Published August 14, 2021

After my separation and eventual divorce, I rented a room in a house in a wooded part of my hometown. The upstairs room was my bedroom and my home office when I needed a place to write away from the newsroom.

The fast pace at a daily newspaper means there’s never enough time to write the perfect story, but you make it as good as you can and move on to the next one. Every now and then, though, you carve out as much time as you can for a feature story you know you’ll never have another chance at, the kind of story that tells you from the start that it’s special. When I could, I worked on those stories in my room up the stairs and to the right.

There were different songs I’d listen to while writing depending on the tone I wanted to create for the reader. I never knew if this got lost in translation or came through on the page, but it helped me get into the headspace to write the way the bones of the story made me feel. The writing-soundtrack song with the most power was, by far, “There’s a Light Beyond These Woods (Mary Margaret)” by Nanci Griffith.

Nanci Caroline Griffith died yesterday, and here I am, in my room up the steps and to the right two time zones away from the one where she unknowingly collaborated with me years ago, and I am writing a story that holds so much meaning for me as I listen once again.

The last story I remember writing this way won story of the year, and the plaque is on my wall to my left as I sob my way through this one. This time, there’s no deadline, but I have to get this one done or risk never finishing it. It’s one of the special ones, so much so that my words will never be its equal. All I can do is cry it out and let it go with all of its imperfections.

It’s a tricky thing to write or edit while listening to music. I’ve spent hours, days, weeks putting together playlists of songs that drown out ambient noise and yet don’t pull me out of the story I am working on. For someone who has ADHD and other neurodivergence, it’s an all but impossible line to walk. There are almost no songs with lyrics on any of my editing playlists, and they have to meet a strict set of conditions to make it on them. The one I am listening to now is in its own class, so it was always exempt from any of my rules.

There’s a light beyond these woods, Mary Margaret
Do you think that we will go there and see what makes it shine, Mary Margaret?

By the time I first sat at a keyboard to compose a story with the song as mood muse and force field, it was so much a part of me that I could get lost in it and find my way back again. The lyrics were encoded in a part of my brain that could switch on and off to either focus on them or to activate itself as a cloaking device to move the blood of their words through me with no risk of hyperfocus on them. But wouldn’t you know? I’m struggling with that now.

“There’s a Light Beyond These Woods (Mary Margaret)” tells the story of Nanci Griffith and her real-life childhood friend, Margaret “Maggie” Graham Heenie. They grew up in a community that over time was subject to the gravitational pull of the metro area of Austin and Round Rock in Texas.

It’s almost morning, and we’ve talked all night 
You know we’ve made big plans for 10-year-olds 
You and I

One became a famous singer-songwriter. One married and had a family. She died in 2008 after years of struggle with a rare disorder called histiocytosis-x. A decade earlier, she talked about her relationship with Nanci Griffith in an interview with an Austin-based website.

(The song) is always a thing that haunts me… I stayed lost for so many years of my life and now it seems strange to say, but even in the midst of this terrible illness, I do feel there is  happiness finally in my life. It wasn’t what i had imagined it to be – I didn’t do the things I wanted to do in life, but I have the real “riches” in life – I am truly wealthy and in need of nothing. So that song is a reminder to me of how tangled up things can look at times, my life as a young girl was very tangled up…. but not anymore. I know that is a lame answer. The song meant different things during different times of my life. Every word of the song reflects a true event or time of my life and my friendship with Nanci. I think we spent some time being jealous of each other… she thought I had something she could never have because I was always in a relationship that I took seriously. And I wanted to be a musician. We always want what we don’t have, don’t we?

There never was another friend like her … i had other best friends, but never another Nanci.

This story I am writing the day after Nanci’s death will always be incomplete, because how can I tell you about the 10-year-old friend I never had? The girl friendships that passed me by in childhood, in early adulthood and on my circuitous path to finally becoming me?

As I sat upstairs in my rented room and wrote to “There’s a Light Beyond These Woods (Mary Margaret),” I was filled with longing for a past that would never be, for a story that I could never write, a story that I didn’t fully understand but that I knew had missing pieces. The biggest of those was a friendship like theirs.

There’s a light beyond these woods, Mary Margaret
Do you think that we will go there and see what makes it shine, Mary Margaret?

When I was young, maybe 10, I dreamed several times that there was a girl in my neighborhood who was supposed to be my best friend. We were supposed to ride our bikes together around and through the wooded areas off Texas Street, or maybe Illinois Street before a neighborhood sprouted up there. On some Saturday mornings, I set out on my bike to meet her, knowing what her house looked like. It was on California Street. No, Oregon Street. Or was it Mitchell? It was just a block or two over from Arkansas Street. If I rode up First Avenue, then turned right on Arkansas, then up Texas, surely I’d find the house.

But no, I could never find the house or find her, that 10-year-old girl who was supposed to be my best friend. The more I pedaled, the more time that passed and the more distance between me and my sleeping hours, the more it felt like a dream and not reality. And really, what could I have said had I met her? I didn’t have a vocabulary for what I didn’t understand.

“Is it you?” I would say in my dreams.

In one of them, I rode past the house, and a woman came out and asked if I was looking for her. She said a name, but I don’t remember it. “Oh, she and her family moved to California,” the woman said. She didn’t mean the street.

As I grew older, I understood that it was just a dream, that the girl wasn’t real, and yet …

♦

When I listen to the song, I fill in the gaps of the girl friendships I never had in a girlhood that I didn’t know to live. When I still had a guitar, I played what I perhaps erroneously call small flourishes. When I find my voice, I sing a certain harmony part that feels like it’s my part.

Fantasies we planned, oh, Maggie
I’m living all them now
All the dreams we sang, we damn sure knew how 

I don’t recall the exact moment when I got lost in the song, came back out on the other side and smiled, remembering that I am out and I am Carly and living in second puberty, but a lot of pieces fell into place in a way that you feel more than you think, and that was the closest I have ever come to the experience of writing a story with that song as my soundtrack.

There’ll never be two friends just like you and me
Maggie, can’t you see?

Tomorrow is the 11th anniversary of my first day as an Oregon resident. The car that carried me to the Pacific Northwest from Louisiana was stolen for the second and final time in June, so we will never again listen to “There’s a Light Beyond These Woods” together, which we did many times. But at its core, it’s my song for sitting in my room, a room I rent that’s not really mine, and where I sing harmony with the real and imaginary girl friends of my choosing, and we remember the times we never had together.

By now I think you know that I found that 10-year-old girl after all. You see, I had been looking in all the wrong places, and decades later I recognized who she was and even what her name was. She’s old now, she doesn’t have a bike, or a car, and she spends most of her time alone, like me, but we go on adventures together when we make the time. We have a lot of catching up to do. We write our way through it all, the unlikeliest of pen pals.

Truth be told, this is more a song while writing than a song while driving, though it’s been both. It’s possible, you know, to be both. We talk about it, my newfound childhood girl friend and I, here in this room. And we sing about it. And today we cry about it.

There’s all kinds of loss. Today we mourn so many of them at once, she and I.

Photo by MCL Yingling/via Shutterstock