Of Ghosts and Spirits

Life in small town Ohio

Back in 2021, I started this Substack to document the late quarantine insanity and sweetness of living with my boyfriend, my parents, many big dogs, and occasionally my sister on the outskirts of Baltimore. Times were tough, also fragile; time itself was doing that curious elongation and collapse so particular to the pandemic. I had a lot to say.

Then I returned to New York. Life pushed itself up from its face-plant on the floor and resumed lurching forward. Sometimes I thought wistfully that I should post to this Substack more often, but though there is a lot to say about living in New York, none of it interested me. I was buried in ordinary life. Also I was writing a novel. All my writing time went into that world.

Then life, true to life, changed again. What’s it like out there? my friends keep asking. How’s it going? Another dispatch seems in order.

I used to write looking at rooftops. Now I stare down at a green patch of lawn, and two spreading trees, and a child’s blue plastic swing, which hangs from the lowest branch of the biggest tree, empty.

Even before D and I arrived, everything about Oberlin had the air of a dream. Last June, in the midst of stormy personal weather, the job offers had arrived: two reasonable teaching loads, freedom to design our own classes, a stipend to help with moving expenses, and a fully furnished three bedroom house available for ridiculously reasonable rent. The makings of a life had arrived flat-packed in a cardboard box on the doorstep of our mangled New York drama. It almost seemed rude not to assemble it.

So assemble it we did. For the first week that we lived in this little red house, I awoke sure I was still dreaming, for how else to explain this Goldilocks feeling that I was in someone else’s home? That there were rooms, multiple, was novelty enough; that there were stairs, and two porches, and a garage—that this was, in short, a proper house, and not an apartment, continually astonished me.

First I felt like Goldilocks, in the three bears’ house; then, like I was playing house, by which I mean that all the ordinary household tasks suddenly felt like child’s play. I took delight in them, the way a child delights in pretending to cook dinner, for with a dishwasher and washer and dryer, with a big sunny kitchen and pleasant back yard, everything felt so easy.

But there was a problem. By “fully furnished” our landlord meant fully furnished for her particular life, which includes a small child. If we were “playing house,” all the toys around us suggested we should be playing Family, too.

Perhaps I should not have been so thrown by the empty crib in the bedroom where we slept, nor by the child’s rose-covered bed in the tiny room where I hoped to make my office. Perhaps I should not have been so bothered by this blue plastic swing, or the tricycle in the garage, or the tiny forks and spoons with their plastic pastel handles. But I was. They taunted me. They gave me the disconcerting feeling that I had forgotten something essential. Oh my god, I joked. Did we leave the baby in Brooklyn?

This was a pre-assembled life, but pre-assembled for a parent. A person I still consider becoming, though without ever the energy or desire to make it happen, a person I don’t want to become, though I also don’t want not to become; I want to keep my options “open” in case I change my mind “down the road.” (Though biology, I am slowly accepting, has a habit of dumping you at the “end of the road,” of turning that indecision into a decision.)

And now, all around me, were the props for a life I had somewhat queasily disregarded, and to sleep beside that empty crib for a year—

Find a screwdriver, I said to D. We’re taking it apart.

Since then, the child’s bed and silverware and baby bath towels have all been tucked away, but the child’s swing still sways in a patch of sunlight, the green plastic safety belt dangling down like a tongue.

Luckily, moving to Ohio does not only entail staring wistfully at a blue plastic baby swing. There are classes to teach and farmer’s markets to visit and oh, the paperwork that beginning a new job requires! Plenty to do.

Plenty to do—and yet enough time to do it. We drive to the grocery store and walk to our offices. There’s time for yoga and a chat with the department secretary. Life here is easy. Time is no longer a tiny cardboard box into which I must stuff too many misshapen objects, but a long low drawer, capacious and generous, in which all my tasks comfortably nestle. Each morning I wake to a green gleaming square of tree and earth, perhaps some squawking blue jays; every night I close the curtain tight and nestle down into an inky silence soon filled by my own coiled, colorful dreams. Walking to class, past puffy-stoned gothic buildings the color of sand and coffee, through the graceful town square with elegant arching tree limbs and gaggles of students cross-legged on the lawn, I feel somehow like the fat groundhogs that waddle importantly about, snuffling up acorns. Here we all are, on a sunny September morning, going about our business.

Not to say that small town life is some non-stop high. There are times—Sunday afternoons, squeaky Tuesday evenings—where the thought I’m bored comes to me. The wish is not so much for something to do—there is always a book to read, a walk to take, perhaps some grading to do or an herb to replant—as a desire for excitement, variety, the clatter of the Q train, the crush of other bodies, the zing of a city street swamped with dogs and bike messengers and a man calling out to Jesus. Something to snap through all this smoothness. I go to my calendar and underline Go to NYC, written on the first day of fall break, as if I could forget. A drink at a bar with a good friend, confided secrets and giggles. Please God. Yes, that.

But instead there is this silence. The fallen leaves, the groundhogs. And then: an avalanche. Ideas, first here, then there, timid, seductive, scooch and slide and trip into my mind, slow, and then so fast that I have to make a map of them all, with little instructions to myself. Metaphors, connections, investigations, brimmings fill my brain. Is this the reward for less activity, less stress, less hustle? A fuller, more contemplative mind?

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Longing for a city, or a child, doesn’t go away. But it is possible to stare so hard at the plastic swing that you miss the green grass growing all around it, the fluttering fall leaves and trapezoidal sunlight, the snowy-haired man next door bent to his stone carving. Lost in longing, or regret, one can conveniently forget that the absence that pains you also produces you. The ideas that come flooding into my brain, making me myself, flow through because there is suddenly so much more space.

In Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Carl Jung notes that the German for ghost, gäscht, is related to spirit, geist. This is unsurprising; we too use ghost and spirit as synonyms. But, he continues, Geist does not only mean spirit; it can also mean frothing, effervescing, or fermenting. Thus, a ghost that haunts you can also be a spirit that fills you, that sparkles like champagne, that changes you into something flavorful and strange.

The empty swing in the backyard is absence, of course. But not all absence is tragic, though maybe it is always melancholic. Absence implies space, and as every artist knows, it’s the negative space on the canvas and the silence between the notes that makes the meaning.

As I move into the expansiveness and ease of a small town life, discovering the power of subtracting elements from my life, the meaning of that blue plastic swing slowly changes. It’s less lack, and more the emptiness that allows everything else to breathe.