From Scratch
Posted on 12 August 2010 | 2 responses
Corn silks, those annoying little buggers that you can’t completely remove from your fresh ear of sweet corn, are linked to corn kernels, one to one. Each silk must be pollinated for a plump kernel to form at its end.
We husk the corn, my son cuts the okra we bought at the market, our own plants too wasted by their passionate affair with the Virginia sun to provide enough of what we adore. I make tortillas from scratch, corn meal, flour, water, salt, a simple recipe for something so delicious.
In the morning, it’s pancakes the little ones ask for, and my husband never stops wondering why I don’t buy Bisquick, it’s so easy. Instead I measure flour, Ethan cracks eggs, we stir gently, leaving lumps because the directions say to, and I never know why.
I am working on streamlining my life, incorporating routines, and I think about our mornings, how I make coffee every other day because I will reheat it the next day.
There there, now. Don’t judge.
The children love this little ritual of grinding beans, boiling water, scooping the coffee into my shiny, insulated press, but I think how nice it would be to have one of those one-cup makers, tidy little pods to put in the compartment, buttons to push. How much time I would save, and I’d hardly have to wait for it at all. No more microwaved coffee on off days, no more pots to clean.
Then I think about how my children would lose the memory of where coffee comes from. They would no longer see beans that looks like beans, and big canisters releasing their wonderful aroma when you open them.
They would see coffee not as a ritual, but as a machine, an invisible something that comes from…I don’t know where. They would see it as utilitarian.
But coffee is not, or at least, not just so. It’s made by a friend when you visit her farm and she tells you her father taught her to use her spoon to cool the liquid, dipping it, lifting it, letting the metal release its heat. It’s served by a HoJo’s waitress in the middle of the night while you solve the world’s problems at seventeen. It’s cupped in neighborly hands while you wait together for news, good or bad.
The farmer walks down his rows, arms shaking loose pollen from his corn tassels so it will do its work. The corn is ground into meal, mixed with flour and water, kneaded, rolled, cooked.
I wake, I grind the beans, boil the water, and wait. And I see that it is good.
Ode to IKEA
Posted on 5 August 2010 | 5 responses
Ikea, I love you.
Your wide open spaces, your
fresh hope of a life
more orderly, peace
flat-packed, ready
to ship.
I wander, ghostly
through draped textiles in
modern prints
the scent of eco-friendly
dyes waft past.
Take me, Ikea,
take me from my cursed
and cluttered abode
drop me in an
Unhappy Hipsters photo
all angular lines,
skinny people,
vast expanses of concrete.
Take these Little People™
from under my feet,
give me a pull-down,
water-saving faucet.
Make my 8′x9′ kitchen look
like an empty warehouse,
all glass doors,
matching dishes in
white.
For an interchangeable backsplash,
I would be yours forever,
nestled
in names without vowels
and lots of umlauts,
or whatever those things are called,
until we could be
thrown into the compost
together.
Amen.
The Unbearable Weirdness of Festivals
Posted on 26 July 2010 | 2 responses
When I drove the two and a half hours to Floyd Fest, following the convo-fucking-luted directions from my GPS which had me rolling nearly three miles over a mountain on a washboard gravel road, I thought the most exciting thing that would happen to me would be the three legged dog that chased me a good ways down one of the roads I’d driven.
Silly me.
It’s been a long time since I hung with the freaks, and honestly, I have to modulate my own freak flag just to keep from getting off kilter. I do best (read: sanest) when my life is pretty reliable, steady, boring.
True, the writing flows best when things get shaken up, but not dying has become important to me, as has showering and getting dressed in real street clothes, so I try to stir gently, not shake. Who knows what comes first? Does the crazy drive the word train, or does the creativity drive me nuts? Does it matter?
It was so hot when I arrived at the festival with my nearly three-year-old, I wondered what the hell I’d been thinking, and how miserable a time I would have, despite my excitement over seeing my dear friend Amy, whom I hadn’t hugged in fifteen years. I eyed the people nervously, overwhelmed and weighted with the thought of trying so hard to be different, of needing to mark oneself as other. I remembered days of going to Dead shows, hanging out in the lots and feeling at home, and I wondered where that ease had gone. Was I so close the edge of discord that I couldn’t even venture into the fray without fearing I wouldn’t come back?
I was dressed the part of just a regular mom: overweight, tired, unkempt. I’m not twenty anymore, and have real, difficult responsibilities to attend to. How does anyone let them go, even for a minute?
But then Beckett started getting into the music, running and waving his arms in the air in his own little dance. We stopped at a stage with a great band from Richmond called The Hot Seats, because Beckett was intrigued by the bass. We have a book we read over and over, and in it a farmer makes his animals happy and his crops grow by playing music with his friends. Bear’s big bass goes whoom-whoom-whum, and it’s our favorite part of the book. This lead quickly to a request for a banjo (”I want one of those!”).
Then I saw this guy, this young, bald, shirtless guy, with a hula hoop. It’s probably not called a hula hoop anymore, and I think they sell them in head shops, but I’m not judging. He was doing amazing things with it, and he was so smooth in his movements it looked like an extension of his body. He had it on his neck, his arms, his legs, reversing directions. It was silver, and looked like a sparkling, fluid thing.
And he was smiling, like really smiling. Maybe he was high, or tripping. Probably. But maybe not. The thing was, he was happy. Completely at ease, with his dorky bald head sweaty and shining. I felt my limbs loosening, and I started rocking with the music. Then, suddenly, my feet were stomping, and I was dancing beside Beckett, my head moving, my tuchus wiggling, my face lit with joy.
Barely Knit: She’s Baaaaack
Posted on 22 July 2010 | 13 responses
The Steps
When I can, which is maybe twice a year or so, I join a think tank.
Of course, this group of men, who meet weekdays at a local cafe to share jokes, exchange political ideas, and plot the downfall of the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, don’t like to call themselves that, but I apparently don’t care.
Today I was able to have a leisurely cup of coffee with this favorite group of grown up men types, and in between talking about cars and politics and the legalization of marijuana and how we might capitalize off of it, home-improvement came up. Well, not home-improvement, per se, since what I actually said was, “I’m ready to tear it down. It’s a fucking disaster.”
I live in a 103 year old house. I use the term “house” loosely, but it does have a roof and windows, which constitute the entirety of our life savings to this point. The thing is, it needs more that we could ever give it, though we could certainly make it more livable, but when we look at it our jaws drop and we sort of start mumbling and the neighbors look as if they might call the men in white coats and then one of us says, “The zombies…the zombies!”
It’s all downhill from there.
This behavior, to a lesser extent, happens in projects across the world in every different branch of anything-that-can-have-a-project-involved. Saving for retirement, planning your son’s bar mitzvah, grocery shopping, figuring out how to rob a bank–it all comes down to planning, and not the kind of planning it takes to skip school, head for those inviting mountains in the distance, strip naked, swim in a creek, and get lectured to by a forest ranger about being nekkid in his cricks. No, we’re talking about Planning with a capital ‘P,’ making lists, setting goals, taking small, manageable bites.
The same way I need to approach writing.
Ahem.
I have a habit of looking at the whole picture and running off into the distance screaming about the undead and Oh, the huge manatee!
But the annoying adage about any journey starting with a single pest…er…step, is, as vexing as it sounds, true.
I will not write a novel this morning, in the hour I have budgeted for writing. I probably won’t even finish this piece, but I will get something down, somewhere, even if it’s nothing more than an exercise, because it’s all part of building. And this is the thing I’ve forgotten, along with getting confused about something called…
Audience
I’ve not only been wondering how I will sit down and write a whole freaking book before my husband gets home from work, but I’ve been overly concerned with who will read it. The same thing has happened here on my blog, where I used to write all the time for fun, and didn’t think much about who would be reading it, because I pretty much assumed no one would.
When that started to change, and I developed a following (of four), I began to worry about keeping them happy, so I channeled what I was doing down a path I thought they would like, and before I knew it I was stressed out about how I couldn’t make everyone happy and what was I, anyway, a mommy blogger or a humor blogger, or a noir comment writer, or a rodeo clown?
All of which made me turn into a non-writer, which, as anyone can tell you, pretty much guarantees that one will not be published.
So now I find myself in the strange position of shouting a big Fuck You at my audience. Well, not exactly. But sort of. Because if I am paralyzed by the thought of the people out there, I won’t do what I am supposed to do, which is get the words down. It’s kind of like going to the prom, because if every girl thought about how miserable a time she was going to have, what with her ex and his new gal riding in the van with you, and your date getting blotto, and how they didn’t even play a single song from a John Hughes movie, not that you would have danced anyway, in your hideous, borrowed prom dress, no one would go. Am I right?
Of course I am.
Anyway, I’m back.
Take that, zombies!
Personal Space
Posted on 24 June 2010 | 7 responses
I walk around the city for the better part of a hot, humid day. The smell of urine and trash comes at me from every corner. I tolerate it, but the tiny breaths I take cause my panic to rise closer to the surface, until I duck into a store, into the air conditioning pouring out of open doorways.
I used to enjoy New York so much more, used to find the number of beautiful people overwhelming. I could imagine ducking into an alleyway for a passionate kiss from a stranger, could picture the young bodies naked, locked together with my own. I basked in the looks I got, rather than feeling threatened or exposed, rather than being sad and empty.
My home is messy and crazed, but it is home, and its routine is comforting, if for no other reason than that I know how I behave there. There is no edge of doom or fear of walking over the cliff, there.
I remember walking years ago, to clubs, to shows, dressed provocatively, wanting to be wanted, wanting danger and desire. Wanting some kind of love, but not knowing what it looked like, I accepted its inferior substitute.
Now, I can’t wait to leave the city. I walk quickly to my subway, to the bus that will take me back across the river. The bus is so cool, I shiver, and look for a seat alone so I can lean my head against the window while I read, safe in my cocoon. I’ve adapted so easily to the crowds, I’ve made almost no eye contact all day and worn a stone-faced expression.
But then the businessmen are on the bus, and I have a seat mate. He is tall and large, slightly soft. His presence reminds me of my husband, whom I suddenly miss even more.
We say nothing, but at some point he sleeps and his arm rests agains mine. I don’t move, instead allowing myself to pretend he is my protector, someone I trust. My skin is against the smooth cotton of his light blue, summer weight dress shirt. I feel his flesh beneath it, warm.
I read, he sleeps to his iPod tunes, head back against the seat, mouth open.
We get off at the same stop, and it’s a sad relief when he walks quickly away and I can breathe deeply, quelling the panic of being alone again.
Boys of Summer
Posted on 17 June 2010 | 6 responses
The air is beach scented tonight. I’ve never clearly identified the source – something sweet, thick, something that pricks your feet when you step into the still-warm sand at the side of the road. But it’s the scent of the Outer Banks in North Carolina, the place my family visited year after year when I was a teenager, until our pretensions of unity unraveled.
My friend called the wildly growing, yellow, red and brown flowers, which were everywhere in the wasted lots where no one had bothered to grow grass, “Indian paintheads,” and I didn’t know any better. I was thirteen and thought she, at fifteen, was wiser than I.
Every year I kissed a new boy, after finding just the right one at the Foosball Palace. Of course, there had to be someone for my friend, as well, whichever one I’d brought that year. We’d all exit the back door, kicking our shoes off as we left the old wooden floors and wandered onto the sand. The nights were cooler, but there was still a stickiness to our skin as we gripped hands in the dark, everything gritty and rough except the scent of the hibiscus perfume I replenished every year from a little shop in Kitty Hawk, the sheen of lotion I kept cold in the refrigerator back at our rental house.
The first year we went was 1984, when The Boys of Summer came longingly out of my radio as my friends and I split our time between childhood and something less, lying face down, our suits untied behind us to darken every possible inch, or body surfing happily for hours. I remember my skin felt soft then, liquid, and I imagined it always would, that I would always pay so much attention to making myself desirable.
So each year brought a new boy, a new set of lips to kiss as I memorized their names. I arranged, every year, to meet them on my last morning there for sunrise on the beach. Invariably they came, and never asked for more than kisses, though now it’s hard to believe I’d been so lucky.
I have their memories in the cells of my lips, in the scent of a summer night, in the music that plays sometimes and sounds like 1984. I want to believe it’s not true that you can never go back, that you can never have that feeling again of a first and last kiss and sandy, imaginary love as the sun comes up to light the Indian paintbrushes, the silvery water, and the soft skin of a girl.
Untimely Eating
Posted on 1 June 2010 | 1 response
The kinds of words I say on a daily basis:
“Did you just throw a fish at me??”
“Stop hitting him with that roll of butcher paper.”
“Do not take apart the porch again!”
“Please stop pulling my shirt up.”
“We do not ride each other like horses in this house!”
“I will not play the zombie game with you unless you say you’re sorry for peeing on your sister’s floor!”
So perhaps it’s no surprise when, at a Memorial Day weekend cookout, I sneak quietly away from the small talk of which I’m not a part anyway, having never met these people before. I wander around the edge of the property, which sits on a grassy reserve in the middle of a fair wilderness, mulched and fighting off the woods that tend to creep in when one is not looking.
Most of the black-berries are not, yet, but are shaded in hues of pink and white, even palest green, which, while pretty, is not palatable. But trudging forward, avoiding hairy, thick poison ivy vines, I spy them.
Deep black, shining even in the shady woods. All seeds and stingy growth in this tough clay soil, but sweet, still, and just what my mouth needs.
Not reprimands, threats. Not pleas or groveling for a minute to breathe, to sleep, to own my flesh again. Not even words to toss out into the ether, wondering why I need this particular brand of everlasting life.
Just me, behaving strangely at a social gathering (again), ingesting the things no one else bothers to notice.
I think of one of my favorite poems, “Blackberry Eating,” and wonder at the poor soul who must wait for blackberries until late September, when the birds have long disposed of whatever good things grow on bushes in these parts. I thank the red clay for the escape, the green forest for hiding me for a little while. I hope no one speaks to me as I emerge, my teeth bathed in purple, my mouth a jungle of seeds. I have nothing of consequence to say at such a moment, anyway.
Blackberry Eating - Galway Kinnell
I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry -- eating in late September.
Storms
Posted on 12 May 2010 | 1 response
I tell everyone I hate storms. I’ve said it so long I accept it as truth, and feel my stomach grip with fear when trees bend and thunder hurtles through my chest.
But today, forced to enter the thrall to rescue a mini-vehicle my husband bought, for too dear a price, for our sons, I remembered a time I couldn’t imagine tornadoes and hail come to batter me and steal my body from earth.
This one today was so warm. The rain had moved humidity from something cloying to something pouring over me and clearing the air. I remembered waiting for storms like this on the hot Virginia summer days; waiting for a break in the heat, for an excuse to be soaking wet in my clothes in public, which is the most delicious feeling. It washes away the sweat that won’t evaporate from skin into the thick air, and helps me understand immersion baptism as a way to holiness. Heavy rain makes the hard, clay dirt around here something soft and luscious on bare feet, if you can stand the color. It makes the grass feel like clouds.
Then I remember Roger, who is so long dead, his ashes washing ever deeper into the ground up in the mountains I think I might never find him again when it’s time, and when we shared that house it rained like this. But I wasn’t afraid, and when we went outside and danced in it, we forgot that we knew each other only because our fathers were alcoholics and he’d been abandoned to grow up with strangers here, in my town. These are the kinds of things that draw people together, I suppose.
Now I live with someone who doesn’t dance in rain storms, and doesn’t understand my fear of them. But I swear I’ll teach my children this secret language of storms, heat, and water, and they can dance with a young girl in the rain before it’s too late.
Abandon Hope
Posted on 30 April 2010 | 4 responses
I slide quietly into the bed beside my sleeping toddler, and lean in close to breathe in the smell of his hair. It’s the fresh air, sweaty boy smell of a good day, and the tears start sliding easily down my cheeks into the curve of his ear.
“I love days like this,” said the older boy earlier that day, the almost six year old kid whom I understand and know in ways that help me understand myself as a child, that help me forgive my parents for their failures.
I love these days also, but it’s more than the fading of the cold, the bright sun and a real spring that sends breezes to keep the summer humidity down to a rumor. It’s more than knowing we can go without furnace but don’t yet need to lug the heavy, powerful air conditioning units from the basement to their complicated window positions, propped with wood and sealed with haphazardly cut foam pieces.
I reach my hand out to touch my baby’s arm, his warmth and smallness a treasure in my hand. The girl is nearly grown now, so I know too well how they go away, how they fade from your arms and become their own people, with no room for you to be wrapped in chubby-armed hugs. Some days I don’t even see my daughter; some months go by without touching her.
My mouth waters with hunger for this, for this little head I can hold in my hand, still, for the small person from whose face I still have the power to erase the lines of sadness and fear.
My daughter’s heart is breaking as she works toward leaving behind a first love who will never match her industry, who will not be able to accompany her on the great destiny she sees laid before her, and I can’t do a thing to ease the sobs that wrack her body. I can’t hold her because she won’t have me; she must do this on her own without my judgement and influence, so she’ll know it’s her decision.
This little boy here, the bigger one, and even the grown woman who inhabits my baby girl’s body now, hold my heart in a purgatory of waiting, of knowing, finally, that we are all mortal. I imagine leaving them, I remember how I was so sure only a year ago that they would be so much better off without me. I would die without them, and so I planned my death, my last act for their benefit, I thought.
But now I hold on to them so my chest aches with the weight of it, my eyes with the pressure of seeing everything so I don’t forget. The pain is so much worse now, knowing I have to stay no matter what, knowing I have to watch them change and hate me and hurt and survive the damage of living a life.
The pain is so much worse, but oh! God, the beauty. The beauty of it is enough, for now.
Look At Me
Posted on 20 April 2010 | 4 responses
Friday night, I had the distinct discomfort of watching a recording of my friends and me from twenty years ago. We video taped it over the course of two nights, in one of our basements, during Thanksgiving break of 1989.
Our crowd was a little unusual. Maybe geeky, kind of. There were at least two references to Star Trek and something about a hobbit, but I swear no one uttered “D&D,” so it’s somewhat questionable.
There’s this thing about me, this thing about anyone who aspires to write, to make art, to perform. There’s a way of relating to the world through public acts. And I noticed that though I hid my face and took great pains to act as if I didn’t want to be seen, I never took a turn behind the camera.
I need to be able to watch myself, I need to see myself, no matter that it’s twenty years later, in a way that doesn’t lie. The video is an education for me in how twenty years can pass and not change a person’s core, an education in who I was and am and a reminder of the reasons I became this person.
I watched myself hinting at the mild abuse I’d suffered, in a subtle but nonetheless transparent way. I suppose, though it’s taken me this long to understand it, that I thought I couldn’t be loved, I could only be pitied. That if I could make people feel sorry for me, they would love me. That I had no qualities of my own to recommend me, but only events that would tug heartstrings enough to earn me a kiss, a lover for a time.
I spend my days now fitting words together in ways that make music, but also convey meaning. Sometimes, though, the music is overpowering and the truth can get lost.
Here is what I know:
I can be a better person than what I saw there. I don’t have to perform, to put on the “poor terrible childhood girl” show. In fact, it’s time to leave it behind, except the parts that make good stories, because really – they’re pretty damn funny.
There are ways to say what needs to be said –I love you, I’m angry, I hurt, help me –without screaming for attention, without a writing a script and putting myself in front of the metaphorical camera.
When my boyfriend at the time was videotaping, he said all he needed to in the way he lingered on my face, my hands. When he filmed his best friend, he was loving him so much it made my heart ache. It makes me wonder why I’ve needed such grand gestures to believe what has always been true.
I’m no less worthy than any of the people in this video who, all these years later, still fill my heart, my soul with love.
