The Origin of Words

It’s a well-worn trope writers are granted the words and stories to write—”when it’s time.” Or if you, the writer, are ready, you can pluck a story from the great library in the universe to set down to paper, in essence becoming the chosen one. Otherwise, another writer will take that chance on a similar story, if you’re busy, looking the other way, or not particularly interested at such time.

But where, where and how do these words start inside each of us?

A long ago move across country, beset by road closures, landslides, and record flooding, was unnerving, as if I’d been riding on a roller coaster upside and backwards, and finally, the ride came to halt. Counterbalanced by my eventual destination, the swimming in the head became water of a another sort. A fountain, a spring, the source of my first words. My writing words.

*

Counting back 30 years, I’m a few weeks pregnant in a Cincinnati winter, the baby likely conceived on my mother’s birthday. I don’t think about that yet, until the baby boy is born four weeks premature. The moving van is packed, childhood things like an old crocheted sunset rug left behind. My tech life and coffee business also stowed with the hopes to rekindle them someday. The goodbye party hosted, vinyl records of The Boss and CSNY, each representing our respective generations, some belonging to my husband’s best friend, sealed into boxes. My parents are already in the rearview mirror on their return trip to Cleveland, the callouses from their sweeping and painting when we first moved to our suburban Cincinnati home blended back into palms. Those same Italian hands, at the end of arms that nearly squeezed all the breath they’d given to me, I would need help from eight months later.

My husband and I will fly to Oregon—it’s a company move to the Oregon coast, or one that somehow, he has wrangled corporate support. We land, rent a car, attempt to meet up with the moving truck which has encountered the most unlikely of obstacles, though typical for Oregon winters through the Tillamook coastal range pass.

A landslide. A road closed. Many of them. No internet news to tell us of such things.

We’re on a highway named for a river. The Wilson winds its way around, cutting through forests of trees faster than the clear cutter paper mills and timber companies. Towns with no names, roads like Cedar Canyon, Timber Road, names more the likes of ski runs with double black diamond designations stand in our way. No GPS. The road atlas in hand is of no use. We stop at the local buy-mart with a sale on firewood, snatch up a few bags of Cheetos, take direction from the local clerk to follow Cedar Canyon to north, to another route which will lead us south, until we’re informed, no, landslides there too. Just north of the Tillamook intersection before hitting Oceanside. The insurance company building, where we signed our closing papers months before, will consistently flood along the slough (slew, as in stew, as in mess) for all the winters to come, even now.

The Oregon Water Science Center described it as thus, “By January 31, snowpack in Oregon’s mountains was well above average. Then came an intense cold snap, freezing the soil. When the warm atmospheric river arrived in early February, heavy rain fell on a saturated, frozen landscape. Rivers rose rapidly.” Seven hundred dairy animals killed. Tillamook County, where we would make our home in total isolation. My kids would say call this the Netti effect.

We double back, follow the southern route, travel east over a different pass, then north. Having arrived two weeks after the floods, there is a way home. Our new home. One of us will have to phone the moving company. Tell them to take their time.

I am pregnant. I have moved 2000 miles away from my family. For a dream. Hormones have shifted into high gear. I stay calm. Some have lost their livelihoods. I have only lost time. There is no path forward but onward. This is a lesson I will learn two years beyond of this muddle of puddles.

A month later, settled, the landslides yet to be corrected, our drives to Portland succumb to the ravages of rain. The upsetting of roads and rivers, the washouts, unsettling, provoking something in me. Yet I am blessed with twice daily walks each day along the Oregon coast. Sunset salutations, before yoga becomes a part of any vocabulary of mine. Pregnancy blooming, the cells inside of me learning to wiggle in the womb, while I swim in the stew of fog, rain, or waves of tides.

Long after high school English or college papers, I write. My first poem. Was it the pregnancy, the hormones that prompted me?

Jellyfish appear,

their tresses like Medusa,

entice us to touch.

But currents return,

offering refuge to the creature

and nature speaks –

observe, but do not disturb

Was it the unknown adventure that awaited? Or the coast itself? What was it I didn’t want to disturb? The peace of the moment? Of existing separate from anything and anyone I had ever known? Of those months wrapped in the vapors of cloud, the frizz of rain, and thicket of seaweed? What was it I was trying to see, the future or just the world in its infinite wondrous being?

*

I miss that womb. Each time I think about my writing, I harken back to that time of aliveness. The world came to me like morning sickness, waves shapeshifting in the dawn, at high noon and deep starry night, never appearing in the same color or form. I too was shifting shapes. The beauty reflected in the tidal pools, my beauty, was new to me, matched only by the majestic awe of such simplicity of being. My eyes bright as sea stars. My belly stretched wide, like a pregnant ocean, toward the ankles, which felt weighted—and strong. Still, I climbed ruffled rocks that protruded from the ocean’s cliff sides—always for the better view towards…what? Higher and higher because I could. The mind was shifting too, opening, closing, like the bivalves that clung desperately to the sides of sea stacks.

In essence, I came to see myself in every living thing, how I too, like sea stars, clung hopelessly to life at times, flung my arms in octopus-fashion, walked more like a crab at times, belly burgeoning. In the Dungeness crab, the belly is where the sweetness lies. Douglas fir needles feathered the rugs of my home like a nest. Beneath, the deepness of the sea brought forth exquisite treasures for me each morning. Sand dollars, brilliant moonstones, buoys from shipwrecks long ago.

I didn’t read Anne Murrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea until long after that move. But she’d written, “the sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy or impatient.” And yet, I was ALL of those. The gifts rolled toward me with all the clockwork of the tides. Perhaps she meant to write the sea does not reward those who don’t realize they are anxious, greedy or impatient. I knew I was all those things. And I would relinquish them to become a mother to the growing cells inside of me.

*

Years later, the great aunt to my son asks something like, “I remember when that kid came out of you. He came out happy. I’d never seen anything like that. Is he still that way?”

She wants to attribute his disposition to his genetic makeup. We agreed that his father, his grandparents saw life with eyes and smiles wide. But because he is part me, I portend that can’t be the complete picture.

I propose it was something else.

The gift the sea gave to an expectant me was of a clarity and calmness I reach for, ache over, still today. Shaped by clawing and cloying waves, molded by mist, held for eternity in the arms of sea stars and tentacles of anemones, in utero, my son’s genetic makeup had shifted, the half of which had came from me.

That half was a body softened, transformed into receptacle not only for a human form, but for the words to operate my own life—from within.

What is the origin of your words? I’d love to know.

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**Stay tuned next week for another Piccoli Tesori: Something Extra for Something Italian, for paid subscribers.

Additional Upcoming Events

February 17 – A Taste of Something Italian, Book-ish, Camp Washington.

February 20 - Women Writing for a Change, Introducing Ellen Austin-Li and her amazing poetry journey. Details forthcoming or check out womenwriting.org.

February 21, Contemporary Arts Center, Creative Writing Project, SOLD OUT. Check out the CAC website for details on the Spring Series.

February 22 - Roebling Books and Coffee, Newport, KY, 4:30 - 6 p.m.

February 28 - Working up a special food and storytelling experience with Bookish at Swell Cafe in Camp Washington. Stay tuned for details. This will be limited ticketing. Details at this link.

March 3 – Caring for the Caregiver Writing experience, virtual, FREE. REGISTER. Contact Kara Pierson Harper. Phone: (513) 244-5494. Email: kpierson@muchmorethanameal.org.

March 16 - Kenwood Senior Star. 2 p.m. Message me for details. Public welcome.

March 28 – Lorain Historical Society, book talk and ancestry writing workshop. Details coming soon.

April 11 - Italian American Museum, Cleveland. Details forthcoming.

April 4 - Contemporary Arts Center, Creative Writing Project, Winter series SOLD OUT. Check out the CAC website for details on the Spring Series.

April 7 - United Italian Society

May 15 - 16, Women Writing for a Change - Friday evening book talk, Saturday morning Finding Memoir in Food writing workshop. Renowned chef James Beard writes, “Food is our common ground, a universal experience,” providing us with a center as we seek commonalities among others. Details coming soon at womenwriting.org.

June 1 - Book Club

July 28 - Caring for the Caregiver Writing experience, virtual, FREE. REGISTER. Contact Kara Pierson Harper. Phone: (513) 244-5494. Email: kpierson@muchmorethanameal.org.

Upcoming in the Fall

West Virginia Italian American authors conference, Tuesday, etc.

Cleveland Book Festival

Cincinnati’s Books by the Banks

Lloyd Library and Museum in partnership with Fotofocus