MY PROCLAMATION OF INTENTION
It is my intention to write a creative nonfiction thesis as part of my master’s program in English Literature and Language. I will be writing in the sub-genre of memoir, reflecting upon observations and reminiscences. Author Lucy Calkins says, “In order to write memoir, we need to see that literature is made out of the everyday stuff of our lives” (The Art of Teaching Writing 399). In this manner, the content of my memoir will focus specifically on various moments within my childhood. The earliest part of my remembered childhood was spent on the dirty and crime ridden streets of North Minneapolis. When I was between the ages of seven and eight, my parents traded this unloving concrete world for the open arms of nature herself by buying an unchartered hill in rural Wisconsin. They scrambled to build us a home—the old fashioned way: with their hands and by the sweat on their brow. They moved us smack into the heart of the natural world—in the honor and likeness of Thoreau: in the woods, deliberately sucking the marrow from life. The tentative title of my work is “We Owned the Dirt,” which eludes to the humble beginnings from which I came.
MY FOCUS
I was born in Minneapolis on the unusually cold night of December 28th, 1975. I came early into this world; too excited to live to wait another two weeks to be born. Not long after my birth my father decided he didn’t want me or my sister or our mother anymore. Nearly two years later, just before Christmas, as we all waited for him to join us at my mom’s parent’s home in Sherman, Texas, he called her from Minnesota to say he wasn’t coming and that, in fact, he was never coming. My grandpa’s response was to ask my mom how she’d “managed to blow that one.” My mother looked up at age 24 and realized that she was stuck at her parents with the two of us kids, no money, no husband, and very little hope.
Two years later, strapping a mattress to the roof of her car, we found ourselves living in Minneapolis once again, my mom trying to support us by working at the Discovery Center—a daycare center. It was here that she met the man who would become my father in less than twelve months’ time. He was the son of a stiff-backed family from Hinsdale, Illinois, and the latest of a string of men in his family to graduate from Harvard; though, unlike his father, he wanted simply to be a farmer and work with children. He was living his life wading through a thick murky marsh of failure and disappointment. Their meeting, conception of my little sister, and marriage came fast into my life. Soon their struggles were united into one struggle and us kids were along for the ride.
We lived in North Minneapolis and across the street from the KFC that offered an open door to the gun man who shot 13 people who thought they were just going out for a special meal that night. All around us women were being beaten, drugs passed between hands without any effort or attempt to conceal. Alcohol kissed their lips while whispering lies and pulling the trigger of their anger, spewing out dirt and filth on the streets, yards, and back alleyways. These were the very places where I would wander as a young child. This filth is a symbolic reminder of it all. Our poverty status helped to remind us that we belonged right where we were. My soul-searching father and my empty and lost mother finally packed our car and drove us out of the dirt and grudge of the city and into a new life that offered none of our previous threats but presented a whole new set of challenges and fears. They bought a hill in Ettrick, Wisconsin, and set out to “go to the woods to live deliberately” as they felt their hearts compelled them to do. We leaped from razor’s edge to barbed wire.
Climbing over and crawling under this barbed wire, from the age of seven to ten, I grew up running through the woods, chasing fish down the creek, and wondering if anyone would ever be able to count all the stars in the endless sky. Out here the realities of North Minneapolis were invisible and only existed in our memories, like the visible moon at noon-day. For a while we lived in a small one room hut-like-house made out of asphalt-impregnated fiberboard. We had no bathroom, other than the five-gallon bucket that stood fifty feet into the woods from the back of our little house. We had no running water and our electricity came from a single power cord that ran along the field from an electric box and into our home. We ate from the earth and when that didn’t provide enough, our neighbors offered their surplus garden produce. I played like a child while the sounds of hammers and saws competed with the natural sounds that floated in the air and came from the woods. Piles of lumber, and my parents’ stressed, worn-out faces lit the backdrop interfering with the soft movement of the rolling hills and the tree lines that edged the horizon.
I grew up here: first, on the inner city streets of Minneapolis and then, in the woods—always poor, always questioning: wondering and wandering.
Two years later, strapping a mattress to the roof of her car, we found ourselves living in Minneapolis once again, my mom trying to support us by working at the Discovery Center—a daycare center. It was here that she met the man who would become my father in less than twelve months’ time. He was the son of a stiff-backed family from Hinsdale, Illinois, and the latest of a string of men in his family to graduate from Harvard; though, unlike his father, he wanted simply to be a farmer and work with children. He was living his life wading through a thick murky marsh of failure and disappointment. Their meeting, conception of my little sister, and marriage came fast into my life. Soon their struggles were united into one struggle and us kids were along for the ride.
We lived in North Minneapolis and across the street from the KFC that offered an open door to the gun man who shot 13 people who thought they were just going out for a special meal that night. All around us women were being beaten, drugs passed between hands without any effort or attempt to conceal. Alcohol kissed their lips while whispering lies and pulling the trigger of their anger, spewing out dirt and filth on the streets, yards, and back alleyways. These were the very places where I would wander as a young child. This filth is a symbolic reminder of it all. Our poverty status helped to remind us that we belonged right where we were. My soul-searching father and my empty and lost mother finally packed our car and drove us out of the dirt and grudge of the city and into a new life that offered none of our previous threats but presented a whole new set of challenges and fears. They bought a hill in Ettrick, Wisconsin, and set out to “go to the woods to live deliberately” as they felt their hearts compelled them to do. We leaped from razor’s edge to barbed wire.
Climbing over and crawling under this barbed wire, from the age of seven to ten, I grew up running through the woods, chasing fish down the creek, and wondering if anyone would ever be able to count all the stars in the endless sky. Out here the realities of North Minneapolis were invisible and only existed in our memories, like the visible moon at noon-day. For a while we lived in a small one room hut-like-house made out of asphalt-impregnated fiberboard. We had no bathroom, other than the five-gallon bucket that stood fifty feet into the woods from the back of our little house. We had no running water and our electricity came from a single power cord that ran along the field from an electric box and into our home. We ate from the earth and when that didn’t provide enough, our neighbors offered their surplus garden produce. I played like a child while the sounds of hammers and saws competed with the natural sounds that floated in the air and came from the woods. Piles of lumber, and my parents’ stressed, worn-out faces lit the backdrop interfering with the soft movement of the rolling hills and the tree lines that edged the horizon.
I grew up here: first, on the inner city streets of Minneapolis and then, in the woods—always poor, always questioning: wondering and wandering.