It's not the kind of memory you bother to hold on it; but it's in there somewhere, so it comes back easily when, after all these years, the action repeats itself. You finish filling the backpack; you marvel at its height; and then stupidly you just lift it, thinking you can just put on such a large, strangely-shaped beast and go on with your usual one foot after the next routine. Instead, as soon as your second arm slips through the loop of the armhole, the pack totters, and you totter, and this time you don't fully fall over like you did that first try half a lifetime ago, but you totter and chuckle, well remembering the surprise of it back then and thinking you should've known better, you should've remembered how to do this. You chuckle, tug on the appropriate cords to tighten that sucker securely to your back, and turn to face the mirror. It's taller than you, it's wider than you; you are sure you could have packed it better. But regardless, you are grinning at yourself in the mirror, because it's been a goddam long time since you went into the wilderness like this -- to stay for a few days, not just for an afternoon, not just for day trips from a hotel or B&B or cabin but from sleeping on the ground, in a tent, like you really mean it -- and you're excited. You remember how much you once loved doing this, how satisfying you know it is to see parts of this Earth that one can't get to with a car or just by walking in off the street, and you know that even though this will be a short trip, it will be a good re-entry point. You are sure, even before going, that you will return to this. You moved all the way across the country for this, after all—you moved all the way across the country to regain your outdoorsyness. And after three years in California, it's about damn time you do!
(More on the excursion when I return...)
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Sunday, August 3, 2008
this suburban life
These are the sounds around me now: the slow traversing of a plane across the sky; the chirping of a bird; the distant joyful yelling of children riding cardboard down a slide (I know where they are, even if I cannot see them); the on-again-off-again rustling of thousands of leaves shimmying against their neighbors above; the humming of car engines; the soft buzzing of a bee; the tic-tic-ticking as the breeze inches the wooden door at the back of the yard further and further open.
Beside me, lemons fatter than baseballs drip like heavy decorations from the extended tips of branches. Behind me, a weeping birch tree drips heart-laden tendrils downward toward my hair; a vine grows along the fence, pushing into my surroundings vibrantly red, tubular flowers that look like brass horns even if they are too small to make any songs. Sun fills half of the yard; shade the rest. The fading leaves of purple hydrangeas look cheerfully at me; above them, the long arms of my grandmother's wind chimes shine in the daylight and swing slightly but remain silent.
This is how I used to live—seated in the backyard, reading, writing, noticing the little details, keeping myself quietly entertained. As a child, I would never have been so surprised as I was one night recently to come face-to-face with an enormous raccoon right in the middle of my driveway; I would never have stared at him so long, nor wondered about his intentions. He was commonplace once; now, he is an at-first-spooky-but-soon-satisfying reminder of where I am living. Of how I am living. Here, in suburbia, where I am frightened by the plethora of BMWs parked on the street, the preppyness of the mothers, the closedness of shops on Sundays, I am also very happy; for the natural world abounds here, and the sun shines, and with it the air grows warm, not foggy or appallingly windy or cool; and the streets are walkable; the whole town is walkable; and I have nothing really to do here, not knowing more than one person in town, and so I am not overwhelmed with plans as I have been the past few years. I have nothing to do here and so I am doing all kinds of things I used to always do, like reading, and writing, and noticing the little details as I sit in the warm sun. San Francisco did not leave me dying to live in suburbia, but now that I am, I am finding all its good sides. There is an intense peacefulness to living like this. About that I cannot complain.
Beside me, lemons fatter than baseballs drip like heavy decorations from the extended tips of branches. Behind me, a weeping birch tree drips heart-laden tendrils downward toward my hair; a vine grows along the fence, pushing into my surroundings vibrantly red, tubular flowers that look like brass horns even if they are too small to make any songs. Sun fills half of the yard; shade the rest. The fading leaves of purple hydrangeas look cheerfully at me; above them, the long arms of my grandmother's wind chimes shine in the daylight and swing slightly but remain silent.
This is how I used to live—seated in the backyard, reading, writing, noticing the little details, keeping myself quietly entertained. As a child, I would never have been so surprised as I was one night recently to come face-to-face with an enormous raccoon right in the middle of my driveway; I would never have stared at him so long, nor wondered about his intentions. He was commonplace once; now, he is an at-first-spooky-but-soon-satisfying reminder of where I am living. Of how I am living. Here, in suburbia, where I am frightened by the plethora of BMWs parked on the street, the preppyness of the mothers, the closedness of shops on Sundays, I am also very happy; for the natural world abounds here, and the sun shines, and with it the air grows warm, not foggy or appallingly windy or cool; and the streets are walkable; the whole town is walkable; and I have nothing really to do here, not knowing more than one person in town, and so I am not overwhelmed with plans as I have been the past few years. I have nothing to do here and so I am doing all kinds of things I used to always do, like reading, and writing, and noticing the little details as I sit in the warm sun. San Francisco did not leave me dying to live in suburbia, but now that I am, I am finding all its good sides. There is an intense peacefulness to living like this. About that I cannot complain.
Friday, August 1, 2008
placing the pieces
Settling into a studio apartment, especially once that's half as big as the last studio you lived in, is like completing a 4,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It takes a few days to find all the edge pieces, and as you do, nestling books into book shelves and food into cupboards, you start to think about where the inside pieces will fit. But just building the border of the puzzle doesn't do you much good in that regard; one at a time, you have to find a way to slot each remaining piece in. So you ruminate. You push things that seem like they might fit together toward each other, but you let them hover, not locking anything in until you are sure. Delightfully, there is a point at which you suddenly see that the stereo should sit here and not there, and that frees up a hole on the wall for your favorite artwork, and then it's clear that another piece of artwork goes ever here. And then you have walls that look like the walls of a home, and then you have a bedroom that feels less like a booby trap and more like a place to put your feet up, especially now that you've cleared both sides of the sofa of inside pieces; and now you have music, with speakers that are plugged in, and so, you think, tonight perhaps you will finally get that thing that all this unfinished placement has prevented: a lot of sleep.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
quote of the day (upon discussing my dating (non?)prospects)
"Flakes should only exist in cereal."
--Julia
--Julia
Saturday, July 19, 2008
the magic of memories
The house I lived in until I was 7 had an array of magical qualities. To start with, there were its unique interior areas, two of which belonged exclusively to each of my parents and proved to be places that I would later realize really defined them. For my father, it was his study, where I tended to go only to play Frogger on the tv screen that he had hooked up to his Apple IIe computer. When I entered, he was usually leaning back in a deep-seated, blue-cushioned arm chair on legs that rocked and swiveled, tapping the tips of his fingers together and staring contemplatively at the wall. A pad of lined yellow paper would lie on the desk before him, and in his fine-pointed but jagged handwriting, numbers and occasional roman and greek letters would cover the pages with equations and possible solutions.
This room was special because it was Daddy's, and because it had a stone floor that brought the temperature down a few degrees from the rest of the house (which made it a particularly enticing place to be in the summer). It also had its own aroma, and I never thought anything of that smell, it coming from a place that already seemed to generate within it its own, quiet universe. It wasn't until years after we'd moved out of that house, when I was 15 and out shopping with my mom and brother, that anyone clued me in to the source of that curious odor. I'd been at a concert the night before, and to it I'd worn a hideous army green and gray jacket of my father's from the 1960s, which I liked for its butterfly collar and heavy, warm feel. As we walked through some affluent suburban mall, my brother chuckled and commented, "It's been a long time since that jacket smelled of THAT." Naive, innocent, extremely pure, I balked. He could not be telling me something about my father I had never known. He shook his head, grinning, and asked me if I knew that smell. I shook my head no, looking to my mother for help, but she was looking away, cheeks growing red, not fond of any of this. "Cigarette smoke?" I asked, hoping. And his grin grew devilish, as it does so often, and he challenged me simply: "Don't you remember the study smell?"
Then I could no longer resist putting two and two together; I knew what my jacket smelled of; but my brain had not wanted to make the association. Soon I would reprimand my father, telling him a good parent does not smoke pot around his children, much less at all, and he would be bashful and embarrassed; but a few years later, he would coach me, and we would have found a funny thing to bond over, much like when he taught me to hike the ball to him when we played football in the front yard, or to catch blue crabs and then clean them, or to ride a bicycle, or to catch lizards in the woods, but just a little bit odder.
Mom's space was in the basement. It spread the entire length of the small house, from the stairs that descended from the narrow kitchen to the back wall along which ran our bedrooms. On one of the long sides, a garage door hung from the ceiling, and she would roll it back up and open and sit atop her kick wheel or her electric wheel, just inside from her garden, and there she would throw hundreds (maybe thousands) of carefully crafted pots. She made everything we used, from dinner plates to ice cream bowls to elegant goblets and sugar dishes. She sold many of her creations, sent others to family members, and kept yet others; for her, the beauty was in the act of creating them; her joy was in the act of creating them. She spent hours down there, and sometimes I would tiptoe through, playing with discarded bits of clay or facing off with the kiln, whose knobs glowed red when it was on and this was supposed to be an indicator that I should be far away from it (but how could I be?). I believed it to be living, a monster, and when she wasn't there, I would see how long I could stand to face it before tearing up the stairs to the comfort of the stuffed animals on my bed above.
In that house, we had heating vents in the floors, and sometimes I would sit on the big one outside my bedroom and listen to her. I associated the making of pots with the noises I heard when seated above her: the whirring of the wheel, the slurping of wet clay against her skin as it spun, the thumping of her foot against the surface of the kick wheel to keep it going. When I would sit near her and watch, I focused on her legs, not being tall enough to see her hands, and so I marveled, later in life, when I realized how much I associated her potting with the kicking and not much at all with the strong hands that pulled clay from lumps into curvacious and precise formations.
Outside the house, the magical spaces multiplied. We had three backyards, and they could keep me busy for entire summers, whether I was collecting the black beads of tiger lilies, trying to shimmy my way up a bamboo stalk, gathering sticks and monkey grass for fort-building, or touching the gray tips of pussy willows and wondering how Earth gave bloom to something so rabbity soft. Sometimes, as I tiptoed across the long green wooden board my father had laid across the swampy land of the third yard, I danced a little, daring the board to drop me as I moved less carefully than normal. Sometimes, as I immersed myself in the creek beyond, I daydreamed of lifting my feet and letting the water carry me downstream, over the small rapids past which I was not allowed to go exploring.
Upriver, my neighbor Louise and I found a stand of bamboo growing out of a sandy shoulder along the creek, and there we built an entire apartment, designating this group of trees as a kitchen and that group as a sitting area. That part of the creek was closer to Louise's house, so we usually returned home through the long, thick woods that ran from it to her yard. This was a more treacherous area, not carefully looked after by a father who thought the outdoors were the best playground imaginable for little ones. We would stumble into briars, fall through thick beds of pine straw padding the area over an open hole, scrape our faces on sharp tree branches that should've been cut down once they had fallen dead. When we got back to the safety of her swingset (not, mind you, more than 100 or 200 yards from the creek, I would guess), we rarely stayed there. Rather, we immediately headed to the best of all places in our magical world, which was Mrs. Topes' yard, the one that lay between the two of ours.
Mrs. Tope was in her 90s, which meant that to me, she seemed as old as a human could ever be. Her used car salesman husband seemed a little younger, though he died much earlier, and he was rarely around. So it was she who welcomed us to come into her yard or her home anytime, she who pampered us, she whom we reminded of grand children and great grand children who lived too far away.
The Topes' backyard was like nowhere you'd ever expect to see in a city. We lived what is now about a half-mile from Lenox Mall and Georgia 400, a massive highway that my mother spent most of my childhood petitioning against the creation of. We lived in the heart of Atlanta, near everything, in a wilderness amidst an ever-growing urban surrounding. Yet Mrs. Tope lived in a backwoods way, her home looking like one you'd encounter in the mountains or in rural southern Georgia, like one most of you have never encountered.
In the front yard, rusted out old cars lay at random angles beneath her magnolias. There was no organization to it; they sat where they fit. In the back yard, long rows of vegetables grew; amidst them stood metal trash bins like bums build fires in, except these were filled with rainwater and seemed to be there for decoration or perhaps, like the cars, just for safe keeping; alongside them lay rubber tires, from the center of which grew the leafy stems of tomato plants.
Dirt paths ran across and through the garden, and one of them passed straight from the door in the fence to my yard to the door in the fence to Louise's. In the middle of this path, facing the vegetables, Louise and I would finish a rendezvous or meet up for the next one. We would sit on a wooden bench—probably just a wooden log dropped there and never gotten back to—and we'd whisper the things little girls have to whisper about. Once we ate cherries there, and I cherished that, for I was eating cherries with Louise Cherry under a cherry tree. Once we fell prisoner to my brother there, for he had laid a trap for us, the kind you'd use if hunting small animals—he'd dug a hole in the dirt, criss-crossed it with fragile branches, and covered it with leaves. We fell directly in, to the delight of him and his friends, and we no doubt arouse from it laughing, if bleeding, and grateful to have our favorite spot so nearby to sit in and recover.
Many magical memories unfolded in the realm of those backyards we lived our young lives in; and one of the strongest is one of the simplest, which may be why it so readily came back to me today.
Mrs. Tope had had a young grandson who had passed away, and for his resemblance to her beloved she particularly prized my brother. When she saw him, she'd beckon him inside, and there she would feed him home-made cookies and the sugar candies she kept on the table in the sitting room. I she had less of a connection to but loved no less, and she gave me free reign of the garden, coming down to join me not to interrupt my play but only to feed me. Though for him she was constantly baking, for me she felt the garden was growing; she knew my fondness for her cucumbers, and I remember time and again she would pick them for me, peel them, and let me stand there and eat them. The freshness of vegetables that come out of the ground is always unrivaled; the way they taste a little of the earth and a little of the air, the way they mean summer and sunshine and wellbeing. Today I ate a cucumber bought at a farmer's market and marveled over how much more flavorful it was than any I've had in a long time—perhaps than any I've had since I stopped being Mrs. Tope's neighbor and stopped having my own private stash of them awaiting me in the dirt.
This room was special because it was Daddy's, and because it had a stone floor that brought the temperature down a few degrees from the rest of the house (which made it a particularly enticing place to be in the summer). It also had its own aroma, and I never thought anything of that smell, it coming from a place that already seemed to generate within it its own, quiet universe. It wasn't until years after we'd moved out of that house, when I was 15 and out shopping with my mom and brother, that anyone clued me in to the source of that curious odor. I'd been at a concert the night before, and to it I'd worn a hideous army green and gray jacket of my father's from the 1960s, which I liked for its butterfly collar and heavy, warm feel. As we walked through some affluent suburban mall, my brother chuckled and commented, "It's been a long time since that jacket smelled of THAT." Naive, innocent, extremely pure, I balked. He could not be telling me something about my father I had never known. He shook his head, grinning, and asked me if I knew that smell. I shook my head no, looking to my mother for help, but she was looking away, cheeks growing red, not fond of any of this. "Cigarette smoke?" I asked, hoping. And his grin grew devilish, as it does so often, and he challenged me simply: "Don't you remember the study smell?"
Then I could no longer resist putting two and two together; I knew what my jacket smelled of; but my brain had not wanted to make the association. Soon I would reprimand my father, telling him a good parent does not smoke pot around his children, much less at all, and he would be bashful and embarrassed; but a few years later, he would coach me, and we would have found a funny thing to bond over, much like when he taught me to hike the ball to him when we played football in the front yard, or to catch blue crabs and then clean them, or to ride a bicycle, or to catch lizards in the woods, but just a little bit odder.
Mom's space was in the basement. It spread the entire length of the small house, from the stairs that descended from the narrow kitchen to the back wall along which ran our bedrooms. On one of the long sides, a garage door hung from the ceiling, and she would roll it back up and open and sit atop her kick wheel or her electric wheel, just inside from her garden, and there she would throw hundreds (maybe thousands) of carefully crafted pots. She made everything we used, from dinner plates to ice cream bowls to elegant goblets and sugar dishes. She sold many of her creations, sent others to family members, and kept yet others; for her, the beauty was in the act of creating them; her joy was in the act of creating them. She spent hours down there, and sometimes I would tiptoe through, playing with discarded bits of clay or facing off with the kiln, whose knobs glowed red when it was on and this was supposed to be an indicator that I should be far away from it (but how could I be?). I believed it to be living, a monster, and when she wasn't there, I would see how long I could stand to face it before tearing up the stairs to the comfort of the stuffed animals on my bed above.
In that house, we had heating vents in the floors, and sometimes I would sit on the big one outside my bedroom and listen to her. I associated the making of pots with the noises I heard when seated above her: the whirring of the wheel, the slurping of wet clay against her skin as it spun, the thumping of her foot against the surface of the kick wheel to keep it going. When I would sit near her and watch, I focused on her legs, not being tall enough to see her hands, and so I marveled, later in life, when I realized how much I associated her potting with the kicking and not much at all with the strong hands that pulled clay from lumps into curvacious and precise formations.
Outside the house, the magical spaces multiplied. We had three backyards, and they could keep me busy for entire summers, whether I was collecting the black beads of tiger lilies, trying to shimmy my way up a bamboo stalk, gathering sticks and monkey grass for fort-building, or touching the gray tips of pussy willows and wondering how Earth gave bloom to something so rabbity soft. Sometimes, as I tiptoed across the long green wooden board my father had laid across the swampy land of the third yard, I danced a little, daring the board to drop me as I moved less carefully than normal. Sometimes, as I immersed myself in the creek beyond, I daydreamed of lifting my feet and letting the water carry me downstream, over the small rapids past which I was not allowed to go exploring.
Upriver, my neighbor Louise and I found a stand of bamboo growing out of a sandy shoulder along the creek, and there we built an entire apartment, designating this group of trees as a kitchen and that group as a sitting area. That part of the creek was closer to Louise's house, so we usually returned home through the long, thick woods that ran from it to her yard. This was a more treacherous area, not carefully looked after by a father who thought the outdoors were the best playground imaginable for little ones. We would stumble into briars, fall through thick beds of pine straw padding the area over an open hole, scrape our faces on sharp tree branches that should've been cut down once they had fallen dead. When we got back to the safety of her swingset (not, mind you, more than 100 or 200 yards from the creek, I would guess), we rarely stayed there. Rather, we immediately headed to the best of all places in our magical world, which was Mrs. Topes' yard, the one that lay between the two of ours.
Mrs. Tope was in her 90s, which meant that to me, she seemed as old as a human could ever be. Her used car salesman husband seemed a little younger, though he died much earlier, and he was rarely around. So it was she who welcomed us to come into her yard or her home anytime, she who pampered us, she whom we reminded of grand children and great grand children who lived too far away.
The Topes' backyard was like nowhere you'd ever expect to see in a city. We lived what is now about a half-mile from Lenox Mall and Georgia 400, a massive highway that my mother spent most of my childhood petitioning against the creation of. We lived in the heart of Atlanta, near everything, in a wilderness amidst an ever-growing urban surrounding. Yet Mrs. Tope lived in a backwoods way, her home looking like one you'd encounter in the mountains or in rural southern Georgia, like one most of you have never encountered.
In the front yard, rusted out old cars lay at random angles beneath her magnolias. There was no organization to it; they sat where they fit. In the back yard, long rows of vegetables grew; amidst them stood metal trash bins like bums build fires in, except these were filled with rainwater and seemed to be there for decoration or perhaps, like the cars, just for safe keeping; alongside them lay rubber tires, from the center of which grew the leafy stems of tomato plants.
Dirt paths ran across and through the garden, and one of them passed straight from the door in the fence to my yard to the door in the fence to Louise's. In the middle of this path, facing the vegetables, Louise and I would finish a rendezvous or meet up for the next one. We would sit on a wooden bench—probably just a wooden log dropped there and never gotten back to—and we'd whisper the things little girls have to whisper about. Once we ate cherries there, and I cherished that, for I was eating cherries with Louise Cherry under a cherry tree. Once we fell prisoner to my brother there, for he had laid a trap for us, the kind you'd use if hunting small animals—he'd dug a hole in the dirt, criss-crossed it with fragile branches, and covered it with leaves. We fell directly in, to the delight of him and his friends, and we no doubt arouse from it laughing, if bleeding, and grateful to have our favorite spot so nearby to sit in and recover.
Many magical memories unfolded in the realm of those backyards we lived our young lives in; and one of the strongest is one of the simplest, which may be why it so readily came back to me today.
Mrs. Tope had had a young grandson who had passed away, and for his resemblance to her beloved she particularly prized my brother. When she saw him, she'd beckon him inside, and there she would feed him home-made cookies and the sugar candies she kept on the table in the sitting room. I she had less of a connection to but loved no less, and she gave me free reign of the garden, coming down to join me not to interrupt my play but only to feed me. Though for him she was constantly baking, for me she felt the garden was growing; she knew my fondness for her cucumbers, and I remember time and again she would pick them for me, peel them, and let me stand there and eat them. The freshness of vegetables that come out of the ground is always unrivaled; the way they taste a little of the earth and a little of the air, the way they mean summer and sunshine and wellbeing. Today I ate a cucumber bought at a farmer's market and marveled over how much more flavorful it was than any I've had in a long time—perhaps than any I've had since I stopped being Mrs. Tope's neighbor and stopped having my own private stash of them awaiting me in the dirt.
Friday, July 18, 2008
adjusting
Yesterday I drove past my street twice, neither time being prepared for it to pop up so soon. I also overshot the turn off a major road on my way back from the grocery store, and though I then had to get onto a really trafficky one, I was still able to get home within just a few minutes. This is a small town, no doubt about it. And as it turns out, all the separate places I've been to previously aren't too far apart; on my drive to work, three of them proved to be connected; on my return from shopping, others, too, lined up right in a row. This is a small town, and by the end of the day yesterday, I was feeling like I might jump out of my skin over it.
I had planned, after work, to take a walk down University Ave and see what all downtown has to offer. But when the time came, it struck me: it's your second day here, and you'll have seen the whole town! I was paralyzed with worry that I'd see ALL of the new place in just one walk. So I went out to do errands, saving the leisurely stroll through town for a time when the panic in my heart wouldn't ruin it.
Holding off was a good choice. I was terribly tired, moving having been exhausting, and today proved a better time to get to know my new surroundings. It's true, in one very short (less-than-ten-minute) walk, I was able to stop by the bank, check out the offerings at the classic-movie movie theater, and arrive early to meet friends for drinks. Afterward, it took three or four minutes to find the indie theater, and after I left the show I saw (Gonzo, which I highly recommend), it took maybe six minutes to wind my way through the blocks back home. But it struck me, as I walked on unfamiliar streets but with no hesitation about where to turn, that it may be frightening to have the whole town so completely at my fingertips, but it's also delightful. I can walk or bike to anything I want to do, and that is very freeing. As well, there is so much to look at. The low-lying houses, though mostly of a similar size, range from craftsman style to New England cottage to Nordic A-frame to basic modern Californian. Their yards, though not all that varied, drip with roses and hydrangeas, are lined by the joyful spherical bursts of the lavendar or white flowers of Andean lilies. Some of them, perhaps to avoid watering in the dry climate, have no grass and instead are filled with stones, some the size of the pebbles I like to call wishing stones and throw into the ocean with a kiss, others fist-size and bulging. Though cold and dry in appearance, these rocky yards seem innovative and logical and definitive of this place being of a different sort than I am used to. And that, I know, is something I live for—the experience of being amidst newness, of coming to know new places and ways of life, of really becoming part of surroundings that at first might seem undesirable or even inhospitable to me in some way.
I had planned, after work, to take a walk down University Ave and see what all downtown has to offer. But when the time came, it struck me: it's your second day here, and you'll have seen the whole town! I was paralyzed with worry that I'd see ALL of the new place in just one walk. So I went out to do errands, saving the leisurely stroll through town for a time when the panic in my heart wouldn't ruin it.
Holding off was a good choice. I was terribly tired, moving having been exhausting, and today proved a better time to get to know my new surroundings. It's true, in one very short (less-than-ten-minute) walk, I was able to stop by the bank, check out the offerings at the classic-movie movie theater, and arrive early to meet friends for drinks. Afterward, it took three or four minutes to find the indie theater, and after I left the show I saw (Gonzo, which I highly recommend), it took maybe six minutes to wind my way through the blocks back home. But it struck me, as I walked on unfamiliar streets but with no hesitation about where to turn, that it may be frightening to have the whole town so completely at my fingertips, but it's also delightful. I can walk or bike to anything I want to do, and that is very freeing. As well, there is so much to look at. The low-lying houses, though mostly of a similar size, range from craftsman style to New England cottage to Nordic A-frame to basic modern Californian. Their yards, though not all that varied, drip with roses and hydrangeas, are lined by the joyful spherical bursts of the lavendar or white flowers of Andean lilies. Some of them, perhaps to avoid watering in the dry climate, have no grass and instead are filled with stones, some the size of the pebbles I like to call wishing stones and throw into the ocean with a kiss, others fist-size and bulging. Though cold and dry in appearance, these rocky yards seem innovative and logical and definitive of this place being of a different sort than I am used to. And that, I know, is something I live for—the experience of being amidst newness, of coming to know new places and ways of life, of really becoming part of surroundings that at first might seem undesirable or even inhospitable to me in some way.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
resettlement
The knuckle on my first finger is purple; it only bends halfway. The side of my pinky is swollen. My wrist has finally started rotating again, reviving after a day of not wanting to move at all. My feet ache when I'm not on them. My back is so tight it hurt to bend over to shave in the shower. I have been packing and loading and unpacking and unloading for five days in a row; and though it took a serious act of will, today I did not stop until 99% of my stuff was out of its packaging.
I have too many belongings for this small space. I am a master of stacking and stuffing items into any possible space, but in this little apartment I will have to get creative to make it all fit. Being so surrounded by boxes, having to shift and re-shift everything I own to make pathways because there is not enough space to just clear one and leave it, finding that the terrible movers did indeed break a few things, it has been a stressful experience. But many hours into my day today, I started to feel a calm growing. Out of one box came the large yellow and orange old-timey Fiesta Ware serving plates I collect from antique dealers. Out of another came my velvet iguanas. Out of a small one came my movie collection, and then boxes and boxes of my photos. Out of many came my books: Neruda, Octavia Paz, Rilke, and so many other poets; Danticat, Allende, Marquez, Gordimer, Husseini, Ishiguro, and so many other novelists; Nelson Mandela, Congressman John Robert Lewis, Rigoberta Menchu, George Orwell, John McPhee, Thoreau, and many other beloved books of autobiography and nonfiction; my art books; my writing books; my Mesoamerica and archaeology books. Out of these boxes came books that I have carried with me for years, in some cases multiple decades. They add color to my room; they add stories; they add camaraderie.
Later in the week I will hang things. Eventually I will go to Ikea and find receptacles for the remaining items that currently lie tucked under tables or stacked neatly on my desk. Eventually I might even throw some things out. But in the meantime, after 36 tiring hours of existing apart from the real world, focusing entirely on my little bubble, I live in a new place, and it feels like home. It already does; I whittled away at the mess and swept away the debris, and out of it all came home—my home, the one I always craft anywhere I go. So I've done enough work on it for now; before I polish it off, I'll let it sit a day or two, and in the meantime, as I ruminate on how to rectify a few small concerns, I'll do what I really came here for: go exploring.
I have too many belongings for this small space. I am a master of stacking and stuffing items into any possible space, but in this little apartment I will have to get creative to make it all fit. Being so surrounded by boxes, having to shift and re-shift everything I own to make pathways because there is not enough space to just clear one and leave it, finding that the terrible movers did indeed break a few things, it has been a stressful experience. But many hours into my day today, I started to feel a calm growing. Out of one box came the large yellow and orange old-timey Fiesta Ware serving plates I collect from antique dealers. Out of another came my velvet iguanas. Out of a small one came my movie collection, and then boxes and boxes of my photos. Out of many came my books: Neruda, Octavia Paz, Rilke, and so many other poets; Danticat, Allende, Marquez, Gordimer, Husseini, Ishiguro, and so many other novelists; Nelson Mandela, Congressman John Robert Lewis, Rigoberta Menchu, George Orwell, John McPhee, Thoreau, and many other beloved books of autobiography and nonfiction; my art books; my writing books; my Mesoamerica and archaeology books. Out of these boxes came books that I have carried with me for years, in some cases multiple decades. They add color to my room; they add stories; they add camaraderie.
Later in the week I will hang things. Eventually I will go to Ikea and find receptacles for the remaining items that currently lie tucked under tables or stacked neatly on my desk. Eventually I might even throw some things out. But in the meantime, after 36 tiring hours of existing apart from the real world, focusing entirely on my little bubble, I live in a new place, and it feels like home. It already does; I whittled away at the mess and swept away the debris, and out of it all came home—my home, the one I always craft anywhere I go. So I've done enough work on it for now; before I polish it off, I'll let it sit a day or two, and in the meantime, as I ruminate on how to rectify a few small concerns, I'll do what I really came here for: go exploring.
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