Halfway Scribblings, for Shadow

Being the brilliant person that I am, I of course failed to have the foresight to recognise that I might end up spending the night at the enchanting little place my cousins call the Salem House, and therefore neglected to bring both earbuds and camera. While the earbuds are not so great a loss — I can play anything I need to aloud, really — the lack of camera is indeed regrettable, since there is no way to visually share the large round iced lemon shortbread cookies gracing cooling racks in the quaint little kitchen, or the delicate pattern painted onto the pale yellow of my borrowed, bowl-shaped mug, or the way the light falls just so over the bank of curling ivy and two-toned hostas bordering the wooden steps embedded into the earth behind the house. They tell me there is a graveyard at the top of the hill. In the back yard, a cement walk outlines what used to be an in-ground swimming pool; there is a tree planted in the center of the now-grass-covered rectangle that two decades earlier was chlorinated water. 

There are some places, indubitably attached to individual people, that leave me with a deep impression of what it means to be a genuinely welcoming soul, and this place is one of them, these people are among them. Hospitality is an abstract concept, but it takes tactile form in my memory: it is sock feet propped comfortably on the rim of a wood-burning stove, hot drinks after nightfall, fingers snipping and arranging and pasting to fashion delicate silhouetted cards, peach cobbler, conversations held in low tones on the single bench in the church foyer, hands curved around the car's steering wheel, flowers like petal-caged sunshine on the uneven brown of the window sill, the rise and fall of a voice reading funny stories, snorting laughter erupting from the depths of the couch, casual and comfortable trading of insults and compliments alike, ice cream, second helpings, random adventures, random hugs. It is fitting so seamlessly into the activities and the personal space of others, not because you do but because they do. It is watching everyone being enthusiastically included. It is dropping everything to run to the door and welcome impromptu guests into the house, and it is everyone being dragged into the kitchen to eat cookies and then to seat themselves freely on the floor and talk and talk and talk; it is the door swinging wide; it is the door always being open. It is borrowed belts and borrowed books and unspoken understandings. It is finding another piece of home.

Perhaps growing up is meant to be primarily about paying for oneself instead of letting other people pay for you. That is quite possible, and it is probably the case, which means that I have been missing the point of becoming an adult, because for me growing up has so far been less about seeing that my pocketbook gains weight and more about broadening my definition of belonging. For my entire conscious life I can only remember perceiving being part of a group as being acceptable if that participation had been earned. Do I make enough money to call myself a responsible member of society who is allowed to take breaks and have fun? Can I treat other people instead of being treated? Am I a smart enough, scintillating enough, genuine enough, friendly enough person to justify my letting go and enjoying other people's company? Do I deserve these relationships? 

Funny how such questions can be so consuming and yet so futile. Because no, I don't deserve the relationships, I don't deserve the welcome, I don't deserve the fun, I don't deserve the love. I never will, and to be quite objectively honest, it's unlikely that anyone else will ever truly deserve those things either. We humans with our limitations can tally and flowchart and quantify to our hearts' content what we do or don't earn from others and what others do and don't earn from us, but in the end what defines our interactions with others is not reward so much as need for relationship — a constant fluctuation between giving and receiving. And, oddly enough, it is the receiving of relationship — without the earning of it — that is somehow creating within me the strength to do what I could not accomplish merely for the sake of becoming a person worthy of being liked.