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...