playing the 'one year ago, two...' game

One year ago:
On January 1^st, 2006 I was visiting my roommate Michelle at her family’s house in Smithville, Missouri. We had spent the night prior– Michelle, Julia (another beloved roommate), Tim (Michelle’s brother), and I – lying flat on the roof of their house, gazing up at the rural night sky, jockeying for the warmer positions in the middle, and making resolutions for the coming year. I can’t remember anymore what the others said, but I know I said a lot of things in my heart, and then outloud that I wanted to move to Africa. 

Michelle and Tim had lost their father in a motorcycle accident just a few months before. We were lying on the roof of a house which he had built himself. Everyone was wearing dusty old letterman jackets from Smithville High and ski goggles and other crazy paraphernalia we found in their attic. There was much harassing and laughing and - for each our own reasons – sober moments of quiet reflection as we shivered in the dark.

Two years ago:
January 1^st, 2005 I was home with my family in Minnesota, gearing up for my last semester of grad school and what would amount to a lot of thesis writing. I was exactly 132 hours behind on my research assistantship work when I drove home for that Christmas break. I worked hard and by New Years, there was less than 20 hours left to make up. I was transcribing old 1950’s anthropology field notes, typing hundreds and hundreds of pages of paper notes into electronic form so that later on my advisor and I could later code and analyze them. It was agonizing work, which is a major reason why I started the break 132 hours behind on it.

But every blessed member of my family sat down with me one long day and we worked on them together: all of us tap-tap-tapping on laptops beside the twinkling fake Christmas tree in our living room, in front of the fireplace where mom sometimes hid M&Ms between the stones (that Dad promptly found and ate), beside the big bay window looking out onto a melee of swirling snow, snow which – if the low whirl of the heater came on at night and you squinted your eyes just right at the streetlight– could make you believe you might be living an epic story of your own, with bravery, danger and love. 

Today:
January 1^st 2007 I am again back home with my parents and sister, but this time in a new townhouse a few miles from the old house. All morning I sat quietly in a strange bedroom digging through bent and worn cardboard boxes that I had purposely put out of sight many months earlier. These boxes are filled with old photos and piles of paper jumbled together: the order of service from Susan Foster’s funeral; postcards from London, Hong Kong, Romania; poems whispering:

“My fellow countrymen,
do you see the clouds in the sky?
That’s where my people are migrating.
They’re coming through the clouds into happiness.”

                                                            (Myagmarjav)

(which I imagined very profound at one time, though I can't for the life of me remember why now); yellowing newspaper items; a list of movies I never saw; old playbills; diaries; and many many notes on torn fragments of paper, all written in the same craggy handwriting, notes which make me close my eyes, remembering, wistful: ‘Wyssmann, let me know you’re back safe! Better still, come join me at library...’

I am packing for Mozambique, searching out the things that will offer me roots of the past when I am far away, that will carry me into a future, hopeful, grounded.

Later I drove to meet Michelle for coffee, who just returned from a semester of public health fieldwork in Tanzania. Welcoming her back as she wishes me adieu. Then I sucked in my tummy and bought a black and red maid-of-honor dress for my sister’s rapidly approaching wedding.

So begins 2007. May it bring every good thing.