documenting the mundane. it's my favorite.

For extra credit for my Introduction To Literature class my teacher told us we could attend a reading of an author\Alaskan fisher woman, Leslie Fields who would be visiting our campus. I can never pass up an opportunity to be read to so i went at 7:30 pm last thursday. Here's my paper. It's due tomorrow.


Leslie Leyland Fields is a small woman. When I heard "a fisher woman from Alaska," I half expected her to appear in overalls and a plaid shirt underneath, the smell of the sea and salt still lingering on the fabric and hovering around her. I imagined she was thick: broad shoulders, strong arms, a weathered face and maybe a low voice. She was, after all, living in Alaska, a land of wilderness. She spends her summers on an island fishing with her husband seven days of the week. Nothing fragile could survive that. This type isn’t usually the writer type. They are usually people about whom books are written, but are far too busy and absorbed with hobbies to care about setting it down in words. I went because I can never pass up the chance for someone to read to me but also to give some answers to the fluttering curiosity in my head.
When I did arrive in that yellowed room I found Leslie, small-boned and fitting very nicely behind her podium in the front of a room full of clean, comfortable women. Her voice was soothing, strong and clear. She wore a sleek black button-up, nothing like a plaid shirt I was sure I would find. Her jet-black hair was cropped and styled; it was edgy. A chunky, beaded necklace encircled her slender neck. I liked this woman. She admitted half way through that everything she wore was from Wal-mart and she’d bought it the night before. This woman was quirky and inviting. I relaxed easily into my swivel chair in the back of the room and listened contentedly to her adventures.
They were not the adventures I was expecting. She talked rarely of fishing and admitted that she no longer helped her husband fish but rather surrendered her five boys to the wide ocean for the whole summer, each day. They were knocked around by the waves, dried by the sun and disciplined into fish-picking machines. Leslie talked of the rigorous work involved in this job. Cups and utensils were nearly impossible to hold at the end of the day. Exhaustion dominated each muscle, joint and bone. These were fourteen-hour days. Leslie talked of her husband carefully selecting twelve strong boys at the beginning of each summer to help in this salmon-gathering expedition. They had to be physically and mentally solid. Some boys, she stated in her evened voice, broke down in tears from the sheer load of the work. This is what I had come to hear about, but they were not what she talked about for the majority of the time, neither were they what I most loved hearing about.
She talked of her family; of not expecting her last son, Abraham, the sixth installment. Leslie said she longed to be free of diapers, of nursery, of spit-up on her shoulders, of unexpected late-nights and of the demands of pregnancy on the body. What she said was honest. I like that she could speak of things that would horrify most women. I’ve rarely heard a Christian woman speak so honestly about raising a child. She talked of feeling like she was backtracking, that she’d worked so hard to get everybody grown up so she wouldn’t feel stuck. She dreamed of traveling with the family once the children were beyond diapers and cribs and now, she thought, they finally could. Like the rest of us she found reason, in the midst of blessing, to complain and worry. And unlike some of us, she urgently prayed that God would change her; help her not to have a set plan for her life but to be open and joyful. She wrote about traveling to Guatemala once the kids were older and how dangerous it was. In the midst of the danger, however, this woman was aggressively trusting in God to protect her family. I liked her spirit of adventure, of danger, of leaving home for long amounts of time and the love she had for her family and her husband without sounding clichéd.
I was disappointed to leave early. The day grew darker from inside the glowing room. Her words kept going and my thoughts slowly wandered towards the unfinished projects I had. I had to leave but as I crept out of that nest-of-a-room and walked briskly back to my dorm through the crisp, night air I felt like I had been somewhere; a new somewhere. I felt like there was a somewhere out there that was very much open to me. Her words made me excited for tomorrow and for the future and for all the little things that may sound daunting: family, jobs, leaving home, and made them sound like an exciting challenge. I could work on my art project and work late into the night, I thought, it’s mundane and I’m tired but it might make a good book someday.

-Kyrie