Wrap Your Hands Around This

After Ross Gay, “Tomato on Board,” Book of Delights

What you don’t know is, if your home’s a van, many of your things—even (especially) those that glimmer in your heart like reminders—will wear more quickly than things who make their homes in cupboards not jostled over washboard roads or tipped slanty round sharp turns or bounced upright with the occasional hard brake.

Such is the case with Bobby Ross, the mug. “Oh, Bobby,” I say when I notice the plasticy sheath starting to peel from his convex belly.

Still, the kettle sings of a night. I fill Bobby Ross with hot water. And, with the string of a teabag looped loosely around his handle, he transforms just as surely as he did on the day I pulled him, all shiny and smooth, from the gift bag my niblings sent him in.

I can’t wrap my mind around seeing the world outside my van’s windows and wanting to claim it, to carve into it and pollute it so it will have no choice but to burn and storm its way to equilibrium. For what? Wealth? Dominance? Control?

So I wrap my hands around this mug.

I can’t wrap my gut around knowing people and imagining what they need is to conform, laws that restrict a person being who they are so they have no choice but to shrink or fight, rather than just be and grow and find and be delights. 

Steam rises. I sip, slowly.

I can’t wrap my heart around thinking you have to decide who belongs.

Once, I stood on a ridge line. Nurse plants (palo verde, ironwood, mesquite) dotted the desert. From these centers, with their broad overstories and mineralized soil, thick arms of vegetation stretched and curled into wisps. The pattern repeated—west and north to the horizon, east toward me, and south far beyond a tire-cut road to a shack manned by people wearing black and Kevlar and guns.

Warm liquid fills my belly. And I think of my mom and her morning tea and hikes and the stories she sees when she plays the piano. I think how, by luck of birthplace, I’ve never been wrapped in fear of my center being sent across a border.

The tea kettle bungeed in for a drive. (The stuff on the windowsill is Velcroed.

One predawn morn, I stepped into a desert still draped in pewter.

Gruff and lithe and ever itching to climb a ridge or descend into the belly of a canyon—now—K walked to my van, casual, as if he’d not been waiting for me to emerge. “Smoothie?”

I accepted the thick blue mix. “I have coffee.” I waggled my brows. “And a surprise.”

“Oh yeah?” He raised just one of his, hoping the surprise would be our third canyoneering buddy emerging from his tiger orange Jeep, ready to hike. “Lemme grab a mug.” He turned toward his truck.

“No.” I stopped him. “That’s the surprise.”

The tea kettle still in pride of place when Ruby’s indoor kitchen becomes an outdoor kitchen. Since it amuses many of my friends no end, I’ll share that my shortness of stature and the plane of the ground in some places I park combine to necessitate that I stand on a stool to comfortably work when cooking outside.

I lifted Bobby from his dishcloth nest near the top of the large door beneath my stove. I turned the Aeropress I’d already filled with espresso grounds and boiling water upside down over Bobby’s open mouth. “Press,” I instructed, “slowly. And eyes on the mug.”

K pressed, slowly, glanced in my direction.

“Watch the mug!” I squealed.

On its round blank slate emerged a hand, a brush, a canvas the colors of hope. And, finally, a pile of wild curly locks atop the head of Bobby the mug’s namesake and a smattering of happy trees.

Bobby Ross, the mug. As you can see from the nicks in his veneer, he's known the road, seen vistas in far-flung places. When he's cold and empty, he's a lovely smooth obsidian.

“Cool.” K gave me a look like a tousling of my head.

“He’s gorgeous, right?” I grinned.

Everywhere I go, the people I meet talk because I listen. And I don’t know if I have the words to say what I mean about how, when they say things that support restrictions and exclusions, it’s from a place of abstraction or lack, and when they act on a personal level, it’s from what our guts know: We all belong, and abundance is everywhere.

And I think there’s a vast difference between abstraction or lack and greed.

And I feel like a naive fool when I say I want to believe we can close the gap between abstraction and gut before the greed makes it a moot point.

But then I look outside my van window.

Near Escalante, Utah, USA

K and I stood, hands wrapped around steaming mugs. Sun rays stroked the mountain range that emerged when the Colorado Plateau had tilted just so, broad strokes of saffron and peach, edged juniper and pine boughs white-gold, warmed a blue Grosbeak who eyed us warily from our spent fire pit, whispering as it painted of all the happy accidents that had led to this, to us.

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A note: This piece came into being because I’m participating in a writing intensive with the inestimable

Jeannine Ouellette

called “For the Joy & the Sorrow”—to my mind, a perfectly named project for the moment. “Joy & Sorrow” draws from Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, which is, yes, an absolute delight. I could read it again and again. Now, I’m listening to Gay read it on audio. And, well, delight.

Along with specific weekly prompts (this comes from one), Jeannine has invited people to write a daily delight for the next twelve weeks. I’ve done so (mostly) for the last three weeks and may keep going for the year. I need, in this moment, to be attuned to delights and to sing their tunes and to know that they exist, not in spite of but as apart of the whole mix of our diverse, abundant world and its sorrows, in this time of increasing sorrow as the powers that be wreak havoc and wield fists against the most vulnerable among us.

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For the comments, what are you wrapping your mind, heart, gut, hands around these days? What item do you think of as friend? What do you see outside your window? What brings you sorrow? What brings you delight?

Thank you for reading, liking, and commenting. You all are fantastic. I love that we gather here. And know this: I would gleefully share a cuppa something warm and delicious in Bobby Ross the mug with each of you any day of the week!

I’d love to pass this delight around. Pretty please, if you dug the mug, restack it (press the little recycle button) or share it with a link!

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Better yet, never miss a post! Escape to gorgeous landscapes. Remember the kindness of strangers. Reflect on the overlap of our roads. Contemplate disparate connections. Get lost in lyrical prose.

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