There was never one day I decided I wanted out of my business. There were hints, for a long time, and I was afraid to admit I had noticed them. When I finally sat with it, what surprised me was how okay I was. I could let it go and move on to my next thing.
That is the part nobody warns you about. You picture a big change arriving the way it does in movies, with a door slamming or a decision made out loud at a kitchen table. For me it was quieter than that and much older than I wanted to admit. Something got planted a long time ago, and it grew in the dark while I was busy answering emails, and by the time I saw it, it already had branches.
I did not have words for any of that until a book handed them to me.
The book that did it
I listened to Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver on audio from my library, all twenty-one hours of it, and I picked it up for the least romantic reason possible. People kept saying it was a great audiobook. They were right. Charlie Thurston does not so much narrate Damon Fields as become him, and I spent a couple of weeks with a kid from Lee County, Virginia, talking directly into my ears.
If you have not read it, it is a retelling of David Copperfield, the Charles Dickens novel (not the magician), set in the Appalachian mountains. Damon is born in a trailer to a teenage mom, and the book follows him through foster care, football, and the arrival of OxyContin in a place that was already hurting. I had never read a novel quite like it. The closest thing it reminded me of was Educated by Tara Westover, which is a memoir and not a novel, but it leaves you with the same ache. Both are about a kid trying to get out of the place and the people that made them, and both are honest about how much of that place comes along anyway.
Format: Audiobook (narrated by Charlie Thurston) | Source: Library | Rating: 5 stars
Near the end there is a passage about change working like a tree planted inside you. Here is the whole thing:
“I’ve tried in this telling, time and again, to pinpoint the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there’s also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing’s going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe. Then one day you say, Huh, that little crack between my ears has turned into this whole damn tree of wonderful.”
I heard it on a regular morning while I was getting ready. I’d just gotten out of the shower, where my audiobooks come with me too, and I was going through the motions of brushing my teeth and doing my hair and makeup. Then it said that, and I just stood there staring into the mirror without really seeing anything for a while. Wow. That makes so much sense.
Seeds planted before you were born
The strange thing is that the book had already been showing me this for twenty hours before it said it out loud.
Kingsolver uses the word Melungeon over and over to describe Damon and his father, like everyone already knows what it means, and I did not. Later someone mentions a war fought over coal in those same mountains, and I assumed he was exaggerating until I looked it up. Both sent me down a rabbit hole, and everything I found is in Things I Googled While Reading in September.
So here is a kid born into a trailer, and the ground he is standing on was planted a hundred years before him. The way people looked at his face was planted generations back, and so was the distrust of the companies that came in and took what they wanted. None of it was his choice, and all of it had branches by the time he was old enough to notice.
That is when it stopped being a book about Appalachia for me and started being a book about everybody.
What grows in a marriage
I have been married a long time, and I think marriages are where this is truest and hardest to see.
Nothing in a marriage changes overnight, even when it feels like it did. A thing gets said once in year three, maybe not even meanly, and it gets filed somewhere. A habit starts because it is easier that week, and then it is easier the next week too. Years later, one of you says something in the car and the other one goes quiet, and you both know the quiet is older than the sentence.
A few examples come to mind right away. They are too personal to put here, and sharing them would feel like breaking my husband’s trust. But if you have been married a long time, I think you already know exactly the kind of thing I mean.
It works the other way too, and that is the part I want to hold onto. The good things grow in the dark as well, like an inside joke that started on a bad day or a small kindness one of you did once and then kept doing for twenty years. You do not decide to build a life with someone. You plant a thousand tiny things without meaning to, and one day you look up and there is shade.
What grows in a family
Being a mom makes this almost unbearable to think about for very long.
Every kid is walking around with trees somebody else planted. Some of those somebodies are me. I will not know for years which things I said at the dinner table became roots and which ones just blew away, and my kids will not know either, not until something they do at thirty sounds exactly like something I did at thirty.
I have done a lot of work on the voices I grew up with, including years of therapy, and some of them are still in there anyway. My parents were raising us in a very different financial situation than the one my kids are growing up in, and not wasting food got planted in me deep. Now every time I yell at my own kids about it, they look at me like I have lost my mind, and I have to stop and remind myself that times have changed. We are not where my parents were. It is okay to save something for leftovers, and it is okay to throw something out when it goes bad, instead of eating until we are too full because wasting it feels wrong.
Food is not the only seed like that. My mother would not let other kids in our house because of her antiques, and for years I caught myself snapping at my own kids over a spilled cup with an anger I did not even feel. I wrote about that farmhouse in Whistler and the Houses I Can’t Walk Back Into, and it is the same lesson from a different direction. I never chose to care about a spill. It got planted in me so early that it grew without my noticing, and my kids were sitting under the branches before I ever saw them.
Tara Westover, who wrote Educated, got out of the mountain in Idaho and still found her father's voice in her own head. Damon Fields gets farther from Lee County than anyone expects, and the county still comes with him. I used to read stories like that as sad, and after this book I read them as honest. You do not get to choose the seeds you were handed, but you do get to notice the tree.
Back to the business
Which brings me back to my business.
For a while I treated it like a failure, like I had missed some warning light. I do not think that anymore, because a seed is small and dull and hard to see. That is the whole point of a seed.
What you can do, once the branches show up, is stop pretending they are not there. That is what I finally did. I sat with it long enough to see that I would be okay letting it go and moving on to whatever I build next.
The book does not tell you what to do with the tree. It just says it is there and you will find yourself holding on to it or shaded by it, and I think that is right. I’m not naming the business or a timeline here. I’m writing this because saying it out loud turned out to be the first branch I could actually grab.
So here is what I keep asking myself, and what I will ask you. What is growing in you right now that you have not noticed yet? And what did you plant years ago that is only now big enough to see?
Where this one is sending me next: the word Melungeon. I went looking for more books about it and found a whole shelf I never knew existed, including The Sea Keeper’s Daughters by Lisa Wingate, Liar’s Winter by Cindy K. Sproles and Sang Spell by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. Which one I start first depends on what my library has ready on Libby, so if you’ve read any of them, tell me where to start.
Where else Demon Copperhead has shown up:
What I Read in September: Three Endings I Never Saw Coming (where I first ranked it)
Things I Googled While Reading in September (the Melungeon and Blair Mountain rabbit holes)
Grab a copy of Demon Copperhead. Borrow it if you can. Buy it if you must. And if you’re buying, my Bookshop.org link keeps it with the indies.
What is a seed you did not notice until it had branches?
If this one stayed with you, these two are close cousins. One is about the habits I carried out of the house I grew up in, and the other is about the work voice I used for so long that I forgot it was never really me.
Whistler and the Houses I Can't Walk Back Into
Ann Patchett’s Whistler made me miss the house my kids were little in, and then it handed me a farmhouse I had not thought about in years.
The Villa and the Work Voice My Family Mocks
She was good at her job. She just was never me. On The Villa, the work voice, and leaving the dinner.