Box 1305

Alma Mater sent me the door to my mailbox of all four years Even the semester I took off to be an intern in DC Box 1305 was still mine. Not occupied by anyone else. And when I received the souvenir door to my once-mailbox in my now-mailbox which is an oddish nesting of postal portals when you think about it, I opened the box containing the door to the box that I used to open every day, ages 17 through 21. I gamely held the dial, pointing it to combination numbers and it all came rushing back.

I was reduced to that tender age where I felt everything acutely. Where I would stand there in the midst of good-smelling fraternity boys in front of the wall of little doors like Alice in a neo-Wonderland I stared at my fate through a clouded window marked 1305. Would today be a day of discovery J. Crew cargo shorts gone pastels this season? Would today be a letter from my granny signed, Keep the faith, Love, Gramma or would today be a telegram from my old man in the form of TIME Magazine which he sustained a subscription for me for all four years as if to remind me, weekly, to take a look at the world's problems for a moment, from the heights of your ivory tower. Or would today be the proverbial golden ticket in the Wonka bar-- a small slip indicating you had won the college lotto: Today a package awaited you.

Box 1305: the gatekeeper of So much more than mail. Homesick for a home that was no longer mine Missing my friends and an identity now amorphous, irrelevant. Point, wind right, wind left, wind right, click, open: Mix tapes and messages in bottles. I was 17, 18 and ready to go for broke. Love letters and love-of-life letters The kind of love I'll not find again The kind of letters I'll read thousands of times when I do find them When I find them in dusty shoeboxes, in my mother's basement and awaken to the fact of how loved I was.

Was time different then? Or was I just different then?

All that time, my husband was only a few mailboxes away But he might as well have been in a different zip code Later his letters would find 1305 Potted clay and grass His animated penmanship a beacon. He graduated I stayed behind Typing papers and writing letters on the road to earning the letters B. A.

Today we share the same mailbox. And our shared mailbox doors can live closer Can live out of the order of numbered portals in Cochran Hall Sometime a million years ago Or was it just 10 or so that our doors and our days were sorted by mail.

Wheelchairs

I believe it was a night in mid-January, and January in New England is an interminably gray wintry snowy mucky windy sludgy unjust punishment lasting 31 days. I worked the 1-9p shift at a community center in a hot little pocket of Boston. I was a youth worker for at-risk youth, a position for which I was sorely equipped.

My manager at the community center had just left and the athletic director was off that day. It was just my youth work partner Kamau and I; we were closing up the center after wheelchair basketball. The wheelchair basketball league was a high point of our week--the men played played hard and laughed hard and their families were beautiful. The only downside of the league is that they always stayed late and pushed closing time even later.

The last couple of men rolled out and Kamau and I ran out into the parking lot, where a full-scale Nor'easter was just getting started. We couldn't see more than a few feet ahead of our faces.  We heard one of the basketball players laughing in a way that we knew was really the sound of despair. If Kamau and I who were ambulatory could barely make it to his car, what was happening just across the lot?

I hadn't even worn boots that day, I didn't even have my gloves on. I ran over to one player's car and the snow was just pouring onto his seat. The cold wind and the wetness stung my skin and I saw he was trying to hoist himself into the driver's seat. He could lift himself but he would have to leave the door open to disassemble his wheelchair. He was laughing because it was just such a mess--he was so tired after his game and I couldn't understand how to fold the chair back up, but somehow we did it, and then I paused because I realized that someone needed to clear off the windows of his car.  I quickly swiped the windshield with the sleeves of my jacket and batted off the soft blanket covering the back windows. I was laughing and I heard Kamau yelling something from probably just a few feet away but I couldn't see him and I laughed because the snow came on so swiftly and so strong and none of us, none who walked, none who wheeled, had a lick of a chance of getting home with ease.

***

I can't forget that night. It was really just a window of 15 minutes that sobered me up about many things. I want to continue to be changed by that night, and those men and their smiles, and the feeling of wind and wet snow on my cheeks.

Life is very hard right now but life is not so very hard right now. It depends on whether I feel as though I'm standing or sitting, whether I can see what's in front of me or whether I can't. It depends on whether I am in a position to help myself and others.

But mostly it hinges on whether or not I can always find it in me to keep laughing.

Identity

Hi. My name is Kendra Stanton Lee.

I am an American-born woman, a wife, and a mother of two.

I prefer to go by my full name. The family into which I was born and the family into which I chose to marry are equally important to me.

I have a master's degree. I was able to attend graduate school because my husband supported me: my dreams and my finances.

I teach full-time. I love my job. I like it when people ask me whether I like my job. I like it less when people ask me who cares for my children while I am working. When my husband worked three jobs, people never seemed to ask him the same question.

I was nursing my baby boy until two days ago. I love tucking my children into bed.

I believe my husband is the spiritual leader of our home. I do not, however, believe that he is always right.

I receive a paycheck in my name that is more than my husband earns per month. However, I believe we are both earning the same amount. Whatever is mine is his. It is unimportant whose name is on the paycheck because we are both working hard toward a goal united: to support our family.

I am uninterested in identifying myself as a feminist.

I more interested in claiming my personhood as woman who struggles mightily to be more like Jesus Christ.

There are women like I am everywhere.

Someday there may be more of us; I am raising one of them.