Edna

One month ago, I hopped a plane down to Key West to visit Ryan and Keith in their new home in Old Town. It’s a handful of blocks from the house we rented this past July after we’d all been working remotely for months and were thoroughly bored with our Boston routines. We spent dinner in Eastie one night clicking our way through VRBO, found a super cute little bungalow on Packer Street, and collectively said, “Eff it. Why not.”

We hadn’t made it a full week into our summer rental before Ryan and Keith decided that they were going to make Key West their forever home. And they were going to use our cultural context of work life turned virtual, and real life turned upside down, to accelerate a dream they’d planned to defer until retirement. And make it happen now. 

By the end of October, they’d pulled it off. 

I gave them a little less than 48 hours to enjoy time alone in their new home before I third-wheeled my ass down there and set up shop in their spare room on November 1. Less than an hour after I arrived, Ryan took me out to the back patio to meet their resident spider. We decided quickly, leveraging our shared liberal arts background, that their spider was a she and we named her Edna. Edna is a Spiny Orb Weaver. She’s a shifty little thing. She drifts side to side and up and down as the wind blows, but doesn’t dislodge, her web. It’s been impossible to get a good picture of her. 

The ominous markings on her back look like a skull and crossbones, but Wikipedia says she’s not poisonous. So we keep on getting up in her grill, armed with our iPhone cameras and our optimism, trying to get a clear shot (successful outcome still pending). 

Blurry Edna.

I watched Edna every day that I was at Ryan and Keith’s and she fascinated me. Mostly because her life seemed like a real pain in the ass.  

She spends days and days building her web. It starts as a stringy outline, as she architects the parameters from patio support beam to palm frond to banana tree leaf to roof overhang and back to the support beam. Then she fills it in. Strand by strand. Reinforcing it to make it stronger. Building up its density to trap more snacks. And by the end of her efforts, especially in moments when the sun is low – in the early morning or just before sunset – Edna’s self-made home is really beautiful. 

And then inevitably it gets completely annihilated. 

A few times I watched it meet its demise in pelting tropical rainstorms. Once it was undone by the winds of Hurricane Eta (homonym, no relation). Each of those days the weather conditions were so extreme that Ryan, Keith, and I watched from the dining table through the hurricane shutters, sure that Edna was gone for good. And then, unbelievably, there she was the next morning. Hanging from a leaf or gutter. Re-tracing her stringy outline. Building again from scratch, right where she left off.

I’d booked my November flights to give me a full week at Ryan and Keith’s. And for the first five days I lived out of my suitcase, which I left open on the floor in the corner of the spare room. I didn’t see the point of unpacking. And with each passing day, as my flight home approached, it increasingly seemed like a waste of time to move my clothes or toiletries from a bag that was within arm’s reach of my bed. 

I’ve gotten used to living out of a bag. There’s a familiar comfort in the routine of it. Out-of-a-bag is how I’ve chosen to spend 2020. First in New Zealand, hiking from hut to hut with Reji in January. Then in Seattle, where I spent February and March in my AirBnB living out of a backpack. Then back in Boston when the pandemic turned my Pacific Northwest adventure around. More nights than not I took my toothbrush and the next morning’s workout clothes over to Ryan and Keith’s in Eastie so that I could spend the night with them and their dogs instead of hanging around my condo alone. When I wasn’t with them I was down on the Cape with Truman, crashing on the pull-out couch that I never bothered to pull out. Under the fancy weighted blanket she brought down there for me because she knows it helps me sleep better.

This year it was by choice, but the truth is I’ve lived out of a bag since the fall of 2018. As much as I wanted to call it home, and as desperately as I worked to be able to call it home, Hingham was carry-in / carry-out. I got skilled at traveling light. Expert at leaving no trace. Back at my condo, my clothes went from suitcase to laundry and back again, rarely seeing the inside of a drawer. And, somewhere along the way, the idea of “home” became synonymous with tote bags and toothbrush cases. Signaled by feelings of motion instead of the increasingly odd sensation of staying put.

On the afternoon of my fifth day at Ryan and Keith’s last month, I went upstairs to do a work Zoom from my room and saw that my stuff was gone. I looked in all the corners to make sure I wasn’t going crazy – and there was nothing. I did the call, 70% distracted, and then opened the door to go find the guys and see what was up. Keith was standing in the upstairs hallway. “I unpacked your clothes and they’re in the dresser. Your bathroom stuff is in the vanity. And you might as well cancel that flight back because we all know you’re not leaving yet.”

I laughed and thanked him. I said I had to jump on another call but would be down in a half hour to crack some beers. I shut the door behind me, sat on the bed, and burst into tears. After a little more than two years, somebody had moved me in. And they wanted me to stay.

I watched Edna for 22 days. She made me think of something my friend said recently in response to another friend and me talking about our increasing desperation to travel: “I want to stay here. I want to fight to feel good in my home again.” It’s stuck with me ever since she said it. It sounds like the right thing to do. It sounds like the thing I really want to want to do. But the reaction that’s stayed pent up in my gut, and that surfaced again as I watched Edna last month, has stuck with me, too: I don’t want home to feel like a fight anymore. I want it to feel like a place that I can just be.

A few days before I left Key West to come back to Boston, Ryan and Keith’s elderly neighbor Gail filled us in on Edna and all the other spiders like her – two of which Gail has in her own backyard: “When she gets in your way,” Gail said, “If her web starts blocking your staircase or she gets too close to the hammock, you can take one of the strands of her web and re-attach it someplace else. To a leaf or tree trunk nearby. And she’ll start building in the other direction. That’s how they operate – their webs get untethered by winds and storms, but eventually they re-attach somewhere else and then…that’s where they are.”

This Sunday I’m heading back to Key West. To spend time with Ryan and Keith and their little dogs Artie and Maeby, which I can’t wait for. And to tag along on the home inspection for the place I bought three days ago. I’m keeping my condo in Boston. But an equally tiny condo at the corner of two quiet streets in Old Town is going to be my new home in the cold months. 

There are a lot of things I love about Key West. I love that sunset is an occasion. It brings the tourists to Mallory Square with their cameras and the locals to Simonton Pier with their portable speakers and little dogs and rusty bikes. Sunrise is an occasion, too – one that even most tourists battle through their Tuesday hangovers to see. It’s a town full of art and music and scooters and overpriced groceries that have to get flown in. It’s a place where everyone says hello walking down the sidewalk – even a grizzled Bostonian can’t help but cave to the habit a couple of weeks in. It’s a place that invites you to come as you are. So it’s chock full of personalities as diverse as you can imagine. Everybody’s got their own story of how they ended up at the end of the world. 

This past week I went back and read most of the posts I wrote earlier this year. I’ve consciously avoided doing that. I didn’t know how it would make me feel. I pictured having a similar reaction to when 20-something-year-old me came across the diaries I’d kept in high school, and was absolutely mortified at all the overwrought shit I’d put in writing. But, at the beginning of this year, I made an intention (“resolutions” never stick) to write more and share it, even if it was scary. So I read them. 

A lot of my reactions are tactical and critical. Everything I write should be a lot shorter, including this. But, in aggregate, I see an unintentional, kind of ramble-y, but very true account of the very hardest, most unpredictable, and maybe luckiest year of my life. 

If you had told me a year ago that I’d be buying a place in Key West, I think I would have said something like this: “I’ve never even been there. I have a job. Did I get some kind of diagnosis, or something?”

Next month I’ll officially have a home on a quiet corner in Old Town. It’s at the intersection of two streets. White Street. And Olivia. 

Everyone in Key West has a story of how they ended up at the end of the world. 

This unintentional, kind-of-ramble-y, but true account of 2020 is mine. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for reading along.