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.

close the door, open the window.

Despite my hopes, the Graduate School of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro will carry on in the fall of 2009 without me.  I applied to the Masters of Fine Arts program in creative fiction back in December and found out Saturday that they aren't really all that interested in me.  I got the steel-toed boot.

I want to write and to teach writing. To teach, I'd need a degree, so I'm out one... for now.  Luckily I'm not out both.  The latter only requires some protected time and my sweet friend Dora, the MacBook.

During the winter I had this stagnated posture with writing. It's scary to write a book, at least for me.  It feels like there is a story, which I vaguely know, that is too complex to tell.  Once I realized back in February that my only reason for waiting around was this brewing fear, I started over. I ditched the old book I'd started in the summer and began again at square one.  This was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating considering that I had poured hours into this amorphous plot.  I filed it away on Dora's hard drive for good.

I'm a good way into the second attempt now and, aside from a few afternoons of writer's block, it's going quite beautifully.  I decided, par the advice of Lamott, to let the book write itself, to let the plot make its way like a secret garden.  It's finally going well.

Rejection is the infamous horror for, well, everyone.  When I found out I didn't get into school, I felt like a dandelion twice run over by a car.  For some reason known only to the heavens every person within 100 miles that loves me was either out of town or busy, so I cooked myself some dinner, drank a glass of Yellowtail, and watched "Marley and Me," which made me cry a little more.  I guess I needed some solo digestion time.  Which I did: I digested, I cried, I sat on the floor with my back against the sink cabinet and began to think maybe I never even had any ability to tell a story, much less write a sentence, and then I let the less dysfunctional half of my brain smack the pathetic side and I stood up.

And I got back to work on my book.

blogger dies in Iranian prison.

Friday morning I read an article about a man about my age in Iran who recently died in prison.  He was in prison because he insulted a "supreme leader" on his blog.  His name was Omid Mir Sayafi.  He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, but he died long before those years came close to passing from improper medical attention.

All politics aside, this news bite stopped me in my tracks. I realize that I don't typically go off on political leaders or say overly racy things on my blog posts, but if I felt passionate about something like that, if I wanted to deride the President or make a commentary on religion, I could.  The only commentary would likely be banter, at most sparking a debate, but then it would all just move on through like a summer rain storm.  

I think about writing and how precious it is to me, the way the written word is in many ways eternal, an anthem that began before him and lasts long after the writer dies.  How God himself is the Word.  Everyone is a writer, really. We have the gift of speech and labyrinthine communication--how tremendous!  This is God's gift to the human race, and yet not everyone is able to practice his right to write, no pun intended.

After the story shocked me, I got pretty sad about it, just thinking about all the writers in the world who can't open the door and unleash their passion.  It made me kind of sick.  It still makes me sad, but I'm also thankful now too. Makes me want to write further, to extend my vocabulary and tell more stories, to contribute to this anthem that's been written for thousands of years since the light first separated from the dark.

Spring on the Northern Coast

Up north on the coast 

Spring is no new season at all.

I remember dense damp fog,

the sky was gray and plump

geese with long black necks

flew as arrowheads slicing slate clouds.

I remember the air so cold and wet-

my skin stayed moist and my nose

became red.

The beach on the sound, rocky

with smooth stones and 

we took off our socks and shoes 

and splashed in the lapping folds of the sea.

Our feet turned opaque on the soles

and in the toes.

We rolled up our blue jeans and

our raincoats collected droplets from the 

tide and from the dripping sky.

We laughed at the sound seagulls make. 

Dad  panned the old shore for 

segments of memories. He held 

the leash and patted the golden retriever

saying, "Good girl, Sadie."

Elizabeth Gilbert in winston-salem.

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the wildly popular Eat, Pray, Love, came to Winston-Salem to speak as a featured participant in the city's Bookmarks series.  Friday afternoon I saw the newspaper article announcing her coming and quickly picked up my cell phone to order a ticket.  There are some things whose urgency transcends even the narrowest of budgets.

All day I had that nervous excited feeling in the bottom of my stomach.  When I thought about what I would actually say if I got the chance to ask a question or, gasp, talk to her face-to-face it felt like my insides were carbonated and someone picked me up, turned me over and shook me hard a few times. Sort of the sick, unnerved feeling I would get in sixth grade just before informing my father of a D on my math test.  I actually laughed aloud in the restroom of the conference center when I realized how ridiculously overwhelmed I was.  It's just a woman, Ginny. Just like you, only dazzlingly brilliant and utterly published.  

You know, I walk around the avenues of my life thinking my passion for writing and chapters and adjectives qualifies me as crazy until I go to a conference where heaps of writers are present in bulk.  It is then that I feel most normal... not that a room full of highly introspective, overly observant artistic individuals would necessarily be considered "normal."  

The older women are strikingly beautiful.  Many wear their lustrous grey hair long and their lips are always red, magazine shiny.  Most of them wear these gorgeous chunky sweaters and corduroys like they should all live in Maine somewhere.  They appear thoughtful with deep kind eyes and such colorful faces.  Writing must be some kind of youth fountain.  There were only a few men, mostly in their forties and fifties I'd guess, with tweed and gray blazers and penetrating focused gazes, devilishly handsome in their seasoned age.  

There are the young writers too.  One woman brought her little baby in yellow fleece pajamas with feet.  That made me wish they made those for adults.  She was tall with her long dark hair pulled back haphazardly in a bun.  The baby crawled around quietly at her feet.  It occurred to me how rare for a child to stay so quiet for two hours.  

My neighbor, reading a workbook on how to facilitate your creative growth in the workplace, had written at the top of her page, I want to be my mother--my mother wanted to be me.  I smiled, understanding her anxiety to secure the fleeting notions, sensing our unspoken camaraderie.

Elizabeth sat on the stage in the front in a large red leather chair.  I scooted to the edge of my seat to listen. I wouldn't move until it was over.  She spoke like on a Sunday afternoon, like she was sitting on the porch discussing memories with an old friend.  She said that writing depends on three factors: talent, luck and hard work.  You can only control one of them, she said.

She cited an old Brazilian adage that her husband, Jose, says: Listen to the whispers or soon you will be listening to the screams.  She said that some people are unsung as heroes though heroes they be.  She said that it is easier to tell the truth than to make up fiction, so write about the truth.

"I get so excited by people," she said.  "There is so much weird variation."  I wanted to jump up and down and say, Me too! Me too! Fortunately I still had a foot on the ground so I held my tongue.  It dawned on me during the interview that I resonated with this woman who I esteem so highly--I could really relate to the things she said.  This infused me with a great deal of confidence about my own journey as a writer and made me want to go immediately home to log some pages on my own book.

Absorbing her aura, her humor, her wisdom, her kindness and her folksy storytelling, I teetered between merry tears and laughter for the short hour and a half.   At the end we all lined up like school children at lunch and waited for our books to be signed, a strange ritual we cling to.  I spoke briefly to her as she signed her name on the title page of her novel Stern Men and I wished for something worthwhile to say but came up with nothing.  Typical. But later I recalled something she said that will propel me and stay with me, I think, forever.  She had said this: 

There is no assurance with writing.  You just have to do it and then see where it goes.

If you're reading this, Elizabeth Gilbert, thank you.