from many places

a note from concourse b at the pittsburgh airport

Outside my hotel room in Pittsburgh there is a confluence of three rivers and many bridges and overpasses. I’m here, gratefully and with fluctuating excitement, to help produce something large and absurd but E keeps reminding me that what we’re really doing is core experience curation, and I nod enthusiastically, there is a reason I have loved events in all their forms for so many years. While we’re here groups of us move from space to space, plotting our plans. Every time, someone will undoubtedly ask me where I’m from and I dance the matter as eloquently as I can. “Milwaukee” would be an easy answer, needing very little explanation, but I have a penchant for unnecessary details, a vie for connection and my own clarity. Cleveland no longer feels true, but that’s where we met! I offer, trying to constellate my belonging. “A retirement condo in Florida”, where we’ve been for the past month, feels ridiculous on my tongue.

When we buy our plane tickets to Florida we are adamant to book our return flight, too. Since then we’ve already changed it once, and quite possibly may again.We can’t accidentally move to Florida we agree, pinky swearing in bed.

A fitting way to wrap 2025, year three of big movements and big changes, this cycle offered a different place almost every month. I scan my calendar for validation and come back with: 82 days at Red Clover. 27 at Penland. 18 in Arizona, 11 in Grand Marais. 136 in Milwaukee, so I must live in Wisconsin now. Right? That’s where my candles are, my books.

Today I’m writing from the airport. This morning it snowed.

A few weeks earlier, when we get the call that my mother-in-law broke her hip we are imagining a winter in front of a wood burning stove. We’re looking for apartments near the lake and we anxiously think we are ready to settle down. I keep uttering the mantra about right-timing, but I’m also annoyed it’s taking so long to find somewhere and when we start planning a December of travel based on this new information — a broken hip, a future house sit, a new gig — it provides a small amount of relief. Oh, it makes sense now. And I trust right-timing again. Okay, Okay. Not quite yet.

If you want to make the gods laugh, they say, tell them your plans.

December counts include (actual and anticipated): 16 days in Florida, 4 in Pittsburgh, 8 in Milwaukee, 3 in Cleveland. Today, drinking coffee in Concourse B, this feels natural, thousands of other bodies in motion, too.

That said, my habit of buying art for walls we don’t have does not waver, all of it destined for boxes in the storage unit. I find two gilded frames last week at a thrift store in Englewood, chromolithographs of birds: TITMICE one says, a banditry of small, perched songbirds, PARADISE FLYCATCHERS, says the other, their tropical plumage a homage to these weeks on the gulf coast. There are five in total, but I stand in front of them for twenty minutes and ultimately pick two, so as not to be excessive. I am fairly certain they will not fit in our suitcase, but this is how I’m praying it seems, collecting bits to build an altar. I don’t want to forget the tug the word home has in us.

Outside the lanai there are two long leafed pine trees and they shimmy in a way that dances light. In the mornings a blue heron often lands in the sloping branches, and they announce their presence with a hoarse croak, a guttural call, that draws me from bed and brings me over to the window where the first sips of humid air enter my lungs.

They’ve come with a message! Lib tells me. She’s been up longer, rapt to their chatter.

What are they saying? She slides open the glass doors.

Listen!

Listen, itself, is always the message. Just keeping listening. I try.

A foot of snow falls and melts in Wisconsin. In Florida, I scour the racks at Goodwill for winter sweaters before this last trip, airing them out in the sunshine. In Pittsburgh I walk miles in new boots and feel some ease return to my gait, my ankle beginning to heal.

I miss my altar by the window, some future altar, too, seasons that change with a gradual arc, not all at once in a day thrust through the air at 30,000 feet.

Surrounded by palm trees, an osprey circles. A red shouldered hawk calls again and again. A woodpecker lands in the gutter, red breasted and insistent. We go to the beach and I touch my fingers to the lapping waves and then to my lips. I find one shark tooth, my first, Lib finds fifteen, their glossy black surface piled into her cupped hand. On the table we arrange them and rearrange them, concentric circles, spirals, this is how I’m praying. I bow down again and again over the shell hash - where the tide pushes treasure into great piles, turning them over in the sand.

Last night, walking back from dinner in the cold, I take a turn and find myself at an ice skating rink, laughter following bundled bodies, orbiting a towering tree festooned in lights. It all reflects off of tall, mirrored buildings.

Somewhere, a bird that can’t be named, plunges themself into the water in sharp dives, once, twice, three times, and flies away.

x

G