about scented laundry detergent, but in this case was my way of trying to absorb every molecule of my old normal life. I loved the smell of the living room, the kitchen, Jenna’s recycling porch, the cupboards, and the basement laundry room. I loved everything, and it seemed to love me back. It was as if my heart had grown to three times its normal size, and it could now hold the specialness of every person who crossed my path; it could track how phenomenal every scent, sound, taste, or texture was. Everything was beautiful, even if it was just the laundry that I’d pulled out of the dryer, still warm, and hugged like a small, lost child.
Over the next few weeks, things continued to be weird. I fainted and got sweaty, and felt that rumbling vibration in my chest far more often than I like to admit. It was as if my heart was weathering a storm, a tornado blowing out transformers and knocking the windows, just like the tornados I saw as a kid growing up in the Midwest.
When I was a junior in high school, a small tornado hit Liberty, Missouri—the town located a few miles from our family’s farm. The day after, my friends and I drove around in astupor, looking at the damage: cars flipped over like toys, like someone had picked them up and simply turned them upside down in their parking spot. There was a horse in a tree, and the oaks and elms near the junior high school had been stripped of their leaves and now looked like a collection of giant pitchforks. It was horrifying, and then there were the unbelievable-but-true stories we heard: how one family was in the middle of a birthday party, sitting at the dinner table, when they heard the tornado sirens in town. They had just enough time to race into the bathroom, where all four of them lay like sardines in the bathtub as the wind invaded their house. In the kitchen, the tornado opened cabinets, threw dinner plates, and smashed canned goods into the dishwasher. It snatched spoons and forks off the table and shot them through the walls, and launched the roast chicken like a wrecking ball into the ceiling. Minutes later, when the family finally crawled out, thankful to be alive and happy to see their house still standing, they found the kitchen looking like a bomb had gone off, but—this was the weird part—the birthday cake that had been sitting in the middle of the kitchen table was perfectly fine. They found it still sitting in the same spot, without so much as a finger-dab in the frosting.
My cardiac problems were confused like that: like a horse in a tree and a surviving cake. And I needed to feel less wonky in the world; I needed to feel like me.
I threw myself into my routine—walking the dog, makingdinner, racing to work, paying the mortgage and bills. I happily hid behind the chaos of each day, and then alone at night I thought about what had happened and what was happening. I kept replaying that feeling of waking up in the hospital, of seeing the nurses race through a series of moves, setting IVs and prepping me for the next series of moves. It felt like death, or my mortality, or something bigger still, was leaning into my bed with the moonlight, clattering when I moved hangers in the closet, buzzing behind the sound of the shower running or my car idling in traffic. The wall that kept opposites in place—life, death, me, others, lucky or not—had been toppled; nothing made sense anymore.
I sat in the kitchen one day after buying a bag of clothespins, a simple task, engineered so I could dry my laundry in the basement near the hot furnace, and then months later in the summer sun. As I was pouring them onto the kitchen table, I realized the technical genius in this simple tool. Perfectly shaped wood pinchers and a dime-size metal spring that creates just enough tension to hold a pair of pants on a clothesline—there must be a dozen patents assigned to clothespins. I looked a bit closer, and without much imagination at all, I could see birch trees growing in
Over the next few weeks, things continued to be weird. I fainted and got sweaty, and felt that rumbling vibration in my chest far more often than I like to admit. It was as if my heart was weathering a storm, a tornado blowing out transformers and knocking the windows, just like the tornados I saw as a kid growing up in the Midwest.
When I was a junior in high school, a small tornado hit Liberty, Missouri—the town located a few miles from our family’s farm. The day after, my friends and I drove around in astupor, looking at the damage: cars flipped over like toys, like someone had picked them up and simply turned them upside down in their parking spot. There was a horse in a tree, and the oaks and elms near the junior high school had been stripped of their leaves and now looked like a collection of giant pitchforks. It was horrifying, and then there were the unbelievable-but-true stories we heard: how one family was in the middle of a birthday party, sitting at the dinner table, when they heard the tornado sirens in town. They had just enough time to race into the bathroom, where all four of them lay like sardines in the bathtub as the wind invaded their house. In the kitchen, the tornado opened cabinets, threw dinner plates, and smashed canned goods into the dishwasher. It snatched spoons and forks off the table and shot them through the walls, and launched the roast chicken like a wrecking ball into the ceiling. Minutes later, when the family finally crawled out, thankful to be alive and happy to see their house still standing, they found the kitchen looking like a bomb had gone off, but—this was the weird part—the birthday cake that had been sitting in the middle of the kitchen table was perfectly fine. They found it still sitting in the same spot, without so much as a finger-dab in the frosting.
My cardiac problems were confused like that: like a horse in a tree and a surviving cake. And I needed to feel less wonky in the world; I needed to feel like me.
I threw myself into my routine—walking the dog, makingdinner, racing to work, paying the mortgage and bills. I happily hid behind the chaos of each day, and then alone at night I thought about what had happened and what was happening. I kept replaying that feeling of waking up in the hospital, of seeing the nurses race through a series of moves, setting IVs and prepping me for the next series of moves. It felt like death, or my mortality, or something bigger still, was leaning into my bed with the moonlight, clattering when I moved hangers in the closet, buzzing behind the sound of the shower running or my car idling in traffic. The wall that kept opposites in place—life, death, me, others, lucky or not—had been toppled; nothing made sense anymore.
I sat in the kitchen one day after buying a bag of clothespins, a simple task, engineered so I could dry my laundry in the basement near the hot furnace, and then months later in the summer sun. As I was pouring them onto the kitchen table, I realized the technical genius in this simple tool. Perfectly shaped wood pinchers and a dime-size metal spring that creates just enough tension to hold a pair of pants on a clothesline—there must be a dozen patents assigned to clothespins. I looked a bit closer, and without much imagination at all, I could see birch trees growing in
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