life like a movie

Do you ever think about the music that would be on a soundtrack of your life? Do you ever catch yourself in a moment that's so ripe with emotion, aesthetics, or meaning that you can almost hear some song you like rising in volume in the background? Maybe what's more common is to find yourself innocently going about your life when a certain song comes on the radio—in the car, in a store, at a cafe—and you're in a certain mood or situation that makes it resonate; and for a minute or two, it's like you've become the movie star, and the scene unfolding around you has been constructed—crafted—to so perfectly carry the mood that's overtaken you.

Today I was driving at that hour of day a poet would call the gloaming—that time just before dark when the air gets a little blue before it loses the light altogether. At that time of day, leaves still reveal themselves in silhouettes pressed against the sky; but stars and planets also sparkle; headlights flash on; street lights begin to glow. In the car I sat quietly—alone except for the radio, which was emitting old-timey jazz; old-timey jazz tunes that dance with a playful joy. This time the movie I was in wasn't set right then and there; rather, the scene was taking place in the future—in what feels like a distant future. I was marrying. Not walking down the aisle or anything so romantic; no, just sitting in a room filled with people, buzzing with chatter and the movements of those I love most dearly, and this old-timey jazz was playing. Like in a dream, I could almost see myself leaning back and watching it all as something inside me danced with that same playful joy and contentment that the music hastened in.

Why did the music take me, I wondered, to some place so distant for me now? It could be something to do with wistfulness, but I think it isn't; I think it was just something clicking in my head, responding to something else that happened a few weeks ago. I had been in class; the professor had handed each student a card with an emotion written on it, and we'd done a free association with that emotion and a set of words. We worked in groups and shared our responses, trying to get others to identify the emotion we held in our hand with the vivid associations of feel, taste, sound, food, and memory that we had made. My word had been rage, another person's happiness. The burning of hot peppers on my tongue, the melting of chocolate chips as cookies baked—my group members had quickly deduced the first few words. Last to share was our professor, and his list of associations was beautiful; we told him his word must be peacefulness or inner calm or something along this track. But he shook his head no. Perplexed, we demanded the answer. "Falling in love," he said, and a classmate promptly informed him he was wrong. "That's not falling in love," she assured him, "that's being in love." No—he tried to protest; but he stopped himself, smiling, and said maybe he would have described it differently 30 years ago. "You would have," she insisted, because Merlot and Beethoven, she was sure, were the signs of a tie that's been shared and adored for a long time. I loved her assurance about it; and I loved that what I associated with inner calm she associated with being in love.

But his words hadn't fit with in love for me at the time, so they had lingered. He had conjured a scene in a living room, with Merlot and classical music and rain falling beyond the window, and I had imagined socked feet on a table, reclining, and faint smiling; I had imagined inner peace and contentment—the kind one gets all on one's own. The kind one needs to have before the falling or the being in love fit in. Only once that quiet steady calm blissful place has been created can the playful joyful dancing be more than fleeting, be sustainable by every breath to be taken for the rest of time. This way it has something sturdy to fall back on in those inevitable if often infinitesimal moments between musical movements, when we all take a breath and a pause. The trumpeter inhales deeply before exhaling the old-timey jazzy tune. I inhale deeply thinking about the emotion the song conjured inside me, knowing I have a sturdy place ready to set it whenever the real-life version comes along.

(let the process bring you alive)

I like going to or from campus best at the start and end of the day. Some mornings, when I bike to school, I get to cruise under the hanging arms of a row of palm trees, whose finger-like leaves glint in the slant of the early-day sun. As I pass by them, a Spanish-roofed building comes into view; beyond its gates, the ornate painted details of a church begin to show; and then I can see the golden hills beyond, and, above them, the blue sky, which here is almost always clear. On days when I walk, I take different routes, getting to know the architecture of this block and the flora of that one. A certain path leads me past a palm tree here while at the same time an old redwood there; another way tugs me through the arching stems of calla lilies as I admire roses stretching unfathomably upward across the street; others reveal the magenta of bougainvillea, the purple of a copper birch, and the deep blood red of a maple in such rapid succession it’s hard to remember that elsewhere the seasons don’t all happen at once. Elsewhere the golden leaves of a jacaranda won’t crunch beneath my feet as I traipse past a flowering magnolia, but they do here. In the evening, palm leaves imprint their silhouette on the graying sky as I head back home. The sky saturates with navy at its pinnacle, with yellow, orange, or pink along the westward horizon, and palm leaves imprint themselves on my brain as a chill sets in. The joys of fall and spring are rolled into one here; they feel magical in a new way here.

That I am living in an enchanting place is not new to me. The last time I commuted on foot was also when I was a student; then, too, I cherished the peaceful way I got from home to school, from relaxation to mental stimulation and back again. When I walk home at night here, my brain fills with visual memories of the paths I took through Cambridge in the evening. Most often I am walking through lightly falling snow; most often I am walking on a quiet city street, the brick sidewalks jostled and worn from hundreds of years of passing feet trodding upon them, the solemn museums and looming design school resting darkly and quietly at the close of day. I am walking past neighborhood houses; I am walking into the heart of the Square and toward my home; away from a street with a name like a metaphor—Divinity Ave, it’s called, and it’s where I spent much of my time in college. It’s a short block, housing a handful of buildings that hold within them a magnificent array of studies—East Asian studies; Russian studies; botany, with its massive herbarium; geology, paleontology, and archaeology, the latter with a warehouse full of artifacts from all over the world; the department of religion, with its walls embroidered with elephants, its yard bejeweled with large stone rhinos. I sometimes sat near those creatures just to enjoy the absurdity of them; and sometimes I wandered beyond them, the other side of that building offering a one-block-by-one-block stand of trees that I could walk amidst and almost fool myself into thinking was a forest, if I tuned out the sound of traffic, the glow of street lights, the smell of chimney fires at its edges.

It is important to me to live in places I love. There is something about the character of certain places that enlivens me. The satisfaction these places give me feels like the satisfaction of true love. You may think that sort of love is one-sided, but it isn’t; there is a vital dynamism to it. As I study the details of my surroundings and fall for them, there is a stirring of something inside me—an ignition of my internal fire. Love, it tells me, love what is around you; breathe deeply, discover, and savor; let the process bring you alive.

the trials of a single girl in her 30s

When I first told my mother I was going to graduate school, she was delighted. She has for years been telling me how much she regrets not getting a higher degree (she was one year into a PhD in biology when my dad got a tenured job and they moved 1,000 miles away so he could take it; she never got back to that degree she'd wanted and has felt hindered by not having it throughout her career). But pretty quickly, she realized there was another cause for rejoicing. She is an avid reader of the New York Times wedding page, and just as she has observed in its listings that many people are now getting married in their late 20s and 30s (hope for me yet, she says, though really she doesn't want me to have a husband so much as give her grandbabies who live in this country), so too has she noted that most of them meet in school. At Stanford, she decided, I would find my husband.

As it turns out, I am in a master's program that is 6/7 female, in a department with about the same percentage, so I'm not finding too many opportunities to meet my future hubby. When I do meet men who seem attractive, smart, and available, they tend to have one major deficiency: a significant number fewer years of life than me. Now given the treatise I once wrote on why younger men shouldn't write off older women, you probably know I'm open to dating younger men. My brother, after all, is four years the junior of his wife, and they have a terrific relationship—just the kind I'd like to find. So I'm as open as open can be. But how much younger is too young?

The first two guys I met on campus who seemed to take an interest proved to be, each, about 22. In both cases, they looked it, so I had to finally step away from the conversation because, really, what is the point? Last week I met one who seemed plenty mature and plenty appealing—but he proved to be just 24. Is seven years too much younger for dating? I couldn't tell he was that much younger—he didn't look it, and he didn't seem it. Does that make it OK? The question is rhetorical, really, because I doubt he would want to date someone so much older—for the self-same reason I identified in the PSA mentioned above. But given that my pickings seem to be mainly in the realm of those younger than me, I'm trying to figure out where to draw the line—or if I have to. It feels wrong, somehow, to be attracted to someone seven or ten years younger than me, but if I am, I am, right? Perhaps I've reached an age at which age matters less. What do you vote for, my dear readers—shall I become the next Mrs. Robinson??

(when something stirs in the dark)

Being back on a college campus these days and having a few seniors in my classes, my brain keeps drifting back to my own senior year. When I think about this exact time ten years ago, I can't remember exactly which classes I was taking or what job I had then, but I know what I was doing with a lot of my free time: I was quite surely falling in love. The story is long and its ending sad, with my love becoming unrequited; but I didn't know at the start (or even in the middle) that that's what I was heading toward; I didn't know anything but that there was this guy I was getting to know and with each inch we moved closer to each other, such a bond was forming that it would take years for me to be able to let go.

The first time I ever saw him, I had my faced stuffed into a lilac bush; I was smiling and breathing in the magnificent odor of the petals and he was passing through the courtyard around which it turned out we both lived. When he saw me, he grinned with a look like appreciation, and I remembered that when, a month or two later, we crossed paths again. This time it was in the stairwell; he was heading out and I was going to watch a movie with a friend who turned out to be his roommate, though I didn't find that out until halfway through the film. At that point he snuck through the dark room to the shower after a workout at the gym. As he finished in the bathroom, he must've heard a scene he liked in the movie, because he came out to watch in his towel, and no one who was there will ever let me forget that my mouth truly did drop open at the sight of his obscenely cut and dripping wet torso. That night I finally thought to ask his name.

A few months later, I had my first conversation with him, sitting in his bedroom and talking for what later seemed like an appalling amount of time for a guy who could happily be silent for days on end. I can't tell you what we talked about, but I remember something that went loudly through my head as I walked back home. I could fall in love with this guy, I had said to myself, and very soon I did.

It's hard, sometimes, to remember how perfectly our friendship unfolded. How it started with him coming over to hang seven or eight strands of Christmas lights around my common room and staying late into the night; how it continued with little things like him asking me to read poetry to him as he lay in bed and tried to get to sleep. He knew I liked poetry, so he had me sit on the edge of his bed and read—one, maybe two poems at a time. Sometimes before leaving I would kiss him on the forehead, just like at times he would lean down and do to me when we were standing somewhere saying goodbye. But that was early on, and everything was still unspoken, so sometimes I just read to him and said good night. On those nights it probably took a long time to reach sleep myself. There was a poem I so wanted to read to him, but I couldn't; things were still unspoken, and I couldn't even let a Rilke poem say to him what I had on my mind:

I would like to sing someone to sleep,
to sit beside someone and be there.
I would like to rock you and sing softly
and go with you to and from sleep.
I would like to be the one in the house
who knew: The night was cold.
And I would like to listen in and listen out
into you, into the world, into the woods.

The clocks shout to one another striking,
and one sees to the bottom of time.
And down below one last, strange man walks by
and rouses a strange dog.
And after that comes silence.

I have laid my eyes upon you wide;
and they hold you gently and let you go
when something stirs in the dark.

One night he took me walking, aimlessly, I thought; but it got dark out, and we had gone quite a ways, so I finally asked where we were headed. We were by the river when he told me; there were tall grasses beside us, and I knew we were almost to the next town. On a walking tour of my childhood, he told me as we reached his favorite basketball court, and then he described how all the boys he grew up with first tasted alcohol sitting out on the court. He laughed as he thought back on that; he smiled as he sat me in the hammock behind his parents' house and swung me; he grew quiet as we lay down on the grass of the golf course beyond their home and stared at the sky. We lay there a long time before he told me that I was stretched out on his favorite patch of grass on this earth, that I was taking in his favorite view of the stars in the sky.

A long time after I let him go, I told myself it was OK to hold on to one or two of the best memories, it was OK to hold on at least to that memory—because it's not so often in life that someone fully lays himself open to you and asks you to walk on in. I don't think back on it often anymore; I kicked him out of my life five years ago, almost exactly five years after we started growing so close without putting the right words to things before it was too late. He wasn't available, emotionally, when I met him; and by the time he finally was, I had gotten over him. We had a bond like family by then, but he hadn't been able to go where I wanted us to go and so I'd gotten over him. But we held on to each other like family; we spent time together like family. Eventually it was just too much; we were too bonded for people who weren't in a relationship; my heart was still tied up in him and it hindered me from dating, and his eventual girlfriend seemed to think the same thing for him.

One weekend after five years of all this, we went to stay at his parents' ski condo and had a great time. I skied my intermediate slopes and he hit the big ones; afterward we sat in his favorite cafe and I drank hot cocoa and read poetry while he did his homework for an engineering class he was in. Sometime in the middle of that quiet afternoon by a snow-filled window, I told him my dream of owning a bookstore with a cafe in it—a cafe just like this one. The other memory I may never let go of is the way he looked at me in that moment; me, sitting in this place that he had loved since childhood; me, sharing a dream with him; me, there, with him after all those years; and he told me that he could build it for me, the bookstore with the cafe in it just like this one; once he (started and) finished architecture school, he could build it. In the meantime, a few weeks later, he gave me as a birthday present a book about the business of opening a cafe, and he told me he thought I really should do it; he really wanted me to do it.

In that moment between my dream and his affirmation of it, I knew that I was still in love with him. It took six more months for me to tell him so—for me to tell him so and ask him to step out of my life in the very same breath. But I knew it in that moment, that I loved him and he loved me but it was never going to be in the way that I hoped. He had a girlfriend then, when he looked at me and told me he could build my dream into reality, and perhaps that's what made it possible for me to finally see that whatever he and I were just was not right.

That all comes into my mind when I'm on campus and thinking back on college, but it's really at the forefront because of something that happened a month ago when I was back in Cambridge, where all this unfolded. I was there just two days, going to a wedding, and as I got on the red line to leave town, I thought I saw him. If it had been him, he'd be an architect now, fully licensed and practicing. If it had been him, he'd be a husband and a father; he might have had his baby in his arms. When the man's face rose I knew it wasn't who I'd thought it was, but in those few seconds afterward, I considered what I would have done if he had been there, just a few people down from me on the train. Five years had passed since I'd seen him; I would have smiled with all my heart. Five years had passed; I would have smiled and stepped off the train.

(for a beloved friend on this day of great loss)

from Theodore Roethke's "The Far Field"

All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree:
The pure serene of memory in one man,—
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.

metablognition

In class, I recently learned about metacognition—the monitoring of your own understanding and mastery of something. It put in my mind the concept of metablognition. Until yesterday, it had been so long since I'd written a blog post that I felt almost paralyzed when I'd try to think one up. I started this blog, after all, as writing exercise; but when you let your muscles go, when you fail to pick up your feet and move, your body reaches a point of inertia; and so it goes with the blogging part of my brain. I'm self-concious about it, feeling ill-equipped to say anything of interest, so I avoid being here. But I miss it, this place where my thoughts get to run around like little people climbing jungle gyms and feeling great satisfaction when they reach the top. I miss it, because I love it, so I've been telling myself to get my act together and get back here.

The post I wrote yesterday seemed very academic; even to me it seemed boring. But I made myself share it; I told myself (metablognitioning away) that I had to just put some words on the blank screen, not worrying whether they rang eloquent or not; just get the fingers typing; get some kind of thoughts flowing. The meaning and the artistry, I told myself, they'll come back.

It's like sex, I told myself; like when you haven't had sex in so long, and when you think you might again, you get nervous, wondering if you've lost your mojo. Metablognition has had me questioning my mojo; but I sat down and wrote something yesterday, and I posted it; and I'm sitting here writing now, and I'm gonna post it. So I know. Eventually, I know, I'll post something metablogmindblowing. In the meantime, god help us, I'll try not to bore you too much. :)

brain yoga

In my intro to teaching class, the professor recently asked us to read Wikipedia's article on theory. He explained that he wanted us to see the different ways the word is construed in various disciplines and to understand that in the context of teaching, theories are more like methods—tangible practices determined by amassing a lot of evidence that suggests that these are the effective ways to do things—than abstract principles. In another class this week we encountered the latter. The course, which focuses on organizational behavior, pairs case studies with theory to equip us to become leaders who know how to effectively shape organizations. As I sat down with an article that posited theories about how people make decisions, I felt like I was back in a class on existentialism that I took in college. I remembered how hard I sometimes find it to process paragraphs and pages that revolve entirely around abstract ideas and logic; it just seems like that's not how my brain works. As I plod through such texts, I fail to visualize anything from what I read, and when I don't visualize, I often don't retain the information. So I have to sit down and read it again, taking notes along the way, building structure into the flow of thoughts since the author didn't seem to. After the note-taking, I can understand the text much better; I can at least visualize the notes on the screen, the four questions the author posed about how decisions get made and the subsequent categories I broke his explanations into it. I still don't visualize the content itself, but I put my mental processing of it onto paper, and somehow, that imprints visually on my brain.

That I learn best by interacting is not news to me. It's the crux of why archaeology impassioned me in college but history often didn't. Some historical accounts, like Zapata and the Mexican Revolution and Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, read like novels to me and don't get put down until I reach the last page; but a lot of history isn't written like that, so back in college, anyway, I found it harder to get into. In anthropology classes, on the other hand, I got to sit down at a lab table and face off with the skulls of our hominid ancestors; I got to study their size and shape, the prominence of the brow ridge, got to hold them in my hand and feel their weight. When I studied the ancient Maya, I got to stand amidst the buildings and stellae they long ago constructed and learn to read the hieroglyphs inscribed upon them; in that incomparable outdoor classroom, I got to listen as the man responsible for deciphering most of the glyphs taught us to see a smoke scroll here and a monkey's face here; taught us to add up the syllables and say the words; taught us to differentiate dates from textual statements and to slowly understand how these artful building blocks relayed information about warfare and conquest, royal births and deaths. In classes, I got to study slides professors had taken at long-excavated or newly rediscovered archaeological sites. Even when learning theory—that often-times deadly, abstract stuff—I got to study maps covered in symbols and differently colored arrows to learn the locations of hominid skulls or coastal campsites, to learn the competing explanations of the migration of hominids out of Africa or the newer take on the route homo sapiens followed to populate the Americas. That all this content stimulated my interest is no surprise; it stimulated my brain waves, tapping into all kinds of functions in my head.

Being back in school after almost a decade away from it is not just an adjustment to my schedule; it's an adjustment for my brain. While both my undergraduate studies and my professional work as a social studies editor were heavily focused on content, my graduate classes are teaching me mostly about academic disciplines and professional fields. That the subject at the heart of them—all courses being connected by the thread of education—is something highly tangible to me, something I have experienced in many settings and from both sides of the equation, doesn't always mean that the way my brain has to work to access the information is comfortable for it. It has been a long time since I read theory; a long time since I read so much of anything in one sitting, or in daily nine-hour sittings. But I consider all the struggles toward adjustment to be brain yoga. In some classes, the teaching methods are entirely new to me; in others, the packaging of the content is; yet in all of them, as the different control centers in my brain stretch their legs, shake out their muscles, and get back on the mat, they exhale a collective sigh of relief. It is exhausting to be inside your head so many hours a day; but it is exciting, especially when you realize that you can learn anything, in any format, no matter the limitations you might think were placed on your brain at birth. The brain is elastic, I think; resilient. Some corners grow dim over time, but all it takes to re-light them is a little effort, a little will, and a solid dose of curiosity. And with that optimistic thought, I leave you, my readers, to get back to my homework!

It's not you, it's me.

Dearest blog readers,

I feel like a teenage boy who's seemingly been ignoring the girl he really likes and is finally getting around to telling her why. I have to say exactly what he would, in all earnestness: it's not you, it's me -- I swear. My life is in transition, filling with new events, people, and assignments (yes, assignments, even before classes technically begin!) and keeping me sternly on my toes (for years I worked at home, alone, remember -- so it's stimulating but exhausting for me to be out and about, surrounded by people, indulged with new information, every day, all day). My life is in transition, and the newness is exhilarating; the prospects of all that lies ahead put a smile on my face as I sit here and think about them. But I haven't forgotten you; even if I don't show it, I haven't forgotten my love of writing for you or my appreciation for your being there to read whatever I decide to say. So sheepishly, I am here to ask you to stay faithful to me, to keep checking for updates as you have been (Google Analytics tells me so!); to know that I'm thinking about you and thinking about what to write for you; to know that this is just part of the transition—the loss of the time to write, the loss of knowing just what to say. But it'll come back. I'll be back. I hope you will be too.

yours in loquaciousness forever,
Lara

from this chair on the patio (which I meant to post 2 weeks ago)

From this chair on the patio, I face a flat-as-glass ocean. Beyond it are discernible the yellow of sand and the dark gradations of greenery on distant islands; the air is clear today, if not the sky, and from the right spot I can see both halves of the old wreck of a tanker that rests off the shores of Horse Neck beach and Westport harbor. Trees block my view of Cuttyhunk Island and Martha’s Vineyard, but I know on a day like this I could see them clearly if I stood in the right spot; I could even see the red tint of the cliffs at Gay Head in the late-day sun.

From this chair on the patio, I am surrounded by the noises of summer—crickets chirp a rapid tune from the gardens beside me; various birds call to one another from the power lines that run behind the honey locusts that shade the yard. A plane flies overhead behind me, making that lolling rumble that they always do out here, where the horizon stretches all around us and planes don’t disappear from view nearly so quickly as they seem to elsewhere. Now Grandpa has turned on the radio, and from the house stream the godlike voices of a women’s choir, filling the air with audial light.

All around me there are flowers and trees, collected seashells, beach rocks, and pieces of driftwood, the dried arms of a lavender bush. There are fields cultivated toward beauty, every inch of them lovingly crafted by my grandparents.

They bought this land in the 1950s. Back then there was nothing on it—nothing but grass and a barn in a corner of the yard, which my grandfather promptly feigned having accidentally burned down. (He didn’t want it, and he loves to watch things burn.) Soon there was a little cottage, with just three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. When I study photographs from the early days here, I see surrounding the child-sized forms of my mother and her siblings only meadows, only bushes; the sculpted flower and rock gardens, the individual and groups of trees that fill four acres now were yet to be thought out or planted.

Over time, the little house grew. First came a master bedroom off a long hallway at one end, then a dining room laid with tile the same emerald green hue as the water beyond the windows and outstretched land; later the spiraling steps of a wooden staircase led the way to an upstairs bedroom, an upstairs porch, from which one can watch the moon rise over the ocean through the fishbone branches of the locust tree outside.

As the interior expanded, so did the details of the exterior. A shipment of large rocks pulled from the harsh New England soil were organized into a garden just next to the house, then topped with flowers and tiny trees (and perched on by my parents on the day of their wedding; in the photographs, there are yellow lilies spilling over the rock beneath them). Soon privets were planted beyond the rock garden, then rhododendrons, then hydrangeas; soon a flower garden blossomed beyond it, an alleyway of grass left between the two for bare feet to dance through as children played tag or practiced cartwheels or ran through the grass to remove sand from their bodies before entering the house.

Eventually, the colonial stone walls gained neighbors—first conifers and blackberry vines, later day lilies, roses, and hundreds of flowers whose names I don’t know. In the next yard was planted a vegetable garden among fruit trees, was built a shed.

At some point, trees began to take root. Grandpa organized them with logic—some to block strong winds, others to block views of newly built houses that he did not want to face. Nine of the trees mark the births of his grandchildren. Mine is a dawn redwood, the tallest of all on the lot and perhaps a harbinger of my move to California. My brother’s is a bush-like short-leafed pine, dark green, stubby, and missing a patch toward the top where a hurricane stripped it bare. The blue spruce down by the stone wall is one cousin’s; the deciduous tree whose name I never retain but which drips like a chandelier with white flowers in early summer belongs to the youngest cousin, the last one for whom roots were set into the earth. These trees stand in various conditions around the house, protecting it from winds and rains and also reminding the people inside that the incredible bond to place that they feel here has a wellspring; that though the place itself is magnificent, it is all the more so because of its caring cultivation. The people inside look at the flower gardens and bushes, the nine grandchildren trees, even the windows and doors of their home, and they know that this place is sewn into them in the same way the roots outside are laced into the soil. They are deeply grounded in this place, and that’s not only because they have always been here and always loved being here; it’s also because it was shaped for them, shaped of them before they had even come into existence.

Little Compton

This is where my heart lives, I’ve always said, though the logical part of me knows it’s not a sensical thing to believe. My heart is just an organ; just a mass of flesh inside my rib cage. Yet whatever it is that we refer to as the heart – the spirit, the essence of my being, the part of the sentient me that throbs with life – that part was born right here, in this place, I tend to think, and not too long after my physical birth took place.

When I first came here I was just a few months old. My mother had swum in this ocean for 30 years at that point, and she took me right in, introducing me immediately to the feel of the salt water, the buoyancy of my body amidst the waves. A year or two later, she taught me how to submerge myself below a crashing wave—how to protect myself from its strength by sitting fully under it, to overcome it from below. I must’ve been very small then, because the waves here are not too tall but in my memory, as I watch my crouching-down self, my eyes-squeezing-shut self, the wave towers above me, as though it were solitary and 15 feet tall. I have never forgotten the first time I did that; my mother must’ve been nearby, perhaps beside me, but in my memory of it, I am alone; I am seated serenely on the sea floor as the water barrels over top of me.

In my first many summers here, she always referred to me as her water baby, her little fish who would not come out of the ocean for much of anything before dinnertime. When I did retreat from the waves, it was usually at full sprint, aiming toward one thing and one thing only—the towel she had waiting for me, spread wide along her arm span, shaken free of sand, dry, warm, and engrossing. As soon as I bolted into it she had it around me, she was rubbing my arms through it to warm them up, kissing my wet forehead, rocking my drying body in her lap, enveloping me in a snuggle. For this I was delighted to leave the ocean; for only this.

Evenings here were always simple. Before dinner, there might be a walk down to the cove, some prowling for mussels or blue crabs, a game of croquet. At 7 p.m., the opening jingle of NBC Nightly News would lure us into the house, which we’d shunned since morning, which we aimed not to enter as long as the sun still shone. Grandma and Grandpa would already be seated, bourbon and gin glasses in their respective hands. They tuned out the shuffling of cards as we slid our tan bodies onto the soft carpet, belly-down, and began to play. They listened to the news, often interrupting it to state their commentary; I listened mostly to the pleasing garble of Tom Brokaw’s speech, the gentle timbre of his voice. I loved him; I loved these summer evenings with the whole family; I loved their reliability—recurring identically day after day and year after year so that I sometimes forgot which visit I was enjoying, which age I had become in the intervening year, which life story had unfolded in between my timeless summer vacations.

I’ve come to Little Compton all 32 summers of my life. In the ten years I lived in Boston, I also came here weekly in good weather and monthly, often, in the off-season. The landscape, over time, has changed a little—the cliff I like to stand on at the end of the lane is slowly crumbling, sitting further back from the sea; the cabanas that once stood just behind the beach have been swept away by storms, the paths around them grown to mere hints of walkways under the dominating sprawl of rose hips and poison ivy; the gardens I like to wander in have expanded throughout our yard, no longer limited to the areas just around the house. Some years we have berries growing; some years Grandpa has killed them off. Some years trees lose branches, hurricanes and snowstorms ripping all but their boughs away, leaving bare spots and scraggly tops. Soon, I know, a more important feature of this place’s geography will change on me, and it will be the only one with which I cannot cope—soon, I know, my grandparents will no longer live here. In the meantime, as I return to this place that they’ve welcomed us into since I was born—since my mother was born too—I think of it only as I have always known it: as my place of freedom, my place to live without purpose other than to enjoy myself, my place to sit and think.

There is a spot on the cliff at the end of the lane where a meadow gives itself over to the sea. There the earth simply crumbles, the rocks below catching it, the sea beyond slowly moving farther from the land. (When my mother was young, the cliff ended in a dirt road; it wound along the precipice, letting cars pass along the wide point of land. As a child, I remember seeing the remnants of that car path—just a few inches you could walk on, dead-ending into shrubbery before you could reach the very tip of the point.)

On that cliff, in that place where earth gives way to rock and sea, there is a spot I have returned to yearly, often monthly, and there I have returned to my self. It is an opening in the honey suckle; a tufty patch of grass amidst low bushes; and though it has shrunk with time it has remained there, still easy to find. I have sat there and stood there, sometimes lightly clad, sometimes decked out in full fleece or wool. I have sat there and stood there, sometimes for just a moment, sometimes for hours on end. I have sat there and stood there, each time saying a silent hello to my ocean, each time saying a silent hello to all the past selves that surround me there. I sit there or stand there and time is both forgotten and accentuated—when I am there, I have never left that spot; when I am there, I am the new sum total of everywhere I’ve ever been.

That spot, this place, they are my signpost in life. Here I sit quietly and reinvigorate myself; I revisit all the past me’s who have been here and, when I depart, I take them with me; I take the lessons they’ve learned and the experiences they’ve had, the heartache and the bliss they have felt; I take all of this quietly away inside me.

To go to a place each year, to measure yourself and your life against its longevity, to take strength and pleasure from that—something in all that gives birth to my joy. This is where my heart lives, you can tell—where I come to reflect on my contentment; where I come to acknowledge just how much I have lived and to look forward to all that lies ahead.

put my finger on it

Today I finally put my finger on what makes living on the peninsula feel so significantly different than living in San Francisco. It's not just the weather—the lack of fog, the presence of warm nights, the chorus of crickets chirping outside my open window. It's not just the surroundings, which here are flat, which here include more grass than a San Franciscan can ever imagine seeing outside of a park, which here include squirrels and raccoons and other critters, which here include driveways, oh so blessed many driveways, such easy street parking, that I can overlook the fact that the cars filling all the parking spots are BMWs. That the place itself is different is not surprising; the thing that strikes me is just how much the difference is also in the people. And what gets me about them is not that they are all so wealthy, though they are; it's not that they are all so preppy, though they are; it's that so many of them—or any of them—are over the age of 45. If one thing more than even the fog and the hills makes San Francisco a unique place in my mind, it's the youth of the its inhabitants, so many of them ranging in age from wee little guy to parent of wee little guy. Even in Noe Valley, aka family central, my oldest neighbors had kids in high school. Anyone older than that I rarely saw.

morning at Island Lake

It was like waking up at the uppermost point of the world. I crawled out of the tent, tugging my hat down to cover my ears, slipping my socked feet into my boots, and arose to face a sky full of sunlight. Around me circled a horseshoe-shaped ridge of crumbling mountains; around me circled a horse-shoe shaped ridge of low hills that blocked the wind. As I climbed up the rocks, summiting the small hillside, I looked down over Island Lake. Its surface moved to and fro; small breezes pushed it this way and that so that ripples sometimes collided. The tiny waves reflected dots of light back at me; they glimmered as I watched.

During the night, the wind had whipped around us, causing the side of the tent to slap me repeatedly now and then. It was so loud you could hear it coming, rising. There were no leaves up here for it to rustle; it was not their shimmying that I heard; it was just the loud whisper of the wind itself. In the morning, it had subsided, but perched up high as I was now, I could see it move on the water, and I could hear it coming and going, zinging around the basin in which I and this lake were seated. Now and then a bird chirped. A yellow jacket buzzed in its arrival, then disappeared. Otherwise, it was just the wind, the water, and myself observing the start of this day.

As the sun broadened its reach across the mountains, I studied their bodies. Mostly gray, with a section of red on the far left end, their crests looked like they might crumble into pieces at any moment. Scree and boulders covered all surfaces. Even the smoother areas were lacerated, as though Picasso had had a hand in designing them. Here and there, a ribbon of quartz glowed in the midst of the hard granite. These were uninviting walls for hiking; but they were elegant for surroundings.

Much of our hike up to Island Lake had trekked us over smoother faces of the granite—pillowy stretches of hard stone, curved in places, pock-marked in others, deeply grooved and chasm'd in some stretches. We had gotten off the trail, following cairns that proved to be more decorative than directional, and ascended to greater heights than necessary to reach the chain of three lakes that was our destination. As we made our way over the crest of rock beyond which we knew we'd see water, we headed downward into the basin, finding the creek we should have walked alongside much of the way. It was a beautiful sight, that slow trickling of water amidst solid granite—moistening the surface without drenching it, moistening my dry throat. I had not wanted to drink all the water I carried until I saw the blue confirmation of more lying ahead.

When we reached Twin Lakes, we found a small peninsula and dropped our packs. My back was aching; I lay on the rock and stretched it flat. I dipped my fingers in the water. I removed my boots. What a way to take a break.

Soon we moved deeper into the basin at the back of which Molly promised our lake to be waiting. I couldn't see it from even this distance—couldn't see where it must be, where I knew it to be. But soon enough we circled past Boomerang Lake; we trudged down thin paths that eked a way through bushes of Indian paintbrush; we crossed a narrow stone bridge; and then we'd reached it, the long strip of glacial water called Island Lake.

In the morning, studying its layout, I figured it got its name from the small spurts of rock that stretched into the water or surfaced in the midst of it. On each one grew lush beds of tall grass, which beckoned for me to take my socks off and walk through them with bare feet. On each one grew pink tufts of mountain heather. On some stood the thick body of a pine tree, massive in opposition to its short arms and stubby needles, half barren but half thriving, diligently withstanding the regular rushes of mountain air, the chill of the water that its roots drank from, the intensity of the sun that beat down on it.

When we arrived we had gone swimming. We had immersed our selves to our knees—then hesitated. We had immersed ourselves to our waists—then hesitated. Finally we submerged ourselves completely, losing our breath a little, losing control of our heart beats momentarily. The chill was overpowering, but it was worth it. In the morning, seated above those same frigid waters, I could not wait to get back in.

After breakfast we did swim again, the temperature seeming slightly less dreadful in the lulls between gusts of wind. We swam and we awoke; we tidied the space in which we had sprawled our belongings; we said a silent thank you to the place for being so hospitable. Then we headed toward home, descending the mountain just as indirectly as we'd climbed it, building up blisters and bruises as we trudged across sheer faces of stone to find the trail once again. Molly has a nose for directions, so I never felt lost; I enjoyed the adventure of feeling our way out; and I appreciated that at the end of the excursion, the shores of Wright's Lake opened up a spot for a picnic and one final swim before we returned to civilization.

getting back into a backpack

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...)

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.

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.

quote of the day (upon discussing my dating (non?)prospects)

"Flakes should only exist in cereal."
--Julia

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.

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.

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.

mornings

It was always a prize to be the first one into the living room in the morning and get to claim the cushy green armchair that the sun warmed as it rose over the ocean. I was never the first one awake—that was always Grandpa, who by 7 a.m. might have on his hardhat or a pair of work gloves, might be peddling his bicycle up to Wilbur's to get the paper, might be doing a crossword puzzle at the dining room table. But I liked to be the first one into that chair and with a book, so I could spread my knees into the soft armrests and sink down into the cushion as I read. Eventually a parent might come into the room and stake out a spot on the sofa; a sibling or cousin might sprawl across the carpet; and by the time Grandma was in the kitchen fussing over breakfast at 8:30 or 9, we'd all be reading something, easing ourselves into the day in peaceful quiet.

Mornings elsewhere haven't always been quite the bliss of that. At home, we got up for school before sunrise and often drove there in the growing light. Once a week I had to make morning basketball practice, which meant I was in the gym and on the court before I'd normally even be out of bed. And on weekends at home, I usually slept in. Once I got to college, my weekday waking hour got significantly later, so it was something I took note of when I had a rare occasion to be out and about on the early side.

I distinctly remember an odd morning when I trekked through Harvard Square wearing hiking boots and a backpacking backpack, leading a group of freshmen to a bus we'd take to New Hampshire for their orientation trip. It was strange, for sure, to be carrying all that camping equipment through the middle of the city; but more so, what struck me as so notable at the time was the life that existed in the square at that hour—about 7 a.m. Unlike the afternoons and evenings, the streets weren't bustling; only here or there did a car drive past; only one or two at a time did pedestrians go by. But there were people out. And most moved slowly, carrying coffee or a brief case and seeming to be enjoying the bright sun and warm air. Was it just my imagination, I wondered, or was this the happiest time of day in the square?

A year later, I spent a month of summer in Honduras at archaeology field school. Unlike other archaeology students, we didn't have to sleep in tents out in the desert; instead, we stayed at a very basic but four-star hotel called La Madrugada (the dawn). When I was in the hotel and not busy having face-offs with rhinoceros beetles in the hallway or competing with geckos for use of the shower, I'd often be found hanging in a hammock near the patio that positively dripped with plants. I'd be listening to the brook that ran below the patio, or the old man who sang to the plants as he touched each leaf with wet fingers, or just daydreaming. I never did get to hang there long, as we were out in the ruins, digging or learning the world of the ancient Maya, pretty early. But it was a pleasure to grab even five minutes in one of the hammocks on that patio that faced the sunrise. It was quite the good way to start a day.

In my adult life, mornings have largely been dictated by commuting to work. I used to love having 30 minutes to myself in the car, listening to, possibly singing along to, certain music that I deemed either good for driving or good for morning uplift. It was a transitional 30 minutes, getting me comfortably from the world of sleep to the fast-paced world of work, and I enjoyed not having to do any thinking during that time. I'd just enjoy the fields and woods I drove alongside, later the winding path of the Charles River. I'd watch the sky, look for birds, take stimulation from the unfolding surroundings in order to fully awaken myself.

Having that time in the morning is something I've greatly missed while working at home for the last three years. Here I roll out of bed and into the shower; then I find myself somehow transported the very short distance to the kitchen all too quickly. Before I know it, I'm eating my cereal and opening my work email. I haven't been anywhere, done anything else. I have arisen to go directly to work. And yesterday, when instead the first thing I did in the day was drop my car off at the mechanic and then walk home on what would prove to be one of the warmest days of the year here, you can imagine that I really enjoyed the 10 minutes of transit.

As with Harvard Square, there is a different life to Noe Valley in the morning than the one I usually see. The park around the corner is quiet; maybe a dog plays, maybe a baby swings, but there aren't 50 of each yet; there aren't 50 sets of parents and owners filling the place with chatter. At the corner, the bus stop is full, rather than empty. And at the top of the hill, as I turn back to look at the east bay in the clear light that we've been missing with all the fires going on, there is a breeze and a richness of daylight that coincide to feel like the blustery wind of a morning at my favorite beach back east. That that temperature and that bit of moisture in the air are always here in San Francisco is not the point; that I don't very often get outside to experience them when the sun is at just that angle is what really struck me. Mornings, I have always thought, are a time for slowly coming forth, slowly brightening; perhaps in the new life I will settle into next week, I'll remember to enjoy them more; to let them, before I rush through them, just become.

open warm brilliant naked

I walked into the kitchen, headed toward the refrigerator, pulled something out—I didn't bother to remember what, as at this point the action was one I could have taken without any thought. But I had an awed grin on my face by the time I let the door swing shut. Right in front of me, at eye level, hung the magnetic words of a poem—and not one written by me. Later I would deem it a prophecy, and I would reconstruct it on each refrigerator in each apartment I'd move into it, hoping that if I kept it present in my mind and in my life, it might one day prove true. It said:

a man is out there for you
he is open warm brilliant and naked
and will devour you

Sara's grin was just as big as mine when I burst into her room to say thank you. She chuckled at my question of how long the poem had been waiting for me; just a few days, she said, and I kicked myself for not seeing it sooner. I still haven't let go of the delight I felt upon finding it—the delight of knowing that no matter the rejection I had just been through, I had a friend who had faith that my luck with men would change; the delight of knowing, too, the sort of man I should look forward to. She had summed it up so aptly: open warm brilliant and naked. In all the times a friend or a personality test had asked me to pick words to describe what I thought I might want in a man, none had so succinctly hit on the heart of it.

Openness, such a multifaceted gem: the ability to let others in; the ability to accept new thoughts, ideas, and people; the ability to be truthful. As I have ruminated on the perhaps serendipitous beginning of the list of characterizations with this word for seven or eight years now, I have settled on this being quite the sage starting point; without openness, how else can a relationship develop? Openness is like a doorway; it lets two people enter the same space.

Warmth, for me the founding principle of my interaction with anyone. If there is one thing I think I have to offer, it is this. If there is one thing I find myself drawn to in others, it too is this. This trait reflects not just an ability but a predilection for developing a closeness with other people. If by nature a person is open, it is still by choice that he or she emits warmth. Openness is like a doorway; warmth is what makes the space beyond it communal. Warmth is what adds enchantment.

Brilliance, something that takes a million forms. In a literal sense, it is emanation, radiance, vibrant light. In the more common usage, it is intelligence, or creativity, or wit—it is having a talent for or deep understanding of something. In my mind, that something could be anything. There is no way to weigh one sort of brilliance against another. All that matters to me is that a person know he has some and be able to find it; and delight in finding it. It is that delight that casts a glitter like fairy dust into the space inhabited by two people, that gives them something in the other to learn about or admire and by so doing unite them more securely together.

Nakedness, the state of showing all. It is equally emboldening to be physically and metaphorically naked in another's presence; it too can be equally unnerving. To strip down clothes and walls is a way of giving and of taking; it is a way of making people vulnerable, and a way of making them strong. It, too, is a way of being joyful; of shedding boundaries and shedding thought; of stepping into the realm of feeling rather than thinking. Openness and warmth draw two people together; openness, warmth, and brilliance give them a way to stay there; but it is nakedness that makes the space between them a certain kind of space and not any other.

It's poetic, this prophecy, and prophetic, this poetry, and what I like on top of that is that it's light-hearted, closing with hope of a delicious encounter and/or a vivacious metaphorical appreciation of me. And ambitious as the whole thing is, after all these years of not finding him, I still think Sara has described a real person, or many real persons, and I am tickled to know what I'm watching for as a trail of potential hims go by.

out of place

Last summer at a wedding, I reconnected with a friend from high school who turns out to live in the east bay. I was delighted to find that he lives here, as he was one of the people I grew up with who I knew I'd always feel at home with. What might seem funny about that to some of you is that it's not something I can say about most people I know from home. On the one hand, I always enjoy the rare chance to catch up with people I hardly know now but once did. I went to the same school for 13 years, and my classmates there were my world until I left for college; even the ones I wasn't close friends with I certainly knew, inevitably being in a class or some extracurricular together at some point in all that time. But there is part of me that always felt that they and I were from different camps, different worlds. Their parents were southern, mine weren't; their parents were loaded, mine weren't; their parents were Republicans, mine Democrats; their parents were born-again Christians, Southern Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, but all Christian, while mine were Jewish by heritage and raised outside of any faith; their fathers were wealthy doctors and lawyers, mine a comparatively poor professor; their mothers were at home all day, or driving carpool, or providing snacks, while mine was at work until dinnertime, inspiring all kinds of unsubtle disapproval from the rest. I grew up in a homogeneous environment, and in it I looked and seemed no different than anyone else. But I felt the differences. My mindset was different, my world view and my belief system centered around completely different foundations than theirs.

So when my friend across the bay emailed me today to tease me about how many more people from our school had befriended him on facebook than had me, to tease me about his being connected on the web to some of my best friends from high school when even I wasn't, I decided to have a look at who is on facebook from that part of my life. As it turns out, most of the few friends I've stayed in touch with since leaving Atlanta have profiles, including one of my closest friends from high school—closest back then and closest now, which surprises me every time I see or talk with her because we could not feel more oppositely about things like George Bush, Adam and Eve, and the Georgia Bull Dogs (she went to UGA; my dad was a professor at Tech; if you've ever been to Atlanta, you understand this rivalry to be no different than Duke/UNC, Yankees/Red Sox, Cal/Stanford, etc., and if you've ever met this friend, you understand this rivalry to be an important part of life).

The schism between our thinking on such things is something we have always known about and never let matter; we had a great time together as teenagers and that's what we hold on to; that's what keeps us loving each other, no matter the differences in our lives' paths. That being said, it was still a shock to open her profile and see Republican listed under Politic Views, to see a John McCain banner running across the page.

My friend in the east bay had mentioned in his email to me that he did think accepting all these friends requests had made his profile significantly more bipartisan than he'd ever expected; and mine will head that way now too, and that's fine; when you've grown up the one who's different, you know better than to hold difference or disagreement against anyone else. But as I typed back to him my surprise, despite all preparation for it, at seeing her support for McCain right out there in public, I realized how cozy it has been spending the last 13 years of my life living in two of the most liberal places in the country—how cozy it has been being surrounded by people with views relatively similar to mine. The debates among my friends from both college and all the lives I've led since give color to the different gradations of liberalism; but other than having a very conservative college roommate, I've been sheltered all these years from non-liberal mindsets in the very same way that the majority of my classmates in Atlanta were sheltered from liberal ones.

That is to say, I've been in a bubble. And while I greatly appreciate that so many people see the world roughly as I do, that moment of shock reminded me of the importance of not just knowing that people see the world in different ways but also understanding how others see it—and why. The lack of that understanding has been a source of great animosity in our history and in our world today. So for all my discomfort with coming from a world full of people who believe certain things with ferocity, I remind myself to refrain from judging them and instead just listen to them. That is, after all, one of the great benefits of being out of place; you come to fully know something that is not yours.

concert review: Robert Plant and Alison Kraus at Berkeley's Greek theater

The concert gets an A despite the steepness of the hill we sat on, the dirt that blocked up my shoes as I descended it, and the foggy chill that set in about halfway through. The setting was stunning and the performances top-notch. I swear Robert Plant must be in love because I'd never expect to see him doing backup vocals, but he sure was good at it (and danced up a storm all the while; ever the rocker, he is). And when Alison Kraus added her voice to his songs, she just about ran away with the show. I was left with one thought and one thought only: somebody needs to let the country-bluegrass star record all of Led Zeppelin's songs, or at least an entire album. Because she just might rival Plant at pulling them off.

Going to California

In the basement of the house I grew up in, we had a guest room that my brother later took over as his bedroom. He was a teenager by then and sleeping in a room between his sister and his mother didn't seem cool. I don't think it had much to do with privacy, as his door was usually open and I was often in there with him. But it was an enormous room, with plenty of space at the foot of the double beds for a sprawling mound of library books to take form, and he would sit on the edge of his mattress or in a chair over that literary hill and play his electric guitar for hours. He liked to turn up the amp so you could hear his Jimi Hendrix-esque wailing down the street. His thick mane of wavy hair would fall around his shoulders, released after school from the ponytail he was required to keep it in while on school grounds, and he'd close his eyes and jam. I'd be sitting on the floor, trying to follow his fingers and understand how they made such melodies out of the sharp strings, or just reading poetry. I'd be sitting there, cozy on the 1970s shag rug, not even realizing how lucky I was to have him. Not realizing it isn't always like this between siblings; not realizing we might ever move apart and lose the chance to spend so much time together.

After he left for college, I moved my easel into his room. He had a walk-in closet full of his own paintings, and I thought they'd keep me good company while I tried to take after my mom and him and prove good at painting. They were a tough pair to rival in the artistic regard, as my mom had an entire pottery studio set up two rooms down, and my brother—who, being older, always learned everything earlier than I did—had thrown pots in his childhood, whereas I had only made small sculptures. So I set up my easel right in the middle of the room, where anyone could see what I was painting, and when I'd go in there after school—when no one else, mind you, was home to witness my progress—I'd pull a tape off his shelf and pop it into his boom box; I'd listen to his music while I painted. I got to know Hendrix that way, and the Rolling Stones, and even Drivin' n Cryin', a high school band from north Atlanta that quickly became one of my favorites.

At some point I started to pull out all the Led Zeppelin tapes that had formerly intimidated me, seeming to me to contain a sort of music you had to learn to listen to. I remember turning over the black tape cases in my hand, noting the sequential numbering of their white-font naming, wondering just how many songs these guys had recorded over time. I knew there was more to their talent than "Stairway to Heaven," and as I listened, I realized I didn't quite get everything they put out. But some songs really compelled me, and one in particular stuck. Many years later, a memory of the sound of it would spark an idea in my head a few paragraphs into writing fiction and I'd eventually type out 120 pages of my personal daydream of an adventure tale. I'd listen to "Going to California" and go west in my head, letting my main character take my journey and take the aching right out of me. A handful of years after that, I'd finally follow Robert Plant's voice all the way to California, and it's in memory of that song that I write tonight, knowing that tomorrow I will hear Plant sing in person, and though the songs will be Americana and bluegrass and nothing like the ones I used to play on that tape deck, his voice will still recall the myth that one tune created in my mind, the tug of it on my heart and—eventually—my life.

blogpal post

Have you ever had a penpal? Well I have a blogpal; she lives a good distance around the globe from me, and we've never met, but we have a mutual friend who reads us both, and we've started reading each other as well. Recently she posted something like something I'd been thinking about posting. So I'm initiating blogpal post #1, which means I'm responding directly to her, with all of you looking on. :)

This blogpal was writing about the Web and the way it teases you into feeling connected yet leaves a very I'm-alone aftertaste in your mouth. And I get that; I've felt that. Sometimes I am shocked by the number of times I drop by my computer, when doing something elsewhere in my apartment, to see if a new email has come in or a new post has popped up in Google Reader. It's true that my gmail account is open all the time—I live alone, I work at home; why close it? And because I don't, and because it re-loads itself, I tend to persistently check in on it. And because I spend a lot of my time one-on-one with the computer (as that's where all my work gets done, not to mention my writing), and because it is the easiest means of communicating with my friends and family, of following the news, of shopping, of checking the weather forecast, of playing Scrabble, of being connected to you right now—because it has become an incredible source of mental interaction with the world, I do at times find myself feeling an emotional tug toward it and then sometimes a sense of letdown when all the green circles in my gchat bar have gone orange or gray and I remember that I am, really, by myself at the computer.

But there are times when I think that interconnectedness is incredible. Recently, a friend went through a very tough week of sitting in a hospital waiting for her dad to come through surgery and finding at the end that more treatment was needed. She couldn't necessarily talk on the phone while there, so it felt good to be able to sit with her on gchat for hours and type this or that back and forth. We were both doing other things but we kept up a running chatter, and I felt as close to being there keeping her company as is possible from 3,000 miles away, which felt very good. Similarly, there are friends—and relatives—who I rarely used to hear from by phone but who regularly send me hellos and little updates through gchat or Facebook. And I've been able to edit every single English essay my former tutee in Boston has written in the past two years via gchat, as he literally sends me paragraph after paragraph, interspersed with queries like "Is that a thesis statement?" and "Did I support my point ok?"

So for all the bizarrity of developing a fond feeling toward a machine or something displayed on its screen, I appreciate that during the workday, as I sit here doing my business in solitary, there are 15 or 20 of you seemingly right there with me, sharing the latest news article you liked or a witty quip about politics or your recent adventures in your status bar. I like having this little-green-dot community alongside me, having all this information around me to peruse during breaks, having it be my turn to play a word against someone I haven't seen in 15 years but am delighted to be back in touch with.

I realize that enjoying that puts me at risk of getting attached to it as reality, of feeling I can't live without it, of feeling disappointment when I have it in hand but it's giving nothing back to me. So I make a point of enjoying the interconnectedness when I am for some purpose at the computer—and forgetting it the rest of the time. And I think that’s key—to resist relying on it, or expecting it to be more than it is. After all, everything on the Web is constructed and being constantly re-constructed; so it's a fickle creature, becoming only what a bunch of humans here or a bunch of humans there shape it to be.

prejudicial dating

Now that we're in our 30s, a friend and I often discuss dating on a more conceptual level. It's not that we think we're worrying about missing the boat; it's that dating changes as you get older, and to some degree, it's hard to tell whether you're changing appropriately with it. Now don't misinterpret that; I'm not saying I think we're not playing the game right for our age. I don't believe in playing games with dating, and I think mostly I succeed at not doing so. What I think you have to do—and what you are fortunate to have the gained wisdom to do well—when dating at an older age is shed some of the prejudices you once may have felt you had the luxury of sticking to.

Take for example an easy one: physical requirements. Years ago, when some friends of mine took a comment I made about there being "no Lara's man bar, no place where I can go and all the men are single, and available, and looking" and considered how we might build Lara's man bar, every detail of this bar full of men vying for my attention was catered to my pickinesses about who I would date. At the entrance would stand one of those "you must be above this height" cut-outs from the amusement park rides. Just inside would await not a coat rack but a shirt rack, since back then I liked men not only tall but well cut, and I really thought those things mattered; I really thought I could not be attracted to men who didn't meet those restrictions.

Over the years enough lanky guys of all heights and hair colors (I previously had a bias against blonds, too, though now I can't seem to get my eyes off them) have appealed to me that I've realized that the muscle does not make the man, and I've let go of some of those silly daydreams.

What's been harder to get over is my belief about how a guy I should be with should be. I don't mean what he does with his time or what he believes in; I mean how he is with me. I have long felt there are two ways to be in a relationship—co-dependent or independent. You won't be surprised to hear that I strongly favor the latter. Co-dependency goes against my entire being; no doubt because of the 22 years my parents spent poorly married, I strive to be as happy as I can be all on my own. Only once I have contentment as a single girl do I feel I am in shape to be in a relationship well. And as a person who has long known that contentment, I've been having a hard time finding someone else who both prizes that in me and has achieved it in him.

Now don't get me wrong—I'm not looking to be in an unloving or self-centered relationship; I am a born nurturer; I love pampering and caring for people and do it (if I do say so myself) very well and all the time. It's just that I believe in caring for yourself, too, and I want to be with someone who knows how to do that—who knows that I can be an incredible bonus on top of the rest of what he has but does have a lot there for me to build on, a joy all his own for me to add to.

To my surprise, the last few guys I've dated seriously or considered dating seriously have been a hint toward the co-dependent (my last boyfriend definitely was). All are still well-formed beings, so it's not like all they want in life is to be a boyfriend, but they definitely all view being in a relationship as better than not being—and that is very different than what I think I want. But am I foolish to stick with that prejudice? Am I foolish to think that someone who favors being in a relationship just for the sake of being in one is someone who could never make me happy?

I will admit that my leaning is still to avoid anyone who views alone as lonely, single as un-loved. But recently a part of me said to another part: reconsider that, just theoretically, and see what you think. And you know what struck me? Maybe someone who is a little emotionally needy is at least someone who is in touch with his emotions; and maybe that's just as important as having your whole sense of self sorted out. After all, I want someone who wants to be in a relationship because he wants to be with me; and to know he wants that, he's got to know what he feels. So I've been trying to lighten up on my judgments ; to remember that my m.o. in life is to live and love a lot, not just a little, and maybe the person who can return that comes in some quite different package than I expect.

spring cleaning

I may be a tad overdressed for writing tonight; I'm sitting here in a floor-length gown feeling a little constricted because I weigh a bit more than I did when I bought it. It was my waltz dress in college, when we had a formal waltz every spring and we always dressed quite appropriately for it. The gown is a soft navy blue, gauzy and flowy, and if you don't know just what an hour-glass figure I have, you would if you saw me because the way I fill it out now, it's hip-, waist-, and chest-hugging and really emphatic on my curves. I feel like a plump princess in it, and I also feel nostalgic, because I'd forgotten it existed until I dug it up in a pre-move fit of cleaning out my (rather overflowing) closet.

Packed with it at the bottom of a sweater box were other dresses of the same era—a long velvet drape I wore freshman year, a delicate black-and-red flowered slip dress I wore a few seasons later, a truly tiny little-black-dress I wore to the senior soiree and impressed even myself with the audacity of my cleavage. Tonight I tried on each dress again, and though they don't fit perfectly, and though they don't suit my style anymore, they are gorgeous pieces of fabric, and I decided that rather than toss them on the for-sale pile, I'd re-pack them into the box and let them sit another decade at least.

After all, when I was a little girl, a favorite pass-time was sneaking into the hallway closet outside my room and slowly unzipping the floor-length garment bag that housed my grandmother's dresses from the '50s and one precious older one—one of my great grandmother's. It was a thin layer of black gauze that overlaid an off-white slip; I would slip it over my head and shoulders and then feel the soft fabric cascade down around my torso and legs. I was the right height and width for it, at least until my body started to develop, and there was something about the musty smell and the crinkle of the fabric that captivated me. The royal blue Jackie O dress was equally fun to try on, and a less appealing plaid one couldn't be resisted at times. It tickles me to think that some little girl in the future might have fun pulling out my old dresses and admiring their feel and their look. So I'll leave them in the bottom of the box a while longer; I'll leave them there and hold on to the memories they recall just a while longer yet.

I was less sentimental about a heap of other clothes. True, I couldn't bring myself to throw out the brown velvet skirt that I would never wear now but twice in my 20s donned as part of a Brownies uniform on Halloween to great applause from all the men I encountered. True, I couldn't bring myself to toss the fleece vest I was given when I became a leader of the freshmen orientation backpacking trips in college, no matter how vile the bright red and purple of it seem now. True, I didn't even consider chucking my elementary school P.E. t-shirt, which still fits in a very snug and cute way, or the 1970s-era baseball-sleeved PBS t-shirt of my mother's that a few of you know too well. But to my surprise, I finally parted ways with my favorite t-shirt (from my semester in Maine in high school and veeeeeery saggy and old); a well-worn and -loved sweatshirt; my best hiking shorts before all the buttons began dropping off like leaves in autumn; a shirt I slept in for years; all kinds of mini-skirts that I am inarguably too old to wear now; and quite an array of other items. I do, in fact, have two large bags full of clothes to donate to Good Will and two stacks awaiting review by a friend who may fit into them before I try to sell them and make a few bucks off my bad shopping habits. And I have to admit I have those habits because after three hours of sorting and stacking, re-folding and re-considering, if you were to open the double doors of my very large closet now, you would find a much-better-ordered but still enormous collection of clothes. You would have trouble believing I had removed anything. But I have. And I have to say, it's at least the fourth time I have done a massive overhaul of my wardrobe, and most of the items in the for-donation pile have never been considered throw-away-able before!

It's funny the attachments we develop to things. Though my size has changed, though my style has changed, though the seasons in the place I live have changed, there were some items I didn't want to part with not because I think I'll wear them again (I am quite sure, in some cases, I won't) but because I absolutely loved wearing them once. Certain skirts, certain shoes, certain winter coats just make your day when you have them on, and it's fun to remember all the different styles that you've worn with a smile. Certain items recall particular experiences, too, like the sparkly skirt I first wore to an outdoor concert in downtown Boston (it was summer; it was evening; and I felt beautiful, with my tan legs and the silver strands in the skirt flattering one another) or the thick wool turtleneck sweaters I always wore in snow storms (snuggling into them as the flakes landed in my hair and on my lashes and on the soft collars that kept me warm) or the metal-buttoned peacoat that I wore when F. and I spent a winter making a digital film and he captured me, without my knowing it, in a scene at South Station, and in that scene I also had on my favorite shoes from back then, and I won't ever forget the shoes or the jacket because dressed in them I am featured on film for the only time in my life.

It's funny the attachments we develop to things. And it's funny how hard it can be to let them go, even when we know the memories are with us forever. What I found interesting tonight was that in some cases, just as I had outgrown the item, so had I outgrown my passion for the memory that comes with it. But perhaps that's natural; that's maturing.