Emily Dickinson’s funeral procession came here, too

I am looking out at our backyard, which used to be an apple orchard.  I know this because the old woman who lives across the street was a little girl when this house was built.  The land belonged to the owners of the big white house on the corner.  They divided their lot and sold off this portion, having had enough of apples, I suppose.

 

The man who built this house had great plans.  He bought this place from the Sears catalog and had it shipped, piece by piece, to the railroad station around the corner.  I imagine him, on sunny summer afternoons, wandering down the street with the catalog rolled up and stuffed into his back pocket, eager to meet whatever came next on the train: maybe the bathroom today, maybe the glass for the built-in cabinet in the dining room.

 

He was building the house for his bride.  She was older, I’ve been told; they both were.  Which is, perhaps, why their marriage did not work out.  Too set in their ways by the time they came to this place.  And so the apple trees were cut down and the beams went up; and so it was that two short years later, the house was for sale again.

 

I don’t know about everyone who has lived here, but I do know about some.  There was a family with a little boy right after that first couple, but his mother always kept him from talking to the neighbors.  There was a mother and her grown daughter, for a while; the daughter was sick, and the mother took care of her.  At some point, there was a lawyer.  And just before us, there was a rabbi and his wife and two little boys.  We find traces of them all the time, mostly baseballs that had rolled under the back deck.  We also found a dusty skull cap behind one radiator.  They left holes in the door frames where they had nailed mezzuzzah to guard the house.

 

They only lasted three years, the rabbi and his family, before moving back to California.  When we came to look at the house, they had already cleared most everything out.  The big flowerbed in the front yard had been covered in mulch, a clean slate of dirt, For Sale sign plunged like a sword into its midst.  The house faces east, and the morning sun made the windows bright the first day we visited.

 

Now we are the ones leaving, the ones who have decided that this particular Paradise was not all it was cracked up to be.  We have only lasted two years ourselves.  I do not know what future inhabitants of this place will find to remember us.  No apples, no bouncing balls.  I planted some foxglove under the pine tree in the back yard—perhaps they will notice that.  Or perhaps they will be glad for the rows of azaleas that now border the street, especially when they grow wide and fill with blossom in the spring.

 

We had the house blessed in November, in the darkest weeks of the year, just before the baby was born.  It leaves no external sign, of course; the sprinklings of holy water dried that night, I’m sure.  But I would like to hope that we have left some trace of goodness here, some joy in the checkerboard of sad history that seems to hang over this place.  It is a lovely house, really; I feel it somehow deserves better than the array of misdirected, questioning people who have lived here.  We are just the last in a long line.

 

Perhaps someone, sometime will finally come here, maybe whistling on a warm summer day, and not know any of this history and so defy it.  Maybe he will lay fires on winter nights while his wife cuts up apples in the kitchen, planning to make applesauce.  And maybe they will save this seeds—this is, after all, the sort of place where people do that sort of thing—and lay them aside until the spring.  And then they will plant a tree, right at the back of the lot, or even two or three.  And in the springtime it will be full of white blossoms, adorned as a bride for her husband, and there will be sorrow here no more.

 

Where do you come from, who are you, what makes you you? (Round 2)

This morning, I had some spare time after dropping Lucy at preschool, so I took the baby around the corner to the Cushman Cafe. It is one of my favorite places here. For years, it was an old whistle stop station; it was abandoned sometime earlier this century. A few years ago, someone fixed it up, painted the exterior purple, and opened a small grocery store in front and a coffee shop in back.

The ceiling is painted tin, the pale green of avacado flesh. The walls are red, bright and clear as the crayon from the box. There is always a low babble of conversation. Two women this morning are talking about a paper deadline; the man at the next table is asking his conversation partner about the physical effects of emotions in his long illness. Several people have books open, underlining as they read. The air breathes ideas.

The menu board boasts any number of sandwiches, plus breakfast until noon each day. They make delicious granola here, toasting pumpkin seeds and pecans and flax. All the choices are illustrated with hand-drawn pictures and old advertisements. I remember the first time I saw menus like that, back in high school—one at Ben and Jerry’s, when they were still a small operation, each flavor name hand-lettered and hand-painted; one when I went to visit my brother in college at a deli near his house. The chain operations near my house had everything printed out in plain black and white. I was hooked by the power of chalk and paint.

I order a cappuccino. It’s not as elaborate here as it is some places in town, no heart or leaf drawn into the foam. I pour in a generous helping of brown sugar crystals, being careful only to disturb one corner of the milk. It is bitter and sweet at the same time when I drink it.

This morning is what, for years, I had hoped my life might be like. Looking out through the dusty window at the bright snow (another foot, even in March), I can see two black labs romping in the dirt parking lot. They look like my dog at home, the one I finally got after over sixteen years of wanting. Green ceilings and books of poetry and a baby at my side. Home later to wood trim and a fireplace, and an afternoon of part time work on a sermon. My husband will be home late, after a trip to New York to deliver a lecture, but we can all sleep in tomorrow. No one has to be at an office.

I remember the first time Steve and I walked into the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca. It was ground zero for my high school vegetarian fantasies. That winter afternoon, two teenage girls were there playing the violin; a group of men with ponytails and women with long gray hair sat watching them appreciatively. This is what we want, we decided together that day. We want to be those parents, we want to offer afternoons of music and the life of the mind to whatever children we might have.

Are desires identity, too? Can wishing make it so? Because this life does not fit as well as I’d expected; either I am too big or some part of it is too small, or maybe something just shrank in the wash when it wasn’t supposed to. But some part of this morning feels like home, simply because it’s what I’ve imagined for so long. Does who I have wanted to be count as who I am?

Could everyone just keep their bodily fluids to themselves?

I wrote, a few weeks ago, that I felt as if our family were becoming feral. Today has convinced me we are.

The morning included my straddling the dog, pinning his haunches between my legs, so I could pull a bloody tick off, and also pulling Lucy from the car so that she would vomit in the parking lot instead of the back seat. I nursed Molly about nine thousand times today. She spit up at least that many times. I am constantly trying to keep the dog from licking spit-up off me.

I think the squirrels know. They have, previously, kept to the basement with occasional forays into the kitchen. Today, one decided to join us upstairs in the bedroom. He knew we were his kind, I guess.

Where do you come from, who are you, what makes you you?

I didn’t like the idea of growing up in the suburbs because they were so, well, suburban.  My childhood fit many of the clichés of white, middle class life in the seventies.  I played soccer on Saturday mornings, with oranges wedges at halftime and store-brand sodas in a cooler after the game.  My friends were the kids who walked to the same school as I did—Cardinal Forest—down streets that bore the names of habitats no longer there—Oakford Drive, Fenwood Lane.  My mom stayed at home until I was late into elementary school; my dad had a white-collar job just a little ways down the highway.

 

When I was a teenager, I became pretty certain that I never wanted to move back to Springfield, or any of the other generic enclaves like it.  I discovered The City when I moved across the river, choosing one of the grittiest, most criminal neighborhoods for my first stop.  And then I discovered The Country a little later on, when I realized that I wasn’t cut out for concrete and spent my weekends driving out to low hills and weedy fields where I could breathe better.  Eventually I decided that Small Town would be for me, that I would enjoy getting to know some discrete collection of quirky personalities, surrounded by a lovely natural vista of whatever kind geography happened to provide.  I would shop at cute little local bakeries and enjoy newspaper headlines about my next door neighbors.

 

I have what I thought I wanted.  And I don’t think it’s me after all.

 

Cute little local bakeries there are—and I get fatter every day eating at them—but that’s where the dream ends.  The second day here, the newspaper headline read “Shutesbury man collects paperweights of the world.”  I have shockingly little interest in paperweights.  Our second month here, the newspaper headline was about our next door neighbor, indeed, talking about how she believes the September 11 attacks were a hoax.  She is not merely colorful; there’s something more irresponsible in her quirks, and they don’t charm me.  They annoy me.  I drive through the center of town—don’t blink, or you’ll miss it—and out towards the hills and feel hemmed in, the breaks in the ridgeline stitched down tight.

 

I miss some of the things I never knew I needed.  What I once thought was sameness is, at its best, some sense of connection, some sense of the basic similarity of all our needs.  What once seemed stifling now feels like rest.

 

All of this is not to say that I want to move back to Springfield, or anything like it.  Split level ranches and boxy colonials still feel like they belong to another generation than mine.   But I know the appeal of the burbs, perhaps because they are what shaped me at such a young age.  Sub-urb—below the city.  Being at a place of convergence and bustle and busyness, yet somehow below the radar.  Having a connection to a great pool of gathered humanity, but at the same time lying down, calmly, letting it be nearby.  Being in the world, perhaps, but not of it.  (Who knew that Jesus was really talking about a subdivision?)

 

Something in me will always know orange wedges and dirty cleats, streets that are safe enough to let six year-olds walks to school and mothers than are available enough to come on every field trip.  Some part of me will always expect to walk into a friend’s kitchen and have it look like mine, only mirror image, because her house is the same model, just flipped.  Some sixth sense in me will perk up around 5:30, because that’s the time dads get home and the evening news gets switched on and baked chicken gets prepared for the table and the kickball game in the cul de sac reaches its peak.

 

I don’t know how much we can become someone other than our roots.  I’m not even sure how much I want to, anymore.  I have been, for many years, proud of the ways I’ve changed—the intellectual curiosity, the travel, the risks of it all.  But I have recently become grateful for what I haven’t lost.  Being able to rest in attainable expectations and simple happiness—these are not bad things.

 

“Be a local hero,” and ad campaign here bids, encouraging leftist gastonomic habits through the purchase of locallygrown procude.  Seeing as it’s midwinter, I should be picking up kale at my local farm.  But instead I find myself at the supermarket, eyeing bags of oranges, big enough to feed a family for a couple of weeks.  I want to buy them and slice them into big wedges and eat them out of season, juicy and delicious, leaving the rind in front of my teeth so that it makes a big, orange smile.

The Other Side

I think I am suffering from a serious case of hankering for greener grass.

 

For months, I have been complaining—to Steve, to myself, to anyone with the patience to listen—about how I am stuck inside.  On the bad days, it’s with two cranky girls; on the good days, it’s with two well-rested nappers.  But the end result is usually the same: inside, from about noon onwards.  In the deep of winter, it is dark by 4:00; there’s no chance of going out with the girls after that.  I hanker for a bit of air and sunlight.

 

And yet, today, I can tell the light is at a different slant; I can feel the ice on the driveway melting.  My feet slosh through a layer of water when I walk across it.  Chances are, we could go outside, at least briefly, after they both wake up.  There’s even a little patch of green under the pine tree in our back yard, where the snow didn’t fall as thickly.

 

And what is my response?  I feel like it takes energy I don’t have to confront air that is less than 68 degrees.  It takes time I don’t want to give to find shoes that can get muddy and a towel to wipe them off afterwards.  I know that Lucy will be content to stay in her pajamas all afternoon long.  It seems that I am content to stay in my pajamas, too, at least the interior ones.

 

So it goes, with things great and small.  I start work again on Monday after three generous months of maternity leave.  And I am so glad to have adult conversation again, so glad to have someone other than the dog to share ideas with at 2:00 p.m.  Except.  Except that what if I get too busy?  Will I miss not being able to all the little chores that pile up, miss not having the time to unclog the slow drain or track down the beeping smoke detector battery or wipe down the counter behind the toaster oven as well as in front?

 

And the bigger questions still.  Where to live.  How much to work.  I am not sure if my waffling stems from envy, or a lack of confidence, or maybe just some basic reality of being human.  Perhaps I have a set limit of happiness, an internal barometer that only lets the pressure build so high.

 

It’s Lent now, and so I am thinking about sin, and I wonder if any of this connects.  Because I go to track down great big sins in myself, or at least readily identifiable ones.  And there are.  Some.  But my life tends to be troubled not be great, clearly drawn monsters but instead by this inescapable trickle of sludge.  I would kind of like it, in a way, if I were an alcoholic or a thief and I could cleanly kick the habit for Lent.  This sort of sin—this pervasive, insidious discontent—this is harder.

 

Because it’s not all sin, perhaps?  Some soul restlessness is normal; some, I hope, is even healthy.  Life needs questions.  Contentment risks complacency.  So looking over the fence is necessary, even a tonic.

 

But there is undoubtedly something broken in it, too, something sort of bent out of shape in a heart that can never rest.  I am reminded of that wonderful opening of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, in which the devil makes a mirror that shows only distorted images, making the good and beautiful look cruel and ugly.  The devils try to fly the mirror too close to heaven, and it shatters, and shards of the glass fall down all over the earth, into people’s eyes and, occasionally, their hearts.

 

I feel like I’ve got one, sometimes, and I don’t think I’m the only one.  Sometimes, I see things for what they are.  And then, too often, I see things for what they are not.  I look at absence.  It’s rarely a pretty sight.

 

The question then lurks: how to extract it?  More practically, what the heck I am supposed to be doing this Lent to get to grips with some small aspect of my sin?  (I’ll leave the challenge of the plural for another time.)  I think about practices of gratitude, and they are very useful, of course, but there’s also something treacle-ly about them.  I don’t think a pink-covered journal full of counted blessings is quite enough to cure pervasive restlessness.

 

I am wondering if, perhaps, there is something here about redeeming the impulse.  If there is some hope of living with the restlessness and finding the gifts, the purposes, towards which such discontent can be used.   Maybe it’s the difference between being a naysayer and being a questioner; the difference between being totally lost and simply being a doubting Thomas.

 

But maybe.  What if.  If only.  Yes, I think.  What a tentative vocabulary I speak.  I am not sure if it shows a lack of faith, or if it leaves tremendous room for faith to grow.

The Nocturnal Family

We are becoming a nocturnal family.  Last night was a sadly typical case in point.  Elder daughter, not having napped, collapsed into bed at 7:30.  Younger daughter nursed herself to sleep, slowly, finally giving up the fight against sleep by 8:30.  I was in bed an hour later, expecting Steve shortly behind me.

 

But, then.  1:00 a.m. and younger daughter is awake, snuffling with a cold that keeps her from nursing back to sleep.  I realize that Steve is still downstairs, tapping numbers into his computer, willing them into theoretical alignment before his big presentation next week.  Somewhere around 2:00 a.m., in the midst of the rocking, Steve comes to bed; soon after, elder daughter awakes, hollering, incoherent.  She is comforted with a pacifier she should be too old for.  Her outburst has roused the younger again, so we set off on another round of nursing, rocking, waiting.  I watch her eyelids twitch and wonder when they will stop.  I creep to bed around 3:15.  I am so tired that I sleep through the 4:00 waking.  Steve is closer to the door; he gets that one.

 

I have been trying to figure out why it is so agonizing to be up in the middle of the night.  Some of it is physiology, of course.  I start to ache with less than seven hours of sleep.  But last night wasn’t really so terrible; had I been in a better mood, I could have propped up a book on the pillow and read as I rocked.  It is not my body that irks me.  Some less tangible insult goads me in the small hours.

 

Perhaps it is the frustrating exile from normalcy.  We are supposed to sleep at night.  Babies are supposed to be lulled in a rocking chair.  Curly-headed toddlers are supposed to keep their angelic heads on the pillow and not wail like indignant banshees.  These are the rules I was given when I signed up for this particular game.  But they are not the rules, evidently, in force right now.

 

A strange duality, almost worthy of fiction.  By day, we can pass ourselves off as an ordinary family, neat enough house, table set for dinner, lists mostly crossed off.  But at night it all falls apart, an eggshell opening, revealing something stranger and, I fear, more true.  We are these terrified little mammals, only half aware how to find our way through to morning.  Cars come down the street, their headlights shining through the stairwell window, and I imagine them catching one of our sets of eyes, turning them into reflective mirrors like an opossum by the side of the road.  We engage in furious repetitive activity—tapping, rocking, sucking, muttering—activity full of intent yet incomprehensible to an outsider, nonsensical by daylight. 

 

It’s not every night, of course.  I certainly hope for something better tonight.  But that feral reality is always there at 3:00 a.m.  Any night, we might become creatures of that particular night, belonging more to its darkness than anything else.

Practicing, again

“This is the practice school of writing.  Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it.  Some days you don’t want to run and you resist every step of the three miles, but you do it anyway . . . . You don’t wait around for inspirtation and a deep desire to run . . . . You just do it.  And in the middle of the run, you love it.

 

Runners don’t say, “Oh, I ran yesterday.  I’m limber.”  Each day they warm up and stretch.”

 

I’ve picked up Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, and I feel like I’ve been busted.  Because with many things—writing included—I have become a person who thinks I practice a particular discipline, rather than a person who does.  Of course, there’s been some major disruptions in life lately, so I can see where and how it’s happened.  But I long to be stretching again, muscles in the body and mind alike.  So her goes, half an hour a day, at least on the days the girls give the time to me.  (Maybe—who knows?—even on the days they don’t.)

 

Another piece of advice—just from the first few chapters, which makes me think this will be a very worthwhile book—is to begin practice by writing about the present moment.  No crossing out (which I will equate to no backspaces), no stopping.

 

This is a little bit hard to do, because the present moment feels awfully dull sometimes.  There is a sameness to it these days.  Quiet moments come at one time only—when the kids are asleep—and so chances are I am holed up in the playroom-turned-office.  (The room now also does triple duty as a gym, thanks to the new elliptical trainer.)  The winter sun shines brightly through the southerly windows, and even though the carpet is covered in dog hair the space still feels clean and bright and still.  The moment’s emptiness is its virtue.

 

I did get out today, though—walking instead of still, sky instead of low acoustical tile.  My husband took the baby while the older one was at preschool, and I went out walking, in the thawing woods near our house.  The day is warm, but the layers of snow that have fallen mean that the ground is still white, the path packed with old snow that has become ice.

 

And I just walked.  And walked, and walked, and 45 minutes became an eternity.  Perhaps the only thing brighter than this sunroom on a winter afternoon is the sun on the blue-white snow.

Shakedown

Like everyone else, I’ve had money on my mind this past month.  I finally sat at the kitchen table, phone in hand,  to go through a periodic if unpleasant ritual: institutional shakedown.  Two hours, more or less, on the phone with bureaucracies that owe me money (or so I believe), attempting to rattle the refunds loose.

I started with the call that would be most pleasant, to the bank that my great-great grandfather founded in Arkansas almost a hundred years ago.  It was balm to hear the Southern twang on the other end of the receiver; it was even more comforting to discover that I did, indeed, have a neglected account there with a few hundred dollars that only needed a change of address card.  The sweetness with which the teller promised to send me the forms belied the bank’s founder.  “Squire” Cash, as he was called, did not build up a sucessful bank by being sweet, or promising, or any kind of nice, for that matter.  When a run on the bank threatened during the Great Depression, he put the bank’s cash out on the counter for everyone to see, then sat next to it with his shotgun.  The bank stayed open.  The shotgun still hangs under his picture in the lobby.

Then came the IRS.  Thirty-eight minutes on hold, five frustrating minutes with a clerk who persuaded me that I was wrong to think I deserved more of a refund, then two minutes of head-smacking after I hung up the phone and realized that she and I were looking at the wrong numbers.

So the hours conintued.  Victory at the doctor’s billing agency from a claim over a year old; moderate success with the cable company, who promised to take away our unwanted HBO.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, supposedly.  It seems like a strong adjective–desperate–yet it took a certain and unfamiliar level urgency to sustain me through all that recorded music in hope of a live person who can solve a problem.  And the math is plain: 120 minutes on the phone and now there is money to buy a few Christmas gifts, maybe enough to resurface the driveway.  Otherwise, a bleak midwinter.

Despite the hours of forced patience with phone banks, I can feel the belligerence underneath.  Blood is telling, and I can understand my great-great grandfather better than I once did.  I’d love to hunker down, entitlement on my lap, and say, OK, world, just you come and try and take it away.

Excavations, again

I had always thought that recovered memories were about abuse.  Turns out that mine are about toys.

I’ve recently discovered the Take It Or Leave It shed at the dump, one of the silver linings of living in a relatively affluent and eco-conscious college town.  It’s not a very big space–about the size of the average living room–and, honestly, I’m perfectly happy to leave most of what’s there.  But on our first visit we scored quite a few baby things–a swing, some nice wooden toys, and an oversized Lego set–and now we are hooked.  Or, more rightly, Lucy is hooked.  Going to the dump now beats a trip to the playground, because the dump means new toys come home with us.

Last week wasn’t too promising at first.  Rain had kept the weekend tag sales to a minimum, and so there wasn’t much new on offer.  But sifting in between a beat-up game of Clue and some suspiciously dusty dolls, I found them: little plastic animals, maybe each an inch long, rattling around in a cardboard box.  Lucy didn’t cotton to them right away, but I had to take them nonetheless.  I didn’t understand why.

It wasn’t until we got home and Lucy went off for her nap that I took a closer look at them.  I knew I had seen them before.  It didn’t make sense, because they were all different sizes.  No one would ever sell such a mismatched set.  And I new them all in their strange collection.  Largest were pair of lions and a pair of tigers, one male and one female each.  Then assorted smaller animals, a polar bear and something that might have been a panda.  Three little monkeys, all black.

I started to look for the cheetah that I knew belonged there.  Finally, I found her, crouched down, tail straight back, just as I had known and contemplated her in my childhood.

It wasn’t until the next day that I remembered where I had played with such little critters.  They lived, I finally remembered, in a blue cookie tin in my grandmother’s study closet.  The tin had once held those butter cookies that everyone seemed to have and no one ever wanted to eat; filling it with tiny plastic animals had definitely been a promotion for it.  I would spend Saturday afternoons on the study floor, moving these tiny animals in inscrutable patterns while my mother and her mother sat over the remains of our lunch in the ktichen and talked about things too hard for me to understand.

I had forgotten every trace of that blue tin and its treasure.  I wonder what other past, what other parts of self are lodged in me, hidden and buried in the field of my imagination.  How strange that someone else’s trash should be my history.

Lucy has not taken to the animals as I once did.  Mostly, they sit in her backpack along with some blocks and puzzle pieces that she likes to collect.  But she does tell me that she likes the cheetah best.  Wise girl, that one.

Excavations

It’s been a month of opening boxes.  Not sure if any of them belonged to Pandora.

First, there were the boxes in my new office.  I opened them at the beginning of August, almost a year to the day from when I packed them up back in Alexandria.  The brown cardboard had been gradually mildewing in the basement, and I was afraid of what I might find inside.  But the books were fine.  What’s more, what’s stranger, is that they felt as if they had just passed through my hands minutes before.  I could remember how I’d debated throwing one paperback away, or how another slim volume had been a farewell gift that came the very day I was packing.

And the hardest–the strangest–was the last, haphazard box, all those things from the very last morning when I was trying to leave the office and meet the realtor back at the house and get the child in the car to drive out of town.  It was a bankers box, with a lid that came off and on easily as I thought of more things to toss inside.  It held all the loose ends that seemed so vital that they could not be packed until the very last minute, and then became so unimportant that they sat in a box for a year.  A to-do list, all done now.  A copy of the last sermon I gave.  Blank cards, leftover from writing farewell notes.

Then, mid-August, another project: the boxes of china from my grandmother.  She died in a car accident when I was sixteen.  Even though she was old at the time–well past seventy–it was a shock.  No one had given any thought as to what would go to whom; there was no sense of preparation or closure.  My mother had simply shipped everything valuable off to storage, between sudden outbursts of tears and the sedatives she had to take to sleep.  To storage the china went, and there it stayed, until it came with us on this last move.  I finally pulled it out after the anniversary of our move.  I need more china like a need a hole in my head, but it seemed cruel, somehow, to leave it in paper any longer.

I had forgotten how feminine the pattern was–little violets in the center of the plate, with a gilded, scalloped rim.  If I were to look at it with thrity-six year old eyes, I would never choose it.  But it had been untouched for more than half my life, and its last use still clung to it.  My grandmother had probably washed it and put it in her china cabinet after some formal dinner, never knowing that she would not touch it again.  Maybe her fingerprints were still on some of the pieces.

And now, quite different, in a box not literal but metaphorical: pictures from our beach trip last week.  I miss it too much already–the sticky salt air, the smell of suncreen, Lucy in her little red bathing suit playing in the sand with her own grandmother.  And this box I can’t trust myself to open.  I can’t even look at the pictures we took without wanting to exchange here for there, now for then.