At the very top of the ice column, a small slit had melted, and an occasional splash of water bounded out of it. Spring was arriving. Tears sprang to my eyes. Yes, winter is ending, the ice is melting, everything is coming back to life. Including me.
I carefully clambered over the frozen pool to peek inside the slit and see the water flying on its way. When I got back to solid ground, I play-jumped at Frances and she ran and ran, sliding out on the ice, leaping over the rocks, threading between the trees. I threw my arms in the air and whooped. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
CHAPTER 15
AN EMBRYONIC LIFE
I could hardly absorb the new reality of my life. I felt like a kid in a candy store: I could start running again! I could try biking! I could hike in all the places I so loved!
I hiked into a box canyon near where the artist Georgia O’Keeffe made her home in New Mexico. I followed a tiny stream through the cottonwood trees with cliffs on either side that grew closer and taller. After two miles, the trail dead-ended at a giant box of cliffs, with water seeping straight through the sandstone to form the stream. On one side, the cliff blazed incandescent orange as the sun struck it; on the other, the shadows glowered a deep red. I raised my arms and turned my face to the sky, where blue seemed to seep from every molecule. I died out there in the desert. This is all extra, an unearned gift.
At the end of the four-mile hike, I felt like a squirmy puppy unable to keep my tail from wagging. I was barely tired. I knew that I couldn’t possibly live the rest of my life in a state of giddy delight, but at that moment, it seemed nearly inconceivable that I could ever feel any other way.
I was still staying with friends as I waited for my tenant to leave, but during one four-day period, none of my friends had free bedrooms to offer me, so I found a good deal on a vacation rental. The manager, an older Hispanic fellow, showed me the casita, which was lovely, clean, bright, totally renovated, not a whiff of mustiness.
But just after entering it, I felt a peculiar sense of internal heaviness—just the kind of sensation Erik the Mold Warrior had tutored me to pay attention to. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to leave on the basis of such a wisp of a feeling. Maybe it’ll pass. Then I felt an unfamiliar wave of light-headedness. If this place was indeed moldy, I knew the likely cost of staying: a day of feeling poisoned, with a bone-deep ache, swollen eyes, a fuzzy brain. Not worth the risk.
But telling this fellow that his lovely little house was moldy, when the evidence I had for it was so weird . . . The words stuck in my throat.
Time to get used to trusting weird little feelings like this, I told myself. I coughed out an apologetic explanation that I was “allergic” to mold and didn’t feel well here.
The man’s weathered chestnut face stayed impassive, as if he were used to bizarre statements from these rich white folks he dealt with all the time. “I have another casita,” he told me, his voice rising and falling with a classic northern New Mexico accent. “Do you want to see it?”
Indeed I did. But again, within moments of being inside, I felt light-headed. I apologized again and fled.
I tried a hotel next and was relieved to feel fine there. I felt torn between being thrilled that I seemed to be developing some weird and much-needed sixth sense and horrified that I was entering a warped parallel universe. Am I becoming Super Mold Girl, or am I turning into a muttering bum on the street, flailing my arms at invisible airborne tormentors?
My tenant left, and I moved back into my house—that is, I carried in my camping gear. It was time to find out if my future was in Santa Fe or in a Vanagon.
I put the two flimsy pots I’d borrowed from Gary in the cabinet where I’d once kept the Revere Ware saucepans my mother had gotten as a wedding present 50 years earlier. I set my one dish, a big white plastic soup/salad bowl, into the empty mahogany dish rack above the sink. I’d designed that rack just the right size for my dishes, so I could wash them, put them away, and let them drip straight into the sink as they dried. The soup bowl looked cheap and lonely there.
The house echoed as I walked around. I unrolled my camping pad and sleeping bag in my empty bedroom and put Frances’s bed next to them. I saw the scratches in the walls left by various tenants, the torn window screens, the stains in the toilets, and I felt as though I’d neglected the house over the last six-and-a-half years. I swept cobwebs from the bas-relief in the stairwell that showed our two dogs, now long dead, playing in the snow. Geoff’s sister had created it for us using natural clays, back when we still imagined that someday our children would run up and down the stairs. Ghosts seemed to be brushing past me.
Every time I turned around, I discovered something I didn’t have. No trash can. No trash bags. No couch. No telephone. I couldn’t bring my router over from the trailers in case it was contaminated, so I huddled in the one corner of the house where the Wi-Fi reached. I knew I shouldn’t run out and buy a router or trash can, since I didn’t know yet if the house would work for me. I wouldn’t need such stuff in a Vanagon.
I sat on the brick floor leaning against a cabinet, monitoring my body for unusual feelings. It seemed like I was okay, but I felt acutely aware that at any moment, a stray sensation could divert the course of the next several years of my life. I focused on my breath, on the pressure of the floor against my butt, on the faint whisper of the stream outside. The evening light shone through the stained-glass window that my mother had found in a consignment shop years ago, a remnant of a torn-down church. My eye traced the curves of the kiva fireplace tucked under the stairs and the undulating adobe wall along the oak stairway, covered in chocolate-colored earth plaster. You done good, Julie. This is a beautiful house.
But an overwhelming loneliness prodded and shoved at me. In Death Valley, the aloneness had felt expansive, but now, it came with a flutter in my breath I recognized as fright. What am I scared of? I have no idea. I watched the emotion like a scientist studying cells in a petri dish, feeling it move in my body. It seemed like a primal impulse, an instinct far deeper than consciousness: Must Be Part of Tribe!
Hello, fear and loneliness, I thought. You are part of me too.
The air went into my lungs, out of my lungs. Into my lungs, out of my lungs.
I slept badly. I was using a borrowed child-size sleeping bag for Frances’s bed, and every time she shifted, the nylon made a scritch-scratch noise. The neighbor dog barked off and on through the night, sometimes while sitting just below my window. As I watched time snail past, I worried: Was I failing to sleep because of mold? I didn’t feel poisoned, but my moldie friends had told me that sleeplessness could be a sign of mold exposure. But then, they say practically anything could be a sign of mold exposure! It’s far more likely that you’re not sleeping because you’re anxious. Calm the fuck down, Julie. It struck me that “Calm the Fuck Down” was a good motto for living, and I pondered getting “CTFD” tattooed on my wrist.
But still, I didn’t sleep.
The next day, I was unsurprisingly exhausted. I tried taking Frances for a walk, but I was so tired and draggy that I cut it short. The tiredness made sense after the poor sleep, but the dragginess—was that really normal? I didn’t know anymore. After I took several naps that didn’t make me feel much better, my worries grew teeth.
I tried to reason through it: Maybe a bad night’s sleep could make even a healthy person feel this way. Or maybe it wasn’t normal, but I was reacting to mold from the restaurant I went to the previous day, not the house. Or maybe neither of those things were true, but after so many years of illness, sleeplessness was more stress than my body could handle gracefully. Or maybe my house was moldy and I was fucked. How the hell am I supposed to figure out what’s going on? I thought. There are too many variables at once!
That night, I put a non-crinkly blanket down for Frances’s bed, curled up next to her, threw a prayer to the mold and barking dog and sleep gods, and closed my eyes. I slept straight through to the morning, and when I woke up, I
didn’t feel poisoned or exhausted. I got up tentatively, stretched, and walked to the bathroom, feeling how each muscle and joint moved. Frances offered me her head for scratching as I peed. “I think I feel okay, cutie pie,” I whispered into her ear. “I think I feel okay!” I got up from the toilet and, naked, chased her around the empty office. “I think I feel okay! I think I feel okay! I think I feel okay!” Frances danced her delight.
All that day, I felt better than I had in a year and a half. When that continued for the next two days, I began buying stuff: a router, a trash can, a telephone.
I’m home.
It was the beginning of a monetary diaspora that shocked me, about $200 a day scattering as I gathered the basics. Frances saw no need for furniture: With the house empty, it was a giant doggy playground, ideal for running laps and tearing up and down the stairs. I disagreed. Happily, I had left some of my furniture in Santa Fe, so it seemed likely to be safe. Bit by bit, I moved in my mother’s claw-foot dining table, some chairs, a clothes cabinet, and a desk. But with almost no living-room furniture and no rugs, the house still echoed.
I hired my cleaning lady to rout out all the dust in the house, removing any mold fragments along with it. She had cleaned the trailers and chopped my vegetables and helped me up the stairs when I couldn’t walk, so I felt a loyalty to her. The truth was, though, that she wasn’t a very thorough housecleaner. Plus, she didn’t speak English, and I knew only a little Spanish, so communication was difficult. Since I wanted it cleaned well, I worked beside her, the two of us scrubbing side by side. She was astonished: “¿No estás enferma nunca más?” You aren’t sick anymore?
We spent five hours cleaning the downstairs alone. My dusting cloth seemed to be wiping away separation and neglect along with the dirt, renewing a sacred bond between me and my house.
I was thrilled to be able to trust my body to accomplish the task, but I ached the next day and my limbs trembled. I knew I must have breathed in whatever mold bits were hanging out in the dust. Still, I found it unnerving to feel so shaky and weak. I couldn’t help but worry: Could the house not be so good for me after all? I wished I could just stay home for a week to thoroughly convince myself my house was okay, but tasks called, and every time I went into a store to buy something, I risked getting whacked from mold. I finally managed to hire a truck to haul the stuff from the trailers away, so I once again donned my Darth Vader clown suit and loaded it all up—and I got whacked. My cleaning lady and I cleaned the upstairs together, leaving me whacked. Each time, I spent the next day catatonic, lolling outside in the sun on my camping pad, feeling like an unstrung marionette.
But my good days overflowed with productivity and joy. Every task I accomplished, every hike I took, every day that I just sat in my very own home—they all felt like small miracles. On one level, I felt like a rat scuttling at the edges: small, cautious, uncertain, dangers all around in a world no longer designed for me. But at the same time, I felt a strong current carrying me, as if a boat cradled me like cupped hands.
It reminded me of how I’d felt before my mother died: Just below the surface, mythic currents had seemed to be propelling me toward my destiny of saving her. But those currents had vanished with her death, leaving me suspended in a void filled only with my ignorance of what my life might hold without her. For years, I had allowed for the possibility that my childhood feeling was largely fantasy, but I now felt that same deep knowing, the same mythic quality breathing itself into my life. The feeling had transformed in the intervening decades, though. As a child, I’d seen myself as the hero, accomplishing my destiny through great effort and individual fortitude. Now, though, I felt as though my core “I” had vanished, replaced with a flowing spaciousness. Effort felt beside the point.
At the same time, I felt a bit like I had when I’d first started doing math and knew less than all of my classmates: I had to learn as fast as I could to survive. Now, my ability to function, apparently, depended entirely on my ability to detect and avoid mold—and to diagnose the problem when I failed.
So I started accumulating tools and habits to keep myself safe. I bought a dozen baseball caps, and whenever I went into a building I was unsure of, I tied my hair into a bun and put on a cap. I kept spare shirts and caps in my car along with bottles of water, and whenever I got exposed, I swapped caps, rinsed my face and hands, and changed my top, aiming to get rid of the contamination as fast as possible. Then, when I got home, I immediately stripped my clothes off and showered, depositing my clothes straight into the laundry basket. If I’d taken Frances with me, I took her straight to the bathroom and washed her too. Happily, I had taught her to like baths, and she’d rest her head on my knee and close her eyes as I rubbed shampoo into her throat.
I felt like I spent half my life scrubbing away mold. I’d been told that washing machines were prone to getting moldy, especially front-loaders like mine, so I was doing all my laundry by hand. At the end of each day, I faced a dishearteningly big pile of dirty clothes, with all the clothes-changing I was doing. I wanted to test my washing machine, but I had only one tool for doing so: my body. I couldn’t bear a self-inflicted hit on top of all the others I was taking, so I kept wringing and scrubbing.
Even with all my washing and effort, I didn’t always get it right. One night, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling poisoned. I quickly realized why: I hadn’t showered before bed. I’d gone to town, but since I hadn’t gone anywhere that seemed moldy, I’d thought I could get away without taking one more damned shower. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I staggered up to wash off and considered the consequences of my mistake. My body had almost certainly cross-contaminated my sleeping bag and blanket, just as Erik had seen field jackets cross-contaminate his fellow soldiers’ clothes in their lockers. The only solution was to wash them—ugh. The sleeping bag and blanket were so big and heavy that it exhausted me just to consider washing them in the tub. Instead, I decided to lug them into town to wash them at a friend’s house.
But the next night, I again woke up feeling poisoned. What the hell is the problem now? I washed the bedding by hand, figuring that since I’d washed all the bedding in a single big load, it might have been packed too tightly to get thoroughly clean.
But the third night, yet again, I woke up feeling awful, though less so. I panicked a bit—Is the house no good after all? I decided to try sleeping with the windows open, and finally, I slept.
My mind spun a thousand alternate hypotheses to explain what had happened. Maybe the bedding was still mildly contaminated but the fresh air made it tolerable; maybe the house was moldy; maybe I had it all wrong and something else entirely was happening. The uncertainty unnerved me, but hey, I was feeling good again. That was what really mattered.
One thing was undeniable: When I felt good, I really felt good. One day, I even tried going for a run. I moved pathetically slowly, stopping frequently to walk, but nevertheless, Frances and I capered and danced when we got home. A run! I went for a run!
I worked up my courage and washed a T-shirt in the washing machine to test it. I cautiously held it up to my face, breathing through the fabric, waiting for the mold gods to strike me down. Seems okay . . . So I wore the T-shirt for the evening. Still seems okay . . . I wore the T-shirt to bed, with the windows closed against the cold. I woke up feeling mildly poisoned. I pulled off the T-shirt, showered, changed my bedding, opened the windows again (cold be damned), and slept fine. So, what to conclude? Was it the T-shirt, the window, the run? I didn’t know.
Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if I could train Frances to detect mold? I had heard of “Molly the Mold Dog,” whom you could hire to go into a house to find any moldy places. I had a vision: I’d go to an unknown building and send Frances in without me. She’d run around sniffing, run back to me, and scratch at my leg if she found any mold. And maybe I could even hold up the questionable T-shirt for her to assess. Frances might be able to hugely expand my world. And I’d have a mold-detecting sidekick to g
o with the new mold-detecting superpower I was acquiring!
I could think of a bunch of reasons this might not work. The truth was that I didn’t even know what it was that made me sick. I was using “mold” as a stand-in for some environmental something that did me in. Water-damaged buildings contained a stew of toxins, from mold, bacteria, particulates . . . Plus, if “ick” was part of the problem, no one knew what the hell it was. Could Frances sniff out “ick”? Maybe, but I probably wouldn’t be able to find out without doing a huge amount of possibly fruitless work. It seemed even less likely that she’d be able to tell me if the T-shirt was problematic—how much mold could possibly be on it? And there were bazillions of types of mold, most of which, I guessed, weren’t a problem for me at all. Cheese, for example, is made with mold, and I didn’t seem to have any problem with cheese. Would she end up telling me about lots of stuff that didn’t matter?
Still, I sent e-mails to several dog trainers. They pointed out that, in addition to the worries I already had, the process of training her might kill me. Frances would need samples to sniff during training, which would require me being in alarmingly close proximity to bad stuff. She might even get enough of the bad stuff on her snout just sniffing it to make me sick.
Hmm, I thought. This sounds too hard to take on right now. But maybe eventually I’ll find a way . . . In the meantime, I continued the service-dog training we’d been doing for months.
I took on the task of buying a car, feeling bad about keeping Gary’s car for so long. I found a Subaru an hour away in Albuquerque around the age of my own car. Carfax showed that it had spent almost its entire life in Albuquerque, with just one oil change in Portland—a bit worrisome, since Portland had a moldy reputation with all its dampness, but it seemed like it had only been there briefly.
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