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.

Pause

Andover is folding itself into a late afternoon fog and we, in this particular holiday household are on pause. The 6-yr old nephew and his mother, my sister, are out at a movie. My parents are at work. My brother in law is working in his bedroom. My old friends are off in other towns. The dog is asleep. In this pause I breathe more fully and relish the quiet.

In another hour the household will rev up again for the evening. The TV will blare, drinks will be poured, both gentle and biting arguments will begin. In this house,traffic jabs and shifts around oversized furniture in miniature rooms. There is no flow. In this house, without a single curtain, drape or blind to its name, all our noise and jagged movements are advertised to the neighborhood.

I love this family but I'm ready to go home to a cover of rain, velvet curtains and the familiar sweeping silences of my Portland life.