Ballard Locks
Aaron and I are firecrackers, both of us—deep-feeling,
mercurial, creative, passionate. We want what we want; we
dream hard.
We fell hard, romance and wildness, going to plays and
rock shows, talking all night, slow-dancing and running
around the city. We met the week I turned twenty-two.
I was a writer, a feminist, prickly about all things church-
and-faith related. I was fresh from four years in California,
back home and testing the waters of a world I thought I’d
never return to. I had my dukes up all the time: I’m not who
you think I am. I’m not only a pastor’s daughter. Please see
me for more than that. Please see a poet and a fighter and a
thinker. Please see me.
I’d made a mess of things in Santa Barbara, in some
ways. In some ways, I’d made something beautiful—a
person, a whole self, a messy collage of a million books and
a thousand walks on the beach and a hundred late nights
and a half-dozen heartbreaks. But when I got to the end of
that wild season, I wanted to reconnect all the various pieces
of my life to the spiritual part of my life. And looking back,
I didn’t know how to do that anywhere but home.
I went to work at the church my parents started. And on