Furrow & Trowel Is One Reason Why I Write

South China Sea brushes against the shore of an island in Thailand, 2003. Image by author.

Last year, I joined a professional writing certificate program at the University of Denver. I have trained in fiction writing; blogged for years now; and even taught rhetoric, composition, and research methods courses to undergrads. But I never studied the craft of creative nonfiction despite my longtime love of personal essays and memoir. When I received a tuition waiver benefit reminder in my work email in late 2022, I decided it was a sign.

When I think about my reasons for creating Furrow & Trowel--a personal quest for trying to live intentionally in the world--I remember that this quest started so many years ago as a kid when I realized my love of reading and writing. The act of writing has animated my life since I was in grade school. I was grateful that the first writing assignment in my certificate program asked me to read Joan Didion's and Terry Tempest Williams' essays, both titled "Why I Write," and then come up with a personal writing manifesto.

I've kept this essay close over the year. I needed time to grieve the unexpected but inevitable loss of my mother just weeks after I first drafted it. I thought I'd share it here now. Imperfect as it is, this essay feels ready to be released.

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Why I Write

We're faultily designed light bulbs. I've learned this over the years as I've watched the incandescence in those I've loved begin to flicker, until one day their once-blazing but always fragile filament burns out.

Like Dylan Thomas, I want to rage against the dying of the light. So, I write in defiance of our planned obsolescence. I write to remember what can otherwise slip away without notice.

Cheap dollar store tennies, me standing in the rain for the morning bus, the Alabama driveway a mud puddle. There was a hole in the shoe's sole beneath the joint of my second metatarsal. There, the sock touched earth. The fabric was a sponge pressed against rust-colored water spreading its damp along the arch of my foot, inching toward the ankle.

I write because I’ve hated wet feet for as long as I can remember, and I worry for the day I’ll forget. These bony digits are almost always cold in Colorado where I've lived for over a decade now. I inherited poor circulation from my father.

His callused hands held firm around my ankles. I was a small girl then sitting on his shoulders, my arms raised high, waving to the costumed revelers easing by on Mardi Gras floats. “Throw me another one, Mister!” That’s what he taught me to say. Make eye contact. Be known. Reach as far as you can. Fling yourself if necessary. Know I am here, holding steady.

My father wasn’t there when I left for college in 1997, the first in my family to make it through high school without major incident. He didn’t help me check my foot locker at ticketing or carry my suitcase through security. My mother and best friend were the ones to wave as I disappeared through the passenger boarding gate. I was bound for a college I’d never visited. My father was the one helping to make that possible, but I barely thought of him that day. I was finally free, I thought, the world mine to explore.

I write because, as the plane taxied toward a gate in LaGuardia that hot, sticky August, my father was working on a crew who constructed sugar beet factories and industrial slaughterhouses in the Great Plains. Pipefitting made more money than his welding skills, though he’d been at that for years before the layoffs at the Mobile shipyard became untenable for a man trying to put food on the table for a family of four.

When I introduced myself that night to housemates in our common area, a soon-to-be friend from California asked my name’s origin story. “It’s my father’s middle name. It’s Welch.” I’d mispronounced Welsh, but I didn’t know that yet, not until the strangers tittered and said they loved my Southern accent.

I write because when I found myself bobbing against waves on the South China Sea in 2003, my father wasn’t there, either.

The longtail motor boat was taking on water. Our driver thought it’d be fun to race another longtail ferrying tourists between the islands off the coast of Thailand. Then, the fellow racer accidentally jammed his propeller shaft into the backside of our boat and puttered off, oblivious. There were no life jackets. There were three other passengers, a middle-aged couple and a man who’d been handsy with me when we’d boarded the small wooden boat bound for a private beach. They were from Italy. I was not, which the single Italian guy had found exotic. When I’d made clear I wasn’t interested, he’d turned insolent. I’d wasted his time, and time was scarce on vacation.

We hadn’t noticed the leak immediately. The couple sent me sympathetic looks as the single guy pointedly spoke rapid-fire in their shared tongue, his back turned to me. My one year of college Italian was a measly defense against exclusion. I stared at the waves sloshing against the bow, thoughts of parrotfish and circling sharks swirling through my mind. I wanted badly to be anywhere but there, even back home in rural Alabama as a kid, listening for the pregnant pause between my parents’ raised voices and the thwack of a TV Guide against one of their faces. That inevitable violence was a known quantity and preferable to the shame and terror currently blooming in my gut.

It was then that I felt water lapping against my sandaled feet and noticed the crack near the stern. Why had I thought moving to China on my own to teach was a good idea? Why had I assumed I had it in me to wander alone through Thailand and remain unscathed? The Italian guy glanced at me with disdain, piercing blue eyes in a sunbathed face. I’d never learned to swim.

I yelled to the driver, “We’re sinking.”

He was thin, deeply tanned. His face was lined from the sun, too, though he didn’t seem much older than me. He smiled, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses. He wore a white t-shirt emblazoned with a smiley emoticon and the words 'Don’t Worry, Be Happy' printed in sans serif font. “We’ll be fine,” he said in halting English.

I wanted to believe him.

The driver pointed to buckets stationed at the back of the boat. The act of our bodies, a universal language. The Italians and I bailed water while the driver caught his competitor’s attention. The undamaged boat circled back. The winning driver was sheepish. He assured us he hadn’t meant to cheat. He threw our driver a rope and hauled us back to the island where we lodged. I’d made it, alone. I missed my father.

I write because in the summer of 2022, I held my father’s hand, his gnarled from a life of manual labor, spotted from age, and bruised from badly set needles meant to nourish him. Mine was older, too, though you couldn’t tell because it was sealed within a latex glove, part of the PPE requirement for anyone who entered his hospital room.

When I arrived in Pensacola after the 22-hour drive from Denver, my hands rested against the steering wheel. They were shaking. It’d been a long drive alone. He’d gone in for an outpatient bladder surgery that spring. There were complications and an admission to the local hospital. A short stay in skilled nursing to get his strength back, his doctor advised. There, he contracted COVID, another ambulance ride ensued, then another hospital stay, then a move to a specialty facility. He’d inch toward recovery and then be set upon by a new illness. When COVID led to pneumonia and then to MRSA, I drove south, knowing this might be the end.

He didn’t know me when I held his hand that first night. I was a woman named Rosie from some other part of his life I had never bothered to ask about.

He was sunken, too ill to eat, too ill to sip the water we offered. Would he make it? It was too soon to tell. I sat beside his bed in that sickly half-light so at home in hospital rooms housing the serious cases. There were no words to make this right. There was only the waiting. So, I waited.

I write because, if for nothing else, noticing is a gift we’re offered. This gift can point out beauty in the world and make what seems senseless and ugly or worse, unremarkable to others, something meriting remark. The world will tell you again and again in a million different ways you don’t matter. You matter. My dad told me so in so many ways, though he rarely spoke the words.

This is why I write.