they are full of surprises. And they never really leave us.
And you are the girl that pulled a prank at the copy machine – so deadpan, so effortless – that dreary May evening in Grand Rapids.
And I am the girl who stood on waves.
This is a book about being a teacher, and about being a mother, and, in its way, about being a writer. But it is most fully a depiction of living with a work of literature, about the conversations literature can spark and the memories literature can hold and reconfigure. The acknowledgments suggest that writing this book helped Callie Feyen remember why she loved teaching. Reading it made me remember why I love to read. —Lauren Winner, bestselling author and Associate Professor, Duke Divinity School
Available for purchase here.
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