I wrote the first draft of this post while Kaden was in Spokane, interviewing for a position at Eastern Washington University and visiting loved ones. I started it Incredible, amazing, life-altering news over here. A spell for manifestation. Do I believe in such things? A few years ago, Amber told me about an easy witchcraft practice, putting something on your key chain representing what you want to call in. I looked at the seemingly-random Spokane Community College Sasquatch mascot key chain on my keys. I’d just been hired by Spokane Community College.
Some of you know that Kaden’s contract was not renewed in the American Studies department at Smith College. He was on borrowed time, anyway: his one year contract turned into two, then three. But now, the person he filled in for is officially coming back, for real.
Some of you know how brutal and disappointing and time consuming academic job searches are. Kaden has basically had second full-time work applying for academic jobs these past months. When a posting appeared for Eastern Washington University, the school in Spokane (Cheney) where I earned my MFA in Creative Writing in 2023, he jumped on it. It was possibly a stretch: in the education department, teaching future K-12 teachers how to teach Social Studies. But, with a focus on his specific areas of expertise, Indigenous, environmental, and Pacific Northwest history. He was delighted when he got a first interview. Surprised to hear he was a finalist. If nothing else, we said to each other, you get a paid vacation to Spokane, the home of our hearts! The city we wished we never had to leave! You can see all the pals!
We tried to keep our hardest hopes and dreams at arm’s length. He’d been a finalist for a position at Westminster University in Salt Lake City—took a paid vacation to SLC—but came in second place, which means absolutely nothing on the academic job market. And we’d woven a pretty good fantasy about living in SLC, even as queers.
But could the universe dangle something like this in front of us if it wasn’t going to deliver? As I said to myself when I got the UMass office gig last fall: How dare I not trust the universe. I walked around with my palms open, to receive whatever we had coming. I found so many four leaf clovers. I even found a five leaf clover. I closed my eyes and said, the first word I see is going to tell me whether or not Kaden gets the job. I opened them and the first thing I saw was a fire hydrant, name brand Kennedy.
EWU’s campus library is named Kennedy.
Friends and freaks, Kaden got the gig at Eastern Washington University. We are moving back to Spokane, a city with a strong and weird literary scene, a city where the streets are carved through basalt, a city of arrowleaf balsamroot and bitterroot flowers and Ponderosa pines. A city where so many of our loved ones are. This is a permanent gig. We get to settle down.
Who ever gets what they want? I ask over and over. It seems too good to be true. You’re fucking shitting me, I said, over and over, in the doorway of Kaden’s campus office building when he told me, feeling my face contort into a grotesque grin. For a moment, I had the stupid fear: if something good happens, something bad must happen in equal measure. But we’ve kept our dreams modest. Who else dreams of getting stuck in Spokane?
I am always pining for home. I’m not sure anymore whether home is Olympia, or Spokane. Both. Scrambled in my mind, I keep thinking we’re going back to the people and places of Olympia, too. We’re kind of rough and Spokane’s unofficial slogan is “Keep Spokane Kind of Gross.” I scrawled it on the back of my Sasquatch key chain (plastic legs broken off), while Kaden was out west. When we moved there in 2021, Spokane felt like home immediately. Let’s be real. Olympia is kind of gross, too.
My heart moves so much slower than my body in space. It only just caught up with me here in Western Mass, the moment I knew we were leaving. Things seem to go that way. My life has been so full of leaving, arriving, leaving, returning, beginning when I was 12, constant since I was 25 and Kaden started grad school. It’s not just the transition of arriving in a new place that is hard, I said to Kaden, driving out to the Hancock Shaker Village in the Berkshires. It’s the leaving. Because I did, ultimately, make a life for myself here, with the two main things I need: a good writing group, a good job.
My heart is not quite ready to leave these good works behind, 8 of Cups style. I have left my good works behind so many times. May this be the last time.
We came to New England for Kaden’s career, and now his career is taking us home to the west, to Washington. The week before his interview, I screamed at him, I can’t contort my life around your career anymore. I said I was going to move back to Spokane whether he got the job or not and he finally relented, okay, it would be good to have a home base.
I took it back. If you’ve been following along, you know I vacillate wildly on whether or not I like it here in Western Mass. I think I could say, I like it here, but I never loved it. Until now, until I knew I was leaving. Things seem to go that way. I think you could say, I texted Kaden, riding the bus through Hadley on my way to work, that this region has everything we need culturally and materially, but not spiritually. He agreed.
We entertained a fantasy of what we would do if we stayed here another year. Move to Greenfield or Turner’s Falls. I’d keep working at UMass, going to Morning Shift Saturday mornings at Looky Here, my good job, my good writing group. We took a gamble and bought tickets to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings play mid-July, knowing our Smith faculty housing lease ends June 30. Kaden had been accepted to a Feminist Studies research cohort for next year at the Five College Consortium, unpaid but with office space, library access, and a workshop group. He was going to complete another book manuscript. Take GIS classes so he could do more with maps in his work. It was going to be okay. He would try again next year for something permanent, somewhere, anywhere in the west.
Now he doesn’t have to, praise the lord.
But it’s so strange, the way the sense of urgency in the desire fades immediately.
We make plans to pack all our worldly goods, again, and drive the Little Yaris across the country, again. Heading west, this time, thank god. To help with river cleanup and prairie restoration. To become first time homeowners in our mid-40s. To build my own lean-to shack by hand, to ride my good bike all across the Centennial Trail. To be actively involved in specific academic and literary communities where we already have connections, go to Broken Mic and Voiceover and Foray for the Arts. To drink local beers and eat local food. Maybe care for guinea pigs? Guinea pigs, we’ll see.
Before that, Morgan and Stephen are coming out from Ohio and we’re going to Cape Cod, and seeing the Edward Gorey House, the only other place I really wanted to see in New England, besides the Wilhelm Reich Museum.
We may never see New England again!
But it’s gonna be all love from here on out!
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