belonging

It turns out my poem about false starts was itself a false start. Under-baked. Waterlogged. What is it I was trying to do then? It all feels like a very long time ago.

I've just finished reading Nora Krug's Belonging, with the intent to include it in my literary memoir class in the spring. She is living in New York, but returns to her childhood home in Germany to try to learn the truth about her family's involvement in WWII. Through bits of family ephemera — photographs, notebooks, letters — she pieces together a complicated portrait, the burdens of inheritance of family and of country, the long afterlife of war. It's beautifully and meticulously illustrated and I find myself wondering about its composition, each page an artwork in itself, multi-layered, expressive. I think the students will find it engaging. I'm hoping it gives us a way, too, to talk about the histories of nations — the burdens and responsibilities of their histories as being wholly entangled with the privileges and benefits offered. I want to have more to say about it, but I don't quite yet.

A friend stops by while her daughter is in dance class and we have tea, compare notes about the holidays, family dramas past, and those we anticipate. As we talk, the sun sets, pale orange streaks through the window. She tells me about a project recently finished, and one she has just begun. We are just collecting drafts these days, stacking pages up around us. She says she can hardly recognize the concerns that she once wrote about. What is there to be said now, about the way we are living? It's all being said all the time, relentless utterance from which there is, it seems, little respite.

Mostly we are fine, we agree, even if what we have is not what was expected. I am happy to see her, happy to catch up over tea. Happy for the company as the sun goes down. The house is cold and dark when she leaves. In the dim porch light, I watch her descend the steps and wave.