I went to the mountains this weekend. I thought I would come back with a soul full of flowers and sunsets (and puppies and unicorns, obviously), and I did.
Oh I did.
But I also did some digital archaeology with my dad and found my old blogspot — Squeeze the Universe — along with its hundreds and hundreds of posts written between 2007-2015.
I thought I’d skim a few from the beginning, just to remember what I was writing, and instead I basically fell in. Reading my essays until my eyes were red and raw — like stumbling across a forgotten hope chest. Finding myself ten years ago, seeing her face to face, word to word, was better than unicorns.
In case that comparison feels suspect, you should know that I have significant memory loss from my years as a young mother. Maybe someday I’ll tell you why, but for now, just know that reading these blog posts felt like stepping back into some skin I accidentally left behind.
It’s stuff worth reading. And so, that’s what the Hope Chest will be here on Large Hope: Weekly (ish), I’m going to reach in, pull one of those old essays out, and set it here exactly as it was — typos, tangents, weird obsessions, non-existent capital letters and all. Then I’ll sit down next to my past self, like an old friend over gelato, and tell her what I think now.
Not to correct her.
Just to say:
Look what you already knew.
Look how far you’d already come.
Let me introduce you to the Jes of ten years ago with her first blog post, written just a few months after having her first baby, graduating with an MA in English, and moving across the country. Living far away from the Colorado mountains she grew up in, trying to make sense of this new phase of life.
04/05/2007 | published at 9:48 p.m. — Cleveland, Ohio
i remember an afternoon digging through my mother’s old things [frayed scrapbooks, reams of paper, bits of photographs] and finding a notecard with a few lines of ee cummings written in ballpoint pen:
i didn’t know it was ee cummings then, i only reeled back with shocked delight, sucking in air. my mother! poetry! and a stanza as sultry and velvet as this one! i copied the lines down into my own notebook, keeping them, reading them at night after everyone was asleep.
this is how spring should feel: a close secret, a delight, a petal by petal moment that reveals just a little more beauty, a little more color until the whole world is alive and gasping for breath.
I read this and I see magnolia trees everywhere. Their petals in the wind like pink dappled snow. Bursts of dogwood. Peonies, leaning to the ground, heavy with beauty and perfume.
I grew up in the west, and moved back several years ago — the absolute abundance of willing flowers and trees and bushes in the midwest still surprises me. Out here, we coax buds from the rocks and crevices into blinding sun. But in Ohio, the blossoms covered the windshields of cars and you could see little girls carrying umbrellas to catch them.
The whole world is still alive, still gasping (with delight, with pain). Still waiting for all of us to notice.
Finding your own words from years ago must feel like meeting someone you thought you had lost. I love that you’re not returning to correct her, only to sit beside her and say, “Look what you already knew.” That feels like such a tender way to remember yourself.