i’m still here in this spot, still moving words around. tomorrow my class-week starts and i am ready for the change from the holed-up weekend.
i had a talk with my parents about how they oriented their lives in all the incarnations a life can take. i’ve been interested in tracking paths. like thinking about what someone i know does and where they live and the shape their life takes…and then wondering how it came to be, asking what they love, what they avoid, moving backwards through the years to see how i might continue doing what makes me feel alive inside. i like thinking of movement, in some perceived direction. i feel settled in my center when i have an idea of what i am hoping for.
but this month i’m in this tiny northern town, it’s getting darker and colder and wetter and i’m in a m.a. program studying writing and pedagogy. i like the idea of teaching, i’d like to try it i mean, though nothing about it sounds easy to me. lots of my days fill my head with thoughts of where to and how and am i sure that’s really what i want. the hardest thing is to stop that chatter and to notice what’s happening now, to let myself sink into experience, to notice how i feel and be present inside my skin. right now iris dement’s voice is coming from the invisible speakers in my computer. singing about mysteries, laughing, death. cheyenne is laying on the couch reading middlesex, and i’m at my table, next to the piano, up against the wall with my homemade calendar months, surrounded by books and trying to write a pretend abstract for a thesis i have barely begun to think about. i’m tired of words and feeling absent from my body, staring and thinking, and tapping away at these tiny black symbols all day.
the computer took this picture of me today. unenthused.
first of all. working on work, i mean words and papers, i forget to be hungry. i just ate two corn-tortilla quesadillas and now my stomach hurts. i am remembering fingers – some of me is getting extra practice today (i can feel protest from my center).
some beautiful things are painful, like the light on the redwoods i can see from here, though their outlines are blurry through my neighbor’s chimney smoke. i spent today almost all inside, in this spot at this table covered with books and notes and half-thought ideas. now the sun is leaving today and i can hardly believe it. speaking of such – i thought i might write a little history of the past ten years (in my life) to celebrate (?) the close of the first decade of this century. i’ve been putting it off because the passage of time can be scary for me, because it’s so fast i mean. though time is slow when i’m waiting for my hair to grow. when i’m writing, just after i’ve planted seeds, anytime tiny flowers are becoming tiny fruits.
last night we were getting ready for bed, the three of us because it was a bona fide slumber party (as i’ve mentioned, i’m on here lots mentioning lots of things – i’ve noticed – when i have obligations to do a different sort of mentioning somewhere else). we were figuring out how to make the couch into a cozy bed for a nearly-six-year-old. c thought to put pillows under the cushions to create a slant towards the cushy side of the couch (as opposed to the empty side – the side that makes you fall off if you lean that way). c’s nephew asked,
“but don’t you want a pillow” and c told us that she didn’t really want one. after brushing teeth, while c was distracted by dirty dishes, her nephew beckons to me with his hurried hand, come close, i put my ear to his rushed hushed mouth,
“do you think cheyenne is different today?” he asks me.
“why do you think she’s different?” i am as stern and serious – sharing concern – as i can be.
“well, doesn’t she usually sleep with a pillow?!” i can tell this really unnerves him.
and about nerves, we spent a lot of the evening talking about boys and girls. m (the nephew) asked c if she was ever going to get married and she said,
“maybe.” and he asked to who and she pointed at me, eyebrows raised and his head whipped around and back to her,
“don’t tell her!!”
he drew a picture of two silhouetted figures almost on top of each other and was eager to share, but only with “sign language” although after some suppressed whispering, i found out it was me and c kissing.
do we do that? he wanted to know.
yup, sometimes we do. apparently it was the first thing to tell when he arrived home, shouting the news as the door closed
last night brought the first hard frost to this edge land against the sea. c’s nephew spent the night in our home. we read stories next to the fire – about birds traveling through seasons, and children escaping violence through a wardrobe and entering into a snow-covered world of conflict. we woke early this morning, walked across the crunchy grass with white accents. collected eggs from the hen-house. 
through the cold to let the ducks out of their house into the garden to do their mucking about,
to pick collard green gifts and to let our noses red-over themselves.
it looks like c and i might be coordinating the big event (the only fundraising event) for the local sister-city project…it’s in august and it will be a lot of work and it is the 25th annual, so there are some high hopes and expectations and it’s exciting.
i know what i am writing my papers on for this semester – none too soon as a draft of one of my seminar papers is due in 7 days.
tomorrow we are seeing greg brown, actually will be mostly listening, and plan to eat crepes for dinner in town.
i have an interview for work in the morning…which is good and scary, i haven’t logged any hours working on research for almost a week.
there are 14 persimmons on my kitchen windowsill.
i make kick-ass fires, and i love how quickly they heat my little home.
it is cold, out.
i bought gelato at the co-op, even though i am a good number of stars away from my prize.
i present to you my star chart.
it is on the fridge and it is below cheyenne’s star chart which is also incorrectly (what high hopes we had) labeled “sticker chart.”
we were inspired by our five-year-old twin-friends and here we are, a mere 12 stars away from ice cream at the arcata scoop.
those of you with superhero eyesight will notice that i am making great strides in the category of witty and original commentary regarding my physical attributes, i mean i’m supposed to say nice things about myself and my kneecaps and my nose (i like my nose, see this is working! no, i’ve always liked my nose, i’ve always mostly liked all of me, i just don’t always have a very nice way of showing it).
i have eaten greens for dinner four nights in a row – because, apparently, good health is not motivation enough, but ice cream, that still works.
also, i now use scrap paper – by my own volition – even for very special projects (like the creation of star charts). such a sacrifice earns me 1/22 of a kid’s size scoop….so worth it.
cheyenne has yet to do anything nice for anyone, we’re waiting. she also hasn’t read anything for a long while…but this was never meant to be competition.
in conclusion, i love my star chart. its powers are transformational and far-reaching. make a star chart today and you won’t kick yourself in the seat of your pants ten years from now. you will be good and nice and have no cavities.
i can lay a fire in the dark. crumple old newspaper, twist it and scrunch until the print overlaps, becoming itself over and over again. lay the lightest and driest of sticks on top. criss cross. then i light a match, brought north in my backpack from guatemala, tiny pictures of uvas, xeca, e izote printed on one side of each tiny box, and orange propane-smelling light shines on my hasty creation.
c is busy in the kitchen. stringing collected leaves that were quickly dipped in hot wax. saving their color, suspending them in this now, plucking a transitory moment, like the inhale right before they dry and crumple, and stretching it out, along discarded embroidery cloth, across the kitchen walls.
and there is apple crisp in the oven, leftovers rewarming themselves, there is tea steeping. there is a red couch and a movie to watch and a house that is getting warmer and tiny boxes strewn about, all empty of matches.
there are nine persimmons, all in line on the kitchen windowsill. i’ve been waiting days and days and some really long days for them to soften and sweeten and they are, all nine of them, shiny and round in their firmness. my eyes keep darting up there, recounting, making sure there are still nine, still waiting, hurrying and rushing. i am trying to slow myself these days, but it – my days and myself – still feel in a rush. i wake early and clean house…i hold thread between my teeth to keep my fingers busy typing (holding up leaves, cheyenne runs back to the kitchen), i rush to a whistling kettle, up to class, up to offices, down to meet c waiting for me, home on a freeway, hastily eat carrot soup — i’m hungry, build a fire — it’s cold, hurry outside because it gets dark so soon. and i have this nagging feeling that i am running circles around myself, that really i am somewhere in the center of this constant movement, suspended and waiting for me to slow down.
reading old letters
about guns and threats
i miswrote “days”
dies
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.
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
October 11, 2009
October 10, 2009
