My friend knit me a rasta hat for my dreds and it really has made something click in me. It makes me feel like a character from a book. I pop into coffee shops and stroll down sidewalks feeling as though I'll be remembered as some carefully designed character: just slightly more than a stranger.
This past weekend I felt myself getting restless in this tiny county of mine. My twin sister is a days drive away and I am rendered "individual". Some call it lonely.
What do you do with restlessness? What do you do with loneliness for that matter?
I stuck a sketch-book, my little acer laptop and a borrowed book about road-tripping into my little red backpack and headed out the door for a different place. Somewhere out of Holmes County where I could simply be the girl with the yellow hat and dreds.
Don't let me get away with this independent picture of just painted of myself. The truth is I had my mother pick me up at Java Jo's in downtown Berlin and drop me off at the coffee-shop in Canton. Yes. I hitched a ride with my mother.
The feeling of anonymity I get from going to some other town's coffee shop is a refreshing one. I'm just some girl.
When my mother dropped me off in Berlin, the Harvest Festival parade had just begun. The road was lined with conservative Mennonite families and occasional clusters of tourists. If you grow up in this community, you have no trouble spotting what variety of "conservative" or what variety of "Mennonite" a family may be. Shirts are tucked into straight-leg jeans and denim skirts hang just above flashy white sketchers. The place is full of children who have churches to attend on Sunday and good schools to spend their weekdays in. One day these children may become mothers with the ability to make delicious home-cooked meals or fathers with 9-5 jobs and chairs at the head of the dinner table.
or perhaps one or two of them will become single 20-something bloggers with sketch-books in their backpacks instead of cheerios in their purses or sales reports in their briefcases.
It felt good walking down the road on the heels of the floats just watching people...and being watched.
Am I really that cliche? Am I really just out to be "unique?"
Perhaps this little character I've created for myself is the beginning of a better understanding of something less cliche: something more than getting a reaction.
I loved meeting you for the second time that day. And your hat was perfect. It was the first thing I noticed as I walked up those steps behind you. Then I saw your hair and knew it was you, Caroline Yoder...even though we had only met once years ago... That sounds a little creepy.
ReplyDeleteUmm, what I'm trying to say is that I think maybe you are more on the unique side rather than the cliche side. That is a good thing. A very good thing.