East Africa Returned

....like a package from UPS

I have been returned from East Africa for over a month now. I use that passive verb the way one speaks of a package sent back via UPS. A large, oversized airplane, called a 787-Dreamliner with good reason, returned me. I did not return myself.

Given the options, staying behind would have been my choice. Did that happen anyhow?

Before departure, I visited a lovely paper goods store in Over-the-Rhine, Wings. My purchase included not one, but two thin journals wrapped in leather. What better way to keep my memories close at hand than to stuff them inside pages where they would live on in ink formations urged from my restless handwriting.

Did I write across the two weeks in Kenya and Tanzania? The mind formed photos for me more vivid than my iPhone might capture. The page remained a suitor left waiting.

Following a rather long drive from Nairobi into the Masai Mara toward our lodgings for the night, we encountered our first sightings of animals in the wild. The itinerary had noted “afternoon game drive.” With little knowledge of what lay ahead, we ferociously lapped up photos as if scarfing down our last meals. There’s an elephant. Two giraffes. TWO. A topi, a black-patched face of an antelope. Only feet away.

For the remainder of the sojourn, I felt foolish at my initial girlish predilections to capture it all. It would be pointless. The journals were never page-opened or dog-eared or Kenyan-coffee stained, and still reside in plastic in my backpack as if I could hide the shame of being the simple American.

The esteemed Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa and so much more, could not contain East Africa. How dare I try?

Still, I endeavored upon my landing at home. For 30 days, I wrote as feverishly as one might feel with malaria, to revisit each day and formulate how I might return. How I might make some significance of that time. The writer in me knows that meaning comes after time, not in the dictionary but in life.  I dragged myself from bed at 5, 5:30, 6, each morning and pushed at the keyboard to imprint those my memories. Whatever it took to break this fevered state of mine. The southern Ohio heat wave did not relent, steamrolling through my sleep. Nor did I.

I sit now in the quiet after the rains of a Monday morning cleared my head. It’s cooler outside. Politics heavy upon my heart given the sheer lunacy of voters who attack a woman for her laugh, her cats, her stepmomming. Because she dares to use her voice? No, because she dares at all.

Has the initial shock of my return from East Africa worn off? I have been less brutish in my attacks on my morning writing, but what has come out on the page, what will yet come out, is more feral.

In the first days upon our re-entry, I didn’t want to speak to anyone. Still don’t really. Like an animal caged and pacing. Rescued against my will. Slowly forcing myself to write in the confines of my space or rejoin conversations with those in whom I trust. The experience is so close to my heart that palpitations are inevitable each time my mind conjures up the dirt that swirls around the Serengeti and falls into the day like magic fairy sprinkles, imagine hearing Swahili words whispered in my ears, words I’ve forgotten how to pronounce but not how to feel, or scroll through my iPhone to find images for show and tell only to be disappointed. The pixelations were proof of the falsehoods of film.

My heart contractions are sonorous, plangent. They live deep inside of me. They scare me in a way that is arousing.

The lesson is: I don’t want to share any of it. Moreover, I’m not ready. To share means I know why I was placed in a certain moment on a certain speck of sand. To share means I am as certain as those particles that comprised all of me in that flash. Enough to resolutely say, “Here was my trip.”

No, I would not let a summarized timeline stand in for what was made real before me. I would not allow the experience to be snatched by others, minimized with an ill-considered, casual, “I’m happy you had a good time." A piece of myself would be lost to a world which had yet to understand. Not because of who they are. Because of me.

The closest I’ve come to explaining what is traveling inside of me, clawing its way further into my core, was a conversation with my writing partner whose husband had recently passed away. I endeavored to bring our talks to the edge; how does one take complete possession of one’s gifts? Once we plummeted into the gorge of those ideas, our exchanges carved through depths where truths are hard to come by and wisdom elusive.

Upon my marking of dates again in the eastern time zone, the death of my partner’s husband and the diagnosis of another dear friend scraped at pockets of decades old memory. What was held deep was made touchable again—that first real loss in my life. How it called me to write. The call to answer. Now a song taps into a vein so foreign to my body I cannot call it heart. A thinning of that pulsating membrane reminds me of my weaknesses as a human and when I write. When I was asked, “How was Africa,” I would say, “It was so big.” Not the wide-openness of the land. The compendium of unfamiliarity contained in a speck of sand. One that is no less immense than its country of origin, and no less weighty enough to hold me upright. And one that is swept away in a blink.

I stare into my own cradle of humanity. This futility of living an examined or unexamined life, this realization of the foolishness of the ego, and this vexation over this violent extraction that ratcheted through my bones and being, has been mine each day to conquer or collapse.

Pole, pole, they say in Swahili. Slowly, slowly.

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While Something Italian: Essays and recipes from the family table cooks on the back burner through another series of reviews, there’s plenty happening elsewhere.

Edible Ohio Valley

Last quarter, I interview Ryan Morgan of El Camino Baking Co. and the founder of Sixteen Bricks. Ryan’s energy is only matched by his output and skill. I also spoke at length with Crystal Wilkinson, former poet laureate, cookbook author, and MFA professor at UK, as well as winner of many other esteemed awards. She appears in the Cultivator column of this issue’s EOV. On the newstands now. Find your copy here. I’ll also share the digital copy when available.

Aug 9 - Our next in-person Caring for the Caregiver Writing Experience is August 9th, 10-noon. Watch this space, email bwilliams@muchmorethanameal.com, or visit givingvoicefdn.org register. Our FREE, VIRTUAL writing experiences for caregivers will continue. Dates include November 14th, 10-noon. Registrations details above. Or email: bwilliams@muchmorethanameal.org. Mark your calendars for the next online event, November 12th.

August 21 - 6 p.m. Gugel Alley Writers Readout

Join the Gugel Alley Writers for some summer fun. Writers read from their upcoming or work in progress. Roebling Books and Coffee, Newport. 6 p.m. Drinks and lite bites available for purchase. No need to RSVP.

Upcoming Workshops

Lloyd Library – In partnership with Fotofocus 2024, and its theme of Backstory, I’ll be presenting Looking Back, Moving Ahead: In Story and Life to discuss backstory in writing and in our everyday lives, examining various memoirs, whether on food or the outdoors, to discover what past circumstances can reveal. October 9th. Sign up for the Lloyd Library newsletter for information when it’s released. www.lloydlibrary.org.

Keynote Appearances

October 26, Kensington Senior Living. Virtual. Details coming soon.

November 14th. Online. WellMed presents Caregiver SOS.