We are all stronger than we think. This, I already knew, but I just proved it to myself again.
Ten days ago, I hadn’t packed a single box or sold anything, but now, like a dream, our presence in Louisiana has dematerialized, and here we are, gazing out the window at Turnagain Arm in the Autumn rain.
We’ve landed right at a power point on the map of Alaska, just outside of Anchorage, where mountains rise right up from the sea.
We’re drinking it all in — the views, the water that flows through the very rocks which hold us, and all the wholesome goodness of every hug and smile we’ve received with open arms from warm, Alaskan hearts in the last thirty-six hours. There have been at least a couple dozen.
In the prior ten days, I sold off both of our vehicles and most of our furniture, donated a ton of other things, packed up everything we decided to keep, loaded it all into a shipping container, deep-cleaned the house, weeded the garden, went to final doctor and vet and car maintenance appointments, tended to wrapping up every little loose end, moved forward on the sale of our house with a cash buyer (who requested zero repairs, thank All That is Holy), and simultaneously searched for the next place for us to live, in Fairbanks, Alaska.
I had to do this single-handedly, given that my pilot-husband was traveling for work until literally a few hours before we departed for the airport. We needed every extra greenback dollar he could make, as moving in and out of Alaska is not only an Olympic feat, it’s also quite costly.
As we pulled away from our little white house with the turquoise door to drive through the night to the Houston airport, a storm was chasing us. A bullseye was drawn on the map exactly over Lafayette, where Hurricane Francine was predicted to make landfall the next day.
Maybe our magical sense of timing can only be explained by luck, or maybe it’s my being freakishly intuitive. Or perhaps it’s being married to a master musician — probably, that’s what it is. If you heard him chopping on the mandolin, you’d understand why friends lovingly call him Chuck. (Death once had a near Chuck Norris experience, so I’m told.)
Our exodus was a bit biblical. With the storm barreling down, my last foray into a store in Louisiana revealed shopping carts teetering with towers of bottled water, and the words, Stay safe out there, Bebé, tumbling from everyone’s lips.
The scene at the airport was about what you’d expect. Jason dropped me at the curb to wait while he returned the rented pickup truck. I stood there with our pile like Rose Ellen Clampett for a good forty-five minutes, and got yelled at by the security guard who wanted to know, “How long you gonna stand here with all this stuff blocking the sidewalk for ever’body?”
As long as it takes, I guess. Sorry!
There was nothing she or anyone else could do about me and four huge, seventy-pound totes, a large dog kennel, a small dog kennel, four musical instruments, my husband’s pilot grip, a ski bag, and two dogs. As my husband says, “It takes a lot of shit to be us.”
We stayed awake for forty hours in order to get ourselves to Anchorage, which reminded me of all the times I’ve pulled all-nighters to attend births. Except this was our own re-birth, and crowning is a bitch — there’s just no way around it.
But slowly, the sweat dried and cooled, the humidity loosened it’s grip, the air felt colder on each jet bridge we crossed, and my frizzy hair flattened in surrender as two days bled together into one.
Now here we are, drawing deep first-breaths all over again, freshly washed by cool rain that just doesn’t quit. And it won’t, until each leaf has turned yellow and fallen, and is replaced with snow.
Cataclysmic pivots in a person’s life often have to be reprocessed, with certain themes revisited over and over again. To peel back the layers in raw self-examination of what makes a heart beat, it can take running over the same old ground sometimes in order to make sense of things. To excise a wound, there has to be a willingness to open toward the healing. Now I will rest here to recuperate and acknowledge all the raw nerves that tingle.
Unsafe, unloving homes, outright homelessness, and a general sense of instability as relates to housing: these have been lifelong core wounds for me. I’ve recaplitulated the experience of moving to Alaska to find a Stella-shaped place in the world a few times now. This is the third time in my adult life I’ve chosen to move back here.
Each time I claim it for my home, I’m more certain I’m healing those deepest woundings, and each time I’ve left, it’s cut deeper.
But in each leaving, I never fail to wind up clearer about where I belong. And with each return, there has been a fuller sense of informed consent to what I am signing up for. A place can claim you for its own.
I woke up yesterday with so much emotion, it leaked out around the edges all day. Laying in bed in the arms of my husband through the morning, the tears turned to quaking sobs. He held me and listened quietly as I unfurled toward a new understanding, all at once, about just how hard the last couple of years have been.
They broke me. America broke me. My body bears the battle scars.
In the last week of packing up, I felt myself going over the time we’d spent so far from home, and all that has transpired. It was like my mind was rewinding the whole experience with each item I placed back in a box, each picture I unhung from the wall, each nail hole I spackled. My surgical scars ached, and I knew I was pushing the limits.
One of the last nights I spent there, basically camping on the floor of a home come undone, I came to my knees in more ways than one. I looked in the mirror as I brushed my teeth and noticed my “breasts” were bright red.
“What the FUCK?” I asked the mirror (and that’s an exact quote).
What, indeed.
The thing that started the whole process which ended in a double mastectomy last February was the sudden occurrence of relentless breast infections that began just like this. They came out of nowhere a year ago, almost exactly. Eleven rounds of antibiotics were required during a six month period, in order to avoid sepsis, and, of course, the whole thing led to deeper looking. That revealed many masses, and the predictable shit show unspooled from there: biopsies, atypical cells, the eventual removal of all breast tissue. I opted for immediate DIEP flap reconstruction (thus the quotation marks around “breasts.”), which has been a bear to recover from.
I can’t help but to feel that, forever more, this particular hardship I endured will be inextricably linked to this place.
As I stared my body down in the mirror, I tried to make sense of the return of the redness.
Were the flaps failing? Had I overdone it, lifting too many heavy things? Was it the lack of sleep? The stress of moving off into the unknown again? The loneliness and exhaustion of doing it all myself? Those methhead-assholes from Facebook Marketplace, giving me the runaround late at night?
Whatever the cause, these lumps of repurposed flesh were PISSED OFF.
Soon, the unmistakeable fever and chills and requisite shaking through the night ensued, and it became abundantly clear that regardless of the great lengths I’d gone to to ensure I’d never find myself curled back into this particular ball again, here I was.
I wept at the injustice.
It was at that moment I decided to hire some moving help — something which, in all the umpteen million moves I’ve made in my life, I’ve never done before. It was a great relief when a couple of dudes showed up to help me physically load all of our remaining belongings; the best five hundred bucks I ever spent.
With a fresh physical breakdown and other challenges I’d already been hurdling throughout the week, I realized how much we’ve been pushing a boulder uphill by trying to live in ‘murica. (Which is kind of ironic, given that in Southwest Louisiana, there are no boulders or hills).
I’ve long understood that when life gets to feeling like that, it’s time to reevaluate. I had been doing some deep looking at this question for almost the whole of the two years we’d spent “Outside,” as Alaskans call it. And we were moving home because I’d come to an undeniable conclusion: I am not cut out for living in the U.S. of A.
Somehow when you’re busy getting through the day-to-day, you just keep rolling. But my one wild and precious body does not lie.
Upon reflection, I can see the thing that’s made me feel most like an alien.
What’s bothered me most, living amid a lot of hustle and crime, in a place where you have to lock your doors at night, listen to sirens at all hours, where cars drag-race down Johnston Street and the buzz churns constantly in an electric hum, exhausting the nervous system, where one never sees the stars and the sunrise is blocked by buildings — the thing that wore on me was: no one around me seemed to think anything was wrong with living like this.
The struggle has been normalized. A complete lack of thriving in America has become a foregone conclusion.
I don’t mean to say there weren’t positive take-aways from our time in the South. We’re so lucky to have made some lifelong friends, and to carry back with us rich memories of some quintessential, direct experiences we got to have with the best aspects of the musical and food-centric, very rich culture in Acadiana. For that, we’ll always be grateful.
But home is home is home.
We have a friend from Grand Coteau, just outside of Lafayette, whose family is many generations deep into it. She asked about our decision to leave Louisiana, and summarized it best.
“Oh, I get it. Alaska is your place. It’d probably be like if I tried to live anywhere else besides here.”
Yes. That! When you are Of a Place, it’s very uncomfortable to try and wedge yourself elsewhere.
When it came time to pull on end of the thread and began unraveling the Louisiana chapter of our lives, in its deconstruction I saw with fresh eyes just how hard this has been for me. For us.
There were many things we loved, of course. Especially the good people we met, whom we will carry with us forever—people who showed up for us in moments of need, though we barely knew each other. The magic of a Cajun Mardi Gras or the very specific groove of a danse de Louisiane. The warm home an incredible friend willing to make the gumbo gluten-free, just for you, against hundreds of years of tradition. Lunch dates with Scooter (if you know her, you’ll smile). The raw, soulful way music rises from the hardships of heat and sweat and bugs, just as craggy peaks do from the tidewaters, here in Alaska.
Without the struggle, the raw beauty of Cajun music would not have the same grit that makes it what it is. The plaintive cry of French-speaking voices cutting across accordions and fiddles. The haunting chank-a-chank of the ’tit fer. The beautiful sunsets on the prairie. Spanish moss, dangling from the stalwart oaks. Oh, how I will miss those trees!
But the sirens. The concrete. The billboards.
If I’m never again struck by a forty-eight foot vision of a personal injury lawyer leering at me from the side of a superhighway, it will be too soon.
Yesterday, on our first full day back on Alaska soil, we popped up to Fairbanks and back, in order to look at a house we’re interested in buying. It was the kind of adventure that affirmed all of the choices we’re making, and that we’re on the right path.
The very second we stepped off the plane into the airport, we heard a little voice call out, “Jason and Stella!” Within our first minute back, a friend was embracing us.
“Is this the moment of your move home?” she asked, excitedly. Word travels fast in a small town, so somehow she already knew. And I love that in Alaska, you always, always, run into people you know in airports. It helps so much to shrink this big, wild place into something you can fit in your pocket, and carry in your heart.
We walked out smiling into the florescent yellow light of a Fairbanks Autumn, and it was easy to remember why this place is called The Golden Heart City.
Dear friends picked us up and dropped us off, and gifted us the use of their car for the day, thoughtfully leaving a guitar and a mandolin in the back seat for us. These, we took to the Wednesday evening jam at the Golden Eagle in Ester — a bar where there are always about as many dogs milling about as people.
It was so hard to leave Fairbanks that night, we almost missed our flight back to Anchorage. We got to the gate with just one minute to spare before the door closed — another instance of tight-timing in our whirlwind lives.
We’re housesitting for the rest of the month in Anchorage before we head back to Fairbanks for good (and I do mean good!). This gorgeous post and beam-constructed, hand-built house sits perched on the hillside overlooking the tides of Turnagain Arm. Its orientation to the ocean gives the impression that we are floating just above it, and has provided a very soft landing after such an arduous journey.
A heroes journey, I would say. The kind where one goes searching the world over for treasure, and returns changed, only to find it was in her backyard all along.
We are staying in the home of some of the loveliest, kindest people on Earth. People who helped raise my husband, though they were under no obligation to do so. People who embraced me as their own when I came into their lives.
When they saw I’d picked up the guitar at age forty, they promptly sat me next to them on a stage for my first ever public performance.
These folks have taken us on bucket-list level boat trips all around Alaska, to catch king salmon and rockfish and crab with which to fill our freezer.
They’ve invited us to come along on their family vacations, where they’ve housed us in beautiful Mexican casas, taken us snorkeling and driven us around to hot springs.
This stand-in, secondary Mom of Jason, knowing I was suffering last spring as I went through a difficult, life altering surgery, dropped everything to come down to Louisiana to help. She drove me around to appointments, cooked us hand delivered, fresh-caught seafood, and mopped our floors (I never even mop our floors!).
Now once again, they’ve done what they always seem to do: shown unstoppable generosity and taken us into their big, Alaska-sized hearts. Being allowed to steward such a special home while they are out of the country has provided a very gentle re-entry. A safe place to sit and cry tears of pain, of relief, of joy. Of homecoming.
Some people have so much love oozing out of them, it infects everyone standing nearby. We are some of those fortunate enough to get caught in their wake.
“It takes a lot of shit to be us.” oh that is some classic Stella.
What a heartwarming chapter in your heroic story! And what a beautiful home to come home to.
All my very best wishes for this re-birth into a new life. 💗