Last Thursday driving east to where home used to be, my mind swelled with stories.  It always does, but they used to be about me.  This time in the eight hours from Pickens, SC to Hampton, VA, I was bursting with ideas from three interviews in the days prior.  Evan, Chris, and Sue. 

When I visit, I’ve got so many friends and family to see that I couch surf from home to home, no desk in sight.  Those had been vacations.  Now, I’m a writer.  Where would these people’s stories come to life?

The Crawfords and the Palmas go way back.  My sister-in-law Gabrielle was friends with Mary Beth before she met my brother.  They are godparents to each other’s kids.  Those five children have grown up like cousins, rarely a holiday spent apart.  I was grafted in when the twins were born nine years ago and I moved to Hampton.    

Mary Beth wasn’t sure that I could stay with her this time.  She just remarried and bought a house, and I could picture her new husband adjusting to living with three women and understand his reluctance amidst boxes that still needed to be unpacked during the last two weeks of school. 

I was a few hours into my drive when Mary Beth’s husband called and three-wayed her in.  To my surprise, he was okay with me staying with them, not just for a couple of days, but for a couple of weeks. He established some agreeable ground rules reminiscent of summer after freshman year of college. 

I hung up, excited, redirected my GPS to their place, and thanked God audibly for instantly answered prayer. I’d have the guest room to myself, and even the whole house when they had to go out of town for a few days, ideal for some serious writing.  Our dogs Tito and Hershey get on well, too.  

By the time I’d arrived, their eldest Josie had made up my room, complete with a chocolate on the hand towel.  Her sister Ginny helped her lug an aqua-painted desk out of the garage.  Josie hung twinkle lights and put a framed photo of us beside a vase of freshly-clipped blue hydrangeas Ginny snipped from the front yard. 

We had leftover barbecue, chatted until bedtime, and hugged good night.  It had been too many months since I’d participated in the normalcy of a family dinner and bedtime routine.  Tito and I slept well. 

I’ve been here five days, and the sum of the moments I’ve collected couldn’t fit in a blog post.  I didn’t just publish a story about a homeless man that became a friend, Ginny and Josie watched me take it from interview notes to published form.  They were captivated by his story, and how the pictures made him real.  They saw me reformat my story from MLA to AP style guidelines, double-checking every quotation mark placement.

When Evan hit me up on Friday with a draft of a flyer to leave estimates for his new lawn care business, I just worked it into opportunities for free in-home journalism and copywriting lessons for the girls. I called him up. 

“Evan, can I play with this?  I need copywriting samples for my portfolio.  This is in my wheelhouse.”

“You want to fix it for me?  How much do you charge?” he countered, baffled.

“I don’t know how much to charge. I need a portfolio to prove I can do what I’m great at outside of teaching before I’d even know what to charge you,” I laughed. 

We agreed to table payment arrangements and let me work on the flyer over the weekend. I dug in the dirt with the three Crawford ladies from early morning to early afternoon, weeding the garden, planting flowers, and landscaping with thousands of rocks.  They were so small we’d be surprised how we ached the next day.

And when it was time to rest, they helped me make a flyer that turned into a free Wix website and a flyer that linked to it. It only took a couple hours, and we had fun making choices together, going off a handful of details since Evan didn’t know about the site.  They were as excited as I was to find out Evan’s reaction to his preliminary ad campaign.  If he has his way, he’ll work some free lawn care in to the copywriting fee. 

After five nights caught up in the beautiful chaos of daily Crawford family life with visits to see my brother’s family and award ceremonies at my old school for all their kids, I’m thinking about my current story.  Like Evan, Chris and I were out to dinner one night when this story started coming out of her. 

Telling your story makes you feel seen, known, and acknowledged.  Last year when her son needed a liver transplant, it was her daughter who became his living donor.  Chris’ children were interviewed by a local paper.  She hadn’t gotten to speak about what God had done in her life that’s made her cherish life’s tiny, everyday moments. She was just waiting for someone to ask her to tell her story. 

Like Evan, my time with Chris has grown me… better.  I’m leaning into hair braiding, wardrobe changes, borrowed shoes, doing dishes, and putting IKEA furniture together.  Not everyone wants to wind up in an online magazine, but telling your story to even one person makes you feel seen, known, and acknowledged.  And I learn something when I listen. 

Teaching English in general, but more specifically, doing so alternative school with Mr. Adams as my fearless leader, made me lean into people’s messy stories.  When my students were acting off, I’d get them talking.  The children in my care these past sixteen years came with their own stories, and more often than not, they needed to tell it… even if it was just to me. 

My year in Pickens at Project Go built the infrastructure for me to tell stories on purpose for a living.  There, working with such an at-risk population, you know a kid has a story when his ankle monitor is going off during class.  I’m not publishing those, but they’re stories worth sharing, and they shared them with me.

Like Evan and Chris, Mama Sue has changed my life in far more ways than the story I submitted about her miraculous healing on Monday. My niece Katarina was moved to tears when I read it aloud for story time, upset that Sue had missed out on her kids’ childhood due to illness.

I listened to Gabrielle explain to her daughter what it meant to have empathy.  She included me and Kat in the ranks of the people who have a lot of that.  We feel what others feel, strongly. She told her this was a good thing and why. 

It’s why people tell me their stories in the first place.  I’m a good audience.  I can feel what they feel. People open up to me waiting in lines at grocery stores and walking by the beach.  There’s an exchange made, and I’ve learned a lot from chatting with strangers and friends alike. I don’t publish every story I hear, but when they want me to, I get to walk a mile in their shoes.

There’s a reciprocity with the writer’s life that just keeps getting sweeter.  When I wrote stories about Evan, Chris, and Sue, these three remarkable human beings were also grafted into my timeline, my story.  Telling their stories lets people feel seen, known, and acknowledged, but writing about them reshapes my perspective of the world.