happy returns

It’s been a month of returns, but not necessarily the literal sort returning to a place, unless and in this case, the place is held by visiting with familiar people. I’d never visited Colorado before this month, never read a poem at a live show. There is a theme to these returns, and they all link back to Orquevaux. 

Photo by Joel Carpenter

At the end of our cohort’s time together in March of this year, I had the most heart-breaking time saying goodbye. Our residency group was a unit of creativity and care, and returning to a place without that neighboring support was stark. It’s not an ache that’s gone away easily either, as I’ve found over the past five months since our departure, but this month has yielded a cure—full of joy and hope—which is, of course, coming back to each other again. 

On August 7th I battled traffic north from Boston to Portsmouth, NH and shared the stage with our typewriting resident poet, Myles, and his band. I read pieces of writing that have come to me in the months since returning from France, full of longing and movement; and danced beside him on the stage the way we’d done in the courtyard of our stables studios.

On August 8th I flew west, and an airport brought me back to Autumn, our group’s resident filmmaker and writer. We drove off into the surreal Zapata Falls area and camped and explored and marveled at the surrealism of the Sand Dunes National Park. I danced in the sand with the wind catching the floaty tulle we’d bundled into our bags, and she caught the motion and the golden hour light in her camera. 

On a Tuesday in August, four of us artists from the Stables studios gathered onto a zoom call and peered into each other’s non-France lives: Nina’s painting studio, Sarah’s pink-accented gallery wall, Lisa’s hanging displays of prints and painting tools. Talking with each other again felt like it could have happened in the courtyard or at dinner at the chateau. 

I am alive with the energy from these meetings, grateful for the warmth and care that endeavors us all to keep reaching out for one another. Our residency cohort is stretched across countries and oceans, but I see all of us still, and I see the work I’ve made this month and since March in inevitable and beautiful relation to the chateau community where it was nurtured. 

And I’m holding it all close.