Late bloomers

This is the first year I've planted dahlias.  I can see how the man I bought my bulbs from got obsessed.  His whole property is devoted to this prolific late bloomer.  I only got one of mine to mature, but every day there's a new bud unfolding its crazy pink petals.  It doesn't care that today is the first day of fall and that the Japanese Maple in the front yard is sending out its red warning signal – Danger! Danger! Winter approaching!  The dahlia exists in a state of denial that I can fully embrace:  Fuck that chilly breeze.  Fuck that sagging dresser drawer loaded down with sweaters.  It's summer, dammit...look at me shine!

My affinity for this late blooming beauty makes sense in another way too.  In one week I turn 40 and I'm surprised to find that it feels like cause for celebration rather than despair.  I just slipped into a pair of jeans I haven't been able to fit into in several years.  The various body aches and pains that plagued me for the same amount of time are gone.  The chaos that consumed my psyche in my teens and twenties and the hurdles thrown at me in my thirties have grown smooth and calm. 

At 40 my mother had a 9 and 11-year old and was preparing to take us on a tour of Europe.  As V.P. of a candy company my father traveled weekly between Chicago and New York.  My life is very different, but I have no complaints. Being on a different schedule than the rest of the garden flowers can be a pretty good thing.

Summer spent

My disappearance from this blog all summer is not necessarily an indicator of a season full of activity, too busy and brimming with heat to bother slumping down in front of the computer to post a thought or too. Our six short weeks of tepid, cloudless balm were sweet but largely uninspired. Nonetheless, here are 6 highlights.

1. In search of warmer weather we drove south to camp in the Willamette National Forest in a new spot with a frigid but beautiful swimming hole.  Standing on a narrow bridge over the Santiam River, we looked into the clear night sky and saw the milky way.  No pictures.  Forgot my camera.
2. I took a workshop in massage for the frail elderly.  I rubbed lotion into the thin map of skin on the hands of women in a skilled nursing facility, some of them able to offer nothing but a vague grin, some of them responding by returning the favor and rubbing my hands.  As I said to the instructor, this work is going to force me to be a better person.
3. At 30 I bought my beau a gorilla suit, a massive contraption of fur and rubber.  This summer, when he turned 40, we went to Men's Warehouse and I bought him a monkey suit.  There is something very sexy about a man in a tailored suit holding a guitar.
4. I coaxed from the earth a towering sungold tomato plant, a plodding zucchini, a handful of strawberries and a single dahlia plant that looks like a pom-pom from Dr. Seuss.
5. I entertained my entire immediate family for nearly two weeks straight with only the briefest of less-than-generous behavior.  Six of us packed into a giant air-conditioned SUV, shunning the flash of hot weather, and drove to the coast, the gorge, the valley. 
6. I sat in the dappled afternoon light of my living room and read The Odyssey and Lia Purpura's magnificent essays, On Looking and Gregoire Bouillier's funny, crazy wonderful book The Mystery Guest.  I thought a great deal about writing, about why I started writing and why I should continue, both here and elsewhere.  I haven't come up with the answer yet, though I feel a slow but powerful shift beneath me, aiming me in a slightly different, more challenging direction.

Cannon Beach

Mt. Hood

Kale grown for the sole purpose of making kale chips

Spider playground.

My view for the last hot day of the year, August 30th.

Rescue

In the summer, there are three things I need to accomplish to feel that all is as it should be:

1. Berry picking at Sauvie Island Farms. Despite getting the first bee sting I've had since I was 5, the day was gorgeous, the berries plentiful and I was surprisingly tickled with the new added feature of a wagon ride out to the fields and back. It was driven by this young lad with what has to be one of the sweeter summer jobs for a teenager–driving a tractor around and around while listening to your ipod.



2. Half an hour in from the coast sits my favorite camping spot. Last year we got shut out and had to settle for a day trip to the swimming hole, but this year there was plenty of space. The water wasn't too cold, though the chilly breeze let us dip no deeper than our waists. Instead we watched salamanders crawl among the seaweed, watched hawks circle the sky. We admired the giant evergreens, and lush, mossy campsites kept in tidy order by an inmate with what has to be one of the sweeter prisoner work gigs - a shovel for ash, a pair of clippers to trim back the foliage creeping onto the paths and the tall, bright forest all around you.

3. Tin House runs a week-long workshop every July and every July I hop on my bike and savor what becomes a well-worn path out to Reed College to sit in on lectures and readings. This year, my favorite bit of advice came from Steve Almond's lecture about the particular torture that is the life of a writer. It is this: If you can find some more efficient form of rescue, I recommend you do so.

Hello summer

Finally, it's hot. Say what you will about leaping from 55 to 95 or how it makes you lethargic or how you have to rush from one air conditioned container to the next...I love it. I'm in love with it. I'm lovin' all up on it. After so many months of cool wetness, this all-encompassing, full bore blaze is like a long hot kiss.

I love the long days and the way the heat builds across the hours. This is the brief time of year when direct sunlight actually flirts with my bedroom, licking the window sill and curtains just before it drifts behind the neighbor's house. The view is less than stellar–a wobbly red fence, the meeting point of two garage roofs and beyond the giant swaying trees–but for a few minutes, the curtain glows and billows like a jellyfish. The breeze stirs the heat without distilling it, like in a hot bath made hotter by the sway of a knee.

Love it, I say. It won't be here long.

Kelly, Lime and Forest

Mud green. Moss green. Fresh-from-the-seed green. Pine, pond and sea-foam. Three hikes in one week: Angel's Rest, Tryon State Park and Falcon Cove. I feel like a forest creature, slicked in mud and swallowed in leaves. Eyes made of wet emeralds. Blood made of bark dust. The clouds float through me and I drink.

Good glowing fruit

I can't deny that the relentless wet of May and the cool, damp of June have left me less celebratory than I usually would be this time of year. But then I remembered the strawberries I planted for the first time this spring and suddenly the tiny harvest is beginning to pay off. It's 55 and misty but I just ate this luscious fruit grown in my backyard. Behold the perfect palate cleanser: Bitterness removed. Sweetness restored.

Poetry x 12: Belonging

I'm late on reporting on the Poetry x 12 challenge for May. But late for what and for whom? I'm pretty convinced that the vast majority of the hits on this blog are from Japanese pornography spammers (now there's a term I couldn't have imagined using ten years ago.) Oh well. Whose to say Japanese pornographers don't like Iranian poetry.

May's challenge was to read a poetry collection from another part of the world. This was a perfect opportunity to read my former classmate's translation of poetry written by Iranians in exile. Belonging is a beautiful book that offers Niloufar Talebi's translations of three different generations of Iranians all of whom left their country because of the 1979 revolution.

This collection was appealing, in part, because I'm drawn to literature that either evokes a strong sense of place or explores place as a theme. What does it mean to have a home you will never see again? One of the more well-known poets included in the collection, Nader Naderpour, writes in his poem "Conversation in the Dark":

World of swarming crowds,
And of all that avails on the endless horizon,
If we have a destiny, it is our loneliness.

I love Mina Assadi's simple, evocative expression of longing in "Yearning for Saari 1" where she addresses the wet weeds of her homeland:

tell the breeze
that so lovingly passes through you,
someone on this side
of the world is also enamored
of the scent of your bodies!

Loneliness is not the only subject here, but it is the one I was most drawn to. There is actually great diversity of style and subject in this sampling and I was continually impressed with Niloufar's translation abilities. Despite the fact that the original poems accompany each of the translations, it was easy to forget that these were not written in English. This is a great introduction to a world of voices of which we've heard far too little. For more info on contemporary Iranian literature and the other interesting work that Niloufar is doing, check out The Translation Project.

This month's challenge: The classic poetry collection you always meant to read but never have. Coincidentally, I purchased a copy of The Odyssey a week or so ago and have dug in. This is not only in keeping with the Poetry x 12 challenge, but in keeping with my habit of reading large dense books during the summer. I swear, I don't do it on purpose, but clearly my subconscious is in rebellion against the breezy beach book. But more on that another time...

The green fuse drives the flower

More nothing. Just a bit of documentation. Garden as of the first week of June. Now all we need is a respite from the rain for a little while so I can sit out here and watch the crows watch me and watch the squash unfurl oh. . . so. . . slowly from the earth. Green strawberries. Baby, slug-nibbled lettuce. Ugly little Dahlia shoots struggling up into the light.

Excuses

I've had so little to say because:

• I've been rubbing butts (and backs and achilles tendons)
• The lengthy case of tendonitis I've been nursing has had me contemplating the end of my career and/or the beginning of my ability to predict the weather with my joints.
  
• The Internet is pretty and shiny.
• The Megavolcano in Yosemite Park explodes approximately every 600,000 years. The last time it went off was 640,000 years ago.
• For ages, we've contemplated the end of our oil supply and now we will suffocate in the stuff because they can't make it stop.
  
• I was given my very first car by some very generous friends and now I must confront all the reasons I never bought one (see above). The amount of space it takes up in my brain is appalling.
• Writing is hard and researching agents is exhausting.
  
• Matt Debenham's The Book of Right and Wrong, Lydia Davis' Varieties of Disturbance and Belonging, Nilofar Talebi's translations of Iranian poetry.
  
• Rain in the form of sweet spring, wild & tempestuous, sunshower, two-minute downpour and when will it ever fucking stop.
• Weeds needed pulling, branches needed lopping and just look at the inky spill off the tongue of that iris.
  

Spring break

I've been away. Out in the world. In shorts and t-shirts and sandals. In the sun. In the park. Not caring much about writing because I can walk in the woods with my beau in mid May then come home and eat pudding and watch Irish movies with the subtitles on. Just like my beau, this city knows how to soothe me and swoon me and sweep me off my feet.

Poetry x 12 where I delve into Shel

April disintegrated in my hands. Already gone and I never chimed in on the Poetry x 12 Challenge for the month which was to read a favorite collection from childhood. For me, there was really only one shining star of verse in my youth and that was Shel Silverstein. I still have my copies of Where the Sidewalk Ends and Light in the Attic. I devoured these as a kid. Returning to them now, I was reminded of how dark and sad some of these poems are. I mean, look at the author photo. Good god. My mother must not have turned the book over before buying it. Either that, or she understood that this would appeal to her rather broody child.

As an adult, what appealed to me most was the juxtaposition of the sing-song rhymes and the slightly sinister tone. For example, "Me-Stew" ends with this: So bring out your stew bowls/You gobblers and snackers/ Farewell – and I hope you enjoy me with crackers! That "Farewell" kind of kills me. As does poor "Hector the Collector" who calls over "all the silly sightless people" to share his treasure box of bricks, vases, buckles, etc. and they call it junk. Heartbreaking, really. Brilliant really.

Joseph Harker, the man managing the Poetry x 12 challenge has more to say about Shel over at Naming Constellations.

And next on the list for May is the challenge to read poetry from a foreign country. A perfect opportunity to read more of my fellow Bennington-ites efforts. I'll be reading Nilofar Talebi's translation of Iranian poetry, Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World.

A package (or four) in the mail

All four of these volumes came in the mail today: Matt Debenham's The Book of Right and Wrong, Hayden Saunier's Tips for Domestic Travel, Damian Rogers' Paper Radio and the latest issue of Blue Mesa Review. The fact that I pulled this mighty stack of literature from my mailbox all at once made me nervous at first. It seemed likely that all these beautifully bound words were going to fill me with petty jealousy or at least tug me deeper into the shallow but stinky pit of crankiness I've been sitting in lately. Here was a trio of books written by people who were at the Bennington Writing Seminars at the same time I was and alongside them, a lit journal I received for losing a fiction contest.

I sat on my porch, undoing the books from their wrappings and waited for the sick trickle of envy. Instead, I found my mood shifting. As I opened each book and read the first page, the first poems, I was genuinely moved. It wasn't because my friends had been published, but because the words were so good. No shit, I'm not just saying that. These are some talented people and how can I not be soothed and cheered by a bit of fine writing? A big thank you to them all.

OMG Tinkers won the Pulitzer!

I'm so thrilled that Paul Harding's Tinkers has won the Pulitzer Prize. It gives me hope that a debut novel from a small, specialized independent press (Bellevue Literary Press) can get this kind of attention. At a time when the records of our lives are regularly trimmed to a 140 characters or less and the "like" button is all we have to hit to feel like we've connected, Tinkers offers an alternative of long, luscious sentences and a beautifully odd structure. I highly recommend it as a cure for too many self-involved status updates.

"He thought, Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband's boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas."

Done

I'm done. The book is done. The file is saved in a dozen different places. The words are fixed. It feels less strange than I thought it would. As the end neared, I procrastinated a bit, not wanting to seal this world up for good. Not wanting to resign my characters once and for all to the fates I'd chosen for them. But overall, it was anticlimactic.

I've written this book half a dozen times, at least. With each earlier draft, I felt great joy and relief for my accomplishments. This time, I simply feel done. The cement has dried. It feels less like an accomplishment and more like a simple fact. I'm 5'10", have brown hair, and wrote a novel.

The state of publishing today is daunting to say the least. The long, hard trial of trying to find a place in the world for my story brings a sickening swell to my stomach. I can't imagine NOT trying, but I'm also weighing how much of my life I'll allow to be consumed by the process. It's a good story. I've worked very very hard at it. All I can do is hope for a little luck.

With that, I close my eyes and start dreaming into my next project.

Sharing

I breath, not a sigh, but a giant exhalation of relief. For the last ten days we've been hosting a guest who has now left. My house is returned to me, with all its dusty corners and sweet, forgotten surprises, like this bouquet of euphorbia that's been sitting ignored in my front window. Now I can take photos of it without being questioned about my photography habits or my gardening habits. I no longer have to share my thoughts or my space.

I've been reminding myself repeatedly throughout our guest's stay, just how lucky we are. Ten days with an old acquaintance should be considered a gift, a chance to learn something new. We have plenty of room to share. We have plenty of food. But what about people who have to take in refugee relatives? What about people who have never known a couple square feet of private space?

I wonder if my love of solitude is something I was born with or if it's at least partially a product of having grown up with my own bedroom, a wide backyard and a sister who was equally uninterested in my company as I was with hers. Is there anyone in the insanely crowded cities of India or China who have the same hermetic longings but are forced to always share, to be perpetually in the presence of others? There are ways to adapt, I suppose. I'm just thankful that I don't need to find out what those are. Not yet, at least.

I'd been wanting to see Jane Campion's movie Bright Star, so when I realized this month's Poetry x 12 challenge was to read a poetry collection by a poet featured in a movie, it seemed like the obvious, if not downright lazy choice. All I knew about Bright Star was that it was by Campion, who's made some truly great movies, and that it was a love story about a poet. For some reason I thought it was about W.B. Yeats and Maude Gonne. Of course, in an instant of turning on the movie, I realized these were not Irish Nationalists at the turn of the century. This was Keats and Fanny Brawne. Oh dear.

I've never been a fan of the Romantics. I distinctly missed out on studying with the best English Prof. at my college because he taught Shelly and Byron and Keats. I couldn't stomach it. But that was twenty years ago. Maybe Keats and I could come to better terms via the silver screen.

It is a beautifully filmed movie. And in this case, the beauty of each and every shot, is not just a bit of tasty frosting, but what the movie is about. I can still feel the breeze rolling in through that window, fluttering across her skirt. Aaaaah.

Scrawny, sickly Keats (who could easily have been plucked out of a Portland bar, stripped of his ironic t-shirt and made to memorize the lines) says this to Fanny when she first feigns an interest in poetry: "A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it's to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."

Good advice in general, and in particular with the Romantics. When I pulled out my giant, tattered copy of Norton's English Literature and flipped through the thin pages to the section on Keats I tried to keep this advice in mind, but still, I failed. I could barely get through a single Ode. It wasn't until I looked up some very oddly animated videos of Keats poetry that I was able to begin luxuriating (with my eyes closed...the videos creeped me out). Without trying to follow the meaning or understand the philosophy I fell into the rhythms of the language, soothed by them like a lullaby. Of course, lullabies are really good at putting me to sleep.

So much for this month's challenge. Now who's going to make that Yeats movie? That I really want to see.

Camera Supplies. Myrtlewood. Souvenirs.

Last week, I took the train to Seattle. As wary as I was of this notoriously tardy stretch of Amtrak, it was hard for me to pass up a few hours of swaying through the scenery. I love the faded glory of the old train stations. I love the graffiti-slashed walls nobody's supposed to see. I love the brambled woods that open onto a brilliant stretch of dark blue harbor. As long as the train is moving, I feel as though I could sit forever and watch the world pass this way. Something about the train rhythm and the train view syncs perfectly with my brain's rhythms and thoughts: Not dwelling, but seeing and smiling and moving on. Over and over and over.

The Other Grandmother

Last week I received a short video my sister made for her students who were doing a digital storytelling project. The subject was my paternal grandmother, a strong, bright mystery of a woman. As my sister explains in the video, my grandmother was her role model, the woman she most longed to be. My sister became an archeologist just like my grandmother, traveling the world to dig around in small plots of strange dirt.

I'm sure I've pulled out the same grandmother myself in more than one school essay. She was the easy one to spotlight as wild and unique. She had impossibly long dark hair that she secreted up into a bun every morning. She married and divorced the same man twice. She lived in Saudi Arabia for 20 years and rose above the ranks of the "pot pickers" to become a published archeologist.

But what about the other grandmother? She was the American born daughter of two Italian immigrants. She lived in the Bay Area for 95 years, worked in a ketchup factory, married young and raised three daughters. At the age of 55 she moved into a retirement community and made us biscotti every Christmas. Instead of ancient desert treasures, she collected crystal figurines. Instead of escaping to exotic landscapes she traveled almost exclusively to bask in the warmth of her family.

I've never really had one person, or even a series of people, that filled me with awe and ambition. My influences have always been subtle and largely undefined. But in light of my sister's project, I need to give my maternal grandmother a hardy nod. She was the person who defended me against my mother's temper, the one who, at 96, continues to love her late husband claiming (over and over) that she was happy to have him for 40 good years. Not a great intellectual, but a great lover of family and friends. The one who kept my photo on top of her TV and never fails to show her love to those who deserve it.

Dioramas and so much more

The February challenge for Poetry x 12 (now being administered by Joseph Harker) was to read a collection recommended by somebody else. I took up Amy Gerstler's Dearest Creature recommended by Deb at Stoney Moss. I forgot about writing something up for this challenge and have now returned the book to the library, but here are a few random thoughts:

This was such a different experience from the A.R. Ammons collection I read the month before. Reading this collection felt like hanging out with the cool kid, not the pretty popular girl, but the one who's really smart and sexy and just a little devious. Funny because the first poem is a letter to a young girl welcoming her into the ranks of the nerds. Well, if that's the case then Gerstler's my kind of nerd.

Fun and funny and poignant, I really enjoyed these poems. I didn't swoon with the language the way I did with a few of Ammons' pieces, but they delivered their punch. Plus there's a diorama on the cover and every good nerd knows how cool dioramas are!

Why I Love Portland: A brief list

• Because this was what the sky offered me at 6:20 last night.
• Because my neighbors seems to own no curtains though they do own chickens that are housed in their front yard.
• Because this is February and rather than being crushed by the weight of winter, I'm tripping on the sidewalk while looking up at the spring blooms.