Longhand

All the words until now have been longhand, computer left behind in my cabin with the cell phone, and no photos to write from. The eight of us retreat participants plus Ryan met the first day, at a table in the middle of a recital hall, all wood paneling and one whole wall of windows, a piano on a dais in front of the windows, and I kept thinking things like "naps!" and "manicure!", thoughts of leisure and vacation. But after we left the recital hall, I sat down with my notebook anyway, and just started to use ink. I made a manicure appointment and then cancelled it, and was sorry when I slept in until 9:40 the first day. No naps yet. 

My writing so far has been constant but scattered, concerned more with the problem of writing than with any story in particular. This second full day has been tainted with migraine, and at lunch I felt that odd migraine-related grief draining the words out of me. I sat and looked out the window at the shaded picnic tables, the practice rooms converted to writing studios for us for these five days, the small birds in the trees. When at a loss, I do come back to the birds, the house finch with it's rosy crown, the white-headed woodpecker pecking out a lacy pattern in the bark of the evergreen it mines for bugs. It's the simplicity of it that I love, the pleasure in naming something, in noticing it. White head, black body, white arm band, the tree-clinging shape. 

Clearing out

 The night before, I kept saying "I'm on vacation!" and Tom and I stayed up later than we should have, and I lingered in bed longer than I meant to and then there was coffee for me, made by Tom, and the walk around the property, and new blossoms on the apple tree and more weeding to be done in the circle of the middle of the driveway, and it was hard to leave. I wanted to stay and eat the good salad from dinner, with leaves from the garden and I wanted to open the watermelon I had brought home from the co-op, and suddenly it seemed like clearing out the spare room upstairs would be possible if I actually had a work day off, and I would have been happy to just move gravel around, for that matter, any of the things that would mean the mini-farm could be a still better version of itself.

But I got in the car anyway, headed off to a five day writing retreat near Leavenworth, with a box of books and a bag of knitting and two camera bags and enough clothes for three times as many days as I'll actually have away. It started before I even got out of Skagit county - little fragments of writing, nothing special, just throat-clearing sorts of things, a few words strung together to articulate the most obvious things. But a certain kind of writing, my mind starting to write itself, is how I tend to think of it. 

Where to

 Can't wait to go to the co-op, then home for the last few minutes of daylight. Two days at home, then two days of work, then off to Icicle Creek for a 5 day writing retreat, where who knows what things will happen or show up here!

Some of what's going on.

Sunday Stop

 Samish Bay Cheese was everything I hoped it would be. One small room with a stool and a cash register, a few chalkboards telling you which cheeses were available that day. Ask about something special and the woman working there will open that little white door inside to search the racks and racks of aging cheese for just the thing you are looking for - 4-year aged Gouda or something with nettles in it, or something spicy. There was a little dog sitting outside   waiting for a little cheese snack, patrolling in the most friendly way. I bought fresh Ladysmith and the cheese crackers that Breadfarm makes for them, and some sweet italian sausage for a Bolognese sauce I'd make later. When I got home, Tom and I took a break from the yard renovations currently underway and sat at our little table eating salami and apple slices and the crackers and all our cheeses. 

Going Home

Wednesday felt like a tease this week. One little night at home, dinner with James and Tom as though it were the weekend and movie night. Jessica was missing, off on a field trip to Portland, and so was the day off that I so wished would follow that night. 

After James left, Tom and I went outside, the way we do, a single dim flashlight illuminating the parts of the yard that he had worked on since I was home last, the parts of the yard not illuminated by the big floodlight from the back porch. Sweeping it along the fence line, the beam of the flashlight caught something glimmering, like a fishing lure in water, then a quick beat of wings as something dropped off a fencepost, then lifted up to perch on the next post. A little owl, I think, and the reason that the frogs were singing so loudly in the front part of the yard, and not at all in the back. He flew off eventually and the frog song flooded the property entirely. 

My life is so much more populated by the feathered and furred creatures of the world these days. I love that about the mini-farm. People always ask me if we have animals there, and I know what they mean so I say, just a dog, though she is so much more than just a dog, and the rest of the creatures we share the land with are so much more as well. I should say yes, harriers and moles and eagles and frogs and there will be swallows again this summer. Herons fly over and so many other birds that I have yet to name, and hopefully more than I will ever be able to.

Sleet

Technically, there isn't any sleet around here at the moment. But for some part of nearly every day, the cold, rain-slanting wind makes it feel as though there is. Coming home from dinner tonight, Tom and I sat in the car in the driveway for minutes, engine off, just looking at the cold rainy fields, still pond-like with flooding. Yesterday was different, though, the evening around sunset was lovely, warmish and made musical by the frogs, the spring bird songs, and when you stood in the back field, the quiet trickling of the groundwater sinking back into the earth. 

Home, Kind of

we are staying in New York this weekend. It feels like a rare, special thing to be home on Friday night with no particular plans for tomorrow beyond brunch and maybe the playground.

During the winter we are almost always bound for the house in Vermont and every Friday night involves simultaneously packing the laundry, cooking dinner for and feeding the kids, packing groceries, toys, books, movies, etc. etc. forever and ever.

But a night like tonight I get to spend cooking an experimental dinner, watching some crap television, catching up on the FB addiction and generally relaxing. While the twins are sleeping, of course.

We have a lot going on here. Birthdays. Potty training - oh, god the potty training... work and whatnot.

I went to my first ballet class in 25 years today. I spent the entire time trying to not fall over because I was laughing so hard.

Anyways. There's a lot going on. There is also nothing going on. The boys are healthy, cheerful, surprising and delightful. When they aren't being challenging, contrary, pissy and whingey. Ahem.

Next weekend we'll be back to Vermont for our last week of skiing and snowboarding. I can't wait until next Winter, when I am teaching. But I won't wish my time away.

Love you, miss you.
A

Better Late Than Never

A little peek into the boys third birthday...

How To Have Your Picture Taken, part E

First, write a book. Write the kind of book that someone unrelated to you, who is not your friend, will want to read more than once. This book could be the kind of book that a perfect stranger will want to peddle and push and champion, and that other strangers will want to bind together, box up and send out into the world and that more people you don't even know will see and touch and carry around, and linger over. Maybe. Time will tell. At that point where you are not sure, but have hopes, hopes that have started to seem concrete and tangible, with details and tasks and dates, then, call someone who has several significant cameras and a love of literature and a fondness for you as well. 

Next, think about what you love. Think about your favorite shoes, and what you like about the way you look. Brush your hair, which is gorgeous, and put on lipstick if you feel like it. While you are looking in the mirror to put on your favorite lipstick, notice that your eyelashes really are kinda long and you have that to be glad about. The things on your face that you like are the things that will make it easy to smile. Not a big forced grin, but the right kind of smile for a close-up, just a small thing, just a hint at contentedness. If you are dark brunette, with fair skin and deep brown eyes, it will not hurt to wear green. Or pink, or both together, or really, anything you know is good.

Now, think about outside. Think about the places where you once sat thinking about things you loved, or wearing that small smile, accidentally, without even really noticing it until you realized that someone you might have been in love with was seeing that smile on your face. Think about secret places, places that lend themselves to the extremes of human emotion, places where if you are not wearing the smile of the deeply content, you might be licking your wounds, having a safe cry. These are the places where you are likely to find a great blue heron, trees that have surrendered themselves to the water's edge, plenty of undisturbed moss, and probably teenagers smoking pot. All of that is fine. Pick your place, then stand there. 

You do not have to think about smiling, or not smiling. Realize that no one is trying to make you look like anything other than yourself. Think about the things that made you write that book, good and bad, no doubt funny, maybe a little heartbreaking. Let a hint of it all show on your face. That's all anyone will be looking at.

Small things, named.

When I left for the Seattle week on Monday morning, I brought with me, among other things, my new sturdy glass travel mug, a small baggie of dried mango, a Cara Cara orange from the co-op, half a sandwich that Tom made me for my travels on Sunday, an overnight bag full of socks and underwear, and two rolls of film from the portrait session I had done with Elissa, who just got an agent and needed author photos. Naming things, making lists is comforting these days. At Kate's house and in the spare room at the mini-farm, I am working my way through old boxes, slowly, using little tubs of sugar scrub and travel-size shampoos, making inventories of yarn, dreaming up uses for boxes and boxes of stationary. 

On the internet today, I found a video of Pam  reading at the Rumpus Room in SF, probably the reading where Kristin's photo was taken for the NY Times, and we texted back and forth with her giving me updates about the reading that I so wished I could be there for. Texts that said things like "Indian Springs" or "Fenton the human and Fenton the dog"or "mini-skirt!!!"  A quote that I love from that section is exactly how I'm feeling today, and a lot of days recently.

"I'm thinking about Bob’s reading, thinking about how the older we get the more we’re inclined to simply name the things of the world. A whole valley that smells of grapes fermenting in barrels; the taste of donut holes dipped in cafe anglais; a great blue heron standing on one foot at the rippling edge of a pond."   

- Pam Houston, from her forthcoming book "Contents May Have Shifted"

The other way

 Another one from the walk I took with Jessica a few weeks ago. The sky in the water and the rounded shape of the water's edge seems right for a time when we're hearing that the axis of the world has been shifted by the trauma of the recent earthquake in Japan. My own world seems a bit wobbly on its axis these days, not traumatically so, just a lot of change happening, organizations re-organizing, groups re-grouping. At the center of the circles I run in, the mini-farm is there, a piece of ground that we move the furniture around on, little patches of dirt we scrape at, that we gift with seeds and dream over. That's what I wanted, a place to come back to, something mostly still. Still, as in still there, still as in Eliot's still point of the turning world.  I'm grateful. 

Things stay the same, even while they change

The world is too big to save, too small to treat carelessly. I'm not sure what to say beyond that, but I realize I have to get back to saying it, eventually.

Across the field

I can't wait to go home for the weekend. It's been a long three days in Seattle, nice and productive but the days are always so long when I've got meetings after work and errands to run. Luckily there are always my two sweet (plus one furry) roommates at the Ballard house to greet me, with pie and chatting and clean towels and tea and movies. It's pretty good for a double life. 

Back at the mini-farm, the lap blanket I'm knitting is almost done, and tomorrow I might spend the whole day in my pajamas. I can always pull my boots and parka on over it all for the ritual fence walk. Even the Friday grocery trip sounds fine, knowing that there are still a lot of staples left over from last week, and chocolate and coffee eclairs waiting in a little box from Honore. We just need some veggies and maybe a steak or two, though no one ever turned down a new pint of ice cream in my house. 

Last weekend Lindsey and Kate braved the blizzardy conditions to come up for Kate's pie reading at the Winter Commission in Bellingham, and afterwards Kate told me that the farmhouse inspired her to make a few changes in the little Ballard bungalow. I guess that energy just perpetuates itself because I feel the same way right back at her. Ready to tackle a little more, to be nice to my space and keep sprucing it up a bit at a time. Every week feels like progress.

Adrift

After the reading was over and Katherine and Peggy and Patricia had all gone, I went to the Honey Bear Bakery at Third Place books and ordered a chicken pot pie. Looking at their menu, I had the same feeling I have when we go to Adrift in Anacortes, that anything I could get would be good and comforting and contain no danger. I don't know whether that's true of Honey Bear or not, but it felt that way. 

I suppose it was inevitable that the migraines would eventually lead me to some food-related phobia, and now I'm here and only looking at that fact glancingly, dealing with it through avoidance and a certain care that I've tried to make rote so as not to have to think too much about what has happened. $144 spent at the co-op will ward off a lot. Lunches from home, dinner somewhere expensive and ingredient-proud, dried mango (no sulfites), a lip-numbing love of kumquats, too many pistachios on the drive home, those habits  will all ward off a lot. 

The reading was Summer Wood, who came to Creede the summers I went there for writing group. She read to us from Wrecker, which was just in progress then, and now is bound and sold and sitting on the table in front of me. I haven't read the whole thing, and while I have heard enough to know that it's a beautifully written thing, I can't really pretend, even to myself, that it was just her reading that choked me up as I listened tonight, or made me blush when she looked up from signing my book and inquired, "Your writing?"

I know that I miss writing even when I don't feel it. It's like the food thing, something I don't really check on the status of, there is just a warding off of that knowledge. There is photography and work and one acre and a farmhouse and long drives and so much else. It's funny, though, how many Seattle things I avoid doing in order to get home to Bow every night I can, and yet I wasn't tempted at all to skip the reading tonight, and seeing my old writing group friends. Summer's voice, the way she read, her particular way with language - it was like seeing a wolfhound on the street. I know a few of you will know just what I mean by that. Something rare and familiar and so deeply evocative of the things and people and animals I want close to me.

Not So Bad

The ferry photos didn't turn out so bad after all. Neither did the predicted snow storms this week. Even when it was bad, so bad that you couldn't see lane markers on 405, so bad that sitting at a stop light meant that the side windows on my car, which a co-worker had JUST cleared off for me, were covered in snow by the time the light turned green again, even then it wasn't that bad. I rolled the windows down and back up again to try to shake some of it loose, and that worked but resulted in snow in the back seat. Oh well! I made it home fine and Kate had a slice of pie saved for me, cherry cranberry, which I recommend, and I've been remembering to bring my gloves everywhere more so even my hands were warm when I got there. 

Field Trip

Yet another photo from our great weekend at Festival of Family Farms back in October. This was the farm where we got a free jug of the most delicious apple cider I had ever had up to that point. Since then, we've become ardent cider fans at the mini-farm and often have a fresh half gallon from the co-op in our fridge. 

There are more photos, finally - one lonely roll waiting to be picked up at Kenmore Camera. I confess that I don't have high hopes for that roll, having taken many of the first photos without regard to a little thing called shutter speed. The good (?) news is that the shutter speed setting I had it on was way too slow, so there will be something on the roll, something blurry and overexposed, but There, nonetheless. We'll see. The photos were from a disorienting weekend a few weeks ago, when I was supposed to be at both a 40th birthday celebration and a memorial service in the same weekend, and instead found myself curled up in bed in a little cabin at Doe Bay, completely sick with a migraine. Who wouldn't get the shutter speed wrong on a weekend like that?

This morning I woke to a car that had been turned into a giant metal popsicle by the clear frosty Ballard morning. How I made it through this particular winter with nothing to scrape my windows other than a plastic co-op membership card, I can't say. It was too pretty for me to mind this morning, and maybe that's how the other mornings of car scraping have been this year too. Too happy to care about the wrong tool - maybe my thought each morning has been "Got the job done, didn't I?" I was on my way to pastries and cafe bon bon from Honore, and a day full of pretty fruitful meetings at work. I guess that's how you survive without an ice scraper. Some things only need to be Good Enough.

Daily

Habits. Coffee for the long drive in the morning, Bird Note at 9AM. Fresh Air or a novel for the drive home. The co-op on Friday nights for the weekend's food. Lately I've been reading Antonia Fraser's Must You Go? a few nights a week just before bed. It's an account of her life with Harold Pinter, told mostly through the vehicle of what I assume are snippets from the diary she kept for years. Some days are just a few lines, but it makes me think how precious those little written lines must have seemed years later, after his death especially. It made me miss my own journal-writing, but only mildly, having just the other night had Tom pluck a little green book off our new bookshelf, my mortifying journal from 1989. 

Bookshelves! We bought three over the weekend, from Midway House Antiques, the little place on Chuckanut drive that I sometimes wander into on a Saturday or Sunday, looking for new additions to the stacks of sweet smelling handknit sweaters that the woman there cleans and repairs so beautifully.  It was so windy on Saturday that it felt like the tallest bookcase was going to take flight as we lifted it into the van, and every time we opened a car door, some little piece of tissue or receipt got away from us and had to be chased across the lot. The bookshelves are safe at home now, plants on top of the two biggest, making them look like they've always been there. Last night I remarked to Tom that in four and a half months we will have been there a year. It's hard to believe that the seasons will have come all the way around then, but I'm happy with all the little things we've done, the good way Tom finds places for things, the cozy yellow couch, the blanket I've been knitting for it, almost done. 

Usefulness

I don't know (yet) what that title or this photo has to do with anything. I've been slow with the photos lately, having misplaced the cord that connects my external hard drive and blah blah blah a lot of boring technical stuff that keeps me from using my digital SLR. I'm still picking up the Bronica from time to time, but am slower than usual getting those little rolls of film into the shop for developing. I've got a good roll in my bag that has been there for over a week! Maybe that will change soon, maybe it won't. So yesterday I was clearing out the jumbled drawers of my desk and going through old CDs of scanned photos, labeling them and matching them up with their cases (I'm so guilty of CD abuse) and looking for little unpublished photos that might inspire a bit of writing.

I took this one last fall when Tom and I went on the Festival of Family Farms tour. That is still, for me, one of the highlights of having lived at the mini-farm these past seven months. I loved being out on a field trip with him, visiting farms that I now think of as neighbors, thinking about all the possible things. This little corner of an outbuilding was so interesting to me as a record of what people were up to there, the business of the place. All the ugly plugs and weird little tools and rusted metal panels remind me now of our basement, the garage, the hard parts of the house, and the things that make things go. Having a house is a constant act of care, a practice in patience and in both vigilance and a certain blindness, the kind of blindness that keeps you from being overwhelmed by the piles of things to be taken to the dump, the pails of old paint left by former owners, the light fixtures in the bathroom that have to fall to the bottom of the to-do list, being functional and harmless, if unpleasant to look at. I keep thinking about, longing for, a way to keep track of it all without overwhelming myself. I keep longing for better systems, more routine, and being grateful for what we have established. 

One thing I  love is the weekly yard walk we do. Most every weekend, I pull on wellies and a warm coat and follow Tom around the property as he points out things he's been working on or thinking about. I almost always forget to take the camera and have to run back to the house to get it. Same thing with mittens. Once I'm outside, I'm loathe to go back in until I'm well and truly frozen, because that's when the convocation of eagles shows up, or the vine around the bench swing begs to be pruned, or the frogs start chirping, or some other thing presents itself for my attention. There's nothing more satisfying in that moment than giving it. There is a use to all that beauty - it's the way it woos me into wanting to keep working at it, to tend and trim and take great care with that little patch of land and the house on it that serves us so well. 

Upside Down Moustache Time

Kate and I went to Sambar the other night, the first time I had been there in a long time. We knew Michael the bartender (of course), and the exceedingly pretty waitress, and the sommelier is an old friend of Clay's from their Campagne days. At one of the six tables, there was a couple I know, eating frites and drinking champagne and looking happy and talking about moving in together. One of the women sitting at the bar was someone Kate had met at one of her many pie events, and who I swear I've met before. That's one of many things I love about that place. I've been away from Seattle enough lately that Ballard is full of new restaurants and shops I've never been in, but Sambar stays both familiar and shiny new. 

I have two days of my alternate universe this week. Sushi and salons and coffee shops and french food and sleeping in my loaned bed at Kate's house. Maybe I shouldn't be taking a break from shopping for 25x15x1 inch furnace filters, but I am. The distance from the mini-farm might be good for now, I find myself rambling to Kate about how I need to get my act together, prioritize, organize, quit feeling like I'm wasting time. I realize I need a dose of humor and comfort, some way to forgive my own shortcomings, which include failure to unpack, poor spacial organization skills, procrastination and a tendency to wear sweaters one time too many before washing them.