Category Archives: north carolina

The Work of Grieving.

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It’s been a teeth-rattling week.

I’m cozied up in J’s favorite armchair (he’s diplomatically taken the couch) staving off the onslaught of indoor air conditioning. It’s been a glorious day, the kind of North Carolina day when i see old friends and make new friends. The kind of day when the pollen coats your shoes from walking in sun-dappled grass, the kind of day when the flower blossoms make you forget the annoyance of yellow stains.

But my newsfeed is not so sated with Guglhupf chocolate as i am. My newsfeed is full of memes of the Sandy Hook children’s faces juxtaposed to the US Senate, it’s pictures memorializing Boston. It is full of arguments over the atrocities that occurred at the same time as the Boston Marathon in Afghanistan, where thirty people were killed at a wedding. Reasons for tremendously legitimate anger, and tremendously legitimate questions to ask.

And also on my newsfeed, buried within it all, is an obituary my aunt posted of my grandmother.

Grief is a season, my mother always says. Grief, she says, is exhausting, hard work. My grandfather has done little else but sleep, these past few days. The funeral has passed, out-of-town relatives returning to their homes afar. Their support has not abated, but the forefront of the crisis is gone. And so our refrigerator’s stock of casseroles dwindles and life starts to resume a trodden pace.

The grief, though, remains.

I remember nearly needing to leave the sanctuary when, at church, they read off the names of the children at Sandy Hook. How several pews ahead there squirmed an impish little one in a striped shirt, tugging on his mother’s sleeve for attention.

The human connections, the moments i remember with faces and feelings attached, remain. Listening to WUNC with my grandmother on a rare solo visit before i left for college. The sigh of relief at texts from friends in Boston assuring us they were okay. I don’t recall the macroscopic picture so much as i recall the details, details interwoven with emotion and simplicity.

And maybe that’s why we can’t carry grief forever the way we are grieving now. We can’t hold the enormity of tragedy. It is too great for human hands. There is a time to sleep all day. A time to let it crush and consume. And i don’t want to anticipate so much to say it’s time for us to move on – it’s not. For anything. This is the time to mourn, and we don’t always get to decided when we are done mourning. Grief, in some ways, gets to decide when it’s done with us.

But it is in doing the hard work of grief, as my mother says, that i have to choose to remember that little boy in his striped shirt pestering his mother. Being a squirmy kid, probably not understanding why such a pall was cast over his parents. I choose to eat shrimp and grits with my Papa, talking about Granny but also about summer plans. School. The elusive normality we all crave.

I have to choose to see this Carolina day for all it’s possibility, even when at the corners of every conversation lurks a greater sadness. The work of grieving does not need to stay, forever, the only work i see.

Home Again.

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In a stunning turn of events, i was in an airport.

In not so spectacular events, i was headed home for what looked to be a funeral for my grandmother.

I should have known it was going to be nightmarish. I had to fly through not one, but two of my absolute least favorite airports in the whole world: Heathrow, and JFK. People crammed in yellow-sign-lit hallways and endless bus rides between terminals. I did not relish the journey, but i relished the 400 dollars cheaper ticket. Gritting my teeth and bearing it was in order.

It began with my intended carry-on being snapped shut with a white-and-black luggage tag. Too big for Europe, apparently. Backpack on my sunburnt shoulders and bleary eyes searching for my 7 am take-off gate, i bid adieu to Edinburgh and a good morning to London. A two hour layover became three. I practiced yoga in the terminal to remain calm; a lively American doctor now living in Nairobi joined me. She asked my least favorite question: why do you study religion? An interrogation later, i was grateful for her diplomacy but weary of people. I had, after all, woken up to a 3 AM alarm.

A blessing: the seats behind my ticketed place were empty. I claimed them, napping curled-cat syle in between movies about Paris on my personal TV. Snappy and sassy flight attendants left me snacks for when i woke. Being kind to service workers always pays off.

A hiccup: we landed in JFK with twenty minutes for me to clear customs and board my next flight. Lip-biting and nail-chewing windled those minutes down as we taxi’d to the terminal. Thick New York accents pulled me out of line, handing me two boarding passes in an offensively orange envelope with instructions to use the enclosed cab voucher to get to LaGuardia for my rescheduled flight.

Two boarding passes?

A man in a black kilt and rollings r’s of beloved Scotland inquired after his own ticket. We shared a surname and an RDU destination. Suddenly, this was my brother Callum and we, having flown from Edinburgh to Heathrow to JFK and (in theory) to RDU, were travel mates.

Another man with an Eastern North Carolina drawl and the same name as my own J joined us, and then we were three.

A blessing: we got to skip the queues in customs and our bags were pulled for us. The immigration officers loved my Obama-sticker-covered water bottle. My newfound Scottish brother was held back for his greencard, so travel-J and i hailed our cab and counted the ticking minutes to our departure. A fifteen minute cab ride, they said.

Twenty minutes later, we arrived with barely thirty minutes to get to the gate.

I’d prepped with two puffs from my inhaler, willing my tiny lungs to hold out.

A sprint and shoeless security check later, i was wheezingly wheeling my reclaimed suitcase to gate C4. I mentally ran through the yoga routine i would do at home to un-knot my ribcage and shoulders. I scanned the crowd, anticipating the line to be forming for the flight –

only to find this flight was delayed by another half an hour.

A deep breath. Another. And suddenly, i was calm. I had thirty minutes to breathe, so i ventured into the WC for a freshening up. Positive vibes, i thought. Child’s pose, and release. Ready to collapse in my real-J’s waiting hands and elbows and arms, cat-curling into a sleep that was not suspended between armrests. Staying in a centered place, a focused place. Just get home. Travel-J loaned me his phone, i made the calls.

Two hours and a sweet tea in hand later, i was home. Too late to say goodbye to my Granny, but in time to hold my own mother’s hand when the undertakers arrived. It’s been a long few days of casseroles left at the door and family in black. It’s good, if hard, to be home. There’s no place so beautiful as North Carolina when the dogwoods are in bloom. Especially when spring blossoms can so remind me of life in the midst of honoring a death.

And no journey, no matter how frustrating, discounts that.

Today.

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Though this day has been earmarked on my calendar since October, its arrival feels tremendously sudden. Like no amount of fretting or anticipating or eagerly-anxiously dancing around unpacked suitcases could have adequately prepared me for this. The maps are tucked in their pockets, my phone is charged, and the laundry’s on its last load.

Come 6 PM tonight, i will be United Kingdom bound.

I’ve been instagram-ing* my last few days in Chapel Hill. Looking over these fragments – photos doctored up in fun filters that capture only the smallest of moments – i feel an encompassing sense of minutia. Like, the Big Adventure about to happen is going to comprise of the same sorts of pictures: books on a dashboard, drinks with loved ones and new friends, feet walking on the ground. Ordinary and simple, made profound by the newness such simplicity inspires in me. All things made new.

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Being home has become its own kind of adventure in the profundity of simplicity. Simple cups of tea, simple smiles, simple time together.

The first few days in Edinburgh are going to be anything but simple. Acquiring keys, learning the map, navigating new cultural expectations. Small things i daily take for granted here. But i’m up for the challenge, and praying i stay enthused and open and encouraged.

See ya’ll on the other side.

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current jam: ‘where the boat leaves from’ zac brown band

best thing: elmo’s & the padre & the man.

*if you’d like to join in the fun, my username is lizziemcmizzie! (assuredly, there will be lots of scottish-themed uploads!)

Making Rice, Making Do.

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What i lack in Southern charm, my mother makes up for with every sultry ya’ll she smooths out of her mouth like butter. When she cooks, our table is swimming in vats of her fried miracle meat masterpiece she’s fondly named “Hannah’s Second-Helpin’ Chicken.” A friend of hers recounted their initial introduction, enumerating specifically that she was wearing her perfect pearls strung around her neck. My roommate frequently remarks that my ability to curl anyone’s hair (no matter the thinness or resistance to hairspray) is my Southern Superpower. I’m always quick to share it’s a superpower i inherited from my South Carolinian mother.

But easily, one of the most Southern things i have inherited from my mother (particularities with hot curlers aside) is an abundant love for steamed white rice.

She is the master of rice. Nowhere else have i had rice that compares – not the kitchens of Mount Holyoke, not the restaurants in Uganda, nor the meals consumed at friends’ homes. My mother’s rice is the kind of food i cling to as a measure of perfection. While some rice dishes may rank on a scale of goodness, none have ever paralleled Hannah’s Second Helpin’ rice concoction.

Part of what makes her rice so delicious is the particularity with which she makes it. In the unending panicked phone calls i’ve made to her asking for cooking advice (including, once, from Uganda) she’s quick to reiterate: rice is very, very precise.

“Don’t be sloppy with your measuring cup,” she shows me in my umpteenth lesson, bending down to be on eye level with the red dashes marking ounces and liters. Often as she does this, there is a persistently misbehaving strand of brown hair (curled, of course) that she tucks primly behind an ear.”You have to make sure it is exactly 3 cups of water.”

Over the phone, she reminds me the name for the recipe: 3-2-1 Rice. Precision in name, precision in numbers. 3 cups of water, 2 cups of rice, 1 teaspoon of salt. For the longest time, i couldn’t remember whether the three was for the grains or the water. Naturally, a few pots have turned a delicate shade of brownish-black as a result of my imprecision.

Living in Massachusetts for two and a half years now has been brilliant. I’m even growing to like snow. Living there has also been a lesson in just how Southern i am – even if i’ve spent the better part of my early adulthood in denial. Sure, i don’t own anything Carhart and will never suggest a BBQ joint for lunch. But i have a strong affinity for pearl earrings and i brew my own sweet tea (à la my mother’s recipe). The longer i live in New England, the more i come to make peace with – and embrace – the roots i have in Carolina country. The salience of my differences among my peers has been a wonderful part of this path of discovery.

And in five days, i begin the next big cross-cultural expedition to Scotland.

As i frantically decide between which map of Durham, NC to bring and put on my wall, i can’t help but think about how much more i’m going to learn abroad. I intend to try Haggis, explore the bowels of Edinburgh castle, breakfast at the Elephant House Café. I hope to grow in my sense of a globalized identity and engage critically with my own assumptions.

Learning who you are while abroad is a messy process. There’s plenty of journaling and contemplating and weepy phone calls ahead. Nothing is precise about identity, i think. But that’s also the adventure of it; for every homesick day i’ll have, assuredly there will be wildly wonderful moments where i can scarcely believe the world unfolding around me. For me, the most important thing right now is to focus on making those moments meaningful by being present in the moment. 

And when the days are so messy and i feel so foreign and disembodied, i’ll go home by making a bowl of rice. In all the messiness, there is still the precision of her 3-2-1 Rice Recipe. (Hopefully, i can even find that calm without burning the pot.) And the thing is, rice is still rice even when you’re 3,700 miles away from the woman who makes it best in the whole world.

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current jam: ‘toes’ zac brown band

best thing: hanging paintings.

 

 

Giving Thanks.

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Having survived another round of baggage claims and poorly packed suitcases, i’m back at Mount Holyoke after a wonderful excursion home to Carolina for Thanksgiving. My nine days in dixieland were spent with such beautiful people it was impossible to go un-reminded of how blessed i am to share in their company. And, with a family that is expanding and beckoning, i was thrilled (and stuffed with) no less than three Thanksgiving meals to partake in. This misplaced Carolina girl has had enough sweet tea and sweet potato casserole to survive forty days in the desert tundra of the impending finals season.

(from thanksgiving #1 out of 3. spoiled and privileged and ten-pounds-gained am i!)

 

I hope, for those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving, that is was a bountiful time for you. I hope especially that this bounty in heart and spirit continues in the coming weeks!

Thank you for being.

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current jam: ‘beautiful things’ gungor

best thing: journey mercies.

 

Voting Don’t Stop for Sandra-Dee.

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Sent off my absentee ballot for the state of North Carolina today! This is my first time voting in a presidential election, so i’m pretty stoked – and i’m able to vote in a swing state, which is really satisfactory. No rager of a hurricane stops this lady from civic duty or casting my vote for Obama!

North Carolinians: if you are still uncertain about local elections, i highly recommend you check out EqualityNC’s Voter Guide! It’s a list of all anti-Amendment One and pro-LGBTQ equality candidates in the state. Our voices matter, and no real change can happen if we don’t put pressure on the powers at be to represent all the people of this country.

Stay safe out there, ya’ll. This storm looks as feisty as Olivia Newton John in that leather suit.

What was it like when you voted in your first presidential election?

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if you like this post, you might also enjoy my post about voting against amendment one.

current jam: ‘shark in the water’ vv brown

best thing: civic duty, ya’ll.

“It might not be easy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not simple.”

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The time for leaving is fast approaching. I’m still so much of a conflagration of thoughts, senses of melancholy and anticipation coursing through. Really, though, there are no thoughts i have on leaving that (brilliant, as ever) Ze Frank has not already espoused in succinct video form:

 

There is one thing i feel a disconnect to in his video, though. The part where leaving is the going, without the coming back. Of course we often leave knowing we can never come back – back to the time we left, the person we were upon departure. It’s part of the transience of human existence, i think. When i leave Chapel Hill, again, this week, i’ll be leaving a part of who i am behind. It’s inevitable. But i also feel that it’s ever a shedding of another layer of skin, to reveal a new and vulnerable and malleable layer underneath. A layer that needs strengthening.

However. I do come back. Maybe it’s the time of my life that i’m in – being twenty, in college, still dependent on my parents and yet living apart like a quasi-adult. There’s no permanence to my geography, so the leaving is always with an eventual bent towards coming back. It’s perhaps less frightening this way, but it certainly isn’t comfortable, either.

I learn by going where I have to go. (theodore roëthke) 

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current jam: ‘skinny love’ cover by meghan tonjes

best thing: burritos.

Hometown Tourist Night Out: Wine & Design

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So while i was internally wrangling with the metaphorical implications of turning twenty, i actually spent the day doing less-than-tortured festivities. Namely: painting an acrylic tree with a Van-Gogh-inspired backdrop with my new social event obsession, Wine & Design Chapel Hill.

(they gave me a free koozie (for my soda!) for my birthday!)

Wine & Design is, as i understand it, a quickly growing corporate art-making franchise wherein you can take a night out to “get your art buzz on.” You bring your own beverage (thus, the wine!) and an artist teaches you step-by-step how to paint the chosen work for the evening. We went for their “funky landscape” workshop and had a total blast!

the supplies provided for art-making!

Our artist, Arlie, was hilarious & a really wonderful teacher!

the painting progress over the evening…

(photo courtesy of the wine & design chapel hill/durham facebook page!)

It was such a treat to get back into painting. I haven’t really made any art since going to school, other than the semesterly tradition of découpaging the hell out of my notebooks and plastering my walls with postcard collages. There is something incredibly soothing about the physical motion of painting, the satisfaction of seeing a piece completed to its end. It’s also fun to make a less serious piece – like a tree – rather than always getting caught up in making something that matters. To me, what mattered was this cherished time with loved ones and having a blast swirling paint on a canvas.

my finished piece!

Though Wine & Design can be a little pricey, it is totally worth it. You’re not just paying for the painting instruction, materials, or work itself – you’re really treating yourself to a night out!

(For more of my hometown tourist series, click here!)

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current jam: ‘she walks right through me’ alex day

best thing: chai tea & legal pads full of inked notes.

Thoughts in My Head: Turning Twenty.

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Yesterday* marked my twentieth birthday – two decades of breathing, eating, writing bad poetry, drinking too much sweet tea, not reading enough books, and falling more deeply in love with this wide and wondrous universe. And while in every measurable sense yesterday was rather ordinary (no Grecian temples cropping up in the hallway on my way to breakfast or anything unusual of the like) turning twenty does, in a somewhat uncharacteristic way, feel like a new chapter.

Normally, i feel as though there is too much hype placed around birthdays as the annuals of change when the day itself is, ultimately, rather plain. I’m not trying to discount the miracle of human birth or, frankly, to dissuade anyone from the practice of present-giving. Rather, i just think aging is more gradual than a once-a-year phenomenon. We grow older by experiences, not by numbers.

But. Yesterday really felt like a shift. Perhaps it is because the timing of my birthday; the colossal amount of clothes and books and q-tips that remain not-yet-packed in a heap on my floor remind me of the impending end to summer. Friends in Carolina have already returned to school, and i embark in a week for the two-day journey back to my own beloved Mount Holyoke. The transition period of no job, not packed, not ready to leave is giving me a permanent psyche of an ellipses. Spaces between jolting, frozen-up moments of haltering static. I am here, i am nowhere, i am the pile of jeans and old socks, i am the books i never actually read this season of the sun.

Going back is going to be harder than it’s ever been. I love college, make no mistake. And i love Mount Holyoke. Especially in the fall, when the leaves paint the world in shades of rouge and crimson and sulphur and citrus. When the air is bitingly fresh and the sky unbound – before the deadness of winter encloses the sun. I love, most of all, the people who dwell under that sky and in the buildings of brick and memory between the red-painted trees. People whom i haven’t seen in four months, people whom i am ready to live in the day-to-day with once more.

But being home this summer, and making peace with my home in Carolina, means leaving a piece of what i used to bring to school with me behind. And that’s just – well, it’s just hard.

Last summer i was given a name: Nachap. Though i had aspired to be called something snappy and cool, i was given a name more apt for the season of my time in Uganda – and time in my life. Nachap means that i came in the season of weeding. As i wrote this time nearly a year ago today,

“Weeding, pruning, preparing and tending to the earth to make room for a healthy and uncumbered crop to grow.

This summer, this time spent in this beautiful and broken place, has been a time of pruning. A time of discerning in what soil to plant my crop, a time of pulling out by the roots what would choke the vine. A summer of being aware of the baobabs that might overcome my small planet in the universe, a time for allowing good seeds to take root. Waiting, throughout the weeding, for the plants to bear fruit.”

Last summer was hard. It was also worth every bit of the difficulty, and it was educational and incredible and suckish and awesome. Pruning to bear fruit means, to me, we make sacrifices in order for the real rewards to be reaped. We learn patience. We allow ourselves to grieve.

To my unyielding praise and relief, has been the season of fruit-bearing. And since i now live in New England, i can expertly assure you seasons are not mutually exclusive. My winter coat has been exercised long into April – both in practice and in metaphor. No world turns without hinges or hiccups. Perfection is a false notion of infallibility, i think. And maybe seasons are kind of a falsehood too – at least, metaphorical ones. Perhaps we live in a permanent ellipses, a life of constant motion perforated with events that turn the tide of direction.

And maybe sometimes the events aren’t so pronounced or known – maybe they are small, gradual. Decisions made every day change slowly with the entrance of new people. Such a tilt bears equal magnitude to the people who step forward into you plugging track of a life and, in their stepping forth, completely maul your track’s plans. Maybe both of these kinds of progressions are the best kind, the kinds that make you more critical and more appreciative, more open to change and more bound to your convictions.

In the same blog post where i first wrote about my name, i talked how i have had a history of name-changing, and of being different parts of my self in different contexts. In the subsequent year, i honed my understanding of the structures of language concurrent to my studies of the self and non-self. Now, when writing my name, it is lower-cased. Yet another change.

But the more profound change has come – a change, strangely, i sensed was growing. I wrote then that i thought there was a time coming when i would no longer introduce myself as lizzie, that a new name was to be sifted and selected for my adulthood. I think now that it is less about having a new name, and more about growing into the one i was born with: elizabeth.

In unexpected and serendipitous ways, i find myself growing up. Sure, i still am terrible at parking cars and call my mom when i am overwhelmed by the prospect of cooking for myself. I make no claim to being a mature sage of responsibility. But turning twenty at the tide of this season comes with the most serendipitously beautiful change of my life so far, and it is because of this change that i feel – more than ever – it is time for me to face the name i was given. I am learning, in the little moments (when the rice i fretted over doesn’t burn) and in the big moments (when i have faith, with re-found conviction, that the sacrifices we make will reap joy) to live into the fullness of my given name.

But really, twenty is another year. In its simplicity there is the enchanting allure of un-made decisions, living not-yet-realities of all that could be. It’s not going to be perfect. It won’t be a summerlong annual of fruit-bearing, and i pray it won’t be a winterlong tide of pruning. Mostly, though, i can only have faith that there is a season for all things, even if such seasons are not bound by conventional weather.

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current jam: ‘twenty years’ the civil wars (the pun was too beautiful to resist!)

best thing: bouquets of sunflowers and acrylic paint.

*this post was originally drafted on august 23rd.