#heather mcleod

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Unextracted Gratitude

The following is the final entry in our weekly series in November on: Inverse Thanksgiving

     My little family of four has been voraciously consuming The Great British Baking Show on Netflix for the past two weeks. It’s old, but new to us. My kids just turned 8 and 10, and it’s the first episodic show we’ve watched together in their lives. During their screen time on the weekends, we tend to each retreat to our own screens; because we can, and because we all have different interests.      This show, though.      We quote from it in British accents (“I can’t believe I’m crying over cake!”) and argue over who should be star baker. I’ve noticed that anytime something tense or funny or sad happens during an episode, my son, who is very much a preteen, turns to look at me. He obviously wants to connect—he waits for eye contact before looking away—but he also seems to be gauging my response so he can measure his own. I haven’t said anything about it. I don’t want to ruin it.       The morning before Thanksgiving, my husband TJ told me about his plan to set up stations in the kitchen for the kids that afternoon, a la TGBBS, so they could help make gluten-free bread for the stuffing. We doubled over laughing, imagining how into it they would be. TJ set everything up, but by the time the afternoon rolled around, the kids refused to help. Kind of a bummer, but they had a good reason. They’ve been playing roughly nine hours a day with neighbor friends, including a boy we love who moved away at the end of the summer to live with his mom for the first time in his life. We had no idea he would be back for the holiday until our doorbell rang and there he was.      “Our Thanksgiving dreams have come true!” I shouted when I saw him. “It’s hard to believe this is really happening,” he said, trying to keep it chill but unable to contain an ear-to-ear grin. Ever since then, the kids have been busy dressing up, freeing the neighborhood of zombies, and eating sandwiches. So I guess it wasn’t too surprising when they ditched TJ’s TGBBS idea in favor of more play.      In any case, I’ve been thinking about why all the thanksgiving posts online can be so obnoxious. For me the worst ones have a combination of three things going on: 1. They’re connected to a personal brand. 2. The object of their gratitude isn’t specific, but something general, like “family,” 3. They display too much perfection. Too much!      I feel a lot of gratitude, but I’m resistant to sharing it unless it’s part of a bigger story, and often that story feels private. One thing I’ve realized this year is that my gratitude is woven into a lot of other things—chores and caregiving and heartbreak and the overall madness of day-to-day life. Extracting thankfulness from that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It’s in there, everywhere. I love the Thanksgiving posts that manage to include all of it.

    Our next-door neighbors couldn’t go to their family gathering last week because a relative was getting over a staph infection and my neighbor can’t risk getting sick. She has had a devastating year on multiple fronts. She and her husband follow an autoimmune diet similar to mine, and TJ made a ton of food (have I mentioned how thankful I am that my husband stopped drinking almost two years ago?) and he packed a bunch up and texted them the menu and left it on their doorstep, because they weren’t feeling social. Apparently, they had been about to eat salad in bed when he dropped the food off. “YOU SAVED THANKSGIVING!” they texted. It’s worth mentioning that last year when TJ was out of town and our ceiling started leaking, this neighbor’s husband came over at 11:00pm and snaked our disgusting bathroom drain, where he discovered a foot-long letter-opener.     I’ve been running across the street since Tuesday to take care of another neighbor’s cat, Lucy. She’s old and needs medicine in her ears twice a day. Sometimes, if it’s cold, she doesn’t come out from her hiding place, and then I have to keep going back over. But when she does come out, we have a love fest. I wish you could see the Instagram story I posted of her and her insanely loud purr. I’ve realized that I can sneak over there and write in the middle of the day, and I get so much done away from the noise level and endless chores at my own house.     Is it clear that I’m thankful? I hope it is. My son made lunch today for four kids. I showed him how to make a mean grilled cheese sandwich with mayo. Of course, every kid had a different sandwich order. Now that I think about it, even without the GBBS station in the kitchen, the kid did end up putting his culinary skills to work over the break, and it wasn’t just for himself.

Heather McLeod is a writer and former copy editor living in Austin, TX, with her family, a cat and dog who are best friends, a baby bearded dragon, a fish, and many crickets. She’s in her final year of the MFA program in poetry at Texas State.

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[frontporchlit]

The Artist’s Vow, Post-Election by Heather McLeod

Has anyone else found it difficult to dive back into a large writing project after the election? I’ve struggled with it. If you’re like me, there’s a distinct before and after feeling to this season, which makes it disorienting to return to your subject and write on as though nothing has changed. In fact, everything has changed—shouldn’t we be addressing this in our writing? To myself and to anyone reading this, I don’t think the answer to this question is a simple yes or no. I believe the answer, and what we need to keep giving each other permission to do, is: Return to the work. Go back to it and know that when it comes to telling the truth, the stakes for artists—for people—are higher than they’ve been for some decades.

In his mystery The Language of Cannibals, George Chesbro writes that “the fastest way to destroy a society is to corrupt language.” If lies are the language of cannibals, our culture is in a precarious position. We need radical honesty, and we need it in forms other than frank sound bites on the internet. We need it in our fictional stories, our memoirs, and our poems, whether we’re describing an imagined conversation that happened twenty years ago or a walk we took last night. In Fanny Howe’s book of essays, The Winter Sun, she notes that “there isn’t one part of [America’s] breaking that is not also replicated in each section of the culture. In cars, traffic, movies, buses, banks, schools, war, architecture, hospitals and labs, and in poetry.” Our job as writers, according to Howe, is to “document the cracks” we see. No crack is too small or unworthy of our attention.

I don’t know what this will look like for me yet, a renewed vow to record the cracks. I know it will look different for each of us. I know it will involve doing things and writing things that scare us and make us feel vulnerable and perhaps put us at serious risk. I think it means questioning everything we think of as “normal.”

Or maybe it won’t look that different from what some of us were already doing. I don’t know. I hope it looks different for a lot of us, though. All hands on deck.

I suppose the charge of documenting the cracks has always been the artist’s charge, and so in that sense, nothing has changed.  The poet Gary Snyder, a longtime Buddhist, talks in his 2014 book, Nobody Home, about a vow he took sixty years ago upon hearing the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after climbing to the top of Mt. Saint Helens for the first time. His fifteen-year-old self declared: “By the power and beauty and permanence of Mt. Saint Helens, I will fight this cruel and destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life.” As time went on and he grew older, however, Snyder realized there was a lot he didn’t know about the world, and that if he were to approach his oath in a literal sense, he would feel as though he’d failed, because his original wording placed the burden of the fight on his own shoulders. Now in his eighties, Snyder understands that “we don’t take [the vow] because we can do it. All we can do is take the vow to help others also take it.” To his mind, the promise he stepped into has been at work for thousands of years, and will continue on, even past the existence of this universe. “So,” he says, “let’s have a cup of tea and take note of the falling leaves.”

Okay, Gary, okay. I will join you in that. Thank you. After that we can get back to those cracks, which aren't getting any smaller in our lifetime.