a beautiful campaign

(an Italian Sonnet)

“I think you are a beautiful campaign,”
he said to us, this boy from Italy,
as we explained how we had come to be—
an Italian, German, and American,
three girls who’d met as students on exchange

and under an Australian sun had schemed
to trade goodbye for the next lazy season,
our plan traced eagerly into the sand.

We fashioned a collective map of homes
and homes away from homes with open doors
connected by a path to be explored.
First marks on where we’d soon return alone:
a city, small for Germany, near Koln,
a farm on shores of Lake Superior,
a white Stucco in Brecsia, (north of Florence).
Then Lisbon, Canada, Sicily, Rome...

Land circled. Money saved, to execute.
We named our first adventure with a date
and talked of it so often it became
a mantra: Summer 2002.
That summer we would meet in Bonn and prove
the smallness of the world by conquering
Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam, Italia

(at least the north), and Salzburg too.

He said campaign and we assumed he meant
“a company,” or group, not like the sort
of military term once used in France,
translated “open country”: Armies spent
the winter in the comfort of their quarters
and in the summer took to the campagne.

mapping minneapolis

I’d wanted a good map of the cities for awhile. “The Cities” are the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. Growing up, my family would make weekend trips down to the cities from our farm in rural northern Wisconsin. We would usually stay with the Beyer’s. Bill was my dad’s best friend from college. His family lived in a little stucco house on a fairly quiet street in St. Paul, just a few blocks away from the Lutheran Seminary my dad had entered after college and subsequently dropped out of. This is the piece of the cities I know best—the soft blues and cream of their combined living room and dining room, the little wooden bench that my mom and I would share pulled up to one end of dining room table, the bread and cheese and wine at every meal, the little staircase leading down to the basement a multi-purpose guest room slash t.v. room slash office slash library with bookshelves living every wall and big red cushions that could fold into couches or be pulled to create beds on the floor.

I can also remember the apartment where my older brother Chris and his wife Honey lived for three years, furnished with a lot of the same furniture they have now, but cramped into two bedrooms. I vaguely remember the two other apartments he lived in with friends before he and Honey got together and the dorm room he had at the U where I got high for the first time.

When we drive in the cities, there are bits of familiarity—the water tower near Beyer’s that marks St. Anthony park, the neighborhood my parent’s lived in when they were first married, and where my mom’s parent’s had lived when returned from eighteen years of missionary work in Papua New Guinea, the white pillow of the metro dome breaking up the skyline, the two towers of square apartment buildings with squares of primary colors where it seems there should be windows, another architectural experiment filled with poor people, I remember being told, the flashing pink sign for the Gay 90s that marked the existence of gay people, even though I later learned it wasn’t actually that gay.

More recently, I have traveled up to the cites from Chicago with my girlfriend Sarah. Her parents live thirty miles west of the cities, where farmland blends into suburbia. We drive into the city to meet up with her sister or friends from high school. We mainly hang out in uptown. From the dreadlocks and tattoos and mismatched clothes sported by the people on the street and filling the bars, I imagine it’s the Greenwich Village of the cites, although I’ve never actually been to Greenwich, just seen it described in books and movies.

Just two months ago, Cory, my best friend from high school, moved to Minneapolis. We talk on the phone and she tells me of the coffee shops she frequents and the bike ride she has started to take every night to the lake to sit and write and think.

The cities exist in my head only in pieces. A house, an apartment, a storefront, a story from my Grandma Dale that she would walk everyday from the hospital where she was in nursing school to the lake to swim. But I don’t know where the hospital is and I don’t know in what direction she had to walk to get to the lake. Unlike Bayfield, surrounded by Lake Superior, and Chicago, pushed up against Lake Michigan, the Twin Cities don’t have one huge body of water to rest against. Instead there is a river that snakes through the cites and over a dozen small lakes scattered through out.

Last Friday I rode up to the cities with Sarah in her beat up little teal green car. I told her, if we cut over into Minnesota at LaCrosse instead of taking the interstate, we can drive up along the river. Our little detour made the trip almost two hours longer, but it was one I would take again. There was something about following the flow of water instead of the flow of traffic that felt right. Even though I knew I couldn’t trust the river to run in a straight direction, I knew that this river cut through the cities, and following it would take us there.

A day later, after getting drinks with Sarah’s oldest sister Vic, sleeping in at her parent’s house, and then coming back into town to buy a bike map and split a pizza, Sarah dropped me off at the airport. I flew back to Chicago, leaving Sarah and her car behind. Ever since we had started dating, just over a year ago, I had known that Sarah would be moving back. She had done her undergrad in Chicago and then stayed on an extra year when she was invited into a MBA program. She had been counting the days until she could leave the big city for her smaller one before we had even met.

I took the map out this morning. I laid it on the floor. I stared at it, attempting to commit it to memory, starting with the blue line of the river and blobs of the lakes. I took out my address book. I wrote down the address for Beyer’s and the Chris and Honey’s old address. I texted Cory and asked her what her address was. I wrote down other places I wanted to look up: Bryant Lake Bowl, Northwestern Hospital, Luther Seminary. Then I went online to Google maps. I typed in an address or business name and it would bring up the map, a green arrow marking where two families sat around the table and passed a bowl of pasta, where Chris and I played darts on the porch and drank Apricot Ale, where Cory and I lay on navy blue sheets and dreamed about our futures, where Sarah and I kissed on the New Year, where Grandma Dale learned to check for a pulse, where my Dad had given up on the church. One by one I committed each intersection to memory and then returned to the map on the floor with a brown marker, drawing an X and a name.

I imagine Cory’s bike ride to the lake. I imagine Grandma’s walk to the same lake. I note that uptown is actually south of downtown. Everything makes more sense. I’m eager to make more Xs by digging up the old addresses of apartments and houses where my family has lived. I’m curious about the future, the Xs for homes that have yet to be discovered.

a muddy practice

It’s a rainy spring morning, so the field at the high school is wet and muddy, but with their first game just a couple weeks away, I make them practice in the mud anyway. They start out whining, avoiding the puddles and holding the ball with just the tip of their fingers and a disgusted look on their face. Then Isamar fakes a pass and Giselle falls for it and slips in the mud as she tries to chase after her. Isamar laughs as she touches it down past the orange cones that mark the try line and Giselle, no longer worried about getting dirty, is up quick and tackling Isamar to the ground even though the play is over. It spreads quickly now, with the muddiest girls eager to make a good tackle on the cleanest girls, the sort of tackle that dents the ground and forces mud into the space between fabric and skin, hair and scalp, shoes and sox. Soon, all brown, they are no longer distinguishable by the colors they wear. Only the natural shape of their faces and bodies separates them into individuals.

I have organized them into four teams of five, and marked out a small grid with cones, ten paces by fifteen paces. The teams are lined up along the side lines. When I say go, one team runs around the far right cone and another team runs around the far left cone. They meet in the middle. First there is a tackle, the fastest defender wrapping her arms around the legs of the ball carrier and bringing her and the ball to the ground. Then a ruck, where the opposing teams push against one another until the stronger team is able to step over the ball. Once the ruck has moved over the ball, another player picks it up and runs with it until she is brought to the ground and another ruck forms.

The girls work harder than usual, diving for tackles and throwing their bodies into rucks. When they have the ball in their hands they spin and juke and stretch their bodies to touch it down across the try line. They whisper strategy to one another as they wait their turn on the sideline: “Joana you take it in first, and Christina be ready to ruck. Then I’ll try to dish it out to Pearl.” And they yell in support as they run through the drill: “Joana! Give me ball! Help! Who’s rucking?! Ball out!” The teams converge in a ruck, a shoulder fitting into the cup of an opposing hip, fingers grabbing jerseys and shorts, cleats digging and clinging to mud and grass and roots, and then once the ball is passed out of the ruck everyone breaks apart and sprints to the next break-down, where they will converge again. Tight and solid and pushing together in one unit and then running and cutting and exploding apart, together, apart, they pulse.

It isn’t always an easy thing to teach, getting dirty, but it is the only way to teach rugby. The hardest worker on the field is usually the one with the dirtiest jersey. When I teach tackling to new players, I am constantly telling them that the easiest way to bring someone down is to throw yourself on the ground with them. The more seasoned players have already learned this, and then there are some girls who never need to be taught, who have no problem jumping right in and getting dirty. I was one of these girls.

Growing up, I don’t remember ever halting my play because I was afraid of getting dirty—flipping the rocks that create the border of my mom’s garden, pinching the soft wet body of earthworms, pulling them up from the soil and feeling the tickle of them wriggling in my hand, or constructing sandcastles in the sandbox with Chris. I remember summer nights when we would be in the sand box for hours, adding a roof-top skate board ramp (Chris) or a clover-leafed moat (me) to our designs. Our shoes and sox would come off and be set on one of the thick rail ties that served as a border for our 5’x5’ beach. Without an ocean tide, we would haul pails of water to test our moats and rivers, watch the water wind through the trenches and then disappear as it seeped into the sand, leaving the mini-banks smoother and a shade darker than the rest of the sand.

After the sun had set and the cool sand and breeze brought out goose-bumps on my arms, I would sit on the rails and rub my hands together, knocking the little grains of rock back into their box. I would rub my hands over my arms and legs and poke a finger between my toes, step out of the sandbox onto tip toes, grab my shoes and sox, and dart up across the sharp mulch path to the front of our house. I would rinse my feet and hands off under the cold sharp sting of the outdoor tap, leave wet toe prints in the entry way and kitchen as I walk back to the bathroom to clean feet and hands again, this time with warm water and soap.

I don’t think anyone can know how good it feels to be clean unless they’ve been really dirty. The shower after a camping trip, or a day of work in the garden, is a completely different one from the wake up and get ready shower in the morning. It is a wind-down shower, a long comprehensive shower that requires you to really scrub at every patch of skin to rinse away the dirt and sweat. The stream of water is felt underneath your skin as well, slowing down and soothing the pulse of your muscles to a hum, a quiet song of the activity of the day, a lullaby.

*

Practice is over. The girls got in trouble last week for tracking the mud from their cleats into the school, so I’ve brought them plastic bags to put their muddy shoes and clothes in.

“Ahh… Thanks Coach!” Diana says with a glint in her eye as hugs me from behind and is sure to wipe her muddy hands along the clean gray sleeve of my coat. I watch as the rest of the girls catch Diana’s glint. Then I am sprinting to my car as the mob of brown muddy bodies chase after me, hands out stretched. I am running away because I am in my work clothes and can’t get muddy. Coming from practice, I will already be late to work, with no time to change or shower. As I run away, I imagine turning around and chasing Diana down. I imagine dropping my hips just as I approach her, bringing my shoulder up into her hip, my hands grabbing behind her knees, lifting her up for a split second and then letting gravity pull us back down, the thud on the ground, the spray of mud, the perfect tackle, the perfect response. I imagine playing until I am as muddy as the rest of them. I imagine going home and stripping the wet dirty layers off, turning the shower on, feeling the hot water hit my body, watching the mud slide off my skin and slip down the drain. I am clean, calm, content.