What I did on my summer vacation

For the first time in as long as I can remember (which, let's be honest, could be as recently as last year) I took a week off of work without packing my bags and hopping on a plane to visit family or friends or tropical beaches. My nails grew long. Hours and hours were drowned in heavy summer heat and along highways as I drove my broken-footed friend to work or my birthday boyfriend to water. Even more hours were spent trying to sleep off an exhaustion that never quite left me and watering a garden and watching a cat. My little, uncomplicated life.

Looks perfect, right? This is Benson Lake which sits RIGHT off of highway 84 in the Columbia Gorge. The water was about as warm as you're going to find in these parts, but shallow and muddy-bottomed and accented by the roar of passing trucks. Not bad for a desperate dip, but not generally recommended.
After drying off and heating up, we set out for The Treefrogs show at the Laurelthirst which was being recorded for posterity. The air conditioner was broken and nobody could open their mouths without commenting on the steamy heat of the place, but I liked it. I felt like I was in New Orleans, sweating cheap beer and loud music.
The next night, Sean's Afroknot bandmate treated us to a birthday dinner at Urban Farmer, one of the hippest spots in town where her boyfriend works. Sean and I loved the deserts most of all. I'm particularly pleased to be associated with people who are willing to pose for a corny phallic photo in the middle of a swanky meal.
After one camping trip at the beginning of my break got canceled due to unforseen emergencies I was banking on the camping trip at the end of my break. When I went to rent a car, I discovered every single car was spoken for. We borrowed a truck from the above super-generous bandmate and headed out as early as we could manage. My favorite camping spot proved to be everyone elses as well. Not a spot to be had without some sort of fist fight. "I knew it," Sean said and it was true. He was convinced of our curse which has ruined about 50% of our camping attempts. The saving grace of our day was a shallower and therefore warmer swimming hole than in years past. I stayed in the water. Stayed and swam against the current and stayed and floated on my back for the first time ever in Oregon waters. We loved it and went home happy with our little difficulties.

Writing Advice

Last week was the Tin House Workshop held at Reed College. Every year I hop on my bike at least once a day and pedal through the summer heat to the auditorium or the amphitheater to I sit in on lectures and a few readings without paying the thousands of dollars to actually participate in the workshops. Sometimes the bike ride is barely worth it. Sometimes I walk away with a few gems. This year one of my favorite panel discussions was on Beginnings with Karen Shepard, Walter Kirn and Dorothy Allison.

Dorothy Allison listed the three top motivators in fiction as Fear, Lust and Curiosity. "If you can get someone scared, horny and uncertain you've got a franchise."

Walter Kirn spoke eloquently about how beginnings are about closing down your options, and letting the reader know, with confidence, how to read your story. "Beginnings are shadows that are cast across the whole of the story."

Karen Shepard gave perhaps the most useful nugget of advice and that was the simple idea of policing your sentences. "Interrogate them. What are they telling you?"

New Tattoo

A lady on a book? The man getting a tattoo next to me wanted to know what it meant. What did his tattoo of a skeleton riding a pig with an apple in his mouth mean? I didn't ask, fearing the answer. Make up an explanation if you need one. I guarantee it will be more interesting than my own.

Profusion

The garden has tipped over into wildness. The spinach and arugula bolted a week or so ago. The volunteer tomatoes are bowling over the wildflowers while the sunflowers bully the tomatoes. The nasturtium flow like water from their inch of soil. The bamboo seeks the sky.

Now if only I could hide the way the cat does, nestling into a spot between the flowers that smell like Good n' Plenty and the silver-blue grass. Nobody can see me. Nobody knows I'm here. Just watching and waiting and napping.

Eagle Creek

I'm waiting out the neighborhood fireworks tonight. I thought some calm green photos from my hike up the Eagle Creek Trail a few days ago would help distract me from the explosions. Icy water to cool my tired feet, the endless rush of Punchbowl Falls and the sweet cure of dappled light. Aaah, that's better...

Mao grows bored with an article in BOMB magazine about "Nights of Horror" - the sado-masochistic cartoons made by the creator of Superman.

I love that this house is being swallowed by plants, the sidewalk barely passable. I hope that when I'm old and arthritic that my house and garden will succumb to a similar fate. Actually, I wish I could make this happen to my yard right now. I wish I could make everything in my life overflow this way, in wild beautiful bursts. One thing tangled in another. All of it sweet.

Community, Hope and Pyromania

Twice a year at every solstice my friends build and burn a wooden figure along with the wishes of the witnesses. This isn't related in any way with Burning Man (capital B, capital M) and the oddly false, strained and irritating people I generally associate with that drug pit in the desert. I prefer our low key event, one that celebrates a true sense of community, hope and pyromania. Here's to summer!

Suffering under the So What Factor

The symbols of hope have deflated back into normal politicians. The big, nearly ungraspable problems of the world have pulled free and become truly ungraspable. People are buying bread instead of books, booze instead of bread. To all this I say SO WHAT? The days speed and the gray hairs grow and the kids outside take longer and longer to GET OFF MY LAWN.

In the end, the world doesn't care if I write a good book. Even my friends, who will certainly support my efforts to keep writing, to keep striving won't love me less if I fail to do so. In the back of my head I hear half a dozen different writing teachers saying "What's at stake here?" The truth is, not much. This fact alternates between feeling liberating and terrifying depending on how well I slept the night before. The drunkards were out full force last night and I was awake for hours so I apologize if I sound too bleak.

In truth, it's too beautiful outside and my life is too sweet and easy to feel any real depression over this. I don't even know what "this" is other than a pang of existential angst. Maybe I'll head out into the yard, soak up some sun and try to shake it off. And if you have any suggestions, short of having a child or finding god, I'm all ears.

Summer is not quite officially here but it's busting out all over nonetheless. We pick salads out of the back yard and eat them on the patio while we watch the cat stalk the bamboo. We go down the street on our feet or on our bikes, happy to have the warm wind around us, the sun on our shoulders. I think about how different my life would be if I had to hop in the car to get anywhere and feel endlessly grateful for all the years I've been able to stroll the neighborhood. How different would my vision of the world be if my experience of it arrived as isolated points rather than continuous paths. I can't recommend it enough: Take a walk, ride a bike and watch the world slow down.

Yesterday I witnessed a man sleeping on the grass in the South Park Blocks being harassed by a trio of jock assholes. Sean and I approached the scene as it was playing it out; the jocks throwing something small at the man, maybe a rock, then throwing a sandwich at him when his response was less than the jocks had hoped for. Sean and I both wish we'd moved faster and with less hesitation, fast enough to warn the sleeping man or discourage the dumb mob mentality of this pitiful crew of douchebags. We did not. The only reward was that another witness chased them down for several blocks. The jocks tried to play it cool, but two of them ended up running off. The third broke off from his clan, turned the corner and was hunted down beyond our sight.

As a person who was harrassed a'plenty in my youth, I feel a particular kind of outrage and sadness at this kind of behavior. Sure, you can rise above it and dismiss the asswipes, but for me at least, it confirms a dreary belief. I maintain my faith in individual humans as being basically good. That good may be solid and thorough or it may be irretrievably buried under a mountain of bad. Still, I believe it exists in each isolated person. The problem is we don't live isolated from one another and the crap that I witnessed confirms that people collectively are a miserable, sheepish lot as often as they are a supportive, uplifting mass.

None of us are immune. I've had my own cruel moments, my own sheepish nods. Sean too. All we could do was shake our heads in unison with the harassed man then wander back into our day. But today all I've been able to think of is that sweet bland thing called kindness and how we should all dig a little deeper for it.

This week I get the short stick and become the one that stays. You, the one that goes. In your absence, the hours flatten into uncurled ribbon, long and smooth. I gain a wealth of wasted time. I go to sleep beneath a day both unmarked and unremarkable. Not useless without you, but simply not as good.

Go figgy go...

Stretch bamboo stretch...

Though I got me some garden last year, largely with the help of my friend, Rob, this year I've decided to shed as much of my hesitation and doubt as possible and plunge recklessly into it. I've spent hours in the dirt lining our gravel walkways and building tiny walls with bits of kung-fu-cracked brick. I've planted and watered and weeded. I've gone to the store for groceries and returned with my basket full of fescue and poppies.

At first, I saw the task of laying the bricks as a nuisance, once I was out there with my shovel and trowel and my nails full of dirt, I was struck by an old memory. When my sister and I were wee lasses we would go down to the creek behind our house and build bowls and sculptures and walls from the clay soil on the banks. Perfection was in the process not the product. And so it is now. Joy in the digging and in the daily measure of the season growing to its fullest.

Not everything is thriving in part because my "good enough" philosophy doesn't bode well for sensitive plants, but that comes with the territory. I dislike the notion that "if you can't do it right, don't do it at all." I say if you can't do it right, do it half-assed and enjoy yourself along the way.

I know it's not even June yet and that the heat will come on in my house at least once more before the Fourth of July, but let it be known that the toes are silvered up and strapped into their new red shoes. The veggies are planted. The first official camping trip is on the books. How lucky I am to live this.

It's the end of the day and we dip into the early, pale end of twilight. The only clouds in the sky are like sweet exhalations; the breath of a woman napping in the park. I open my mouth. I swallow.

Ecola State Park

I took an overnight trip to say hello to the ocean and to see what nice spring clothes the forest trails picked up this season. A dozen different greens, a layering of mud and a mottled sky. Back in the urban noise for no more than an hour, I already miss the racket of waves and wind and want to run back, lash myself down to one of those mammoth driftwood logs or hide under the canopy of infant leaves and refuse to go. I always want more ocean, more bright air, more chartreuse, celadon and sap.

We are in the midst of Lilac Stealing Month here in Portland. Every year for fifteen years, Sean has shown up in late April and early May with lavender, white and plum bouquets snatched from any large prolific lilac plant drooping over the sidewalk. Blooms in varying stages of decay are now scattered around the house. Someday, I will plant my own lilac bush, I promise. I'll put it right out front and applaud any man who stops to break off a branch or two.

Tenderness trips me up. Lately, an unexpected emotion has washed across my eyes and hands and heart as I work. I've gotten through almost thirteen years of doing massage by keeping a thin, hard layer across all my exposed surfaces, all my tricky synapses. For the last few weeks, however, I've fallen into an unexpected kindness. A tremor of empathy runs through me for the exhausted, aching people who lie naked on my table beneath a thin sheet and soft blanket.

I've never been a cookie cutter therapist, but I've always let my hands be my dominant guide, working on an instinct that seemed to largely circumvent both highly technical routines and overly emotional responses. That same instinct remains intact, but now something else has seeped into my sessions.

My cynical mind remains cynical. The collapse of the Great American Dream continues full force. The destruction of the planet grows loud and real. Religion blinds us, money corrupts us, etc., etc., etc. Nothing new there. But as I sit at the head of the table with a person's head in my cupped hands, my fingers pressed along the edges of their vertebrae and my palms wrapping their tired shoulders little wishes for them run through me. Wishes for kindness and joy, wonder and health.

As one of my favorite William Meredith poems says: "But whether from brute need/ Or divine energy / At last mind eye and ear/ And the great sloth heart will move."

Go figure...

I stacked my youth into a pale blue bin: letters from a boy in upstate New York once scoured for hidden signals, journals smeared with the misery of being seventeen, and eighteen and nineteen, good photos of people whose names I forget and bad photos of people I still love.

I read a couple letters and smiled. I showed some of the photos to some of my friends. I read some of my words, decades old and showed them to no one. And then I went to sleep.

There I met my high school boyfriend. We were both soft and lined and smartly dressed and despite our long absence from each other, still together and still the same. He sang obscure songs at me and wouldn't tell me what they were. I moped at his side and answered every question with "I don't know." We stared at each other and I confused pangs of anxiety with pangs of love. I woke up annoyed, as if our dream selves should have learned more in all these years. Am I doomed to repeat history, even in my sleep?

The blue plastic bin is heavy. I will need Sean to help me lug it to the basement. In another twenty years I will pick at the detritus there and let it trickle through the sluggish coils of my brain. And when my dream self again meets an old beaux or enemy, a lost friend or lost chance, maybe she'll take the opportunity that dreams offer and try it a different way.

Euphorbia. Euphoria.

The sun comes softened by a breeze but still makes its mark on the new leaves, the sloth-rich soil, my frightened winter skin. Now, with a fresh blush burned into sternum, nose and arms, I am Italian again. I am the tomato-grower. The protector of young basil. Despite the dip of light, evening will not start for hours. We are busy playing music and writing poems. We are sun drunk and in love with our drinking buddies.

On the radio this morning, I heard a worldwide call-in talk show focused on the topic of slowing down. More than half the people were happy with the quick pace of their lives and thought that to slow down would mean failure. A few people advocated for reading poetry in the sun or taking the time to cook a really good, really healthy meal, but most of them liked their quick paced lives, their busy schedules. For them, staying busy was equal to staying both happy and productive.

In my head, I argued that being productive doesn't have to be the key to happiness. And productive in what capacity? If I take the time to read a book, am I not being productive, albeit on a cerebral level? Isn't taking a walk and admiring the spring flowers productive for your health and well-being? I think so.

But here's the catch... I've been in such a funk lately because I haven't produced nearly enough writing. Despite what I said in my last post, I've been struggling to get the words down, though I've been trying. At every step I meet a hurdle if I'm lucky, an electric barbed wire fence if I'm not. This sticky, gummed-up story is driving me mad.

So maybe those people were right. I may not need to produce reports, resolutions or widgets but I need to produce something to feel my best, to feel like I'm something other than a receptacle for youtube videos and Netflix DVDs. My only solution is to ratchet down the expectations to an even slower pace and try to learn how to savor the drip...drip...drip onto the page.

I've written it in pen, right there on the calendar, not only for Wed. 8th but on all the days of the following week. I've swallowed too many misspent hours and feel a bit nauseous, a bit deceitful. My life feels funny without a solid writing project in front of me. The new project is unformed, unweildy, un-everything. It has things to teach that I'm reluctant to learn. For one, have some goddamn fun. Furthermore, make millions of mistakes.

At first I wanted to think and dawdle and dwell on the shape and character of this new book and I've done a bunch of that. But now it wants me to write it out fast. It wants to be long and shitty. It wants to make so many wrong turns I get lost somewhere kind of cool.

If only I had a montage. Enter the button-down recluse whose worn down all the erasers in the house. Exit the footloose free spirit who tosses off pages without a second glance. All set to some jangly folk-pop song by Feist. A magical transformation.

We, as a city, exhaled fully these last few days, dropping our cramped shoulders down from our ears. The sun came and cured us of most of our bad moods, our tedious confinement and our frighteningly luminous flesh. Someone told me there were 25 days of rain in Portland this March. It felt like it. But now, I'm sitting in a tank top and shorts writing this beneath a picture of this year's first flowers, carried home in my bike basket. If it didn't interfere with my cargo capacity I would carry potted flowers around on my bike all the time. You should know this about me...for a misanthropic hermit, I am inordinately delighted and soothed by the presence of brightly colored petals. I am also notoriously bad with plants. More on this conundrum to come...

Almost all of my friends live a decent but nonetheless check-to-check existence and always have. This craptastic economy has tightened our well-cinched belts, but ultimately hasn't changed much in our daily lives. Except for this: We used to joke when we talked about a grand European vacation or saw a perfect piece of perfectly spendy art or walked by a gorgeous 5 bedroom house that we would go ahead and buy it. "I've got $5 bucks in my pocket. That should be enough right?"

Well, now it is. In Detroit, at least. I know, it's Detroit but still...When I heard about the crazy market there I googled Detroit Real Estate, entered a value between $100 and $1000 and came up with 156 results. The above 6 bedroom multi-unit building is going for $600.

I'm not sure why, but I'm totally fascinated by this phenomenon. Maybe it's just the strangeness of watching a city decay, first in increments and then in leaps and bounds. Maybe it's the dash of entrepreneurial spirit inherited from my father that makes me think somebody should be taking advantage of this, not in a greedy, lecherous way but in a way that does something daring and grand for these neighborhoods.

I'll go crazy and throw in $20. Who else wants in on the American dream of home ownership?

Somehow, I've ended up with a number of jewelry designer friends. Some are of the fine metalsmith artisan variety. Some are of the cute, affordable and fun variety. Cute, affordable and fun sounds pretty good right around now... This piece is made by Sisteria Designs. They use reclaimed game tiles and fine Japanese papers and make these pretty pendants. They just got their online store up and running so now you can order them directly. http://sisteriadesigns.com/index.html
Definitely a cool gift and if you and your friends collect enough of them, you can turn them over and play dominoes with them too.
This purty birdy is from Twicksie Jewels. I got it at Christmas, then immediately lost it as is my way. To my delight, I discovered it a few weeks ago when I pulled out my luggage again and found it in a forgotten pocket. Twicksie's lovely baubles are for sale here: http://twicksie.com/

I walked a maze of pink and white trees in search of the faint scent of spring, but even this fresh blush has failed to alleviate the cool gray gloom. Almost everyone I come across is weighed down by it. No surprise, I guess.

What I am surprised by is how thoroughly I've abandoned my own writing over the last few weeks. I'm reading a lot. I'm thinking about my stories a lot. I'm thinking about story, in general, a lot. But all I have to offer is this paltry handful of words. The good thing about this is that it feels calm here. There's no worry that the words won't come back. I'm in a lull and think lull is a lovely word.

My brief time with my family in California left me with a few thoughts:

Nothing has broken my heart more quickly than the sight of my grandmother sobbing. I've never even seen the woman shed a tear, so to witness her red-faced and weeping, caught in a steady loop of lament and despair was overwhelming. I wanted to believe that a certain hardness or world-weary resignation developed with age, but grief is such a powerful thing that years alone are not enough to stop it.

That said, it was heartening to note just how well my grandmother raised her family. At a memorial full of hundreds of relatives and my aunt's friends and coworkers, I suddenly realized how few divorces there were among us. My grandmother was married for at least forty years before her husband died and each of her three daughters followed in her footsteps. Distant cousins I hadn't seen in years appeared with their spouses and grown children and more recently married relatives showed no signs of trouble. In a time when one parent households and multiple marriages are so common, I feel blessed to be a part of this clan that has learned how to hold on through the rough spots and find a solid source of love.

In that same room of hundreds, I became keenly aware of my sister, father and I as the tall, geeky ones being antisocial in the corner, the ones who left California and settled in New England. On top of that, I had to field an exhausting number of questions about being a writer. Being able to announce the title and publisher of my book among such a crowd is probably the number two reason I want to be published. Then there would be no reason for people to tell me about their neighbor's mother-in-law who works in publishing (though they do mostly science textbooks) or their friend who has a son in Hollywood who could turn my novel into a movie or how they don't really read anything but mysteries but they're sure my story is great. I don't want to deny my identity as a writer, but there are certainly benefits to leaving that portion out.

Of course, I will probably never see most of these people again. That was the final revelation of my visit. As the immediate family sat in my aunt's house in the hills of El Cerrito I realized how unlikely it is that I will ever be in that house again, or even in California again. Regular holiday visits there have been a part of my life from the time I was a baby. Now, with my grandmother moved out and my aunt gone, there is little reason to be there. Though my love for my uncle and cousins remains true, we have never had a connection independent of my aunt. While I used to be certain that I would live in California as an adult, I now leave it behind. An unexpected and entirely reluctant goodbye.

Less than a year ago, my Aunt Maureen was diagnosed with cancer. Last Saturday she finally succumbed. Now I fear that a few others will follow, her gregarious spirit unwilling to go out alone. Maybe her mother, my grandmother, will loosen the last few knots holding her here. Maybe her husband, whose heart was already tied together and tricked into working again, will find himself undone. He will have to find a way to sleep without her kicking feet, her slightly sour breath, her faint heat pulsing toward him.

Off I go to Oakland to be with the rest of Maureen's family and her wide blanket of friends to stumble through what we can. To say we will miss her is not enough.

Back from the woods and the tiny town of Shelton, WA. Elspeth Pope and the Hypatia-in-the-Woods organization gave me my week in the beautiful house Elspeth's late husband Jim built. The house is not just surrounded by trees, but seems to have grown right out of them. They were my constant companions. The top photo is the view out the bedroom window. Every morning I got up and felt like I was in a Grimm's Fairy Tale. Every day I sat looking out the dining room window at the trees in the bottom picture, a chaos of greenery. At night, I listened to the owls moan and sobbed over any small thing offered up in the movies I watched on my computer.

I thought long thoughts. I wrote words and barely erased anything at all. I bathed in silence. And by the end of the week my longing for home grew piercing. This is my way, my stubbornly middle path. I like the idea of falling full force into a piece of fiction, into language itself, but I can't obsess that way. It's rare that I pick up a book and can't put it down, no matter how much I love it. And when given all the time and space needed to dig deep into my own imaginary worlds, I only have so much breath. Good things happen down there below the surface, but I need to come up for air. I need to talk to my family and friends and walk down a busy street. I need to watch The Simpsons and rant about some bullshit on the news.

I'm thankful for my week away and equally thankful to be home.

Okay...I couldn't resist. No, that's not true. I could easily have resisted. However, I chose not to. I drove into thriving downtown Shelton, WA. Sat myself down at the libaray computer and pulled up my blog. And as I sit here I realize how little I miss it. After a walk, I will return to my little house in the woods. I will watch the cedar branches lay very still on top of other cedar branches. I will listen to the water drain from the dirt. I will follow my thoughts from ocean to desert. I will luxuriate in the solitude. The tiny ache. The wide, slow sweep.

Not banished, but hiding.

Last year at this time the first pink trees were fully blushed. This year we struggle towards the season, taking gusts of cold wind with our sunshine and frost in our morning hours. The forecast has my week away at my writing retreat full of cartoon clouds and cartoon rain and chill all around...Well good.

I will hole up as best I can. I will try to subdue the rainy day child in me that finds satisfaction in nothing, each option dismissed with a cranky whine. Who will hear me even if I do? Might as well cozy up to the stove with a nice pen and a smooth white sheet of paper. Or find stories in the good green damp.

The house has no internet connection. No TV. No phone. This is not a punishment but a prize. I head out (and head in) to meet my imagination. I'll see you on the other side.

I never understood the full extent of my pet peeve against holiday and other seasonal flags until I saw this one. This is the flag that proves how silly all the other ones are. It was hard to get a good photo of it unfurled, but this is a homemade flag saluting mac and cheese. "Since 1990." It's brilliant and ridiculous and I love it.

If I were more crafty, I would make my own flag. Maybe an I heart Snooze flag. Or maybe a Celebrate Near Miss Day (March 23rd...the day in 1989 when the earth came within 500,000 of a mountain sized asteroid). The possibilities are endless...

In my grandmother's square of concrete and begonias we made pools out of buckets and restaurants out of old iron patio furniture. Surrounded by stucco walls and overhanging oaks we made ourselves into rich artists and elegant athletes. We stepped into the only patch of sun my grandmother's house offered and found a bubble of privacy and fantasy interrupted only by the demands of my mother – What are you doing out there?

We were playing. We were at Grammy's house celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving and birthdays and anniversaries. We were celebrating our own young selves.

In her 95th year my grandmother has finally moved from that square of concrete patio, the circle of pale blue furniture, the dim lace-lined bedrooms of the only home I ever knew her in. She has left the eucalyptus scented streets of her retirement community in Walnut Creek. She has left the circle of East Bay cities and towns that held her for her entire life. And now she's on her way to Columbus, Ohio to start new in an assisted living apartment near to where my aunt lives. I can only imagine being forced out of my home by my own clumsy feet and my own weary mind. I can only imagine leaving behind a daughter, terminally ill with cancer, because I fall and forget and grow exhausted with loneliness.

My grandmother cried for days and I may too.

Valentine's Day is stupid but Love isn't

I'm guessing most of the people reading this will have already signed the petition at The Courage Campaign but if you haven't, watch this video and sign on. It made me cry even though I couldn't care less about the institute of marriage for myself. It makes me insanely mad that people are so scared, misinformed, hateful...whatever.

I will now spend the afternoon in a swirl of creative revenge fantasies against Ken Starr.


"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

Shirley Hazzard is my hero

Though it feels like I've been wild about her for years, I haven't raved about Shirley Hazzard enough, not here at least. Back in grad school, I resisted her despite a trusted source insisting she was worth the struggle. But the struggle presented by Transit of Venus was too much. I put it down after a handful of pages.

Years later, after easing my way in to Hazzard's world via her early novel Bay of Noon then falling in love with her most recent, The Great Fire, I returned to the difficult middle and found reward. She is not an easy read. Her sentences are dense, her structure complex and the characters are hers to control not ours to relate to. But I have never been so in awe of a book, sentence by sentence, for the precision of its observations. There isn't a single lazy word here.

So read it slowly. Read it twice. She is truly a master.

Here is a description, early in the book, of Ted Tice who has just arrived as a guest in this home and is awaiting the host:

In the fireplace, below the vacant grate, there was a row of aligned fragments, five or six of them, of toasted bread smeared with a dark paste and dusted with ashes.

He was used to the cold and sat as much at his ease as if the room had been warm. He could not physically show such unconcern in the presence of others because the full-grown version of his body was not quite familiar to him; but was easy in his mind, swift and unhurried. From all indications, his body had expected some other inhabitant. He supposed the two would be reconciled in time–as he would know, in time, that the smeared toast was there to poison mice and that Tom was the cat.

February used to be the most dreaded of months. Back in New England it usually meant that the snow was either continuing its seemingly endless descent or it was lingering along the sides of the roads getting black, crunchy and utterly detestable. You were sick to the core of all the winter bullshit. If you had to wear that stupid red sweater one more time you were going to cry. If you had to lunge over yet another puddle of slush you might lock yourself inside for the rest of the season. Glasses still fogged any time you walked in from the cold. Elevators, mass transit and small crowded shops all smelled of wet wool and trapped sweat.

Now, in my beloved Portland, February means the start of spring. Today was full of brilliant sun and temps that allowed coat zippers to stray south. The daffodils are starting to come up and I saw some actual pink blossoms busting loose on a tree down the street. Many a cool gray day lies ahead of us, but it's Groundhog's Day and I say spring is here.

I dream of a white washed room where I wake up in a bundle of late morning sun that got caught in the sheets. My eyes skip across the boards above my bed over to where the door bends out of its frame and can no longer be locked. You have already escaped to cook something sweet in the kitchen. And outside is the ocean and the ocean and the ocean.

My best friend of nearly 20 years turned 40 this weekend. My friend and I surprised him at the house on the Long Beach Peninsula where his boyfriend had taken him. We congratulated ourselves on a surprise well-executed and finished off a pile of linguini and clams and a couple different cakes. To keep us from drifting off into an elderly post-meal snooze, we walked onto the dark misty beach, heavy with clouds and lit by the dim glow of the little town on the other side of the dunes. I might have walked for miles if I were by myself. Instead, we returned to the beautiful victorian house tucked into its patch of mossy evergreens, watched some movies then drifted off into our white clapboard dreams


Company keeps me sane. Friends keep me human. But more and more I long for my own path uninterrupted by others. Misanthrope? Oh, probably a little. But there's something else at play as well. I feel how the day races and how hard it is to slow any of it down when surrounded by people. Or rather, how my ability to concentrate and appreciate are so easily distracted when not soaked in the luxury of solitude.

It's been hard to find the time for this space knowing that everything I might say about the inauguration and these first few days of Obama's presidency have been said. I continue to battle my cynicism and yet can't help but feel a flutter of relief when I see the man standing at the podium and then hear the man and know that he's on excellent terms with the english language. Chalk up at least one victory for literacy and language and those badly battered words, terror and nuclear.

This picture offers no evidence of all the somber and ragged humanity I encountered yesterday on my journey out into the world, though this view did provide some balm when I got back to my neighborhood.

Working out of my house in a rainy winter town without a car makes for a sheltered existence. I seem to be particularly housebound this year. Yesterday I had to go to downtown Portland for a dentist appointment and felt snagged if not shocked by all the people moving through their lives. Not that the Street of Shattered Hopes and Thwarted Dreams (Hawthorne Ave.) doesn't have its share of raw desperation, but something about being downtown really overwhelmed. It's a good thing I don't go down there often because I ended up shelling out a bunch of money to people: a man picking half-eaten egg rolls out of the garbage, the Street Roots guy selling his paper, and a performer desperate enough to paint himself silver and stand statue still outside the mall in the middle of a Monday.

Add to that the grumps on light rail, the old Chinese man slapping his knees violently at a bus stop and the high school girl sent to crawl between the wet, prickly bushes and chain link fence to get the shot put she threw there, the boys on the other side of the bushes having a laugh at her expense.

A good rattling for the stagnant loop of my winter days.

Here's a little fun I found out about from my friend over at Noodles Rice and Pasta. It's a real clock gobbler, so watch out.

Grandma always said bored was a dirty word

I just watched this video of men base jumping and flying in "wingsuits." Amazingly, I don't find this insane. What I find crazy is the human ability to adjust, settle in and grow dull with just about everything. At one point one of these guys says that trying to clear the cliff with the greatest distance got boring so they started to play around with flying closer to the rocks at 100mph.

The fact that this sport exists is kind of thrilling. I mean, they're fucking flying, right? But what does it say about us that we have to throw ourselves off cliffs to get a fresh perspective? These people jump and plummet and swoop and after a time they think they're birds. They think flying is normal.

Okay, so these guys probably aren't big Proust fans, but it makes me wonder what hope there is for delicate poetry and complex fiction and small beautiful paintings in a landscape where people grow bored with flying. Sure, they're two different audiences, but I see this lack of awe and wonder everywhere and wish we could all give ourselves the time to be amazed by something miniscule, overlooked or silent.

I studied anatomy in massage school and grew amazed at the machine that is our bodies. We're so complex that I'm amazed we don't break down and die more easily. Our outstanding adaptability keeps us going even when something goes awry. We shift and adjust and before you know it, hey, it's no big deal. Same ol' same ol'. Kind of boring really.

New Years Eve I rose in the early, unhurried dark and made my way back west. I hit many of the major forms of transportation–car, foot, plane, people mover, light rail, bus–and arrived back in Portland twelve hours after waking. I didn't even make it to midnight on east coast time, exhausted with the effort of crossing a country.

I've now slept, finished off the last of the sweets (for a while), exercised off half a sliver of the massive amounts of chocolate and cheese that I've eaten over the last week and gotten back to work. I sifted my way through the pile of mail, sneering at a pat rejection letter that took a year and a half to get here then moved on to better news. I've been awarded a week long stay at Hypatia-in-the-Woods, a retreat center for women artists in Shelton, WA.

Come March, I will be tucked away in this little secluded house with nothing to do but write. How wonderful. My thought is to try and write something new while I'm there. I want to dig in to the solitude, send the nagging critic off into the woods with some bread crumbs and see what happens.