I love this picture, rocking my button of a purse, my cute little hat. I look ready to make tracks on my trike, parked there behind me. I’m in my seventies now, and I’m thinking hard about my life—looking back, and of course wondering what time I have left. Have you ever been on a train as it crawls through a switching yard? Tracks go helter-skelter, crossing one another, this way, then that. At different junctures, I’ve turned down a new track—because I wanted to, at other times because I had to. As a writer, it seems natural to me to think out loud about my experiences. The poet Emily Dickinson said, presumably about herself, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Her approach to life rings true for me. I think we’re born to figure out who we are, and why we are—unpretentiously is my preference—and to honor and respect other people in their searching.

I knew I would be a writer from the time I was a kid. I went naturally down the college track, got an English degree, then spent the next decade waitressing or doing office work, all the while writing poems. Here’s one I wrote during that period, remembering myself at twelve. Turning through the pages recently of the three-ring binder that holds the originals of my poems, my eye alighted on this one. And yes, it inspired this reflection—it has a literal track.

***

At Twelve

I walked the tracks
in the evening,
watched them narrow and fall
into the woods’ edge.
Peep frogs called
in the low spots by the creek;
mosquitoes hummed
around my head.
There were things
that fell from trains.
I held them in my hands,
and I wondered.
When the sun fell
into the dark green of the trees,
the tracks glinted
in the dusk around them,
and heat rose from their
metal smoothness long into
the night hours,
long into my young sleep,
my bright dreaming.

***

The year I wrote “At Twelve,” I saw my first publication. Quarterly West included my poem “The Heart” in their Spring/Summer 1981 issue. The literary world was different then. Now, submission of work is electronic, but back then it had to be done through the mail. You mailed something—you waited. After months—one time I waited more than a year—your stamped, self-addressed envelope came back to you. Usually with a pre-printed rejection slip inside. I still remember the rush of amazement and then joy that coursed through me when I opened that acceptance letter. Here’s the poem that sparked that intense revelry. My husband is also a poet, and I think he loves this little poem of mine more than any other:

***

The Heart

One summer evening
my father
slit the smooth belly
of the largest trout,
and the coolness of it
slid out,
its wide eyes unseeing.
With the tip of his knife,
he placed
the still-beating heart
on the flat surface
of a rock next to me.
Disconnected, it lived,
its chambers struggled,
pumping air, not blood,
and we watched unspeaking
as it throbbed slower
and slower,
until it stopped,
until the caring went out of it.

***

Seeing “The Heart” in black and white in a literary journal, I was sent irrevocably down the writer’s track. But “The Heart” turned out to be more than a first success—it proved prophetic.

The following winter, my father had a massive heart attack that nearly killed him. The condition of his heart became the focus of our family. I have said this before—I will say it for the rest of my life: his heart attack ended my childhood. It’s ironic, because that is also the year I wrote the first draft of a fantasy novel for kids. A twelve-year-old girl finds herself in a world without humans, where animals talk. I’ve carted the unpublished manuscript around for more than forty years and spent much of this past summer working on it. The little girl in me is well, despite my gray hair, and has her hand and heart extended to the children coming behind.

I began at that point to go back and forth in my writing, on different tracks. Here’s another irony: I kept telling the same stories, from a different angle, using a different approach. A strange truth is that there are layers of tracks in a person’s life, running atop, running through one another. What happens to me or around me day-to-day, year-to-year, shapes where I go in my art.

Nowhere is it truer than down the track labeled affairs-of-the-heart. My first marriage ended in divorce—a painful and bumpy shift between tracks. My style during the first years I was writing poetry was quiet and small. The following two poems, considered together, encompass that jarring failure in love. The first poem, a paean to it, was written four years into the marriage:

***

Fern Poem

In this lamplit room,
where tendrils of a hanging fern
cast shadows on the braided rug,
you are a profile beside me,
a dark form chiseled in light.
Your hands are on my skin;
they move, and I move with them,
unfolding.
I am the fern stirring slowly
in the air rising hot from the radiator.

***

The second poem, written four years later, remembers something that happened during the first year of the marriage. The experience described in the poem felt surreal to me even as it was happening:

***

Metaphor: A Marriage

Snow had fallen—
a light fairy-layer that
darkened with the cold evening.
In the garage, we raised
the deer to the rafters.
His hooves swung
in their new stiff twilight
as we lifted him.

My palms were jammed into
the strong wedge of his jawbone,
and as I struggled, blood
traced blood down my forearms,
into my shirt sleeves—

The metaphor we couldn’t see,
that first winter.

***

The metaphor? I was thinking of the weight and difficulty of romantic partnership. I wrote the second poem in 1985. Twenty-two years later, I wrote a play that’s a love song to my place and people of origin. The director of a Finnish theatre troupe read my poems and essays rooted in my Finnish heritage and said that if I adapted the stories for the stage, they would perform them in Finland. Well, I wrote a whole play! Within a month, I’d written the first version of The Rock Farm.

The surreal moment I’d experienced with the dead deer became part of the fictional story of the play. A family is gathered for Thanksgiving at their family farm in the U.P. of Michigan. One of the women, Ann, is going through a divorce from husband John. She has always felt she has achieved little that matters. By the time I was writing the play, I’d had time to reflect with greater hindsight on what a person’s life choices can cost them. Here’s an excerpt from a scene where Ann talks about what she’s feeling, shared with her sister Sarah, who chose a professional life:

***

                                                            ANN (to Sarah)
I felt like I was underwater—couldn’t swallow, sometimes couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t John. It was me. (Beat.) I should have done something for me—should have been like you and not just jumped into taking care of everyone else. (A roll of thunder.) The first year John and I were married—remember?—he shot that twelve-point buck.

                                                            (The memory is so strong, she moves
                                                            through its motions.)

                                                            ANN (continued)
They brought it home, and we hoisted it by a rope around its antlers up to the rafters in his parents’ garage. It was still warm. I was standing on a ladder, my hands wrapped around its neck. I was pushing up as the others pulled on the rope. I pushed (Reaches high, with hands circled.) and I pushed. It was so heavy. Blood was running down my arms.

                                                            SARAH
God.

                                                            ANN
Yeah. Later, I saw it . . . as metaphor.

                                                            SARAH
(Grasping.) The . . . the marriage?

                                                            ANN
Yes. You have no idea. I held up this dying thing for so long, I couldn’t feel my arms. Then it was gone, dead, and I didn’t want anyone to know so I kept pushing, struggling to keep it from falling and crushing me. Then, one day, I realized . . . it was me. It was me I was holding up—someone—something—I couldn’t hold up anymore.

***

It was me I was holding up. Ann recognizes (because I eventually recognized from my own failed marriage) that it was she holding herself down, as much as the relationship. The Finnish theatre troupe translated The Rock Farm and produced it, and I flew to Finland to be part of it. The actor playing Ann lifted the weight of the world as her hands encircled the unseen deer’s neck. It stole my breath away, to see what she added, with her physicality and emotion, to the words that I had until then seen only on paper. It didn’t matter that the actors were speaking in Finnish, and I couldn’t understand it. After that night, writing for theatre became a permanent track in my artistic life.

My divorce had necessitated other changes of track: first, down the graduate school track, then the college teaching track. Eventually, I remarried, wiser than I had been. I began to write more and more in prose. Tracks, upon tracks. I finished and published a novel that I worked on for twenty-two years: A Notion of Pelicans. The novel is set around a church. The characters who narrate the chapters are women, and they have some things to say about their faith lives, their men, and to different degrees, don’t mind telling the reader what goes on between the sheets.

It doesn’t bother me to work on a creative piece over decades. One grows with experience, the work becomes deeper. Writing that novel was part of the religious track I was sent down—I’d had what I can only call a vision. It took me years to write about that experience, because . . . well, spirituality is a minefield. But I did finally tell that story, on this very blog: “What You Dare Not Say.”

Lastly, taking a very divergent track, I spent thirty years on a second play, Peep Show, a dystopic, satiric tale about a man charged with unknown “crimes against morality,” investigated by unknown people in power. It’s nothing like The Rock Farm. You might wonder what moves a person to write satire. We need only look around to see, in this real world, lives upended by nonexistent or spurious charges. If you’ve got the tools to shine a harsh light on injustice that shouldn’t be happening, it’s only moral to use them.

Not every track leads where you think it will. Sometimes—and I’d guess everyone has experienced this, somehow—sometimes I feel like the world longs to tie me to the tracks, especially the artistic world. I’m too old to equivocate. I’m a Midwesterner, of a certain age. The feeling I get is, Ah, regional. And my people are European in origin. No trauma, past interesting.

I wish people could feel the existential fear that seized me, the day my grandmother told me that, at the turn of the last century, arguments had been made in high places to exclude Finns from immigrating into the U.S. under the Asian exclusion laws. Finns were thought by some to be Mongolian, and not eligible for citizenship. I haven’t forgotten the fear and anger I felt, nor do I doubt how easily discrimination could be turned against any of us, how important it is not to undervalue any voice.

Finally, I labor under persistent societal expectations. I’m a woman. I shouldn’t, should I, write a novel about church ladies carrying on in un-churchlike lady ways, or write a play titled Peep Show. Life is perfect for women just the way it is—right? I’m a clear failure when it comes to staying on the good girl track.

Perhaps you’re wondering why I’ve told you these things. If you’ve managed to stay with me all this way, you’re a trouper. I know poetry is intimidating. Here’s the thing: we all have tracks in our lives. We’ve faced quandaries and made decisions. It’s comforting to me, and I hope to you, to know that we’re not alone in what literature teachers call “the human condition.”

This later time of life is rich, and complicated. You take things slower—and burn with energy over the things you most care about. My parents have passed on. I’m long past the “bright dreaming” that came with walking down the railroad tracks at twelve. But I know this. When I cross over to the next world, I want my copper-miner father and my garden-tending mother to gather me into their outstretched arms—and I fully expect to hear their dear, missed voices say, in the strong tradition of our Finnish forebears, “Kahvista nyt. Coffee is ready.”