Leave A Trace
PLUS: The chiropractor.
A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day
Dear Friend,
How did you get to school when you were a child? I mostly walked, but there was also the bus for all of middle school. And this was an important place.
The social landscape of my middle school bus was singular: simultaneously lawless and political. I have diary entries where I wrote and drew diagrams of how I planned to sit (legs folded and up, body sideways, back to the window) while I rode the bus.
Part of the whole thing was waiting for the bus, because that involved being around a smaller, more intimate group of people, and usually without any grown-up supervision. Our bus stop was halfway between Joe Sackett’s house and mine, and I (famously) had a crush on him, and I remember thinking about how I would look standing with one shoe up against a rock wall. Would I look cool? Would this be the place where Joe Sackett would finally See me with a capital S, and notice how perfect my ankles were? (I drew attention to these ankles with an anklet, naturally.) Would he talk about a moment at this bus stop in fifteen years at our wedding?
It was hard to know, but I wanted to tilt things in my favor, which is I think why, on a sunny morning where I’d traveled to the bus stop carrying a pencil in my hand (Why? Who can say. I must have been drawing just before I left for the bus stop.), I made a mark. It was on the back of a street sign: just my name (Sophia), my grade (sixth) and the year (1997). I hoped Joe Sackett would see, and would think, “Wow, she’s really badass. She is doing graffiti.”
Things I remember about this day: There were four other people at the bus stop. I had on black Skechers and a sporty t-shirt I’d gotten from TJ Maxx with a sporty brand name on it. (I forget the brand, the shirt was navy blue and the writing was white.) There was an observable scrub jay on the fence of the house across the street, commented upon by Joe Sackett himself, who said, “Wow, that bird is really looking at us.” (This may not be a direct quote; I just remember him drawing attention.) I didn’t realize I had a pencil in my hand until I did. No one was looking at me. I tried to press the graphite really hard into the metal sign post. I agree that it’s impressive that I remember every one of these details as though I have a photograph of this morning — which I do not. I remember them because I made the mark. The mark made the day feel important. And it turned out, it was.
It was important because of the mark; because making the mark on the sign etched out a little path in my brain that is still there, even if I can no longer inhabit much about the person I was when I made it. You never know when one of those is going to form. Sometimes you think, “I will remember this,” and then you forget it. You might not even know you do that; when you forget something you were going to remember, you generally also forget that you’d meant to remember it in the first place.
My mom self feels so separate from my child self — like the way I think a butterfly must feel about her caterpillar self — that I’m really grateful for these memories of memories. They’re reminders that I was there; a whole person, wanting and learning — a person who is basically gone. I didn’t give her permission to leave, but when I wasn’t looking, she crept out through a crack in architecture.
I mostly remember the day because for years, I walked back to the street sign to see if the mark was still there, and it always was. Maybe if the mark had faded or been erased or replaced by a newer street sign, I would have discarded the memory. But I went back at the end of my senior year of high school and it was still there. I went back in the summers between college semesters and it was still there. I went back during an ice storm that trapped cars in their garages, keeping me from getting back to New Orleans in time for the start of the second semester of my teaching job, and it was still there. I took the boyfriend who became my husband to see it the first time he visited my parents and, wouldn’t you know it, it was still there. How many people have seen this mark? Its resilience really tickles me.
I hadn’t intended on writing to you about this today, but as I was walking from the car to the office, there was wet white paint on the parking lot hallway walls. I thought, Have these walls always been white? I’ve really never thought to notice them. I wondered who’d made marks on the old walls. I’d never looked there for marks, and hadn’t seen them. Now they were under this paint, if they were there at all.
This got me to thinking about some puffy Yoda stickers I surreptitiously stuck to some tiles on the underpass between the garage and my office three calendar years ago. Those are still there. How many people have seen them? I imagine not many, because those stickers beg to be unstuck: recall, they’re puffy. And they’re still there. I promise you, you wouldn’t notice them if you walked down through the underpass. It’s just not the kind of thing a person typically looks at. I look at them, though, and feel a private thrill. I was there. I made a mark.
People are not the only animals who mark-make. Pufferfish intentionally make circles on the floor of the sea. Or: Have you seen a honeycomb? How about a bower? We assume that animals make marks as mating displays or housing endeavors, and fine, sure, that’s an explanation. But why do we feel so compelled to explain these things neatly away? I may have wanted to mate with Joe Sackett in 1997, but the mark became something else completely. Who is to say that there aren’t other animals who want to memorialize somehow that they, individually, were there? Or maybe there’s something else going on for which language doesn’t exist.
Mark-making is an act of creativity, individuality, and play. It’s proof of life; it shows curiosity in one’s materials. Life is for lots of things, or maybe for nothing. And for all of human history, we’ve made marks to tell stories (to whom?) and to make statements (for what?). When you leave a mark, you leave something of yourself behind. You break off the smallest piece and say, “Here, world, you have this. I want you to have it.”
There is a heavy punch behind the statement, “Make your mark.” Making your mark is about doing something important, impressive, or unusual. Culturally, a mark is supposed to be a big, permanent, individual achievement. And here I will tell you that I spent a great deal of time in my twenties going to tiny libraries in tiny towns. When I’d get to the library, I’d ask the librarian if they had any books about local history. Every town has at least one book like this; the best ones are sort of like almanacs that tell tales of the time a cow got on the roof, “and that’s why everyone calls it ‘Cowroof.’” They are by and large self-published and often hand bound or stapled. I liked to hold them and read them and think about how the person who wrote the book also held the book in their hands at some point, because there were probably twenty copies in all. Invariably, I’d think, “This person needed to make a mark. This person wanted someone to know, I was there.”
This strikes me as a kind of play, and the play strikes me as a kind of appreciation.
We are here for such a short, short time. For many people, the fact of that is terrifying; what will it be like when we walk out of this particular home? We’re visiting. As we visit, we try to be good; we try to love and be loved; we try to walk gently. We hope that we can walk a path that will mean that the future of our species will enjoy beauty and softness. We seek truth. We fight for it sometimes. We spend a lot of time pondering, and a lot of time fearful, because the sheer number of question marks is, indeed, frightening. After all, you’re just one animal. And what does it mean to be an animal who is visiting?
In my own home (and I’m now speaking literally about my house), I love having visitors almost more than I love anything else. The best visitors write something in the guest book. A book of marks. I was there. I was there. I was there. The guest book in our guest room has: drawings (some NSFW!), long screeds about Norman the cat, a poem, stories, and big loopy signatures. The mark in the guest book means that the person who stayed took energy to look around and enjoy the time they were there enough to make a mark.
Today, as I walked to the office, I considered writing the word “pudding.” Maybe on a public flower pot. I pictured someone — maybe a space alien — going through the rubble of the world as you and I know it, and picking up a fragment of stone that used to be a flower pot (the alien would probably never figure that out), and read the word “Pudding,” and go, “Huh! I wonder who wrote pudding! I wonder why! How funny!” And maybe that’s something you want to do today: write your version of “pudding” on a flower pot. I can speak to the particular resilience of 1997-made pencils.
Ultimately, I went with something else. I’m not going to tell you where I wrote it — though I hope that if this letter doesn’t compel you to make some kind of small mark, it will entice you to notice marks that other people left. I’ll tell you what I wrote, though; and I stole this from the brilliant cartoonist Rebecca Sugar. In pencil (because I greatly trust pencil; is that clear?) I wrote (and I pressed hard): “I loved it here.”
Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.
Love,
Sophie
Housekeeping
I posted a carousel last week to Instagram that was missing a slide. This is always such a bummer because you can’t go back in and add the slide without deleting all the comments and starting from scratch with the post. So I let it be, but I’m sad it didn’t have the house-in-the-rain slide. So here’s the full carousel, just for you!
If you find yourself opening this newsletter a lot, consider financially supporting it! Because people do that, I can tell my husband that it is “my job” to keep doing this. And while I love nothing more than writing this newsletter (except, I guess, my family), it does take a whole lot of time.
Loose Thoughts:
Today the weather is rain and fog and I’ve HAD ENOUGH. I would like the weather to be sunny, please. Come on, weather. BE SUNNY.
I went to the chiropractor today and he was even drearier about the rain than I was, which made me temporarily like it. Do you find that you ever do this? Try to think positively and speak positively about something that is actually annoying to you just because the thing can’t defend itself in a room that’s angry about it?
Does that even make sense?
Also, the chiropractor has historically really helped (INSTANTLY) my back pain, and this time around, it’s just not flying. Maybe this is aging. I don’t know. It’s horrible to be in pain.
Do you know about SkyFlakes Crackers?
Where do you like to sit?
It’s very, very hard for me when the birds are just all of a sudden gone. Did I complain about this last week? I’m still weathering this. We didn’t see a tanager this year, for the first time in… ever? I feel like we always see at least one. Kat saw one and sent a picture to the Bird Chat, but it’s a letdown.
That said, the bird of the year was the magnolia warbler. He hung out right outside our windows for a whole entire week. He loved it here.
Your comments on making marks brought to mind two memories: one, walking through some 13th-century European cathedral or another, where some of the workers who built the cathedral had carved out their names or marks in stone that they placed. In the 20th century, the cathedral caretakers had framed a few on the wall close to eye level and drawn attention to it with a sign. It's a reminder that, who built that cathedral? Regular people, some of whom had the same impulses that you or I might have carving our names into a school desk or a street sign.
Two, in college in 2001, I lived in the same dormitory that my grandmother lived in during WW2. My friends and I got into the attics there a few times, which were full of marks from a century of college students. Was my grandmother's name in there somewhere? I never got to ask her, but I like to imagine her younger self up there making her mark with her friends.
Dear Sophie,
I love it here.
Thank you for here-ing.
Love
Myq