Julie Lockhart loves an adventure, especially in wild places. Her essays have appeared in Minerva Rising, journal of Wild Culture, bioStories, Feels Blind Literary, Witcraft, Herstry, and Women on Writing essay contests. She is a Pushcart nominee. Julie has lived, worked, and played in the Pacific Northwest since 1982 and currently lives in Port Townsend, WA. Find her writing at: julietales.com.

Ruminations on Space

When you were in third grade, your teacher had all the kids do a collage by cutting pictures from magazines. This was back in the day when cigarette ads were legal in print publications. You carefully snipped around the perimeter of several cigarette packages and spaced them on the page the way your eye saw things. At parents’ night, your mother and father said, mostly to themselves, “She has a real artistic eye for design.” No one spoke about the appropriateness of cigarette ads for a third grader. Your father smoked back then.

Space, spaciousness, the space between notes, the space between objects in a collage. Not enough space. Taking space for yourself. Filling space with words, thoughts, chatter, movement. Wiggle room. Space to become more of who you are.

It's September 1, 2023. You limp into your garden of neglect with a sprained ankle. You thought peas would finish in June, as they did in Southern Oregon where you used to live. In May, you planted beans in front, thinking they would come on just as you were cutting out dead pea plants. Then you planted four summer squashes. Now, with clippers in hand, you observe the where-does-one-begin-and-the-other-end chaos -- the peas producing abundance that you can’t fully consume while the beans barely produce, hidden in a mass of pea plants. The squashes have put up hundreds of green hands reaching toward the sun, one plant overtaking another and another and another. You cut out the large fronds to make space for the harvest. Next spring, less starts, more space.

When you spotted him in class in 1988, he held a secret smile amidst his handsome face. As his smile widened, you noticed buck teeth – cute buck teeth, not something to have an orthodontist fix. Unlike your mouth with ugly crooked teeth. In the 1970’s the orthodontist pulled four of your teeth to make space before trapping your mouth in metal.

You only tried cigarettes a couple of times. You remember an evening with a friend back in the 1990s, where you smoked and drank beer on your new deck with a vast view of Bellingham Bay and islands in the distance. You and your friend needed an “I hate men” bitch session, where you ragged and drank and puffed. A safe space from the men in your lives. Your whole body hurt the next morning, your lungs crying for space. You never smoked a cigarette again.

You married the one with buck teeth. After you got pregnant, you two took one last trip BK (before kid) to Glacier National Park on a frigid November day. He drove the narrow mountain road while you breathed through the nausea in the passenger seat. Without warning, your little red Subaru went into a spin on ice. Round and round. It seemed like forever. Hurtling toward a semi coming the other direction, the driver hugging that side of the road to give your car space that wasn’t there. Round and round and…like magic, the car righted itself at the last minute as the semi squeaked by with just enough wiggle room. That’s when you knew the baby you carried had some powerful guardian angels. That’s when you were sure there is a God.

Growing up, you studied classical music on the piano. You loved attending concerts and recitals, which gave you juice for the music you wanted to learn. People attending classical concerts understand the space between movements in the music – not to clap until the whole concerto or other classical form is over. You wait until you are sure the musicians have finished the piece, then burst into clapping with the crowd. You often look at the program to count the movements, so as not to clap at the wrong time.

The one with buck teeth gave you a beautiful daughter. And then he left this life six years later, a year after your divorce. When she was seven and her baby teeth gone, the front two permanent teeth jutted out. You smiled at the “spittin’ image” of her dad. Her mouth like your garden – no space. In the new millennium, they don’t pull teeth. They expand the jaw to create space. That’s gotta be painful. But not more painful than losing someone you love. Tactile pain, short-term, versus an endless shattered heart.

Patience can be a type of space, painful space. In your early fifties, you were desperate to find Mr. Right. One time, you had three different Match.com dates in one week. Three Mr. Wrongs did not make one Mr. Right. What would space to just be you – alone -- feel like, other than terrifying? But taking that time was worth the agonizing wait. You met your Mr. Right at the age of 55 at a social gathering. A friend of a friend.

Busy-ness is how you roll. Walks with friends, bodywork appointments, volunteer gigs, writing, little time to just be you. You even schedule calls to your adult daughter living 2,000 miles away. A day without something on the calendar is rare. Even the space for nothing is still something.

You and your Mr. Right got married during the first year of the pandemic. In 2021, you two moved to a new town in a new state. You downsized to fit into your new digs, but kept the art collection intact. Family art, some by relatives, some by your mother and grandmother. Some you collected yourself. Some you and your husband purchased together. More art than wall space. After careful placement on the walls in your shared rooms, you gathered the framed remainders and created a collage in your office, your own space. You painted the wall an accent color, Spice Market, a greenish, yellowish, mustardy mix. While writing on your laptop, you can look up and admire the legacy of art. And that odd wall color you chose. In your typical color palette, you tend toward purples and turquoise, so why deviate?

To balance your busyness, a couple of times each year you go on a meditation retreat. You love the space to explore just you, to disconnect from the world. Allowing spaciousness in your mind is how you have grown through old wounds and patterns of behavior that don’t serve you, how you have learned to love who you are in this life.

Sometimes it’s the space between the notes that makes music powerful. You and your new husband took the Bainbridge ferry into Seattle for a concert at a venue neither of you had been to before. A theater where the tightly packed seats gave you no room to move. Even in cramped discomfort, you never loved the banjo until you heard Bela Fleck’s virtuosity. Fleck ended the opening act with his enthralling rendition of “Rhapsody in Blue,” by George Gershwin. Mesmerizing bliss. Afterward, your husband, a fine banjo player himself, said, “Too many notes,” while also acknowledging that “Fleck is a god.” You both observed that even when there was space in the music, the noisy crowd filled it with hoots and clapping. You wondered what happened to concert etiquette. Halfway through the headliner band’s act, you two squeezed out of the seats to relish the space of the nighttime streets.

On your recent retreat, one of the practices of presence-in-the-moment took you down to the water’s edge at Coeur D’Alene Lake. The water rippled soft swells in a soft breeze, a feather brushing your cheek. Sunlight hit the edges of ripples, reflecting like gold filament along the clear rocky bottom with about three inches of space between each shiny, jiggly line. Moving. Moving along with each ripple. You followed the shiny lines with your eyes, seeing nothing, seeing everything. Total awe at nature’s spaces.

That sprained ankle you are limping on. You were hiking down a steep trail in late August in the Olympic National Forest. Your left foot slipped and the right caught on a root. You could feel your heel push into the ankle bone, crunching the space for tendons and ligaments. Nothing broken, just soft tissue trauma. Six days later, you endured painful deep-tissue bodywork to bring space back into your ankle. After a few short days, you walked all over downtown Seattle, exhilarated that you could move quite freely again.

It's how you space the items in a collage that makes it pleasing to view. And, where the colors of the framed pictures are balanced – a splash of red in the woodblock print on the lower left, a splash of red in the pastel with gold frame on the upper right. Each frame three inches from the next. You wonder, critique, imagine if the collage works well or if you might consider rearranging or adding more art in the remaining empty spaces. Spaces where Spice Market neatly surrounds the frames. The color that is an odd choice. The color that fascinates you as you glance up from your computer where you compose an essay. The color that gives you space to break out of old patterns. To reinvent yourself in a new place.