october in winston-salem

It is fall again. For those of you who have followed my blog for at least a year (thanks! What an honor) you know that I am completely besotted with the season that is upon us. The blinds stay open at all times, the windows stay up to welcome the crisp breeze. I have spent countless minutes sitting, staring, out the window above my writing desk. The boys play flag football in the city league every Tuesday night and I pace the sidelines with my arms crossed over my chest in an attempt at warming  up, screaming every so often, and running down the sideline before I can stop myself.  Hannah and I bought the most charming pumpkins at the farmer's market this week and today the leaves are falling, swirling in the breeze. It is my season of joy.

Autumn in West Chester was colder than it is here in North Carolina. I remember vividly running through the park at the end of Hillside Drive, kicking up the piles of leaves collected on the edges of the path. We could play for hours outside, my sister and me, even until dusk.  I have no memory of gloves, only small white fingers turning red, then opaque with cold.  My nose would run and when I reached up to wipe it with the back of my little cold hand, I would laugh at the numbness. The monkey bars, metal and painted yellow, were like ice and after swinging from rung to rung our hands smelled like cold metal. Inside, when it was time for dinner, the house felt so warm and my mother making stew on the stovetop would laugh and make us wash our hands from all of the dirt.  We wore wool sweaters and jeans with saddle shoes, all hand-me-downs; we were ragamuffins with flyaway hair and a bottomless supply of imagination.

The need I feel for the outdoors must have been born all those years ago when we played outside all day.  Our TV was small with a circular knob that could be turned to receive 4 stations.  I wished for cable then, but I am thankful now.

Jonathan, my sister's son, is a year old now. We spend hours outside, picking up acorns and throwing them, examining sticks and bugs, exploring leaves and hoses and mulch.  Hannah says that Jonathan wants to be outside all the time, that he cries and bangs on the door until she lets him free. I feel like that too, and as I sit here on this fall afternoon under this great blue sky, I'm thankful, again, for the season of great joy.

about the book...

I should probably warn anyone who read my review of The Prince of Tides and went immediately to the store to buy a copy:  there is some pretty brutal, graphic violence in the book. Obviously I hated reading these portions of the book, although the violence is a huge impetus in the plot.  There were, however, parts I just about skipped over.

The book is still recommended by me, but with a big fat R rating spread across the front.

"The Prince of Tides"

Because I am always looking for the next good book to read and because I feel like most of the books I begin are actually a bit disappointing, I think I'll begin writing book reviews as blog posts every once in a while. I know that to be a good writer one has to read good writing. It's a sort of teaching once you're out of college. However, considering the current state of my life I have precious little time to read. Therefore it takes an expertly written book to captivate me and hold me prisoner until the bitter end.

I was recently recommended The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. Published in 1986, the year of my birth, the book was widely acclaimed and in 1991 made into a movie starring Barbara Streisand and Nick Nolte. 

If you are looking for a worthwhile read, a book that will make you smirk and laugh aloud, a book that will make you turn 50 pages before you realize any time has passed at all, a book whose drama will roam like a tiger in the front of your mind even when you aren't reading it, a book that will make you cry soft, quiet tears, you just may want to pick up The Prince of Tides.

There is something about this story, told in its narrative excellence and quality of description, that is utterly captivating. It is the story of the Wingo family, told by the youngest son Tom.  Tom, his twin sister Savannah and his brother Luke endure a childhood full of confusion, mystery, defeat, trauma, excitement and, most of all, camaraderie. It is the story of secrets and competition in a small southern town and relationships both deep and dysfunctional.  It is brilliant, absolutely brilliant, and I devoured each and every page.

hhg  vb bj,. <---that was Mark

A good friend and I decided to read this book together.  We haven't had a chance to discuss the book yet, but via text she told me she found the book "good but disturbing."  It's true. The plot isn't comfortable or "happy." In fact, I have spent a few nights a little restless thinking about the events of the novel with all of the strange plot twists and unnerving male characters, the wild setting of the book and the bizarre relationships and philosophies.

For four days I've been circling around and around, trying to figure out just what it is that is so beguiling about the Wingos and their ramshackle history.  It is a story of humanity that doesn't feign beauty where it is vile. In some vein each of us carries threads of pain and humiliation, betrayal and suffering. But when it's all over, when the season of pain has come to a close, after all of the secrets and words and wounds, a rich ribbon of love between the Wingo siblings is redeeming. And a story tied with that kind of ribbon is the best kind of story because that is what we are each seeking in our stories, isn't it?

late august.

In late Augusts back in my memory it has been so hot that the asphalt breathes up under your shorts and the soles of your flip flops seem to melt.  Indebted to this time of year solely because of the birth of my precious baby brother and friend, I usually spend the month of August sweaty and ready for autumn.

Last weekend in Pittsburgh we were delighted when a cold snap moved, it seemed in deliberation, down from Canada and covered over western Pennsylvania. We spent the nights with the box fan running in front of the window in the upstairs hallway to bring in the coolest, silver air I've felt in months. I didn't realize how constricted breathing has been until that night breeze moved in over my covers and eased my respiration, forcing me to bring quilts up around my neck and dream outside of summer. 

In autumn, it always surprises me, the haze of heat rises up into the atmosphere for good and every natural color is richer, darker. Back in Winston-Salem the J. Nissen building changes from red to brick red and the Third Street sign seems to glow in green and white. I am completely transfixed by the state of the world in fall. 

Sur la Table is a store that specializes in housewares, mostly kitchen. During a massive downpour in the city on Friday, we ducked into the store front and looked around at pink and green mixers, a variety of box mixes for brownies and red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting straight out of Santa's house at the Pole. I purchased a set of nine miniscule cookie cutters shaped like leaves and acorns to make sugar cookies and ice them with orange and yellow and brown icing and sugar.  I have to wait, but not for long.

...It is finally September, the base of the rise toward fall. Today the temperature has peaked at 75 degrees, down from last week's 88, and I'm sitting under an awning in the shade in long sleeves. 

lake lure, nc.

For the first annual Ficker family reunion, the Adams and Evans joined mom, dad and Kyle in the western North Carolina vista Lake Lure. Getting off the highway on Route 64, I was surprised to find that the scenery reminded me of the north, the lakes of Canada even, and the lake, when we hit it thirty minutes later, was breathtaking.

Last week dad designated Hannah to purchase the adult beverages and me to grab stuff for breakfast, namely coffee.  We spent the weekend playing golf, riding horses in rivers, jetting around the lake on a pontoon boat, swimming and playing games for hours in the middle of the lake, watching baby Jonathan run a plastic car into walls, preventing him from falling down the wooden steps, drinking wine, playing the family favorite card game “May I” (everyone’s favorite game, except mine, however), drinking coffee, reading, sharing a great deal of conversation and family lore, taking walks, scaling mountains, and sitting out on the porch to enjoy our treehouse view.

A few highlights:

Saturday morning I took a walk up the mountain while the adults (Mom, Dad and Hannah) went looking at houses and lots.  This walk turned into the Great Heavenward Hike and I thought my heart would very well cease to beat.  I lived, fortunately.  As I came around the corner on this “walk” I saw something in the middle of the road like a boulder.  Coming closer there could be no mistaking this object—a turtle.  Surely a car coming around the curve would hit the little guy and I knew he needed a rescue.  However, there is a story that goes like this:

My mom tried to save a turtle once, similarly crossing a little road, and it JUMPED up in the air.  The turtle which had leapt as high as her hip, gave her such a fright that she jumped back and left the thing alone. He obviously didn’t want help. 

Unfortunately for Claire, her middle daughter is the only person on this great green earth that believes the story. My dad thinks she’s nuts, Kyle agrees. But mama and I  know that the turtle leapt that day.

Approaching this turtle on the side of this very high and lovely mountain where there nary another soul could be found and my voice echoed cripsly in the valley beneath, what do you imagine was in my mind? This damn turtle is going to attack me.  However something must have come over me, the non animal lover, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave the turtle. I approached, coaxing it aloud that it should not jump, bite, spin around and claw, or act in any other demonic way as I was simply trying to save it from destruction.  It took me about three minutes to gather the courage to pick up the little shelled being and about ten seconds to walk it to the other side to which it was heading.  On my way back down the mountain, the turtle was gone, probably running far away into the woods from my crazy self.

On Sunday I mentioned we spent several hours out on the lake. Dad had arranged a boat rental and we left the dock around three, just as the hazy rain lifted off of the mountain and the sun began to shine. There are tremendous houses on the lakeside, and there are simple houses that have withstood the increasing property value, the harsh mountains storms and the renovations of time. They are all quite beautiful for no other reason but that they are reflected on this crystal clear lake. We bobbed and sped around for a while until the boys had the itch to jump in. Anchored in the center of the lake, they all debated about the best way to jump in. I stood up on the edge of the boat and dove… they all followed. And, for an hour and a half, we played games in the very middle of the lake. Dad stood up on the boat, throwing the football to Kyle, Josh and Mark for points—this went through several championships (from States to Universe) and Hannah and I swam around, just enjoying the sunshine and fetching rogue footballs. Mom and Jonathan watched from the boat, laughing as Jonathan pointed to us in the water bewildered.

We also thought it'd be a good idea to get an old family picture...on the front of the pontoon boat. Note: they are tippable. Note: we tipped it, almost sunk the thing, and spent the rest of the afternoon with a water-logged floor. The picture below was taken when mom was trying to capture a nice, charming sibling picture. Josh shouted, "We're sinking!" and the rest is history...

(I can't explain the reason for the underlining-finicky computers...)

After playing hard during the day, we went to dinner at Larkin’s Restaurant and ate like queens and kings, listening to stories of dad in college, the year he drove to Mardi Gras and mom abroad, the time she was offered to join the harem of the richest man in Egypt and the time she lived with an assassin.  Doesn’t quite seem real…

The stories, or the weekend. Too charming to be real.

 

family trip to butler, pa.

Stefanie and Paul

Mark and Chris on the back deck

Mark and Me before a nice evening out

Doc and sweet Hannah

Mama Joyce, Lisa and Stef

an avenue of history

The Evans are currently in "recovery"--we took a quick three-day trip to Sandbridge to be with my family, came back to Winston-Salem for one day of insane laundry and packing, and then off to Young Life's Crooked Creek Ranch as leaders from June 18-29 (four of those nights spent sleeping on a bus, one in a hotel and seven one the floor of a cabin at camp), then back home for a couple days, then a two-day trip to just northeast of Philly for the wedding celebration of Lauren Wells and Nate Eakin!  Luckily Sunday night we were able to enjoy some Mexican food and margaritas with the Stogners in order to keep a grasp on some sort of sanity.  

Although the onslaught of travels was a bit crazy, I have felt a sweet peacefulness these last few weeks.  Sandbridge, the only place where us Fickers have maintained roots over the years, always welcomes me back with the untroubled predictability of the tide and the smell of salt in the air. Sand underfoot is never troubling, only comforting. We grew up there and we have enough memories to outnumber the broken shells on the beach.  So many emotions and conversations and fits of laughter and sweet quiet mornings live inside of that old, rickety house on stilts.

To go spend a week at Young Life camp also takes me back to a rich time in my life. There have been times I thought that maybe I don't have "real" or "complete" memories from my childhood spent at Young Life camps with dad on staff assignments because I was so young and saw life through such rose-colored specs, but I've let those doubts go. I met Jesus at Young Life camp, not as a camper, but as a little kid ragamuffing around camp with her sister. It was as real to me then as it is now.  Still now, when I return to camp, I wish my family were there with me and that the history wasn't history, but now.

Finally, our trip to Philadelphia deposited me once again into a sea of childish memories. Mark and I drove from Ashbridge Avenue down to Hillside Drive, the street where we lived when I was young.  Our house was a perfect square, two stories, with a slanted roof and I remember thinking that the bedroom I shared with my sister was neat because the ceiling wasn't flat. I also remember looking out the window on the backyard with the large oak tree that I thought when I got old enough, I'd climb. Mom and I planted merrigolds every spring around the trees and in the flower beds out front. I chose merrigolds because they are bright orange and yellow, my favorite colors.  We had a white picket fence around the small front yard that my dad built and painted one summer for my mom. 

The house is pretty beat up now. I remember a blind man with a massive dog moved in after us and immediately tore down my dad's fence and put up a chain-link fence to keep the dog in. The brick porch out front, which had been crumbling but was, in my opinion, beautiful, is gone now and there is a concrete porch. There aren't merrigolds out front and it just seems strange and different.  I don't know if I can even believe it is the same house.  Our house was such a happy little house and memories of it make me want a small cape cod.  The whole experience was bizarre, sitting in a Jetta with my husband in front of the house that was at one time my beloved castle and watching another family carry on inside.

Time is frightening to me, the way it passes and doesn't forgive or offer a second go. I miss and long for time that has passed and been stored away in the banks of my memory.  But memory, that is the thing I am thankful for. It is a great calm and peace because of the joy of my own history.

a poem I wrote a fifteen months ago.

This poem was written when Mark and I lived across states, before we were even engaged.  These daydreams have actualized, except there are wild trees, rather than hills now, outside the window.

Most poems I've written lack a title.

I wake up to you 

(you wake up 

four hours south)

and my unopened eyes relish the glow

of the rising sun on your butterscotch face

(and closed blinds stack lightlines

on the wall)

Leaning upon my vanilla forearm I

kiss your temple

warm and wispy my butterfly lips

stir and you open your eyes,

azure, as the mountain sky

above organic hills outside of

my window.

519 lockland ave. apt. c

Mark gave me a desk as a wedding gift. A gorgeous, antique, white, worn, delicate desk with round knobs and small drawers made to hold nothing larger than a few pencils or maybe cigarettes.  Perfection.  The desk sits catty-corner in the living room of our apartment beside an old chipped window that looks out on the great oak tree, now green with wet spring, that is so big it fills the windows along our entire apartment. 

We live on the second floor of an old house in one of the most veteran areas of Winston-Salem, Ardmore.  The houses in our neighborhood vary in size, from cottage to mansion, but they are all very complicated. That is the only word that fits: complicated.  In a bewildering sort of way.  The height of the trees and the diameter of the large tree trunks all around the windy streets divulge the great seniority of the streets. The North Carolina Baptist hospital is right around the corner and doctors walk home in lab coats for lunch and nurses linger on corners during their breaks.

The front porch of the house is crumbling. It is supposed to have a half-moon upper deck for us upstairs apartments, but the wood has gone utterly rotten and exposed soggy beams are held up by school bus yellow scaffolding. The house has been this way since before we rented it and looking back, it surprises me that we called the phone number on the "For Rent" sign posted there in the front lawn.  The scaffolding seems beatnik, which I kind of like.

Walking into the foyer, where the door is never fully closed, there are four doors side by side.  We are the third door from the left: Apartment C thank you kindly.  It usually smells like burning incense there in the foyer because our downstairs neighbor is "into" that stuff I suppose. You can also just barely smell the incense, along with cigarette smoke, when you open the food pantry in the kitchen. Just a friendly reminder to mind our neighbors. There ya go, Jenny.  

There isn't much room: a small bathroom with a window and a built in medicine cabinet whose mirror is permanently scuffed so that the reflection looks like an unfocused digital camera shot; a great kitchen with yellow walls and a window that looks out on the far left side of the great oak.  Then there is a bedroom, dainty, and a wide odd-shaped living room we've painted green with the most fabulous four windows.  The oak tree, which wraps itself around our entire half of the upstairs in a great hug, dangles leaves around the windows and casts an even more greenish tint on the room.  Entirely winsome, the small space is pleasant and alluring and ours.

There are hardwood floors throughout the apartment, except in the kitchen and bathroom where there is tile. All of the misfit doors with their crystal doorknobs get stuck when they've been closed all the way, especially when the windows are open and it's rained or is raining. We've got some great furniture, hand-me-downs and a few generous wedding gifts, and a lot of photographs. There are few outlets--2 in the entire kitchen. One on the footboard just inside the doorway and one up toward the ceiling above the refrigerator. One on the footboard in our bedroom.  We've got about a dozen extension cords to access electricity, running all up above door frames and down wall corners.  And the windows... o, the windows. Did I mention how fetching the windows are?

Above my desk there is a black and white portrait in its original mahogany frame of my Grandaddy Jack.  He is wearing a gray suit and a dark tie and he is holding a smoldering cigarette in his right hand, his elbow propped up on the desk before him. He looks like Steinbeck in the picture, sophisticated and entirely brilliant. The photograph is the perfect crest to the perfect writer's haven.

symphony

My name is different now, although I'm having trouble figuring out the way you change  your name with Google... all of its e-mail, blog and record-keeping functions. In fact I think that this name change process is going to be quite a feat.  

Old name: Virginia Leigh Ficker.  It's a good name though I've had my fair share of complications with Ficker, as one could imagine.

New name: Virginia Leigh Evans. Ginny Evans. That's a cute name. Glad I'll be able to publish with that one.

Mark and I got married in Greensboro last Saturday, May 2nd. The weekend, from the rehearsal to my sister's toast at the reception could be summed up in a word: charming.  Charming like a dream... Mark and I discussed the dreamlikeness of it all over pina coladas, in fact, next to the Caribbean Sea on Saint Lucia.  We really were next to something huge.  That may also have been a dream, though I don't think it rains in dreams so perhaps not.  

A good friend from an earlier time in my life sent me a note to make sure that I wasn't giving up on writing, specifically blogging, after my recent rejection from the Creative Writing Program at UNC-G.  I am not, however the wedding and honeymoon did detain me for a little too long and I am also working on a book which takes most of my spare time given to writing.  So to anyone who does tune in and has wondered, I'll try to get back onto my regular blogging schedule.

On the honeymoon I read a book called "The Gathering." It's an Irish novel which, like Irish literature always does, left me feeling kind of dumpy for a few hours after I finished.  Something about that country and its writers digs really deep and sticks inside me and it's all very mournful. I had a great mentor in high school who had this deep deep love of Ireland born of the literature and I can understand that more with each work I read.  And although I couldn't directly relate to the plot of this novel, the writing was incredible. I mean, just dripping with gorgeous symbolism and rich, buttery language. Like listening to some great symphony.  Good writing is like pulling off at a gas station when your gas light is on and re-fueling to drive another couple hundred miles.  I came off the beach at 6:15 that evening anxious to get back to my little white desk and my little white computer to keep trying, the joy of trying, to write measures that will, in time, be symphonies.