Life – Page 4 – Grongar

29 February

This fragile silk of a day, shed snake skin in the woodpile, folded
delicately between layers of tissue, stowed in the attic until nearly
forgotten. This February-smeared-with-March day is crow wing, ice crystal,
moss tendril, shivering beech leaf, pink cloud, frozen mud, sublimation,
revelation. This come-on-I’m-waiting-for-you-everything’s-waiting-for-
you day stares across a locked gate, wagging an impatient tail. This
alluring-stranger-on-a-subway day with stealthy glimpses, a shiver of
don’t-I-know-you? This hard-heart-cracked-open day. This ragged fissure
that holds a secret wish, a pinpoint, a map that unfolds to show you
exactly where you live.

10 years later

Today is everywhere rain, and the snow is lifting fog up into the sky like hands thrown up in frustration or submission: I give up trying to be winter.

I felt the rain all day like some sort of permission. Let’s not do. Let’s stay put. This is the generosity of bad weather on a day off (if you’re lucky enough to have a choice in the matter): permission to read a book, stare out the window, make mental lists without lifting a flesh-and-blood finger, let your mind wander into the foggy past.

Ten years ago today there was a blizzard. I remember this because it was during that blizzard, the first of the winter, in fact, that we were shuttling all of our worldly goods from the shipping containers on the driveway back into this house. This house that we slid down the hill.

Ten years ago this house was like an old friend who’d had minor plastic surgery. Familiar and yet… something not quite familiar.

Ten years ago, this house felt lightly perched on its new foundation. Old bones tentative about its new seat. Untethered somehow.

Ten years later, we are emphatically settled. The house has given up its polite perch on the edge of the chair and settled, groaning slightly, into a comfortable slouch. Us, too, I suppose. We’re as stuck here as I’ve ever been anywhere before. Rooted.

I have plans to see friends tonight, but everything in me is crying to stay put and listen to the rain, watch the dog’s paws twitch in his dreams, dig my roots in even further.

But it doesn’t matter how much we dig in, does it? The world spins on. These posts and beams have been this house’s bones for more than 200 years, and standing as trees for at least a hundred more. It’s watched all of Vermont history pass by. Nothing stays.

Ten years from now? H will be out in the world. I suppose we’ll be here, thinking back thirty years to the day we first peered in the windows of this endearing old wreck of a place and said, “Yes, this is home.”

What’s that you say?

H is Thetford Academy’s Student of the Month for February 2016?

You bet she is!

And oh! Her teachers wrote the kindest, most spot-on things about her. But I don’t mean to gloat. That’s H’s responsibility (though she never ever would, which is another amazing thing about her). I’ll just sit here and glow on her behalf.

But wait, that’s not all you get…

If you act now, you can also read her new poem, “Simple Anonymity,” published yesterday at GirlSense & NonSense.

Dang, she’s cool. (Am I allowed to say/write that? Oh yeah, it’s MY blog.)

</parental crowing ends>

Simple Anonymity

There are a hundred thousand things I don’t experience every day
   and there are a hundred thousand things that I do.
There are a hundred thousand things my mother and my father think about every day
   and there are a hundred thousand things that my mother and my father don’t.
My mother says her mind is scattering, scattering like light
   and she has a hundred thousand lists and calendars to keep the scatter contained.
My father’s brain is an encyclopedia of facts and notes that sometimes all come spilling out at once
   and sometimes don’t come out at all.
My mind is a video camera, one of the old ones, with crackling film and focusless images
   and it records a hundred thousand things a day.
If I could, I would plant her a tree to hang her hundred thousand thoughts on
   and I would give him an infinite page to record his hundred thousand facts on.
But I am no gardener
   and I am no paper-maker

I am a camera
   and I can watch
      and I can listen
         and I can appreciate the hundred thousand things a day that they think of
            and the hundred thousand things a day that they don’t.
The connection between a movie we watched together ten years before
   and the book he was reading this afternoon.
The rapidity of the weekend
   and the slow drag of the week.
The friendly anonymity of people whose dogs meet on the trail between here
   and there.

–Hyla Maddalena

Area Woman Has Cold Hands

Teen Demolishes Mother in Battle of Musical Earworms

In a entirely expected triumph, clever Teen (16) overcame predictable Mom (50) in a battle of the earworms early this morning. Mom came out strong in the first hours of the morning with the Carpenters’ “Close to You,” but she was easily bested by Teen’s “You’ll be Back,” from Broadway’s “Hamilton.” In a final effort to take control of the field, Mom countered with “That 60s Russian La La La” song, but it was too little too late. A rematch is scheduled for this afternoon at school pickup.

Couple Mourns Faithful, Old Friend

“We bought that washing machine the year before H was born,” the couple lamented. “We thought we’d always have it.” Perhaps precipitated by a recent basement clean out and reorganization that included moving a table that the machine leaned against, the 17-year-old Frigidaire Gallery front loader clanked loudly and then spun its last spun two weeks ago. Emergency personal were dispatched, and the machine was pronounced too expensive to fix a short while later. In related news, the couple is happy to announce the adoption of a new machine at this weekend’s Presidents’ Day Appliance Adoption Event.

Gravity Waves and Sings

Scientists working at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced yesterday that they have detected the ripples of gravitational waves pulsing through the fabric of space-time, as predicted 100 years ago by Albert Einstein. The waves, generated by the collision and coalescence of two black holes a billion years ago, reached LIGO last September, waving at the waiting scientists, and singing a chirp of hello. This kind of makes all other reportable news trivial.

Local Guernsey Buck Finally Has Name

Ephraim. It’s Ephraim. Don’t you just love it?

Shy Poet/Photographer Reluctant to Announce New Projects

Our diligent reporter has discovered that Shy Poet/Photographer has been busier than she appears if you use this blog’s output as evidence. Starting late last year, she began contributing a poem a month to the Visual Verse project, where writers respond with poems and short fiction to the website’s monthly image. Her most recent contribution is a terse little verse on the topic of long marriage. Not to be restricted to words, On January 1, 2016, she quietly started a new black-and-white, photo-a-day project called “the composed now.” Shy Poet/Photographer could not be reached for comment.

Area Woman Has Cold Hands (Cover Story)

After an unusually temperate Vermont winter, Mother Nature showed her ornery side this morning, with temperatures “way the heck too far below zero.” Area Woman whined audibly, while watching the tiny birds at the feeder, seemingly so cold they could barely spare the energy to land on the feeder’s perch. Said Area Woman to Area Man, “Please take the dog for the day so I can go someplace warm.” Area Woman was subsequently spotted at the laundromat (see related story, “Couple Mourns Faithful, Old Friend”) and later at her favorite cafe, where she posed as a writer sipping jasmine tea and thinking deep thoughts while writing this post.

Reading Challenge month 13 ~ A mystery or thriller

Hello. MM here, stepping in to write this month’s summary of the Reading Challenge.

This month’s selection was A Mystery or Thriller, perhaps partly because of our schedule: it was a dark and stormy end of the semester and finals were on the horizon, and H. is a happy and well-versed fan of Ngaio Marsh—in a pinch, she could fall back on that; and we’ve all read Doyle, one can always revisit Holmes. R also thought she might reopen the Case of Agatha Christie Books she loved way back in those murky dark trees closed together back there behind us at the vanishing point into the deep past, the creaky gate, the unknowable, uncertain almost certainly suspect and threatening, the vaguely sinister and definitely mysterious…1970’s.

But as it happened, fate held a different…fate… in store for us, when a seemingly innocent trip to the local book supermarket took a strange turn, just past Christian Romance Fiction, and led us, unsuspectingly and perhaps inevitably, to the subset of the Mystery section that was dedicated to… “Genre Mysteries”—shelves of whodunits involving cats, dogs, tea, antiques, what have you, whole series of mysteries related to particular special interests readers might have. We thought this sort of thing started and ended with the “The Cat Who…” series by Lilian Jackson Braun, from 20 or more years ago—but evidently Lilian was enough of a success that she’s spawned a subgenre, which I think we can all agree can only be called…copycat crimes.

Some are obviously tongue in cheek, others more serious. Most are potboilers (where does that term even come from), but evidently even those are divisible into two categories—one, books where people are trying to do their best, and shooting for literary merit or at least sales, doing the best they can do. Others are cranked out (that’s the only term that applies) by more “serious” writers looking for some fun or even an outlet for silliness, and maybe snap up some quick sales on the side while watching that Pulitzer Prize receding into a spinning vortex like the poster for Vertigo when you stared at it too hard.

What a discovery. What a lot of fun.

We’ll leave it up to you to discover the awful secret of which category _your_ pick falls into, should you venture into this section of your local Books A Million. Ours by the way still has the masking tape around it in the parking lot from where it dropped dead, as a Borders store, early one morning years ago, and don’t tell me nobody saw anything. West Lebanon is worse than Cannery Row: drugstores everywhere the cops can’t—or won’t— shut down; Supercuts is nothing but a clip joint, and I don’t want to know what Family Dollar does a dollar at a time to feed its kids. But nobody saw a thing when Borders went down. OK, if that’s the way you want to play it.

Anyway, our eventual lineup back at the station looked something like this:

“Rubbed Out – A Memphis BBQ Mystery”, by Riley Adams (Mine)
“Antiques Roadkill – A Trash-n-Treasures Mystery”, by Barbara Allen (H)
“Fillet of Murder: A Deep Fried Mystery”, by Linda Reilly (R)

And yes, as an added fillip, as if the authors (or publishers) were hedging their bets, these books all have recipes at the back, for some of the foods that show up over the course of the very mysterious journey they lead you on. Unsatisfied with whodunit? Maybe some pineapple casserole or bbq loaf will make you feel a little better, like that first shot of rotgut in the morning —just take it from me, and don’t use Mystery Meat, in either recipe.

~~~~~~~~
Did you read a mystery this month? We’d love to hear about it!

The category for the coming month is:

A book by a female author

We’ll reveal the next category somewhere around the middle of March.

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This post is part of our multi-year reading challenge. We’d love to have you join us for the whole challenge or any portion. Take a look at the checklist to see the current category (in green). We’ll announce the next category in the middle of next month.

Holding a place

Today as the dog and I were walking on a early-February-dressed-as-late-March day, I thought to myself, Of course! It’s all geography! And then set my feet on the homeward path knowing I’d know what I was talking about when I got back home.

But I didn’t. All I remember is the feeling of ah ha! and those now meaningless words.

This is like solving a complex problem in your dream—or writing the perfect paragraph, or understanding a foreign-to-you language, or suddenly realizing the answer to everything—and then, upon waking, knowing nothing more than the distance between your feet and the floor.

So I did the dishes, then wrote an email, then let the dog out, then back in (we’d already done the walk, but he needed to check up on his best friend, the squirrel; the admiration is not mutual, alas…), and then painted the inside of the canelé molds with “white oil” in preparation for baking later today.

And I still didn’t know what I’d been thinking, but I had a prickly inkling. You know that feeling that there’s something beautiful just out of reach, and you can almost sense it in your peripheral vision, but you can’t see it; or you catch a scent of something so delicate that you’re not sure such a thing exists, so you keep sniffing and swinging your head in hopes of catching it again; or there’s that elusive owl in the dark who hoots every time you’re alone with the trees but refuses to converse when you bring a friend.

There are things everywhere like that, real and imagined, so close you think you might just be able to call it gently and coax it to your side, hesitant and unsure, but it keeps its shy distance from you.

The other day I was looking out the bathroom window through a snow squall and I saw what looked like an exploded milkweed pod up high in the sumac. All fluttery white and brown. How odd, I thought. How did that get there? Until my eyes looked beyond my first understanding and the ruffed grouse resolved itself the way a Magic Eye painting suddenly becomes three-dimensional; when you learn how look in just the right way.

I ran to the living room window and it was still there, a puffed ball of feathers and a tiny crested head, impossibly still on a tender branch.

I grabbed the camera, opened the back door, and slid between the snowflakes, trying to walk silently as I imagined a true tracker would to the edge of the deck, but instead making an awful racket on the crusty snow. Still he (she? the difference is subtle, apparently, observable in the coloration of the tips of the tail feathers) remained. The puff was gone, but there he sat, toes curled around the branch, while I clicked the shutter over and over so that I could prove to myself that this one elusive moment was real.

Cold, I went back inside. I looked out the window.

Gone.

But he was here (I have proof of some sort). And I am here. And at that moment, both together with the snow flying down, anchored miraculously on this whirling planet.

When the snow first started to fall, huge drowsy flakes, meandering past the window, I looked slightly away and saw the movement on the edges of my vision and had that sensation of being in a train car in the station and the train next to you pulls away and you feel for an instant that your train is the moving one.

Am I moving? Or is everything else moving? Or are we moving together? The grouse exited by way of the air. I’m hopelessly terrestrial. Geographically connected, making shapes in the wind.

Reading Challenge month 12 ~ A funny book

Writing a funny book has to be one of the most difficult tasks a person can undertake. Maybe it’s just me, but when was the last time that a book made you laugh out loud? (I’m talking about a book that intended to make you laugh; I laughed while reading a few books lately that weren’t at all meant to be funny.)

There are a few writers out there that make me smile when I read them (David Sedaris comes to mind), but so few that I’m going to stop here with a list of one.

There are shelves of humor books, comedians publishing “hilarious” memoirs every month. I’ve thumbed through a few; they make me grimace.

What’s wrong with me? Am I humorless?

This time of year, I’m so desperate to be amused, I laugh at squirrel antics on the bird feeder. I want to laugh. I want to laugh until my sides hurt and my eyes are leaking and I can’t breathe. Is there no printed balm for this longing?

For my 50th, I was given a funny book about tuning 50. You can tell it was meant to be funny because it had a photo of a giant pair of pink “granny panties” on the front cover.

Get it?

Hah hah hah.

Nope. Not funny.

What was funny was I took it along with me on our winter visit to see family, where we got sick and found ourselves upchucking all night long into the hotel waste baskets. Hilarious!

So after 12 hours of that, I’m lying in bed and exhausted and looking for any small thing that might brighten the day. I reach for that pink-pantsed book. The author was really trying to make me laugh, and the more she did her verbal backflips and nudge-nudge wink-winks, the more I despised her. (Yes, Monty Python makes me laugh, as does Blackadder.)

I ended up watching Grease on TV, which wasn’t particularly funny, but it did take my mind off things.

I left that book at a rest area somewhere on the New York thruway, near the vending machines. (Picturing that almost makes me laugh.) Good luck, book. I hope you make someone else cry tears of laughter.

And so I figured my days of laughing at books were over, until M set down a stack of old Lynda Barry comic books on the table next to me. Old friends. I opened the cover of one tentatively, worrying that I’d grown immune to their charms.

No way, no how.

A few pages in and I was laughing. The out loud kind of laughing. The kind of laughing where you stop just long enough to read the line out loud to someone else so they can laugh, too.

For instance, in the very first comic of The Fun House, we meet Miss Bevens, the substitute teacher who has “fake teeth that flipped around.” Okay, that’s kinda funny, but then…”Everyone got at least minus 8 on that math test.”

Yes! That’s funny. I’m laughing even as I type it. Even after rereading it about 12 times. It’s not even the picture that makes me laugh. It’s the phrasing. The image. How could you not be distracted from your math test with that spectacle going on?

Or how about poor Marcie, just a “regular girl with a regular amount of friends.” Again, it’s that perfect phrasing.

And you know those times when you have “hobo feelings”?

Lynda Barry just has that ear. She channels childhood so well I’m always surprised when I remember she’s a grownup. She blows the dust off of memories that I thought were long gone (late nights running the neighborhood, suffering bad substitute teachers, enduring film strips, feeling full of pride over a bicycle with a banana seat and streamers). Her memories aren’t identical to mine, but they’re so close in feeling that they pluck strings that make me laugh in recognition.

She’s not just funny. She’s got a great handle on childhood terror, worry, and wistful nostalgia. Some awful things happen to kids. And some very mundane things. She captures it all with pointed detail. The “ganged up” desks, the comfort of a classroom in the middle of the storm when you’re working on a project, the record player playing hat one “art period song”… Oh, art period! 50 minutes when you were forced to play with clay.

And that’s what makes the funny all that more funny. It can’t be laughs all the time. But every now and then it can be perfect. So perfect you can’t even blink.

~~~~~~~

Our books for this month:

H ~ Spinster, by Kate Bolick
M ~ The Great Leader, by Jim Harrison
R ~ The Fun House, Down the Street, Come Over Come Over, It’s So Magic, My Perfect Life, and The Freddie Stories, by Lynda Barry

So… did you read something laugh-out-loud funny? Something you can recommend to this ol’ grinch? Please do tell!

The category for the coming month is:

A mystery or thriller

We’ll reveal the next category somewhere around February 13.

Winter solstice

Today the sun was a moon, hazed by clouds into a full round I stared directly at as I drove into town.

The night in the day and the day ending at the sharp line of the night and the night lasting a day. Or so it seems.

Here we are at the crease of the year. As if in an origami fold, deep inside something that will become a delicate crane. In a valley where the only way out is up. In a well of dark with a lid of light.

Perversely, my favorite day of the year.

The only way forward is into the light, and I’ll greedily gather the coming seconds and minutes of daylight to stuff into my pockets.

I remember days and nights I never wanted to end, they were so filled with joy.

I remember days and nights I never wanted to end, they were so filled with sadness.

I remember nights that I wanted to drag over me like a thick, wool blanket.

I remember nights when I was a dark stair-sitting child, listening to the sparkling grownups a floor below, silently cloaked and wondering at the light they made.

I remember full moons that made the snowy field a morning.

I remember the faces of people I love with such detail, they are illuminated, even when they are long in the dark.

I forget all the things I forget. Voices. Teases. Misunderstandings. A last laugh, when laughing was still possible.

It’s a blessing to forget.

It’s a blessing to sit in this deep, long, dark night and know that everything behind is lit with love, everything ahead is lit with love, and everything I need is right here, right now, in the dark with me.

Get up, get up, get up

This is not the post I sat down to write.

I had in mind a late wrap-up of a very content Thanksgiving: heaps of good food, hours of board games, reels of old movies, bottles of prosecco, miles of dog walks, days of conversation and laughter (and an exhausting 30 minutes in the grocery story parking lot that included a fender bender, but that’s a story best left untold).

(24 hooves. 16 paws. 8 feet. 8 hands. How many bees wings?)

But then I started typing and, well, that all seems miles back in the rear view mirror. The turkey tacos are a smokey memory and I’ve scraped the very last of the oatmeal pie into the trash. I just can’t look at it anymore, delicious as it was a week ago.

Today, I’m firmly tethered to the current Thursday, but I’m floating somewhere down the road.

Today, I’ve got two feet planted on this worn out wooden floor, but my eyes are scanning the foggy horizon.

I’m as here and now as I’ve ever been—hay in my hair, bits of firewood stitched into my sweater, shivering slightly with the cold wet that is neither rain nor snow—and still I’m not here.

I have in mind a change. Career-wise, that is. This isn’t really anything new (remember that graduate program in Pittsburgh 20-odd years ago?), but I feel a new urgency to figure out how to piece the fragments of my interests into a more satisfying whole.

Years ago, someone my age might be looking toward retirement in the next 5-10 years. That’s not how the world works anymore. I can’t just bide my time and wait for the clock to wind down.

This feels like starting over, but starting from the end, knowing too much and not enough.

It feels confusing and hard and terrifying and a tiny bit exciting.

And necessary.