mercuryfern

Mary

Among my thirty seven cousins all but three are younger than I.  My father is the oldest of twelve children, so when his own father fled to Sudan in an effort to avoid having to declare bankruptcy, my dad became, at sixteen, the man of the house to his brothers and sisters, some as young as infants.  I spent my elementary school weekends at my uncle’s middle and high school sporting events.  At the frequent family gatherings, I cooed over and was entrusted with the care of newborn cousins.

In everyone’s family, the older relations are forever seeing their own childhoods replayed by the children who surround them.  Occupying, as I did, a gray area between generations at a time of turmoil in my large extended family, I was the recipient of perhaps more of this attention than most children receive.  I basked in it.  Someday, I would tell knowing stories about my younger years.

As a teenager, eating meals with the adults, privy to the women’s discussions of perineal cuts vs tears, taking my cues on the consumption of music and literature and pop culture from my now college aged uncles; I noticed a cousin, the first day old baby I ever saw, do something as a seven year old that I knew I had done, and I told whoever was in the room something I’d heard adults say about me my whole life, something that had always seemed a compliment to both parties, the web that kept us together, established the importance of our extensive collective root system.

“Oh, look at that, Andy is just like me.”

His mother, Mary, my favorite aunt, stopped dead in whatever task she’d been engaged in, looking stricken and horrified, as if I were the evil fairy condemning him to be pricked by a spinning wheel and fall down dead in his youth.

“Don’t ever say that.” 

The best thing about not being a teenager anymore is that it is no longer socially acceptable to treat me like a pariah.  For a few years there, my family could get away with disparaging me as a symbol, as an inheritor of their fathers sickness.  Now they have to pretend to respect me. 

My Aunt Mary has been a dairy farmer for most of the time I can remember.  Her farm was a magical place of refuge during my childhood.  I spent summer weeks and school year weekends there, caring for kittens and babies and cows, admiring the bubbly happiness her life seemed infused with, despite their crushing poverty.  She stands as an example of the joys available when one does work one loves, even underpaid, underappreciated, physically draining, never ending work.  She may be the happiest person I know. 

My extended family was a source of intense joy and pride in my childhood.  Despite the costs and inconveniences, I come home across hundreds of miles for the major holidays, I endure their snide questions, their condescension.  I miss how much they used to love me.

Aunt Mary and I attended a small dinner party at my parent’s home this weekend.  Over the winter, she and her husband sold all their cows and are in the midst of starting up a small scale vertically integrated goat cheese operation.  I did some research at the time on marketing opportunities, put her in touch with some CSAs, told her what I know about how these things have been successful in New England.  We talked a long time then about our hopes and dreams, about the simultaneously abysmal and exciting state of small scale agriculture.  It was the sort of conversation I’d dreamed for years of having with her.

A few days ago, I found out that, having not yet been certified to sell their chevre, my aunt and her husband are pouring gallons of goat milk down the drain everyday.  I told her I would buy whatever she had on hand.  We emptied four gallons in to the containers I bought just or that purpose, though she refused to take money form me in exchange for these fruits of her livelihood. 

Today, angry again at my malfunctioning camera, I am preparing to heat the milk to 185 degrees and add 1 quarter cup vinegar for every gallon.  When the milk seizes into a stringy curd, I will strain it through a cheese cloth for an hour.  Sunlight will hit the dripping whey just so, as the sink is in front of a beautiful window, but you, kind readers, are denied that picture, this time because I dropped the damn camera and an apparently integral piece actually flew off. 

No, in fact, the sun has already moved, as it is wont to do.  By the time I get back from buying the cheesecloth and finish cleaning the kitchen, the spot over the sink will be only indirectly lit.  The queso blanco will not  sparkle as it firms, the image I’ve just painted you will never exist.  It is a perpetual heartbreak, it is the reason I take pictures: the light is always shifting, nothing will ever be the same.

Centurium

Your well wishing seems to have worked: the job preinterview went exceptionally well, I will likely start soon.  This weekend I visit my parents. Photos to accompany the following thoughts will be uploaded on my return to Boston.

Since the weather has been foggy, you'll have to take my word for it, but the sunrises over this barn are really quite stunning.  My parents live in the middle of the most fertile non-irrigated cropland in the country; this is the view from their back porch.  It would have been a pleasant place to take ones meals this weekend if it were not for the nostril burning smell of moist cow shit.  Views like this one are becoming more and more rare, even in this county, where agricultural voyeurism is the basis of a fairly extensive tourist industry.  We increasingly grow vinyl sided monstrosities instead.  My parents occupy a particularly ridiculous one. 

To my mind, their two acres of verdant lawn would be better put to use raising livestock, if not produce.  I tried to convince them to get a nice smelly he-goat when they moved in, but the neighborhood association apparently prohibits such things.  Instead, I spent June of that year designing and installing a few hundred square feet of double dug berry and asparagus beds, putting in a huge butterfly garden.  My mother manages a nice tomato and heirloom bean crop every year, too.   She claims that there are species of spiders endemic to her property.  I had to explain to her that the reason she does not see the beautiful yellow and black zigzag web builders in her friend's yards is that she associates with people who are too shortsighted to avoid broadcasting poison all over their land in pursuit of some false perception of beauty.

A bit more than two years ago, when I was just moving into the duplex I have lately left, my mother and I went to a wedding near Albany, stands of oriental poppies I imagined had been established in the 1920's at their burning paper height.  I had known the bride since we were both fetuses, our mothers having met in Lamaze class while pregnant with us, their first.  She was my first pen pal; I probably owe much of my writing style, certainly the habit of writing, the easy intimacy via the written word, to our correspondence.  Kathy and my mother have been best friends for a quarter century, though they have lived a six-hour drive apart for twenty-two years.

Four of us, the mothers and I, plus the bride's little sister, a year younger than my mother's youngest girl, hung the balloons, arranged the flowers, spread the tablecloths, had the sort of intergenerational female bonding made cliché by Lifetime movies.  It was a small reception at a hunting and fishing lodge, the bride having eloped with her military husband a few months earlier, the same time I eloped with Thomas.  Because my father is the oldest of twelve, I've attended more than a few weddings, most of them large and elaborate.  This was different, though, working class and small.  The precious bouquets were full of an otherworldly indigo and lavender flower; the pristine outdoors lent themselves to long talks and serious introspection.

Next morning, the womenfolk and the happy couple went to breakfast, at one of the bed and breakfasts meant for tourists from the city looking for a wholesome country getaway.  The food is very good at such places, needing to satisfy persnickety and sophisticated palates.  On our way in, we noticed the bouquet flower as part of the landscaping, and managed to find out where to buy it.

Long distance best friends have a weakness for trite symbolism, so the idea of each growing Erin's wedding flower in our garden was immensely appealing to us.  It would keep us connected no matter how far apart our pieces of earth were.  Our flock descended and cleaned the place out of every single Montana Blue centurium they had, a purchase we would not have made under any other circumstance, as the plants were sickly without exception.  I drove back to my new Ohio home in a moving van whose cab was full to bursting with not just those flowers but also cuttings from many of my mother's long beloved perennials.

Before I unpacked anything else, the sod was removed and topsoil added; before technically getting permission from our landlady, the flowers were in the ground.  The centurium were badly root bound and damaged by pill bugs, but I separated them gently into five plants, and the next June and the one that followed, too, they were the pride of my garden.  I suppose waxing eloquent about how much the process of gardening meant to me, the friendships it formed, the trust it engendered among the homeowners towards this renter, how it gave the illusion of permanence, is fodder for another post.

Let us instead jump to my leaving that home, to my heart aching over being without the plants I'd spent so many mornings fussing over and admiring.  A better person would be okay with leaving them behind, with knowing that her presence in a place is a net gain of beauty for other eyes to get the best of.  Love seems kinder when it is not accompanied by the anxious need to possess.  Try as I might, I couldn't make peace with the idea that the next tenant might not appreciate the flowers, might neglect them or rip them up, so I did what I've seen my mother do every time we moved during my childhood- I dug up the plants and took them with me.  The summer was chaotic and the centurium died waiting to go in the ground.  There is a metaphor in there, about not just beauty but love and destruction and selfishness, but I refused to dwell on it.  Not everything that happens is a symbol.  Sometimes plants just die because it is too hot and they needed water.

Besides, my mother's centurium, while never as nice as mine (I know because we exchange bragging photos of our respective gardens over the summer) were still around, waiting for me to take cuttings whenever I had someplace suitable to put them.

This morning, puttering around, having woken up early only to have too much fog for a proper sunrise, failing to get this inferior camera to capture the dew beads on spider webs, I discovered that one struggling plant is all that remains of my mother's centurium.  I doubt it will survive the winter in a spot that displeases it so.

My heart doesn't quiver at the fact of this destruction as it did at the fear of it.  Having killed them with my greed, my heart is released from anxiety over how best to honor what I love, and I can finally believe what I knew all along:  beauty is fleeting, but when we are at our best, the glimpses we are given can be enough.

My camera works now.

This is my favorite spot in the woods.  It’s a pier into a tiny pond now dry with the current drought.   The view is not grandiose, some duckweed and a broken ladder... oh, wait, here, one thousand words and all that.  It may be the least idyllic place in the camp- you can hear the road noise loud and clear, but I get the sense no one else goes here.  The trails are tiny and overgrown, intimate.  It is my spot, a little scarred and ill used, but my very own.  Every day, I pass a chicken of the woods mushroom and intend to cut it on my way back, but checking on it has become a comfort.

This land is famous for a certain tallish peak from which one can see all the way to Boston.  It is suspected that the rock after which the spot is named was once part of a Native American communication system.  Oops, sorry about that passive voice there: Adam, the Ranger and resident history nut, suspects it.  Apparently so do other people whose more extensive authority was implied if not stated to me, but, in any case, I don’t remember anything about these original sources now.  Hence the passive.  Almost slid it past you, didn’t I?

I usually prefer tall places.  My favorite spot to have Very Important Drunken Conversations as a seventh and eighth grader was the roof outside my third floor bedroom.  We could see everything: the whole subdivision, the three strip malls bordering it, the highway.  No one could see us, though, and this, combined with the birds eye perspective, and, well, yes the Kuala and milk played its role, too, rendered all our judgments and claustrophobia and angst that much more profound.  Ahhh, I can taste the Marlboro Menthols now... Standing on the edge, woozy, chest about to explode with hope and pain, the wind cradled me and I did not jump.  My heart aches at my current failure to sufficiently recall those heady emotions.  Part of me wishes I could believe in anything so intensely forever, but I know it was exhausting, debilitating.  I can barely function with my eyes at this somewhat less excessive level of dilation.

I am here, in this Eastern Massachusetts Boy Scout camp, to lick my wounds, to get back on my feet.  There is a considerable psychological component to this.  My marital state is not exactly bad, but complicated.  I fear I am not very good at explaining what we are doing, I get disbelieving or pitying looks every time I attempt it.  He spent August sequestered in his parents basement with our cat, finishing the novel he’s been pecking at for two years, sending the short stories off to publishers.  In a few weeks he heads to San Francisco for the rest of the fall to stay with a high school buddy who lived on his couch in Austin for six months.  They will ride the skateparks, discuss their women problems.  Thomas will get a job and pay down some of his debts.

I retreated to my own private sanitarium, to my dear friends who coddle me with their magical rural life, let me eat there frozen blueberries and monopolize their internet.  But, I’m also here to pay down my depression accrued debt.  I freaked out this winter and quit my job without a backup plan.  The college which rejected me a few months later said they’d reconsider if I took a full time semester of classes, so I closed my eyes and put it on my credit card.

All the walks and typing and picture taking and pondering seem to be helping.  I don't hurt so much, but my head feels so fuzzy.  I am hiding from the world, after all, and financially, I just can’t afford to do it anymore.  Did you happen to catch the news yesterday, where they said the feds are doubling the minimum credit card payment?  I was at the gym (my other recent obsession) literally on a treadmill, when I found out.  Time to be reemployed now.

Honestly, I’m terrified.  I don’t feel ready.  I’m doing better than I thought I might, but since this is making sense, I dread changing it.  To that end, I just didn’t go around applying for jobs.  Nothing is more degrading than filling out job applications.  Working itself, even job interviews, do not approach the level of anxiety a job search inevitably inspires in me.  Financial responsibilities are bearing down, I put my head in the sand.

Then yesterday, Abby and Adam, those minions of fate, each found me positions with their employers.  I doubt they know how much it means to me that I am spared the search process.  Even before I came here, I already owed them, Abby especially, more than I will ever have time in this life to repay.  I have been luckier in the friend department than any one person has a right to be.  If all goes well, I could have 1.5 jobs after today.  Let’s not think about what that implies for my blogging career, if we can call it that.  As soon as I press save, I am off.  Wish me luck, cross your crossables, etc. 

Up

Lately, the weird things I do have been unnerving me. 

The other day, I was home alone writing when I stood up and ran a few dozen yards up the path just outside the back door.  After a period of time I cannot wrap my mind around (seconds? hours? weeks?), the ball of my bare foot hit a rock strangely, bruising it and making me stumble.  It was like I’d been jarred out of a dream.  Why the hell am I in the woods?  Running.  Without shoes.  I limped back, slightly alarmed that I hadn’t noticed the litter of sharp sticks on my way out.  I’d never smelled such delicious air, though, a perfect embodiment of early September; the promise of hot chocolate and bonfires implied at the cold edges of it’s gentle warmth.  Near bursting with excitement, I skipped up the kitchen steps two at a time.

My mania has historically been constrained to the charmingly eccentric sort.  In college I frequently went nighttime skinny dipping even long after the Berkshire County leaves had fallen.  I was and am wont to dance with singing clumsy abandon if I hear a good song.  Sometimes, if the synapses are firing at full power and the moon is just right, I will even do so for a tune which otherwise doesn’t resonate.  In New York, a subway musician was playing Pretty Woman and my ass would not hold still.  By the time I realized what I was doing, others on the platform were a bit freaked out.  From what I understand, ruffling the feathers of subway passengers is no small feat. 

All in all, It’s harmless crazy girl stock character stuff.  People worth associating with find it as endearing as I find it fun.  There are, of course, always others in my life; people, frequently authority figures, who see such acts as symbols of worse to come, of reasons for concern.  I am shocked to find myself sympathetic of their view in the last weeks, to feel shame creeping into my perception of what I usually treasure about myself.

I didn’t sleep but four hours Thursday night, up writing feverishly.  When I woke I hit the keyboard running.  Not just entries to this blog, but unnecessarily long comment on others, inappropriate emails to people I don’t know well enough.  Sometimes the fever hits and a morsel of truth is birthed in a fire of fast words, planets collide, insight cascades off of every piece of existence, like water from a spring, it only remains to put the cup under and catch what you can; no no, like an ocean, like waves, it will carry you.

But then there is the coming to. 

On the good days, you pick the thing up and hold it up to the sun.  It is solid; it might even shine.  But the others: mornings where you take a direct hit to the gut knowing you have been presumptuous, arrogant, or, worst of all, the thing to most dread on opening what seemed so profound upon writing; it pulls aside the curtain on your precious hard wrought profundities, reveals the sweet eureka to be an illusion: the words are nonsensical. 

Perlite Dusted Eyes

hey, those moments we were having, I’m treasuring em now.  If someone  hasn’t said this to you yet, they will.

The writer of the above sentences meant well, I know.  He had no way of imagining how bizarre my adolescence was, how completely devoid of even the most comforting of clichés.  The lack of a first boyfriend, I miss this more than not graduating, more than not even attending high school.  What I did instead, was, of course, more interesting, makes for better stories in the end: living in real live communes, attending an unschooling cooperative, becoming, through only my own efforts,  financially self sufficient at 16. 

I had a crush on Mark in fifth grade, when we vied for smartest science nerd status.  He was obsessed with Jacque Cousteau, I with dinosaurs.  He had a crush on me in 7th grade, when I radiated manic charisma, a punk rock goddess; he jockeying for position at the periphery of the circle over which I held court.  Kicked out of school twice, sold down the river by my parents, in ninth grade I ended up at his house, watching Clockwork Orange, desperate.  I’ll admit, I thought I was slumming it, I thought he was safe.  I whispered all my grandiose plans for escape, he got me the job that made them possible.

Our employer was a large retail greenhouse. It was filthy sweaty work, moving heavy things, fixing broken old equipment, watering plants. He was in excellent shape; so was I.  My strength was not hidden from him as  some girls are wont to attempt; I met or topped his ability at every physical or intellectual feat.  He was not afraid of me.  A brave girl reflected in his eyes and I aspired to deserve such infatuation. It didn't take us long to tumble to the floor, hands and mouths discovering pleasure clumsily.

Shortly after we arrived each day, our boss usually went home. He gave us a list of tasks we were to complete; we put lines through each as they were accomplished. At some point we began to think it very funny to add our own chores, crossed off, when we returned the cheet: cunnilingus, nipple suckling, ass grasping.  Then a note left on the time clock,

If you ever again do what I saw you doing behind house eleven, your employment here is over.

We considered leaving a reply:

Your note was unclear about what you saw and deemed unacceptable. Many things happened behind house eleven yesterday. Please be specific about which activities will result in termination.

I needed that job, though, needed the independence the money gave me. We resolved to be more discrete.

Another teenager was hired shortly after. The resulting lack of privacy put  a damper on our affair, though not stopping it entirely. The three of us had fun causing other mischief, having pretentious heated debates about the meaning of life. I was the smart bad girl, one of the guys, enamored of this sweet clever boy I had discovered.  Sometime during this period I invited him to my parents house when they were out of town. We had not yet gotten around to actual coitus; I was anxious to get it out of the way. In retrospect, I should have been suspicious when he declined.

I was carrying a flat full of plants into the greenhouse while he described the blowjob he had received the night before from his girlfriend.  He saw me and didn’t skip a beat, acted like he believed the lie we told everyone so I could keep the job that saved me from my father’s angry control: that nothing passed between us.  She wasn't even a new girlfriend at that point; somehow I was the only person who didn't know. Twelve clay pots of cyclamen shattered violently to the floor, the only failure of my attempt to seal every natural response in.  Not one tear escaped then or ever in his presence, they furrowed deep inside my gut where they lay gnawing for years.

My world crumbled for other reasons then, too.  The tribe that nurtured me through years of parental abuse left me, or I left it.  Where once we found truth and union with the universe through art, where once was the cleansing fire of youthful rage at the hypocrisy of the straight world, was now a hedonistic fashion scene.  My best friend slipped from my grasp, extinguishing her own fire with cocaine and in utero coat hangers, her furious addiction spewing bizarre accusations.  All of our mutual friends believed what she said about me and left me to my own devices.  The unschooling cooperative promised salvation: intellectual passion, community, honesty, but delivered sloth and apathy.  My parents, as always, were oblivious at their finest.  When meals became weekly events, when a bottle of pills failed to end it but took all power of speech and locomotion from me the next day, they did not notice, though my father often found reason to tell me I was ugly, a bitch, an embarrassment.

Through all of this, Mark and I saw each other for 18 hours very week, much of it alone, more time than either of us spent with anyone else.  It seemed important to be on good terms, such was my wounded love for him.  I listened to him prattle on about his insipid wholesome girlfriends, his eyes glazed over when I deigned to broach the topic of my anguishes.  He mocked me often.

This might have been fine, two years of failing at friendship, a long ugly end to a month of sweetness; except that he took to calling the girl of the broken cyclamen fellatio his first girlfriend.  Having touched me was not just disgusting, but insignificant. 

There were other boyfriends, eventually.  Girlfriends, too.  Now, even a husband.  It’s not that I haven’t been loved.  These days, straight facts usually vanquish the years long fear that I am unable to inspire affection or passion.  There is something about the first, though; it digs grooves everything subsequent pulls towards.  I suppose we all have disappointment tangled up in our teenage relationships, but at least most people were loved in the beginning, whatever pain followed.  There were no open skies at the start of my romantic life, no coflowering of souls to recall fondly over late season meals of other fruit.  Everything was frost killed on sprouting.

Walls

My camera is broken.

Could have predicted this, I guess, bought the floor model a year ago, god knows what retail abuse it suffered before I owned it.

It seems particularly bad timing, she and I were just getting used to each other.  Only now do I have access to a computer nice enough to make uploading what I take possible; lots of time on my hands, lots of beauty at my fingertips. This is the moment for defective equipment, of course.

It would have been Monday, walking in the woods, taking pictures of myself, of foresty scenes, when I remembered how the old camera used to sit in my hand, how a rectangle lived at the back of my eye, bracketing off pictures I needed to take, constantly.  I remembered too, how hard it was to take nature photos, how I preferred urban decay, human drama, how clean beauty consistently escaped me.   

This piece of land, though, is scarred from long years of changing human use: a smallpox graveyard, holes once basements, inexplicable rows of piled rocks.  Everywhere lay still straight former foundations and lichen covered curves with a past purpose more obscure, meandering these days along paths before disappearing sharply into the underbrush.  I find myself wondering most about these last, if they constrained sheep once, if they existed only to be built, a tangible task for someone then stuck in a now long silent mind.   Two centuries later, maybe three, countless Boy Scouts have passed with the obliviousness endemic to crowds, and I stand transfixed, fumbling, the light all wrong.

Adam tells me New England has enough stone walls to go to the moon and back.  The crumbling architecture on these 450 acres alone must reach somewhere impressive.  I'm impressed, anyway. 

I had visions of extracting the intersections of hope and defeat, of finding some new small perfection here, of showing you.

The first time I quit taking pictures, it was because my camera got stolen and I couldn’t afford to replace it.  The same thing seems likely to happen now.  My heart says the thing is irreparably damaged, without any real knowledge to indicate one way or another.  Poverty does that, wears down our voices, our visions, any little logistical complication becomes an insurmountable obstacle.

48th and Baltimore

In the summer of 1999 I stood in the street and watched the abandoned rowhome two lots down from mine burn unencumbered for hours. The fire department took it's sweet time arriving to our very poor Cambodian Ethiopian Caribbean African-American neighborhood. By the time the truck arrived, two stories of bay windows and ornate molding were gone, and the fire was hunkered down in what remained, lashing out haughtily at the adjacent buildings: storefront churches and residences.  I’d already put my important possessions in my Geo Metro and moved it a few streets away. We’d taken our cat to stay with a neighbor.  Everyone who lived on our block, and some folks who lived elsewhere, too, were milling about in the sidewalks and on the wide front porches and stairs, Was anybody inside? Was it under control yet? How did it start? No. No. Crackheads. A few days before, a friend and I had walked past that now burning house and noticed, without surprise, a man sitting on the front porch making unsteady use of both a blow torch and a pipe.

Places live in my heart like lovers, and at the time of the fire, West Philadelphia had been my favorite since the summer before.

I was seventeen the first year, living in a four story, eight bedroom Victorian walkup left to decay until some punk rock urban lefties moved in (illegally) and began fixing it up; papering the walls with magazine pictures of birds, adding trapdoors and six burner restaurant stoves.  My beloved squatters bought the house for $5k at auction after they’d lived in it though through two winters of pirated utilities.

This all transpired ten years before I lived in the place; in the intervening time my friends helped other people do the same with two more house on our block, and some in other parts of West Philly, too. Last I heard, the last trust born in those pioneering times owned at least 15 buildings in various parts of the city, with more being reclaimed far under the radar.  I was the youngest among us, a junior member of the secret revolution club, little sister to every idealistic lesbian, feminist stripper and grown up rebel boy.  I could not help but make heroes of these bohemian monkey wrenchers, locking themselves in creative ways to large scale paper mache; getting arrested picturesquely. I marched, too: more aid for this or that, no troops here or there, free so and so. We disobeyed civilly. 

My days were spent at the Children's Garden down the street, teaching the neighborhood kids about compost and mint. All thirty of them, from two to twelve years old, called every insect a cockroach and ran screaming from it, but I sat with the youngest ones in the only circle of shade and taught each to eat mulberries fresh from the tree in June.  Come July, we stuffed our cheeks with sunshine hot cherry tomatoes, sweet juice running from between our lips like blood.  Those small children and I bit into the meat of existence two summers running: soil, sun, water, though wars born of poverty and despair raged just outside our chain link fence.

The family across the street from the garden had a social worker who wanted them to participate in our project. He was an attractive black man, somewhat overdressed, perhaps, certainly over cologned, but good with kids, articulate, committed to social justice. Wearing denim fragments in the near liquid heat, I played the blue cowgirl as always, explaining the goals of the program, pointing out plants of interest as I led him through our verdant oasis, my heart bursting with pride at how much we had done, how important it was.   When I mentioned most fruit trees need a second nearby to produce, he did not stop at raising his eyebrows suggestively, but felt the need to say,  "Just like men and women."  Yes, handsome, I could love you like a peach tree in full pollenheavy bloom.  He asked me out, I gave the only reasonable answer.  One does not turn up an opportunity to gaze for hours into green eyes set against chocolate skin.   Where to go?  Maybe he could come to my house, we could watch a movie. No, no, my house was filthy, I lived with seven other hippies, we didn't have a TV.  Had he been to the free art museum?  He was wary, I needed to get back to work, we'd figure it out later, exchanged numbers to that end.

A few days later, I walked to the only grocery store nearby. We anarchists were the only white people in the neighborhood, so every time I made the four block trek, I was by far the palest person shopping. That day, I saw two mothers from the garden- we chatted warmly if briefly. The cashier recognized me, smiled like she was glad to see me, the look she gave every sweet tough grandmother, every primped thin mother.  Week after week, I stood in line with my orange juice concentrate or pretzels, coveting that smile.  Having received it, I belonged, always had and always would.  I came home.

The exit opened onto a day not yet hot, full of well dressed people showing of for each other and squinting against the sun.  Street vendors sold sparkly things to fashonistas, summertime debauchery blaring from staticy black boxes.  Not ten steps away, the social worker chatted with a group of friends, I presumed, other guys his age, though dressed with more street credibility, looking perhaps tougher.  Some of their faces were familiar, uncles and maybe fathers of kids at the garden. A smiling hello passed my lips as I walked toward the social worker. He made eye contact for half a second, then broke it wordlessly. My steps took me within a few feet of him on the wide busy sidewalk.  I lingered briefly at the vegetable truck, bought two red peppers less then five feet from where he was standing, facing me. I am the only person with blonde hair for twelve square blocks. There is no way he does not see me, no way he does not recognize me.  My hurt feelings giving way to indignation, I did not try to get his attention again, just walked home.

For a successful black man to be involved with a white woman is strongly frowned upon in the politicized black neighborhoods of West Philly. It is an abandonment of the community, it is a slap in the face to black women, to black pride. I can understand that, I support that. Black women are the spine of this neighborhood, they deserve not to be treated as if they are not good enough for the men who make it.

At the very least, the social worker was not willing to admit to his friends that he was romantically interested in a white woman. He may have been in another, more legitimate, relationship as well: wife, serious girlfriend. In any case, it was obvious in that moment that he wanted to bed me without anyone ever knowing about it, to make me a secret he would lie about later.  Whatever larger social forces swirl around us, whatever legitimate grievances your community has against mine, whatever symbolism is carried by unfortunate demographic trends, we are individuals when we flirt.  I will not fuck someone who ignores me in public.

A Mind for Paper Cranes

Abby hates ideas. 

She didn’t always know this about herself, but has been figuring it out over the last year.  I am sympathetic to being wary of valuing theory over practice, but I do love me some theory.  Sometimes I dream of drowning happily in hypotheticals.  To be honest, though, when I’ve had the opportunity, the isolation chafes and I run screaming to some manual labor.

Her new self definition surprised me.  In college we took many of our classes together, usually two a semester. I loved discussion in classes with Abby best of all, because this girl combines irreverence and passion like no one I’ve ever known.  Talking to her, old pieces are hilarious, ridiculous, meaningful, but most of all, relevant.  Abby’s not just the first one to say the emperor has not clothes, but she does so with complete openness, with no malice whatsoever towards those of us inadvertently playing at the charade.

The three of us sat in their hot tub last night, stars and trees above, the wood stove keeping the half barrel nicely in the mid nineties.  We talked about our childhoods, strange how little I’ve told them.  I realized at the Hootenanny that Eli didn’t know I’d been institutionalized at 14, nor do any of my other fiends from that era.

The conversation turned to the Yiddish Volk from which Abby is lately returned, to Mensa, to books we have recently read.

“So, I picked up this book on homesteading, which is something Adam and I are pretty interested in, we read a fair number of these things.  This one, though, was, like, somebody’s thesis, I guess, and it was just a bunch of categories into which homesteaders could be put, and then expounding on those categories.  Y’know, the tell you what they are going to tell you, then they tell you, then they tell you what they told you.  I hate that shit.  I want to read about how exactly one particular family gets water or heats their house, or makes cheese or whatever, not a bunch of definitions some girl made up... 

“...My favorite books are cookbooks, origami books, and Yiddish English dictionaries.  Once you read a novel, you are done with it, you know?.. 

“...I always hated writing papers in college.  I could do it, I always got a’s and b’s because they were grammatically and structurally correct, but I never had any *ideas*...”

We went inside after a half hour or so; made a German pancakes from the CSA apples and one of the beloved cookbooks.

This morning, I went out for one of the walks I am failing to make a daily habit, and noticed a red and white crane sitting on the steps.  I’d planned to take pictures of a small pier jutting into a dried pond I’d found along an overgrown path last night, but I was entranced by this geometric litter.  My camera and I don’t quite get along yet, I miss the control I had over my manual silver gelatin baby. 

I spent what must have been close to an hour fiddling with the few options and the light and my position and the software and deleting everything to head back out again for more pictures; all the while thinking about the intersection of facts and ideas, how sometimes they intertwine pleasantly but other times are best consumed as separate dishes.

Sing it with me now, Johnathan Richman style: Whoa-OH, New England!

Massachusetts has got the small scale agriculture thing down.  My household will eat all of the above produce less than a mile from where it was grown.  Every week, we get a similar haul, including cut flowers and copious fresh herbs; all varying, of course, with the seasons.  The world comes close to falling apart sometimes, but if you can take an few minutes to pick cherry tomatoes and swiss chard with your neighbor, the pieces fit together. 

Adam thinks joining a CSA is one of the best things we can do to promote homeland security.  If our food is grown locally, a gasoline shortage cannot threaten us with starvation.  At the very least, I like knowing that my physical nourishment promotes strength in the community and gives health to the soil it came from.  Look at that table again and tell me it doesn’t reaffirm your faith in the redemptive power of beauty.

I can’t emphasize this enough:  get a membership at your local Community Supported Agriculture farm.  Do it now.

Stupid World

Usually, my husband and I take turns being depressed.  We’ve got the rhythm perfected; one of us wallows and the other comforts, then we switch.

This year, for a change, we thought it would be fun to have our quarter- and tertiary- life crises at the same time.  Now, he types sequestered in his parent’s Ohio basement with our cat, finishing the novel he’s been working on for two years, while I do the Walden Pond thing here in New England.  Last night he called me, bubbly with joy.  My dear one finished the rough draft after only a month, was full of plans to head to New Orleans with the local Red Cross.

This afternoon we had some trouble getting in touch.  When we finally did speak, he was incoherent with booze and sorrow.  An entire week’s revisions had been somehow destroyed in an attempt at printing.  The residents of his hometown conspired to convince him offering aid to a disaster zone was a fool’s errand. 

I will resist the urge to lambast his family as cowardly racists; I will not rage at their efforts to vacuum all passion from everyone unfortunate enough to come near their black hole of small minded provincial jealousy. 

The sentences will be unearthed again, there will be other chances to put the cerebral pain in it’s place by pouring his considerable empathy into something tangible.  Throwing my fury at such small injustices: files corrupted, enthusiasm extinguished, is pathetic; especially in times such as these, when starving people hide from trigger happy gun toters, fire ants, and despair, in attics made islands by corpse filled sludge.

Still, when the person who embodies all that is good and pure in my existence gets handed a day that makes him question the value of his own life, my fire and brimstone cannot be reasoned with.