cafemama ... lovably behind schedule and out-of-date.
permission summer . august 25 . 2010
We wake, when we wake; we eat cookies, watermelon, ice cream, peaches; we do not plan our days so much as we observe them, watching with slow eyes as they slump out like a deflated exercise ball before us, whop, thlupp, mummm... The TV is on more than I strictly allow, and while they are watching it and I have finally begun a sentence that sings sentiently, one yells, "can I please have more toast?!" and another, another. Toast dispersed, I am hungry too, the dishes should be washed and the chickens begin to bwaawwkk. When I come in, more toast is required. With butter, and honey, and cinnamon.
So the days go. We do not swim, or picnic, or hike; we do not camp, or boat, or barbecue. We do not visit the library once. We walk through the alley, one day, and we pick blackberries. We find tart apples, and hops, and little rocks, and a ripe tomato, and figs and Asian pears and grapes long from ripe, and fennel, fennel, fennel. I want to grasp this under the arms, lift it high and swing it around in the air -- but it is over as soon it has begun, the boys are running every which way and soon they are out of sight, gone, down the alley hill, across the street. Home, we find them, three, at the computer, playing a game about jumping and bopping.
How much it is, how much, to let go of the image that I have somehow concocted, to let go of the design of summer as it might be. There might be tall pine trees, a cold stream, cooking on a grate blackened from use and fires built inexpertly. There may be cabins with bunk beds, a cafeteria, capture the flag. There should be picture books, concerts in parks, old blankets laid on grass, picnic tables, watermelon slurped, not sitting with legs spread wide on the kitchen floor, but in rows of cousins and lifelong friends.
When I see summer and childhood, I see sleeping bags and mountains and huckleberries, running in cool grass over wide lawns, chasing children we meet only when the days are long. I see the sky at night when it is dark, wholly dark, stars so close you blink, blink again, to clear your head of the fancy you could reach one, jump, touch it with your fingers. I see us looking at one another, eyes wide, knowing this is something we'll never, ever forget. A bear. A geyser. The very mountain top. An airplane ride.
This has not been our summer. I have wasted time; I have missed opportunities; I have slung darts at the target badly and without practice, brain dulled with too little sleep and too much leisure. All I have are these: a cold hour at the beach, robot arms stacked of canning rings, blackberry leather made, free, words that follow on behind words too slowly, too slowly, books piling up too fast, too fast. I apologize to my boys, who deserve a summer from my imagination, not one to which I have given permission too easily, 'yes' without thinking first, without asking a followup question.
How could I have allowed this? How can it be over, almost, all but the running and the scrambling and the routine trudge back to routine? I cannot say, I can only give myself permission to open my eyes, cock back my head and look at the stars through the city lights. Look, says Everett, the first star.
It is not the first, it is nearly 11 p.m., but I say, oh! and I smile with my voice, and go back to my canning pot, sorry, I say inside, sorry, and reach for the ice cream.
paying the bills
coping . july 18 . 2010
In the morning, it is easy.
Or, it is not easy, being here, at home with these three boys and a husband far away. When it is hard, it blazes out, hot and dizzy and no rational thought can penetrate my thick, yeasty skull. My sinuses blouse with blood, angry; my eyes blear; I want to throw myself into a cool river, sewage or no, I want to lie spread-eagled on the kitchen floor and sob. Too much, too much! I harangue, I bluster; I wail to my heathen soul.
It is easy in the long, winding wisping string of time. It is not easy in the moments. It is in the moments when I hear my eldest, suddenly scattering into a shellfish-like froth, kicking and writhing in an agony of mosquito-bite itches, just as I have found that quiet hummmm of focus to complete a thought, or just as I have picked up a particularly delicious piece of chocolate, or just as I have begun to chop an onion. I take my breath, I say, "I'm sorry, sweetie, I know how that feels," even though I have twice the mosquito bites, I empathize, but his undoneness exhausts me.
It is in the close focus that I can see the grime, grime everywhere, in the corners of the baseboards and the tops of the windowframes, on the windows and the peeling-painted doorjambs, on the shins and fingernails and dimples of my boys. The cars have been kicked across the kitchen, again, by an angry boy (or two, on one day); they are under the dishwasher that does not work, they are nestled between the filthy garbage can and the filthier dustpan; they are behind the compost bucket. There are holes in the walls, where the plaster has fallen or been ripped to expose wiring or has been punched or just picked at, bit by ancient bit, by little fingers. There are weeds, weeds everywhere, bursting up between my strawberry plants and around my garlic and through the neighbor's fence and among the piled branches and despite the hard gravelly clay and through the woodchips and in great patches and strips in the wildest parts of my backyard. The tomatoes in the back are thirsty; the peach tree looks parched to death; the blueberries are choked by the raspberries and the zucchini was trampled by generous helpers. I set out, some mornings, some afternoons, armed with garden gloves and watering cans, buckets of dirt and rags of vinegar or dish soap, shovels and brooms and dusting cloths, long-sleeved organic cotton shirts and floppy hats. I scrabble, I scrape, I scrub, I scrunch up my nose and wrinkle my brow and think, too much, too much! I, publican-like, beat my breast, cry out, not worthy! And inside, there are screams, high-pitched and ragged, I say to no one, "I'm coming, sweetie, what's wrong?" and do not go right away, there is another weed to pull, a bucket to return to its compost-pile, past-ripe raspberries to eat, straight from the bush, yearning, and only then do I go inside to negotiate this desperate struggle over a purple Hot Wheels snowmobile.
The boys are hungry, the clothes are dirty, the bills must be paid and the in-laws must be visited. The milk must be picked up, the playdates must be arranged, the cat food must be filled, filled again, filled again. None of this is negotiable, none of it is hard, unless I dwell on the must-ness of it all.
And yet. The mornings are easy. We rise to NPR and happy games of Legos and bowls of sweet cherries, the coffee is dark and sweet as love, the pace is slow and we have silliness, brightness, beauty too. The days are long and they are filled with surprises of joy, brotherliness, vanilla maple ice cream and blueberry jam and kind friends and sweet words. There are struggles and choler and long stretches of spitting swearing agony, but when they are over, when they are spent, the succubus is gone and a wise-beyond-his-years child looks at me, and says in his quietest and most understanding voice, "please try to be calm," when I have become angry, of all things, over spilt milk. I stomp about the house one more time and hug the littlest, apologize all around, clean up the milk and pour another glass and thank him, thank them, thank God.
When someone asks, I say, "I'm fine, I'm great!" because I am, because the boys save bacon for their brothers, because Everett's friends come over and look at me solemnly in gratitude when I ask, "do you want to eat that raspberry?", because the bicycle-wheel arbor is thick, dripping, tangled with grapes-to-be, because pedestrians laden with grocery bags slow down, stop, stare, point when they pass by our home, because my husband calls from his office in Camp Arafjan, Kuwait and we talk as if we were 20, still, because when evening comes the sun shines through the walnut leaves and into my kitchen in a way that lights my yellow bowl and my dining room table and my heart up like candles, because grace will see me through.
paying the bills
the work i love . july 10 . 2010
It is the work that I love.
Sitting down to compose a tweet, one morning, I hesitated for an instant, almost typing "children hungry, sink full of dirty dishes..." and thought to myself, no, no! and, through this work, redemption: "dishes to wash, blueberry pancakes to make." I saw the two versions of myself, she-who-slaves over hungry, dirty; she-who-saves, washing, making. In those two selves, the whole story.
An essay has come to my attention. It is an essay written by she-who-slaves, and it has wounded me somewhere I forgot was tender until just then, as if I had sprinted a few sets of hurdles out of the blue, pang sharp and twanging. "But the work. Oh, the work! Not spending money is an incredible amount of work," writes Madeline Holler. The work. The work that I love.
"I had considered -- sometimes seriously -- canning produce as a way to keep costs down... Just thinking about putting up a winter's worth of green beans and apricot jam, though, made me want to take a nap."
I do not mean to characterize Madeline as lazy, and myself as industrious, because of how our lives differ but it is nonetheless truth that I do not nap, nor, in the summer, do I long to. It is in the morning that I lie in bed in the time-before-waking, picking up cherries in my mind, one by one, slicing into their bloody hearts with my sharpest paring knife, plucking out pits and, with contentedness Madeline might find insanity, plinking them into jam pots. It is at night when the children are finally in bed that I yearn to wash the many pots of a successful day's canning, running my hand over the still-warm lids' rings, feeling the so-deep sigh of many pints rise in my shoulders and nestle in my belly. This may, for Madeline, be exhausting, mentally and emotionally, but even the ache in my feet-bones and the sweat-steam rising from the canning pot flow into my subconscious and open up my eyes, my heart, my pores.
"Even baking all of my own bread sounded dreadful. For me, kneading dough was the physical manifestation of pushing and pressing all of life's ambitions into one yeasty ball of carbs." This is what Madeline writes and I find it badly phrased and the sort of angry-mean that has no meaning. I read Sharon Astyk counter Holler's essay on ethical grounds, and I agree with her cerebral and sensible argument and I find the competence that I have discovered, uncovered, bit by bit within myself rise up and threaten to overwhelm me, choke me with pride. When Holler writes this I have a powerful urge to measure flour from the 50-pound bag in our servant stairs, mix with sourdough I caught myself out of the air, use the strength God gave me and the minute of quiet in my soul and knead, opening and closing my mouth to give release to all my musclature, yoga, meditation, prayer.
"It takes so much time," Holler writes, life "on the cheap," the life in which Pottery Barn coffee tables are not a obviousness. I find this life to take time, too, but I am the one who has shook off "time is money," hands flinging with the wet weight of it all. Time is not money, time is time, and in my time I will do things that I love for people I love, even if those people require everything of me, toilets and soiled underwear wrung and scrubbed, messes wiped and wiped again, dirty faces made sticky from the deep sweet of peach juice, tears and screams and sibling conflicts and pickles all fermenting through my siesta-space. I will pick up the toys one by one, I will peel these plums, these nectarines, I will get down on my hands and knees to scrub the not-modish floors. I will wear the shirt with a stain on it to a meeting with my editor; I will send regrets to cocktails when my eldest needs to wail, wrath against the world; I will eat bread with butter and apricot jam all winter and I will rejoice! This is the work that I love.
oil leak : a sonnet . may 25 . 2010
It was not this, this leak that garnered such
a bleakstorm of uncompromising pressers.
Reporters rapt with duty thus: bring us
your best in blame, your scandals messier
than the ones before. We ask for the blood
of executives who, we're sure, laugh long
in their pinstripes, wingtips now oil-strewn, mud-
splat, soles mucked with fouled fishscale, choked birdsong.
Not this, lack of governmental foresight,
this splattering of lust for wealth, and less,
this tangle of administrative blight,
the slow looping stream of wide-eyed justice.
'Twas me, and you, our thirst, indelicate
gulping, our leak, our spill, our oil-stained foot.
This sonnet, written today with Mara in our Kitchen Table MFA class, is admittedly in need of a good edit, but it is at the same time a poetic version of this column on Daily Finance; its heart-cry is deep even though its form is lacking. Please write a sonnet of your own and, if you like, send me a link. Here are the general rules for a sonnet -- mine's Shakespearean -- if you decide to adopt another poetic form, I'll love it just the same. Use #bpoilsonnet if you post the link on Twitter. Image thanks to NWFblogs on flickr.
paying the bills
departure . may 21 . 2010
I wake up at 4:33 a.m. and my panic is spherical, nebulous, I cannot see through the brackish shell but I know its contents are vast and viscous. Yes, he -- he should have been picked up at 4, on his way to the airport, and I cast about for clues -- no shower running, no phone ringing, no news network on TV. I disengage Monroe and, he cries, I say in my calmest desperation, "just a minute, just a minute," I check living room, kitchen, driveway. The door is unlocked; the Army duffel is gone; the Facebook status is mute. Gone.
This is how it will be, then? I think to myself, wondering if he left sad or just rushed, wondering if he woke the boys, wondering if this would be the thing we'd all later say, if only. When a soldier leaves for war, there should be a banner sign and kazoos buzzing and smiles and tears and kisses all 'round. But here we all were, sleeping, the house, sprawled and half-blanketed, snoring quietly to itself into the rainy grey morning as he off-headed to ... where?
This is, what it is, not the clean plot of most military stories, the reservist's life. No governor would speak on a loudspeaker to ceremony his departure; we did not even know to which country he'd be flying in seven more days. Iraq had been our certainty until Wednesday, when an early-morning phone call from a First Sergeant with a southern accent gave us a list, Iraq, Afghanistan, Qatar, Dubai. Or something. Somewhere...
And here I'd gone, sticking a fork in the tangled spaghetti of the plot and not even waking up for that tearful goodbye kiss, yes we'd had an evening that was -- not miserable -- a soft lamentative dance of long errands, packing, dishes cleaning, a late and valiant dinner of sirloin tips stirfried with snow peas, sesame seeds, chicken broth. And white jasmine rice. It was a dish that, I told myself, was a symbiosis between the things he wanted and the places I wouldn't compromise. Local, grass-fed beef I'd ordered from the buying club, organic snow peas just-bought from the farmer's market, garlic from my garden, chicken broth I'd frozen.
The boys ate, each in his own way, little piles of just-meat or just-rice or everything, hungrily, and Jonathan barely could. All that afternoon and late into the night and all through this day, in airports and on airplanes and in a hotel bathroom, he was throwing up, food poisoning or fear, both, fear-poisoning, stomach-lurching, emptying him of all but his shaky reminders, "when I come back it's going to be great."
I had done all I could, I thought, we sank into bed at 11:30 and it was his last night and he was throwing up as I fell into my sleep in which panic spurted quietly, at regular intervals, a lesser geyser whose eruption no one ever greets with cheers, laughter, snapshots. And now, he was headed to war without a word.
As the sun moved its way toward our horizon behind the clouds, I washed the dishes, slowly, putting things away with care and deliberation, as I washed jaunting into projects I'd thought I would do once he was gone and some I'd long delayed, rolling saved coffee bean bags into neat snail-shell packages, putting the seasonings only he used into a box, pouring bits of foods I'd never eat into the compost. I filled a garbage bag; I contemplated buying a new toaster; I put away his socks.
I'd given him my phone, but it stayed off all day and all I could do was watch his flight's status on Delta's web site, maddeningly murky and long-delayed. As the boys awoke, one by one, and I began the normal morning machinations on this day everything changed, the status indicator switched to yellow, "in flight," and I had nothing to do but move through this changed world as before.
But different. We were late for school and I was not rehearsing the reasons in my mind, it's ok, of course, I said to myself and that was all. As nine turned to ten a.m., the little ones and I shopped, I saw myself in the third person, there she attempts the escalator with one potentially autistic child and one headstrong one, see how her anxiety is, there!, comical, see how she buys a $169.99 gift for her soldier husband and but three dollars on cars for her boys. I said they could only get one Hot Wheels vehicle each; Monroe insisted on two, two of the same, Truman bought a tank with four guns. It could defeat anyone. Monroe spilled hot chocolate everywhere, across the floor, down, and up the escalator again, in the bathroom, all over his raincoat. It's ok, no big deal.
It is nearly two o'clock, time to pick up Everett from school, when he calls, in Huntington, Alabama, not where he should be. The airport in Atlanta had closed-due-to-thunderstorm, and he had circled, circled, circled, until the airplane ran out of fuel and he had been diverted. "Why didn't you wake me?" I asked. "You looked tired," he said.
We wind through our day, I bike with the boys past exhaustion, past chill, past sense and reason. He will not get to Ft. Benning until Saturday, noon; we will spend Saturday cleaning through the rainstorms; he will learn that he is bound toward Kuwait. This knowledge will be a comfort; he will be better, more solid, eating meal after meal at "chow" as we make toast with butter and raw Portland honey. We will fall into our beds at night, still wet from the rain and exhausted from the riding, we will sleep through the quiet shower-fall, car-wheels-on-pavement, as he awakes each sweltering, sticky morning for body armor fittings and small pox vaccines and regular sessions of shouting through which he will stand at attention with remarkable equanimity. And the next Friday, he will go around the globe as we sleep, rain-wet, muscle-tired, sad in ways we can't explain.
counting . may 16 . 2010
Four.
Four days until we are four.
Of course, we have been alone before. We are alone now, right this moment, the father of the house off playing chess with a neighbor while I write. It could be anything: a bike ride, an errand, helping a friend move, talking on the phone, washing his grandmother's dishes, a state away undergoing sergeant training meant to make him a "warrior leader," which stretches to all but emotional bone structure, taut skin of convention, duty.
Five. Five, his years in service, E-5, his rank now. Five, Truman's age.
I wonder in the times in between the countings and the accountings, what is left? And who was it that did the taking-away? Surely, we have only been withdrawing in these past years, and I do not list in my debit columns the service itself. Surely, we are strewn all over with the red of our deficit, blood or ink or the many jars of tomato sauce I canned (for him, for him!), when I put my hands to my face, some days, I pull them away wet and I expect scarlet. It is the color I see when I close my eyes, some nights, crimson, port-wine, rage. I draw in my breath and it is jagged with the effort, gasping into lungs who protest the overdraft. I search for my center, my mantras, my notes-to-self, but when the gyre's been tangled in knots, the innocence gulps sea water and I shout back, scream, wail, tear out of the house in my pajama pants and running shoes and rain coat, pull the hood down, ask questions with no answer, pray, not expecting anything in return.
Zero. Zero dollars and seventy-six cents in our bank account. I spent that money, knowing; I wanted to buy happiness measured in pounds of sirloin-tip steak, quarts of ice cream, dozens of deviled eggs; I have no one to audit but me; he'll "give me everything," which might be, each month, four thousand, four hundred, thirty-one dollars and twenty-seven cents if I have found the right columns in the right tables, and will of course be enough. Enough. More! This is the low point, here, I swipe my pen for reminder, commemoration.
Because I wish to be circumspect, persevering without perseverating, courteous and kind, it is now that I -- I wish to be mild, you see -- speak in the abstract, the hypothetical, the "one." I can understand how the wife of a soldier might, were she in the sort of situation I am sketching right now in the notebook of my imagination, be counting down to grief but also to equilibrium, to loss, but still, to accumulation. A wife might see her home as castle, fortress, stronghold; she might see a zealous and intemperate and occasionally calamitous force whip her papers, her quiet thoughts, her delicate accomplishments of parenting or householding into the air, so that they are just out of reach and the heat of her tears sears, her heart blisters, she might end up as the clock winds its way around, again, in the dark of the night, with a back that is aching from its daily work (of home, of satisfaction!) and a nature that is too raw to weather one more bluster, and she might not wrap this person in the embrace he requires, instead, she might wrap herself around herself and brace for the wind.
Two. Two boys who, after tomorrow, will be categorized as "severe emotional disturbance" by the public school system; two boys whose eyes look at mine with such clarity, clairvoyance, then flash in an instant to an unholy mindless madness. Two who are angry; one who is unkiltered; three who need the bulwarks buttressed and the covertures conserved. Will I do this worthily, preserving, nurturing, husbanding my whelp and weal? Or won't I?
We are counting "lasts," mourning and marking. Last Saturday morning, last Sunday night, I see my schedule scored with checklists and certificates and the creation of documentary security, and I fear that in all this discipline-making and family-supporting and country-serving a model has been molded, and is it the knight exemplar whose armor I wish to display in my Great Hall? Or will the sculptor wet the clay, again, rework, fire with the heat of the Biblical desert, return the armature fitted as a paragon of husband-ry? He is running out of lasts; the count is ticking down; with what sort of fireworks will the last moments be marked?
The numbers are easy, count down from four to none and then it's 400, the numbers are discernable, the same no matter how I look at them, recorded on papers that I must print 14 times. It is that which is uncountable that has us pushing as through a jungle blindfolded, the rain-ripples on a mudpuddle, the walnut leaves out my kitchen window, the dandelion seed-parachutes on a little brother's head, the number of stabs of sarcasm, the quantity of little hurts and healings, the length of the road back to joy. I know this: in his absence there will be loneliness and a sacred quiet, one year of one centering prayer. I will gather my forces, I will ride my ramparts, I will round we four into the sanctum and, one by lentitudinous one I will count back, again, to zero.
permalinkkop;.,mrs
radical me . april 20 . 2010
I have, of late, become reluctant to adopt others' monikers. As "foodie" and "locavore" became tinged with privilege, I -- always eager to join a movement or two -- have fallen in love with more inclusive and encompassing eponyms. "Urban homesteader" is one of my favorite, evocative as it is of that pioneer spirit infusing the stories I loved most as a child, Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Oregon Trail, plucky tales of girls who ran, jumped, forded streams, let fruit juices stream down their brown-in-the-sun cheeks, stitched hems on cotton lawn, cooked a whole pig, midwived their sisters, their friends. And descriptive: I love a descriptive name. A name, you see, should above all name.
There have been others, of course, through the years that seemed to fit. I've known and loved "voluntary simplicity," "frugality," "locavorism." I've always subscribed to "feminist," though in a way I'd like to consider gentle, quieter, man-indulgent. They know not of what they fetter.
One day, there was an email from she-who-coins. Shannon Hayes had, she told me, written and published a book. She had been given my URL, a "radical homemaker" if there ever was one, perhaps? Yes, I said, yes indeed. That sounds about right.
I read the book quickly, gulping her interpretation of history, drinking facts and suppositions and bitty manifestos with my hands raised in "hallelujah." Here, the choir: there, the preacher. I claimed.
It was about this time that a writer from the New York Times sat down, with (I imagine) Macbook in hand. In her pretty neighborhood in Berkeley, she, too, knew of these radical lasses, and they all had coops. That there were husbands and mid-six-figure salaries to soften the whush of the housework's whip in their Californian estates, I have little doubt; that they had loosed the bonds of corporate servitude, I doubt severely. But, they did have chicken coops, and organic kitchen gardens, and perhaps, foods cooked by their own hands. Without jobs of their own, they fit the bill, she thought. Peggy Orenstein shook off the wispy yokes of Latin roots and bestowed her own title, "femivore."
I do not prefer to eat only of the female animal; nor do I associate with the pretty ladies of Berkeley who are represented so well by the stock model in her knotted charcoal shawl. It is not her name I choose. "Radical homemaker" is, perhaps, a bit prescriptive; I stumble under the load Hayes would place on my back. Not the work, certainly (and in fact, the work of the radical homemaker is, often, something less than the work I do; her homemakers, she says, need rusty cars, don't always garden, turn to their community for much of their needs); the bit that has me staggering is the privilege assumed. Much is made of her family's farmland, on which her home could be built; of the elitism described by the advanced degrees so many of her radical homemakers have.
I do have an advanced degree, and an Ivy League one, too; I do have a homestead to call my own. There the elite-slinging ends. As a child, I was fed by food stamps, charity and prayers. I paid for my degrees on my own. My home, on a big lot in a busy street in a not-yet-up-and-coming neighborhood, was bought with on a modest salary and a lucky investment in eBay. Newly pregnant with my first babe, I sold my stock for closing costs; I began clearly the blackberry brambles by the time my third child was bouncing wetly in my belly.
"Radical," I suppose, I am, and perhaps in exactly the way Hayes proposes. I believe in the life of the home; I reject the empty-sweet sustenance of corporations; I grow an herbacious front yard of change. I barter and I beg, I trade and I teach. I speak out; I plant my borrowed blueberry bush, a hope-offering to the rush and offgas of passers-by. Here, here! A fruit, an idea, a simpler way. "Homemaker," yes: I wash, I knead, I preserve, I dig, I hang.
Leslie called one day, and asked me to describe my life in Hayes' terms. I did; she transcribed, and there I was. It's a snapshot of the radical me. It's a piece of myself, and as such, it's filled with all I wish I could be, and riddled with my flaws. Messy and hopeful. Intensely ardent. Possible, possible, possible.
peek into the past . of daily apples and pinecones . november 18 . 2008
joy in the midst of the dailiness of life
