On The Phone
There is a roundabout way in which I am, indeed, a midwesterner - at least for the time being, because of - the time spent. I was born here, my parents were born here, and their parents, I’m pretty sure, were born here too. But when I was 7 years old, my parents moved us just outside of Nashville, Tennessee. And it was in this place that I lived out my growing up years. The formative ones. The years where you think at the time, that you come into a knowing of yourself and your place.
The air is thicker there. Not just because of the heat and moisture, but because it is laden with the density of its own cultural history that rests at the very tip of every tongue. There is a richness in this - of story, and song, movement, and craft, of food, and moonshine - of heat - and a deep crying out, and mystery - illusiveness, and hiding. It is thick with all of it. But I didn’t set out to share deeply about all that today. The point of this telling, is that this place, where murkyness is met with the clear shrill of the cold hole, is where I grew up. I am bound to that same crying out of old songs and moonlit valleys as I am to the hum of a clear, flat, sunset horizon on the glacier scraped cornfields.
I came back here when I was 19. I was running then, as one will do. I didn’t know how to account for what I had there and was spellbound by the grit, the deadpan, the underground, and crisp smell of my early childhood.
The time returned here was meant to be short lived (or was it?), a holding ground for something else of which I had no idea. And in a way, it was. It has been. I met my husband here, we had our kids, we started a business, we made friends, we bought a house, we raised our children in it. And, while content for the most part, and to a point - I’ve missed the thick heavy air of the south. My parents lived here again too, for a while, my littlest sister in tow. Interesting how that worked out - her being born in TN and raised here, like lives in reverse. Both my brother and other sister had short stints here as well, testing the waters, then spitting it out. I understood. They grey is not to be reckoned with, among other things. Mia and Zach are in New Orleans via Kenya and the world at large, and mom, dad, Beth, and the boys are up in the blue ridge mountains of North Carolina via Tennessee.
So for the majority of my time here, 20 years this past spring to be exact, my most precious relationships have been maintained over the phone. I’ll say to Eric and the kids, “I’m on the phone with Aunt Beth” and they know. It could be 3 minutes or 2 hours, and it doesn’t matter. Because there is a very specific kind of comfort that comes from this knowing - that your mama is on the phone with her sister, again, for god knows how long, keeping up and keeping track, laughing, crying, planning birthday packages for the kids, smoking cigarettes, reminding each other why we are where we are and why we do what we do and what its worth and not worth, and counting pennies for the next visit.
For those of us that remember the phone attached to the kitchen wall with the long cord that you barely made stretch into the pantry enough so you could shut the door and talk to your boyfriend in privacy, as if folks weren’t eating dinner less than 2.5 feet away, on the other side - for those of us that remember that, because it wasn’t long ago, it's that feeling of home - where two people are doing the work of keeping the walls intact and the roof from leaking just by being on the phone. It is a taking care.
Part of me dreads it. How do I make time for all this time that I need to be on the phone? This is insane thinking. If they were here we’d spend the whole night together. We would stop by unannounced, and pick up each other’s kids, and buy a few extra things at the grocery just in case, and cover for a doctor's appointment, and go out for a change, and sit on each other's porches for too long. And we’d fight more, and our kids would fight more, and we’d have to make up more, and learn how to love each other, more. And we’d celebrate the small stuff. And cry about the small stuff, and then laugh about the crying. What a mess that would be. It’s just a phone call. It’s just 5 minutes. It's just two hours.
On The Phone // Oil on Canvas // 20 × 20” // 2026