Dear Thesis Advisor

So last Friday, after emailing you to say I would be sending you a draft of my thesis in the next few days, I gathered together my journals and printed out pages with jotted notes, read them and arranged them in the best order possible around my laptop, and then double-clicked open the daunting word doc titled “home all put together” in the “thesis” folder on my desktop. I took a deep breath, read a paragraph, changed a word, erased a sentence, started another sentence to replace it, and then bit my lip to contain the panic that I felt rising up from my gut. I knew I could sit there for hours—that I had sat there for hours—feeling awful and not making any progress. So instead I opened a new word doc and started typing with the single desire of pinpointing the truth of this exact moment. I wrote: I think I need to start over. There are stories and images and metaphors that I like and can still use, but they need to be grounded in something new, in the present.

When we met in February you told me not to wait to start writing. I didn’t mean to wait. I put it on every to-do list I have made over the past five months, all in caps and with a box around it: THESIS. Sure, I rearranged a bit, found ways to incorporate some older pieces, added notes in the margin of where I wanted to do research and write more, but mostly it made me crazy to pay it much attention, so I didn’t.

There is the normal craziness that comes with deadlines, with big projects, with potential publication, and striving for perfection, but the subject matter and timing of this project carries additional anxiety for me. I want to write about home, about my family and the farm, about my friends and the community I grew up in, the country, but also town, and the island, and the rez. And as I’ve started writing about home, I’ve realized I also want to be home; I need to be home. The initial plan was to move home for the summer: Jon, my oldest brother, was planning on moving back home for Seattle that summer so I could see him. Silas, my brother’s Chris’s first born son, would be turning a year old. Expenses would be minimal, so I could work on the farm part-time and then spend the rest of the time writing my thesis. Then it grew into a year: Jon wouldn’t be moving until the fall now. I realized it had been eight years since I had spent a fall season at home, since I had been there for the end of harvest, for applefest, and thanksgiving, and the first snowfall. I was also probably pushing it to think I could finish my thesis by the end of the summer.

Up until a year ago, I never thought I would be able to live at home again. At most, I could spend summers up there, I had thought, but never would I be able to make it my home again. I was drunk on the city—everything at my fingertips, something to do every night of the week, always new people to meet, diversity, gays. But once I started remembering home, started thinking about being there again, really being there and not just stopping through, the appeal of the city began to fade. Like booze, I didn’t want to give the city up completely; I just didn’t think I could have it everyday anymore. It blows my mind to think back on my thought process of this past year and how quickly I turned my head around. The contrast is illustrated in my journals. The first Christmas home from college I wrote: I’ve been trying to get a hold of Krystle, but don’t have a number to reach her at, and then tonight I ran into her sister at the movies and she tells me that Krystle left this morning to go back to school. I’m so frustrated. She was one of the people I wanted to see most, even just to see her face, but really to sit down with her and talk and really know how everything’s going, to take away the distance. I’m sad about not seeing her now, but also upset because I don’t know when I’ll see her again, which is what I’m really feeling right now, not just about Krystle but about everything. Being away at school and now being home again, I have come to two conclusions: 1) I love my family so much. I think they are the greatest ever and I value my relationships with my parents and my brothers and my friends here with all my heart. 2) Bayfield is in the past (and maybe? –probably not- in the distant future), but for now I’m done with it. I feel I have taken advantage of all it has to offer, but after seeing just splices of the larger world through traveling and friends and school I know I’ve moved way past it. Both conclusions are great in themselves, but put together create this wistful feeling: that maybe never again will I live in the same place as my family.

For whatever reason, I stopped writing in this specific journal sometime during my first year of college. It has sat on my shelf for years now with half the pages still blank, until this past winter when I was looking for something to journal in and I pulled it down, flipped it over and started writing from the back—working my way towards the middle, working my way home, to meet the scrawl of entries that took me away from home seven years ago. This past February I wrote: I’ve been saying I want to move home for a year to work on my thesis, and spend time with Silas before he isn’t a baby anymore, and live with Jon when he gets there, and have a real autumn, but the more I think and dream about it, the more I am beginning to believe this move home could be for good. Especially if I can manage to incorporate Oberlin-esq “winter terms” every year and spend some time traveling in the late months of winter when northern Wisconsin is virtually unbearable. There are so many books I want to read, movies I want to see, places I want to travel too, people I want to visit, and the only way I can do all this is by getting out of the city, simplifying my life and cutting down on my expenses (i.e. paying less rent). But really it’s way bigger than that. I want to be home. I want to share food, walks, space, talks, books, movies, card games. I want the “commune” of my family—ridiculous that this is almost revolutionary in our culture. I remember Cory ending a ranting email saying, “ you know, in most cultures outside of western civilization, people really don't ever live alone” and thinking at the time it was so funny how she was making this grand statement, but now thinking she totally has a point. I thought I could create this community with my friends in the city, but we all have different lives and different priorities and I can’t expect them to stay here for me. They aren’t who I should commune with. I can always visit them and be re-energized by these visits, but it is too much to have it all the time. We need our space alone. It is better when these magical times together are contained within a week or weekend, when all of our energy can be focused on each other. I want the every day to be with my family.

So it’s not that I haven’t been writing it’s just that all of the writing I have been doing is in this vein of journal-entry-dreaming about the future. Some of the dreaming is more specific—thoughts on the artist retreat I want to open on the farm, or the rural magnet high school I want to create. I have a list of the countries I want to visit on my winter terms and a growing list of books and movies and projects I will get to when I have more time to read and watch and work for myself.

I have tried to go back to some of the pieces I started about home and expand on them, fill them with details about my life there. When we met last summer you asked me to describe the chores on the farm as Debra Marquart does in her essays, but I honestly don’t know them like she does, didn’t do them or don’t remember. I tell people I am moving back to the farm and they ask me how many acres we have and I don’t know the answer to that either. The truth is I didn’t love living there. It was isolated. I was lonely. I had a lot of passion and not a lot to pour it in to. I definitely didn’t put it in to the farm. I put it in to sports and more often than not was disappointed by coaches, I put it in to being different—dying my hair pink and sewing my own clothes with my best friend, I put it in to crushing on a college girl that worked on our farm in the summers, and I put it into “getting out.” I spent hours online looking at different college’s websites. I spent the first half of my senior year of high school as an exchange student in Australia. The second half I spent taking college classes a couple towns over. Then I went to college. Then Chicago.

I went to this hippie school in Ohio. I loved it. Everyone was gay and read a lot. They also thought it was fantastic that I grew up on a blueberry farm. “That must have been so great,” they would tell me and I would try and tell them how it really was. I hated how they romanticized it. They had no idea what it was really like to live on farm. Their flowery tone took away everything that made it real. And then always the next question: “Is it organic?” We aren’t and for good reason and yet I felt judged by these city kids with their Whole Foods education. I wanted to defend my family and our farm. I knew we were responsible, that it just wasn’t feasible to never spray ever and still expect to have a crop come August, but I didn’t actually know the specifics. I could hear my dad’s ranting in my head and I knew he was right, but I could only remember the emotion behind his arguments, not the details.

It wasn’t just the farm that I found myself struggling to defend in my time away from home. I went to high school in Bayfield, a tiny picturesque little tourist town on the shores of Lake Superior. Half the kids in my class bussed in from Red Cliff, the Indian reservation the next town over, a few ferried over from Madeline Island. The abstracted reality of farm-life is nothing compared to the way the life of Indians and Islanders is so often romanticized. I was in the same building with the same class of forty kids for Kindergarten through graduation. I had friends in town, in Red Cliff, and on the island. I knew these places well, but I also never felt like they were mine. I wasn’t comfortable hanging out in these places without the company of a friend who was from there. So now when I’m away from home and there is discussion about Indians or Islands, I want to join in, I feel like I have something to say, but I my white girl from the country status will often times hold me back from claiming authority. I’m torn between feeling connected because of where I grew up and yet not wanting to be this person I’m complaining about that puts forth an image or judgment on something they can’t fully understand.

I do know though that the longer I am away the more I want to know. I want to know the names of trees and birds. I want to grow my own food and cook it and can it and turn it into jam. I want to buy milk and coffee and meat from my neighbors. I want to chop wood and build fires. I want to fish and hunt. I want to run on the back roads and through the woods. I want to get lost and then find my way again. I want to learn to swim better and kayak better and hit a softball better. I want to go to powwows with Andrea and watch Animikiikwe as she learns to dance like her mother.

I’ve tried to bring some of these bits of home into my life in Chicago. I bought a hummingbird feeder. (They never came to drink from it. I think I missed their migration.) My roommate and I tried to make homemade mayo. (It didn’t work.) But we have been growing little plants in our windowsill. And a mourning dove has been coming to visit me lately while I sit and read on the porch. The first day he just chilled in the tree, then last week he came up on the porch rail, today he flew up in my path as I was running. “What does it mean?” I asked Cory, one of my best friends from home and the one who influenced me to start paying attention to the animals in my life more. She emailed me back: Doves are related to pigeons. Early navigators took pigeons to sea in hopes that, if they became lost the pigeon would show them the way to land. The pigeon assists us in finding the stability of home that has been lost. No matter where pigeon ends up or how it gets there, it knows the way home. They do not get lost because they are in tune with the natural ways of earth, and are always aware of their goals. They use all their senses equally and navigate their lives in a balanced way. If Pigeon comes to you, it is asking you to keep your sights and sensitivities clearly set on where you want to be, and start moving. Even if you don't know exactly how to get there, by following your inner guidance you can find your way.

The dove is just one of many teachers. Going home I am fortunate to have teachers all around me to teach me how to claim home. There is so much I can learn just by working alongside my family and friends. I gave this thesis a working title a long time ago: “Roots and Wings: Lessons from Home.” At that time I thought I would be writing about the lessons I had already learned, but now I am realizing I am just getting started. I also had only thought of roots and wings as a metaphor, referencing a quote that hangs on the wall of my parent’s house: “There are two things you should give your children: the first is roots, the second is wings.” I was going to write about how central to my life it has been that they lived by this motto—providing me with both a home I could always return to and the encouragement to leave and make a life away from this home. But that is only the introduction to this story. The rest of the story lies in the lessons I have yet to learn, the lessons about and from the roots and wings that will surround me on my return home.

This is my truth as I know it at this exact moment—sitting in my apartment in Chicago with pieces of my life already packed into boxes, counting down the days until my mom rolls into town with our big silver farm truck to take me home. The rest of it will be written up north in between morning coffee with dad and days spent working on the farm, between snapping beans with mom and kicking a soccer ball in the yard with my nephew. It will draw on memories from the past and it will lay the foundations for my future, but it will be always be written in the present tense of learning.