slip

reading old letters

about guns and threats

i miswrote “days”

dies

dark before 6

i rush to stoke the fire, pour forgotten tea, look out into the dark.  i forget myself between all these things that are left un-done.

today two mallards escaped, flew over the fence, the two girl mallards.  one was quacking along the gravel lane and her three family-companions were atop a pile of mulch where they’ve never stood before, quacking back to her.  once that one was herded back to the garden (though i had thought ducks liked to follow), i went in search of the last fly-away duckling who turned out to be silent under a long row of hedges in the pasture on the other side of the garden.  i also found cheyenne’s shoe in the wet grass there.  it had disappeared from the porch two nights ago.

tonight i ate pea soup and bread for dinner, sitting at the table between my mother and father.  my mom clutching her shoulder and finally convincing herself to make an appointment to see about what is probably years-old nerve damage from an old accident, my dad in his neck brace, hair pushed up in the back of his head, stepping clumsily around the table, to the kitchen.  and me, tired, though i feel like i shouldn’t be when i look at them.  wondering how i might hold all these things.  me, still nervous about the dark and windows that act as mirrors when it’s night outside.  paying attention to dry towels and chimney fires, dahlias dying from the outside in, fruit flies, satie’s gymnopedies. my gaze, it’s not long enough to be called that, i look from one thing to the next and i want to know so badly what i am trying to see.

i am trying not to propel myself too fast into the future.  all the time i change my mind about what i want and where i’m headed and i feel this pressure to always decide right now, because i am convinced that the future impacts the present and i so often forget that it also works the other way around.  do i want to teach feminist theory, move back to where i used to be, stay in university-world for five or six more years, grow zinnias?

i want to change a few things about myself.  like my belief that i am hard-wired to disappoint myself.  i’d like to change both the belief and the hard-wiring.  i’d want to like right now as much as i like the past.  i want to see the same beauty in the mirror that i see when i look at photographs of old me.  i want to trust myself and know that i am alright.  like trying to invert the old order of things. and how can i do this?

yesterday i worked long hours on my research-job, which is about sexual assault prevention and today i read the weekend’s newspaper about the girl who was raped at her high school in richmond.  and i wish i could do something better with words.

there is urgency all around me, i am trying to finish all these tiny things and some of them i’m not sure if they matter, and i’m trying to get it all done before i’m un-done, thinking that perhaps i’ll help make myself in the process.  instead sometimes i think i forget about myself that i am too focused on what i do.

i’m not going to revise yesterday’s writing, not right now.  i am leaving the laundry on the oak chest (at least until i finish my tea).  i am going to try, slowly, to do things the way i intend to, to direct myself steadily toward how i want to be, testing out new movements, trying to look at myself for a while.

here is the inverse.  it’s spring, me and my sister, i’m not looking away.

yes i do yes i do

I have more daily pictures of things that I find and work on and look around and can see from where I sit and walk and sleep.

Today I was thinking about something and then I thought about Kazoo singing a song “oh i like the shallots yes i do yes i do” while I was conducting a garden interview with my camera and how some of us of certain (smaller number) ages seem to have this seamless time of slipping between being in public and private.  Like one moment Kazoo is answering my questions about butter lettuce and fava beans and pointing garden stakes too close to my face and the next moment he is by himself, he forgets I am there?  Doesn’t care I am there?  He is singing a song to himself by himself and only concerned with his very sweet self.  I think it’s a useful technique and one I am working on appropriating for my own current needs, such as when someone wants to know about “the internal dialogism of the word.”  Okay, that I am actually interested to talk about, but say I weren’t, what a great segueway into casually not talking about the things one would rather not talk about anymore, to simply start singing “oh i really do like…”

October 12, 2009 . Door knob into my house

October 13, 2009 . I am late turning in forms, I am picking zukes.

October 14, 2009 . Woodpile on my porch, rain is coming, the porch roof does not keep the logs dry after all.

October 15, 2009 . Shoeshelf clogs

nana’s quilt / above the ocean

October 11, 2009

October 10, 2009

neck scar

i haven’t been writing because words have been so hard.  it’s october now, six eggs today, the ducks have a real pool to swim in, but it’s small.  the green beans are tough, the blackberries are nearly all rotten, my first apron is finished.  my dad is having surgery tomorrow, hopefully.  there are these gigantic things occupying me now and they are denial and spinal cords and paralysis, surgery, pre-approval and insurance and emergency rooms and stubbornness.  my dad has this incredible inability to listen to doctors, x-rays, mri results, a hard neck brace or warnings of quadriplegia.  i stop myself from writing sentences about turning his head too far snapping his spinal cord, because i am so tired.  i feel like there’s nothing helpful about it.  i don’t want to read about literary theory, i don’t want to go to class, i just want to sleep and garden and run and distract myself until he is in the hospital and surgery is over and the trick is to convince him not to drive himself home.

i did see kazoo and it was really nice and i didn’t cry at all when i was with him.  actually, i’ve stopped crying in the past week, i’ve just had stomach aches.  everything is too much to write about, though, so i don’t know why i’m here trying to move these letters around anymore.  i’m going back to reading sentences four and five times over and emptying my brain.

leaving today

the plan is that c will build a most gigantic retaining-wall-like raised bed in the greenhouse to maximize frost-free space this winter and my plan is that i will plant some of the ginger bulbs from the great chunk of fresh ginger that flew clandestino across the country in the luggage of a dear easterly friend.  the hope is that ginger will grow and produce wild pink flowers and, most importantly, more ginger bulbs down below in the dirt.

the other plan is that my dad will have an mri on his neck and everybody will hope that the doctors will see a pinched nerve or a ruptured disk or any number of problems that can be solved! easily! (well, speaking relatively), with surgery!  though i am torn, really, between funneling my energy into hope and anticipation and trying to accept what seems to be obvious.  like maybe my hope can change something that always was going to be, some genetic combination producing a predisposition embedded even within that chubby baptized baby from 1951.  and when i’m trying to prepare and to accept, that’s all i can do.  i cry when i drive to class, i try to de-puff my eyes walking up the hill to school in this growing-brisker air and i sneak glances at symptoms and exceptions during lectures.

and my dad doesn’t know about any of this – because he hasn’t researched his symptoms himself, he hasn’t asked the doctors any questions and when my mom has suggested that she has some big fears about what all of this might mean and then she pauses, he doesn’t say anything, and when she asks, are you interested in knowing?, he says no.  and that’s starting to make perfect sense to me – because for my mom and i, it’s all that we talk about know.  and when my dad is around, we don’t talk about it.  we talk about school and i blabber on and on about the research i’m doing, or we ask each other about the jobs of our dreams and my dad says maybe a baseball announcer, but only after i first guess that will be his answer, and my mom thinks he would want to be a librarian and for herself perched out on a mountaintop, down in a valley, watching foxes or antelope, baboons or robins and writing about all of it.  and for myself, i say i want to live in my own house and take care of strawberries and goats, ducks and flower beds, bake bread and pie and try to sew my own wool coat.

there are things i want to write.  and when i am here in this nearly-secret blog-space i tell myself that this is a project about really writing.  writing what is scary to say or what feels most like one truth of my life in some particular moment.  i intended this to be about speaking what is too often silent inside of me.  but right now it’s about something that is bigger to me, which is taking care of myself, but also having a responsibility to this situation, at least for now, to try to stay in the moment and what we know now, and (at least not here) let myself run with off with my wildest scariest thoughts (though this does not make them go away).  i can see my journal on the top shelf of my bookcase, and i know i need to take it down.

today, in an hour, or as soon as i fill my backpack and find my camera charger and say my goodbyes to toby, talulah, margo, marley and marcelle, i’m leaving for the south.  past redwoods and orchards and burning leaves and vineyards.  and i will see friends and pick tomatoes and maybe go swimming with kazoo (!).  i’m both excited and nervous.  and so happy to see friends who will fill my heart and also nervous about trying to spend some hours smiling and not crying and wondering how long i will last before i call my mom with all of me that can try, not letting myself think that my dad will be different on monday, that i should stay home.  the hopeful part is pulling me away, saying it’s okay to go.

returning is metaphorical failure

last night, i came home from cafe-writing research-compiling, work-meeting, soup-receiving and running.  c and i had run from her parents house (origin of soup gift) through the grounds of my old middle school, the huge field where i used to have soccer practice over winter break.  would come home with red feet and shins aching with cold, sink them into the tub, ache some more.  we ran across the bridge over the creek that is always dry this time of year.  through a csa farm, past blackberries still ripe and ready for picking.  past the used-to-be-green now-is-yellow house that burned when i was 6.  the fire killed the three kids who lived there and their babysitter too.  it was empty for well over decade and now is for sale. we ran along a cracked concrete path along a meandering road.  looking over the valley to the freeway, the bay, somewhere beyond that the ocean.  we ran to c’s old elementary school and i remembered my older brother’s clumsy little league games, the falling apart wooden scoreboard where my younger brother and i would sit, stand, dance the games away.  hot-dogs in hand from the roadside corner-store sweet blue candy-stand across the way.  i remember being 4 years old and in the middle of a tall crowd and feeling invisible.  singing songs of nonsense made-up ideas i had never yet thought of.

it is work to fit these pieces together again.  hold my memories gently, toss them around and polish them, try not to change the edges.  making space for me (now) among all of that (was then).  trying to hold on to what was and super-impose this new landscape, the one i see now with my eyes aren’t quite as young anymore, that are still growing.

i collected eggs this morning.  three cold, one still warm.  gave the seven hens the leftover rind of my breakfast melon.

oh, and i cut my hair.  mishapen, puffing out past my ears, sticking straight up in the morning.  something messy, like fall.  chopped, like the excess is gone, taking down what is fallen and old, wilted, dry and brittle.

i’m writing about all this because there are other things i think all the time to write about, though right now it feels safer to practice here with these letters above.  tomorrow my dad is seeing a neurologist to figure out the numbness in his feet, legs, hands and arms.  the lack of feeling that’s been a greater lack every day for the past month, that makes him trip in the afternoon, which makes it not easy to write (grade papers), and not safe to drive a car (can’t feel the pedals).  yesterday in a sweet corner cafe with a sweating icy latte, i stared out at the plaza, thinking i might try to make myself think about sexual assault prevention, but didn’t.  instead read about symptoms and diagnosis and degenerative and disease and demise and felt like we are cornered in somewhere where every view is nothing, every way out is not really.  i felt my eyes cloud over and i am trying not to think that today is the last day that i can keep pretending everything is going to be alright.

i don’t feel up for it.  i am pushing out of my mind the memories of my mom in the hospital the summer of 2006, the time my dad fell off a ladder at school earlier – that spring.  the year both my parents aged with such speed, like one of those wrinkle-applying makeup artists took up permanent residency.  i’m remembering how i learned to answer my mom’s nonsensical questions about dancing iv poles, underground soccer fields, mountains of fabric that i couldn’t see.  i tried to muster the same degree of seriousness she showed.  she’d mutter something, i’d try to catch a syllable before she slept, mid-sentence.  something would startle her awake and with a new tautness making lines stretch around her mouth, an aged elasticity from her jaw contrasting the puffy bruises, her swollen arms, she’s say i seemed so much older.  i’d startle myself awake, sleeping nights on a reclined chair seven stories up in the middle of a city i had never spent so much time in before.  i’d pause for a moment, realize there was no sound, wonder why i woke, notice the absence of sound is what had changed.  i’d count her breaths and struggle to see her chest rise with air, letting her unsteady attempts at regularity lull me back to sleep.  i remember i felt like i wasn’t up for it.  i had been so focused on french quizzes and dividing utility bills by six, devising a grocery budget for the first time.  i remember how all of that vanished and i began to measure survival by not crying until the parking lot was dark and empty.

yesterday i hurried out to the garden and weeded the beet bed.  tears clouding my vision, not sure if i was pulling up friend or foe, not especially caring as long as i was ripping something else away from its roots.  uprooted, but on the same dirt as before.

i still remember one line, written over and over again in joan didion’s the year of magical thinking.

“leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.”  everything changes and i don’t get to say when.

wilted sunflowers

i dreamed last night that i changed my mind and was now getting a master’s in biology.  words with twelve syllables were thrown around and i distinctly remember someone telling me that it was hopeless, i’d never catch up having gone this many years in nose-down in the humanities.  i brought home a stack of books on goats and another pile of feminist science theory and felt like i knew exactly what i was doing.

i don’t know what i’m going to write my thesis on.  in class, when we’re to post a response to something we’ve read on this online forum we use, i read over everyone else’s and they all seem so similar – and i’ve meandered down some totally alternate path, clutching tight to my very own interpretation.  i didn’t study english as an undergrad, or literature, or creative writing.  and now i can’t study any of those things without a lens of feminist theory.

as it is now, i’m awake and sipping coffee over the solola tablecloth, sitting next to a pile of books-for-fun (primate visions by donna haraway, the handmaid’s tale by margaret atwood, and gender trouble by judith butler) and across from the newly-painted dark blue french doors.  c is asleep and the house is mostly still.  once i finish this, i’ll go let the ducks out of their little duck house and into their little duck yard for the day.  there are reports of rabid foxes in the area (two humans in a 5-mile radius have been bitten) and my mom saw something small and red slink out of the yard last week.  so, we let the ducks out late and put them away early and and hope that my mom’s big, lumbering dog will help in protecting them if need be.

yesterday, c and i traveled a few miles to the north to run on trails around meadows and then down a long hill of steps to agate beach where it was hard enough to walk on the sand, 10-foot waves crashing nearby, the lagoon off to our right, far ahead.  we passed something being devoured by vultures farther toward the giant looming cliffs lining that tiny section of coastline.  we sat facing the water and i sifted tiny pebbles through my hands.  digging holes, filling them, covering my arms and legs with their tiny salty wet and sticky gray smooth roundness.  we talked about what we might do.  how we might keep doing this for a long time, how we could just as happily do a number of other things.  mapping out hopes among the possibilities.

week four

leek soup and nearly-failed bread and a new-old knitted skirt hacked to above my knees.  it’s hard to focus.  i jump from shrinking old sweaters to taking down blackberry-stained rags from the clothesline to dabbling blue paint on used-to-be white doors, eating tomatoes, duck-watching, egg-collecting, lemon-balm drying.  school is this big sponge that dries up my brain.  and i don’t have anything else to say.

new developments are haircut, eagerness to play old-time musicals on the piano once again, veering way far over the edge of jam-making crazyness.  blackberry ginger sauce.

pickles, plums, first week of school

i made pickles!

i made dill pickles yesterday from little-sized pickling cucumbers and a huge bunch of dill from the farmers market next to the co-op.  and today i made lemon cucumbers with more of the dill.  i also put in cloves of garlic and created my own pickling mix of spices and even made up my own recipe for brine.  so i am feeling very proud, but might just be because nobody has tasted these pickles yet (they will be ready in six weeks).  pickles are easy!  everyone should make pickles!  and they look beautiful in their jar with big yellow dill flowers floating around.  but i haven’t taken any pictures.  but this morning when i went out to peer in the duck house i saw our two big yellow ducks, toby and talulah, on either side of the three tiny mallards all huddled together, like one feathery family with a large size differential.  and that was the kick in the knickers that i needed to find my camera charger.  so i will find it later.

today i also revived my computer from this horrid place of near-death where it spent all of last night.

i wrote my first paper for grad school.

i ate eggs from our getting-smarter hens.  one of them sat for two hours on a golf ball the other day.  we were sure she was working on her first egg, but she was just keeping it warm, or confused maybe.  we put golf balls in some of their boxes to tell them where to lay because all seven hens really like to poop in just one box and the ones who are laying like to lay in that box too and it makes one really dirty box to get the eggs out of.

i started planting my tea garden: aztec mint, calendula, lemon balm and i also put in some herbs around the sage and roses and zinnias.

yesterday i made plum conserve.  which is also so delicious and so easy.  everyone should also make plum conserve.

this is how it goes:

5 cups plums (my friend and i used green gage)

3 cups sugar

1/3 c. orange rind, sliced into tiny thin slices

1 c. raisins

1 c. orange-pulpy goodness

bring to a boil and boil for fifteen minutes and stir the entire time and hope that your hands are not burned by splattering boiling plums.  after the first ten minutes of boiling, add

1 c. chopped pecans

then ladle into sterile mason jars, put on sterile lids and hope they all seal (or just eat it all on toast the next day).

a while ago i talked to kazoo on the phone.  he picked up and said “I CAN RIDE MY BIKE WITH NO TRAINING WHEELS” and we talked for a while about feeling good and proud and how cool some really cool things are, mostly all in relation to bikes sans training wheels.  he asked lots of questions about the ducks and their house.  he told me a little bit about preschool, like how he has some friends but doesn’t know their names.

“do you like preschool?” i asked

“well, i used to cry in the beginning.  but i think i like it now.” he told me.

i asked him if he still had the book i made for him and gave him the last night when c and i came over for dinner more than a month ago and he said, “oh, you mean that big brown book you gave me last night?  yeah, i’ve got it.”  he told me about star wars and eating pancakes and his cheep-cheeps that live outside in the chicken house.  i miss him so much.  it hurts to be so far from someone so good.