"'Heimlich'?...What do you understand by ‘heimlich'?" "Well,...they are like a buried spring or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having the feeling that water might come up there again." "Oh, we call it ‘unheimlich'; you call it ‘heimlich'." --from The "Uncanny," Sigmund Freud (1919)
Technically, Michigan is a space. A big one, too. Spanning over 97,000 square miles, it is the 11th largest state in the U.S. I lived in Michigan for most of my life. If pressed, it appears that I know--that I have access to--the space of it. I spent years hiking along the scraggly dunes of Lake Michigan. I am intimate with its sand and clay, the acres of C.C. Camp-planted pine forests, the best places to hunt morel mushrooms and where along Bear Creek (pronounced "crick") bald eagles nest. I also know the cityscapes; I've lived and worked in two of Michigan's three major cities. I drive like a New Yorker across its freeways now, slipping in between the aesthetically-uninspired brick buildings that erupted in the 60s and 70s, but the surfaces of these roads remain the same familiar washed grey crisscrossed by a deep black from the tar sprayed into its cracks.
But this is not knowing a space.
When I return to Michigan now, for a few days, a few weeks, on a layover in DTW, or whatever, the space of Michigan is always mediated by how I have occupied space in that space before. I cannot see the space of Michigan for what it, technically, is: the 11th largest state in the U.S., a space that, according to Wikipedia, has the longest freshwater shoreline in the world, a space where one is never more than 6 miles from a natural source of water; I can only see it as a reservoir of contingent meaning. Because when I return to Michigan to visit my family and friends I cannot return to a physical location but may only see the place through anticipating--or reimagining (anew)--those places and spaces I hold in my memory. I drive down roads and know where I am although I don't know where I'm at. The new houses and trees and banks and car washes that spring up in my absences throw me off. They are not part of my memories. And the things I locate in my memory don't exist as they do in my remembrance of them--everything is all just a little off but I can't point out how or why.
It is fitting that Michigan is such a watery state. Nestled into the Great Lakes, it's fed by hundreds of rivers, streams, and creeks that nourish it as the umbilical cord feeds the fetus. In a reversal, it is also my "motherland." I am "from" Michigan. I go to Michigan to visit my mother. It is a hostile womb. At thirty, I'm the age now that my mother was when she was pregnant with me. But it is inconceivable that I become a mother yet, that I would be a mother ever. I am a daughter, a granddaughter, but no womb, no home, myself.
This, then, is no story of Michigan, but of familial space.
My grandmother is. There is a space that she no longer occupies; she has moved to another where she cannot be accessed. She is wheelchair bound, can barely see, and sometimes doesn't remember her children when they go to visit her. There was no chance, then, when I went to visit her that she would remember me. I hadn't seen her in almost nine months, nine months of a lifetime in the span of which she was hospitalized, had several small strokes, and went from living with family to living in a nursing home. Nine months of a lifetime in which she went from remembering her granddaughter to not understanding why she can't go home though she's not quite sure where it is.
I went to the Manistee Medical Care with my mother and significant other, who braved my stories and made the trip across five state lines in my white Grand Am to meet my family. We parked in the space next to my aunt's silver Nissan, she had come to drop off some of Grandma's laundry, and met up with her in the hallway of the second floor. The four of us continued down the hall and found my grandmother in an empty room, save for two parakeets.
The body language was incredible. As alienated as I might have ever been, might ever be, I gained a belonging to my family, the space of my family, at this point. But I can't tell you why for another paragraph or so. For Freud writes, again in "Uncanny," that the uncanny [unheimliche] is "in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression...something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light." Let my memories flow while they can. Anthony (the sig-other) seated himself next to me on the sofa, leaning back against the hard floral-patterned fabric sofa-back, Mom and Aunt Sue sat on the window seat next to the parakeets, Grandma's wheelchair was positioned across from me. I leaned back also, initially, one leg bent and slung carefully oh-so-carelessly open and across the other, shoulders back, arms lightly crossed. I could see everyone except Anthony. My aunt closed into herself bodily, her shoulders dropped, her head down, though she would periodically make attempts at physical contact with my grandmother. A hand on her arm. To straighten her leg brace and look at the color of the flesh above her ankle. My mother closed into herself, too, but instead of making herself softer she became more hard. Her shoulders, dropped like my aunts, were held rigid as she clutched her arms around the knee she bent toward her chest. Her head would jerk toward the parakeets when they would squawk, and from time to time she would whistle back at them in an attempt to make them sing.
Yes, this was the first time in several years, perhaps, I felt at home at "home."
You see, the distance I feel from home and family comes from so much more than the borders of several states. It comes, almost ironically, from a misreading. I misread the language my family uses. They misread the language I use. These languages are languages that extend beyond the verbal and into practices of living and being in space. But at critical moments, in critical spaces, we cannot control how we are read and can, therefore, read one another without misreading. In a room with two parakeets and a space where my grandmother once might have been we found this. The space that my mother and aunt occupied with their bodies became a space occupiable to me. Seeing them thus triggered memories of other spaces where we all occupied the same space and I could read through remembrance their body language in these other contexts--yes, spaces--in which I had seen it before: reunions, funerals, birthday parties, holidays, in a red vinyl booth at the House of Flavors eating mint chocolate chip ice cream. Our spaces, more than bodies, more than personalities, became knowable to one another. The water had come up again and was seeping into my shoes. It was icy cold and carried with it small particles of sand from the dunes.
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