DORMANT SEASON
The first time I drove through eastern Arkansas I thought it was the bleakest place I’d ever been. Its bone-brown fields stretched to the horizon, its corrugated towns huddled under flat gray skies. Time seemed to stand purgatorially still. It was not a place I wanted to spend an afternoon.
Years later, in nearby Memphis where I lived, I contracted a chronic illness that reduced me to a sort of living death. I was so fatigued that I couldn’t take a shower without needing to lie down for hours afterward. Brain fog diminished my mental chatter to a sort of muffled hum. I lived on my couch.
White it's true that illness can strip your life of the things that make it meaningful, it can also help you discover new meaning in things you previously overlooked. It had been a decade since I picked up a camera. It was only housebound that I started to crave wandering the streets with a buzz of creative potential, to feel that heightened awareness that comes with arranging compositions.
I had spent the previous ten years writing fiction, but ambiguity and hidden meaning no longer interested me, and mining my life for them stressed me out. No one likes to imagine us, the chronically ill, trapped on our couches, helpless in our midday beds. I hated imagining myself. There was nothing about the illness I wanted to say. I wanted only not to be ill.
Two years later, after seeing a dozen specialists and trying treatments both minor and extreme, I discovered a study that led me to the root cause of my illness, and the treatment that helped me manage it. Within a few months of starting the treatment, I was tumbling from the rabbit hole, abruptly well.
Across six states and over thirty-six months, I re-connected with the world outside my confined space. My favorite subject had become, ironically, the purgatorial landscapes of middle America. I felt now a deep appreciation for the forgotten, for the neglected, for the things that become extraordinary when you've faced their loss.
