{my topography}

Lists, naps, and a month of living ‘perfectly’

I wake up from dreaming of the Arizona desert and a professor and his wife I don’t actually know in real life. The phrase “sand frills” sticks in my mind, something I’ve invented in sleep: as in, the canons and mesas give way to sand frills. It almost works to describe the way the sand is funneled and scarred with gullies and rivulets, flash floods scraping rivers into dry mud and red rocks. I wake up with an ear ache, the pain sucking at my right ear like altitude.

I slip away from the others, still sleeping: my small boy with his arms flung side to side like the oars of a rowboat, a contented sleep smile staining his face rosy; and my husband who was feverish last night and who wears and orange t-shirt and twitches inadvertently. It is the last day of vacation and I wake up mid day from napping with the sun slanting through the slits of the wooden blinds, dust motes rising and twirling in the air.

Yesterday I napped too, alone with the cats. Both of them curled nose to tail on the flannel. When I joined them, the apricot one chirped a welcome to me. At night she follows me around the house as I turn off the lights, bank the fire, get ready for sleep. She meows plaintively then, wanting one thing: a pinch of cat nip that makes her whirr like a summer fan and fall to the floor like a dervish in a state of ecstasy.

Today I wake up at 2:37 p.m. dreaming of people I don’t know. For the longest time, or what feels like the longest time, I am convinced that I do actually know the man, who in my dream was a professor, we both were it seems. I try to pull my mind from the shallows of near sleep, where thoughts dart like the shadows of trout, illusive and just below the surface.

Gradually I stir, hoping that if I move, inhabit my body again, feel my fingers and toes, I’ll be able to place him and his wife, dark olive skin, but I’m only more confused and the pain from my ear creeps down my neck. When I put my hand up to my throat I find the glands on that side are swollen. Everything participating in the purposeful choreography of falling ill just as vacation is ending, of course.

When I climb from the bed I move the covers, I move my knees, and my ankles and the soles of my bare feet make contact with the wood floor. I can feel the grooves between the planks. The round circles where penny sized tabs of wood cover screw holes. For a minute I sit there at the edge of the bed with the dust motes circling my tangled hair like a halo and am stricken.

I think of all the screws. Thousands, maybe a million, although I can hardly imagine what a million screws would look like, each one made of dark metal, machined somewhere in a plant in Idaho or Tennessee or Mexico or China. I am astounded considering all the people who contributed to my floor in this way: the workers in protective goggles and gloves sorting and correcting package weights; the fork lift driver; those at the shipping yard and at the hardware store, and also the men who likely knelt a million times or more to place each screw, thankful to have an electric or battery operated screw driver.

The floor is old, and when we bought the house, the finish was almost black with age. It didn’t gleam, and by the windows in my studio, a lot of water damage. Someone left the windows open more than once during a summer rain. Now it gleams, sanded and finished twice over. Our sweat. Our bending knees. My feet make contact with the floor. I pull myself to standing. I pull on jeans. I pull on a white terry sweatshirt that I’ve just put through the wash with a few tablespoons of Chlorox.

In the dryer I added a Mrs. Myers Clean Day geranium scented dryer sheet. The smell made me happy. It spelled clean and not cloying, though not natural either. The house is clean now, at the end of vacation. My life feels in order. I’ve spent the week putting things in order: paints on the shelf in my studio, carmine and cobalt and cerulean. I’ve scheduled things: doctors appointments, dental check ups, hair cuts, meals with friends. I’ve crossed things off my list: updated accounts, passport papers, green peppers and Irish oats and oranges for squeezing. On the bag they say “Take home and give us a squeeze.” Like some sort of huggable small trolls nestled together there in the orange webbed bag.

I’m reading Don DeLillo’s book White Noise, and am fascinated with the way he uses lists to tell the story. Lists spiraling and deepening, a little the way Tim O’Brian did in The Things They Carried. This month, March, is a month of lists. It’s a month I’ve decided to live contentiously, focusing on the small things like replying to emails regularly and packing my lunch for work the night before. I get so outside myself, tilting towards the big picture, towards the hungry heat of my passions, that I forget to be here much, and here has a way of getting crowded and overwhelming as a result.

In O Magazine, someone wrote an article about “A Month of Living Perfectly” and I laughed, because it was my idea, the very thing I said to DH. “What if we spend March living the way we always say we want to live? No waffling.”

He nodded over toast. He wasn’t really listening to me. It was the end of February and the snow had numbed his brain. It keeps falling, by the way, falling nearly nightly. Making the woods white and glittering and the driveway slick when it melts and then turns to ice in the dark. But now March is here, and I’m going ahead with my proposition, ready, set, go.

If you were to live “perfectly” for a month, what are the top five things you would do every day?

Dig in and read.

It is midwinter here in my small corner of the world and also in my blue-roomed heart. I’m tucked in, my pulse moving slowly and full of trepidation like water running under pale knocked together shards of ice. Self doubt circles like a pack of coyotes, their tracks mushy and dark where the earth collapses, pressing up close to icy ribbon of river.

This is what winter always brings: a bareness; an uncomfortable edge; inadequacy. Things seem so blatant; personal deficits larger than life, like the huge fiery orange sun we watched today. It tangled in the bare branches of the trees near us at the top of the sledding hill, then slipped away, leaving the snow stained pink with longing.

I spent the morning in a quiet house reading Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer, and coming face to face with the blunt edge of my own lack. In the back of the book, “119 Books To Be Read Immediately” and I’ve read only a small handful. I’m a slow reader, with a tendency to dally in the text. I soak up sentences. I read with a pen, marking, dog-earing, rummaging back through previous pages. But I’m also a sporadic, undisciplined reader, and I’m ashamed of this.

Books have a way of inhabiting the drawers of my mind, like so many jars of gesso and paint, easily jostled, staining the surface of my day. I have a hard time shaking free of them, and carrying on, so I have a certain reluctance grappling with anything weighty unless I have the means to hunker down and read it for an entire day.

Also, I am lazy. I drag my feet about finishing books that don’t catch my interest in the first few lines (fickle, I know). I lack analytical fervor. I read simply for the joy of language, story, and words, which I’ve always loved and carried covetously around in my pocket on the scribbled pages of a 4×6” Mead memo book. But I lack critical finesse, and also time, clarity, and a hundred other things have thus far prevented me from reading the list of books I probably should already have read.

Somewhere along the way I’ve also let myself start thinking that time spent curled on the couch with a book frivolous leisure time, less meaningful than time spent clicking away at the keyboard, constructing jagged sentences about blue shadows falling long across bright snow. Have no doubt: I’ll devour books by the authors I love (mostly contemporary writers: Kingsolver, Diddion, Munro, O’Brien) and I’ll jealously leaf through books by new authors who are rising like sudden shiny stars into the literary sky. But I’ve rarely gone back to the masterpieces, the ones that have endured: prose and plot and construction indelible and profound across time. And lately, as I’m grappling with my own writing more and more, I’ve started to feel a hunger for these texts: knowing that as I read them, I’ll be carried across time, into the world of ideas, word by word.

Word by word, closer to what I need to know.

So I’ve decided to make this my year of reading. This, simply, is my mondo beyondo and my one little word. Read.

{ Tell me: What two books most changed the way you see the world, writing, life, etc?}

Some days like this

Yesterday was brilliant, and then today I woke up inexplicably sad.

Yesterday I made French Onion soup. Farmer’s market fresh onions, bakery baguette, outrageously priced Gruyere cheese, and it was perfect. Last night we went to see Paris , Je’ Te Aime, and to pick up some bowls at clay studio, newly fired. They turned out beautifully. Pale sky blue, nesting together, still carrying a whisper of warmth from the kiln.

The film was quirky with 18 different directors/stories. I loved all the ways it portrayed love: the raw, sharp shards of love that come with the grief of loosing a child; the unexpected fragility of ending up alone, or together; the myriad ways love is tangled in translation: across faith. DH hated it, because he said it depressed him: too close to life, I guess. He wanted something cheerier, some handful of stories that knit themselves together, ending with old folks rocking on some sunny porch together, at the end of a life well lived.

But to me, love IS achingly fragile and the likelihood of surviving a lifetime with it intact, improbable. All the more exquisite because this is so. Like finding unbroken sand dollars at the sea shore. I’m not much of a critic though; a sucker for anything that portrays a faraway place and snapshots of the human condition. I like films to be arty, poignant There were a handful of stories I didn’t like, but more that I did. Watching the film felt like reading a volume of short stories (which I’m doing, by the way. Alice Munro’s RUNAWAY.)

But today, despite the perfect sunny skies, I feel like crying. Hormonal maybe, or maybe just off after a late night, sleeping against Bean, who went to sleep in our bed last night after telling the babysitter he missed us. Maybe I need to go out and soak up sun. Do you ever wake up this way? Simply off, with no real reason you can put your finger on?

Midsummer moodiness

Somehow, the summer is slipping by. Without warning it is more than half over really, and I’m feeling moody about it. The sky has been a mosaic of torn clouds this week. Strong winds and rain have been thrashing about wildly like a greenbroke horse. The night sky burnished with sheet lightening, thunder always rolling low in the distance. It’s that time in the summer when I start to think about it ending, and I feel a certain abject sorrow thinking of it.

Like driving again after living through a car crash, the prospect of going back to work and living through another winter makes me white-knuckled and anxious, albeit in a hazy popsicle and sun-stupored way. Last year’s autumn and winter left scar tissue running the length of our relationship: mine and DH’s. We survived, but sometimes the ache of it painted entire weeks with indigo and gunmetal gray. We came out of it, one bowl at a time at the pottery studio, centering, finding each other among strangers, with slip on our hands and glaze splattering our shirts. But it took until after my birthday to feel like we’d make it to the next.

Now roses are blooming hot red and hooker pink, their petals promiscuously soft, but the slugs are eating holes in the leaves. We still haven’t put in a garden fence, and the ground where the beds have not been turned has begun to reclaim its meadow-ness, grasses and tiny fingered ferns and sturdy-rooted dandelions sprouting up through the rubble of tilled soil. I wake up and spend my days sprawled out reading novels which is something I almost never do, and cannot quite get accustomed to. Hours in a book, interrupted every fifteen minutes by Bean who lopes about the yard with his bubble mower or a watering can.

We got him a set of trains and a an oval loop of track and they keep him occupied for nice long stretches of time, during which I get hauled into whatever place is inked out on the pages I’m turning. I get pulled in so easily, my whole day takes on the hue of the story, as though my life were a cotton cloth saturated in the dye of each story’s language and emotion; little ripples and circles left clean, like tie-dye, where necessity forces me to resurface.

Small things bring me back to the moment. Making alphabet soup. Lying in bed with DH, my head pressed into the soft place where his arm and shoulder meet and his heartbeat thrums so loudly in my head, all at once I start to think it is my own. Or sitting on the planks of the small dock at the neighbor’s pond with Bean, our toes in the water, listening for frogs and splashing, while above us swallows swoop and dive. But in between these things, words are running a haphazard narrative inside my head. Stories are bunkering up against each other.

Last week I finished Pam Houston’s novel Sight Hound, which I wasn’t entirely drawn into at first (many narrators, one of whom is a dog) but found myself sobbing by the end, grateful for it’s right-there in plain sight way of talking about risk and faith and grief. Today I finished As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. DH’s ninth grade copy with his ball point pen notes in the margins.

I read it in two days, though I didn’t expect it to. There was a certain terrifying tension to it. Faulkner’s language is so heady and convoluted and looping that the act of reading it becomes part of the story. You become torn, and belligerent and hateful and grieving because the language makes you feel these things. Like a rip tide, it tows you under. One sentence looping back on itself again and again until you can no longer read it and have it mean anything at all, or another so abrupt, so sharp with colloquial timbre that you have to catch your breath. I want to go back and read the whole thing again, because I felt myself pushed to the very edges of comprehension, as though it were my gut and not my mind to towards which the story was aimed.

I’m also reading Homeland, a collection of short stories by Barbara Kingsolver. My everywhere read. The one I snatch at in all those in-between moments. Each story yanks me into the very center of it’s truth. I read them hungrily, picking over the skeleton of the story, trying to understand how it is made. The gathering of small details, the weight of lines, or the way the author’s voice rides up high over the words of the narrator like radio stations overlapping.

Yet with all the book reading and the lolling about, I haven’t been able to stay focused on writing. There is something in my aquarian nature that is both sanguine and ambivalent. This, combined with Bean’s intermitent pestering, and it seems it is nearly impossible for me to effectively structure my days. I get disoriented in summer, with all the basking and book reading and love making and such, the heat rising up early and abating only after the thunder and rain have rinsed the grass and sky.

Anyone else feel like this, midsummer? What are you reading? Doing?

Waiting

Feeling the tight stomached ache of waiting, now. For spring, for the fat envelope, for several nights of sleep stacked up against each other like a solid cord of wood.

I finished The Year Of Magical Thinking yesterday, and all day today I keep going back to it in my mind. So many of her sentences are like the unusual pebbles we scoop up at the beach and then finger softly in the white cotton interiors of our pockets all afternoon.

This one, particularly:

“Marriage is memory, marriage is time.”

I randomly opened an old issue of Vanity Fair today, looking for inspiration, and landed on a page with her bird like portrait: frail after so much loss, but fierce. I clipped it to the wire running along the low wall near my desk, with other glossy pages ripped from other sources, each image causing amazement to quicken in my soul.

Waiting always feels like this. I heard from one school, yes. But the other, the one I dearly want, most, utmost, not yet. There are more birds now: doves, grackles, starlings, chickadees and a whole bevy of chatty bluejays at the feeder; but not yet robins from the tree tops, and not yet buds swelling large enough to force in jars along the windowsills. Though surely soon.

A reader’s life…

Before reading I listened. I was the eleven-year-old with scratches on her knees, perched on the armrest of my dad’s tan Lazy Boy, listening to Huckleberry Finn and The Yearling. I was a late reader; a kid in the ‘special’ reading group. But those early years when reading wasn’t really mine, gave me stories in a different way, and for this I am grateful. Listening to a book is different than reading one. There is nuance and rhythm to a text read aloud. I think every author secretly wishes his or her book will be read this way: aloud, into the quiet of a room with crickets calling through the open screen, each word received by eager ears. I was such a captive audience then, unable to skip ahead when I was bored or didn’t understand. I learned to stay with texts. I learned to love words, and book after book, my appetite for words grew. Eventually, when I did learn to read, I remember feeling a little bit in awe that I could just pick up a book, open it, and the entire story could be mine.

Now I watch the first graders I teach start the year barely able to identify all the letters in the alphabet, leave in June sixty-pages deep in an adventure story, and I’m still a little bit in awe. I teach kids how to break words apart and reassemble them so that sentences become whole. I teach them how to keep a story map in the back pocket of their imagination, how to watch each character for signs of change, and how to delve deeply into the world of images they know to construct a new world specific to the book, but I do not really teach them how to read. The stories teach them, just as they taught me: how to read, and also how to write so that the words I type take on the shape of what matters in my life.

The first book that had this affect on me was Isabelle Illende’s memoir, Paula. I was eighteen when I read it, and living in Germany for a year before college. By then I had read and loved many books, but never had even remotely imagined writing them. Paula was my first encounter with creative nonfiction and reading it changed my understanding of what was possible, or even allowable in writing. It was the first time I had considered that my life—right there on the train with tears streaming down my cheeks as I finished the book, surrounded by tall men in shearling hats speaking a dialect of German thick with consonants—was story. A year later, I enrolled in my first creative writing class.

Many of the authors I discovered throughout college who still matter to me, are writers who are present with their sleeves rolled up, in the middle of their stories. Tracy Kidder, John McPhee, Annie Dillard, Terri Tempest Willaims, Susan Orlean, Barbara Kingsolver and Joan Diddion, are several authors whose work I have read, and re-read, marking the pages and underlining text, in the process of cultivating my own voice as a writer. Each brings a distinct perspective to their writing of life as it is happening to them in the moment. In Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Diddion took risks that made the hair on my neck stand up. She dared me over and over again to be more honest in my writing, and I copied sections of that book line by line, to better understand how such writing was constructed. Doing this made each comma, each period, each word, newly significant. Reading like this, through writing, allowed me to feel the meter and meaning of her prose in my hands, in my wrists, in my heartbeat.

Because listening came first, a part of me is always listening when I read. What draws me to a text might be its topic or title, but what keeps me is its tenor; the way vowels play together among words, the way meaning is made from each small parcel of lines gathered together with just the right punctuation. As a result, though I have been an avid reader of memoir and essays, nature writing, travel stories, and ethnographies, since college, my nightstand is always an eclectic a jumble of novels and poetry.

Sometimes when I walk in the woods behind my house, I realize after it is already too late that I have walked through a spider’s web spanning the seven or eight feet of path; tiny gossamer threads invisible to me until I feel them. Long after I’ve continued on, I’m still brushing away the sticky threads that linger, clinging to my cheek or hair. Reading is like this for me. A line, a character, a scene, small fragments of the prose I’ve read remain in my mind long after I’ve put the book aside. Annie Dilliard’s essay “Total Eclipse” is like this. Though the first time I read it was nearly ten years ago, I still get caught in its imagery: I cannot imagine an eclipse without imagining hers. Countless other texts have had this affect as well. Certainly Flannery O’ Conner, William Faulkner, Sue Monk Kid, Robert Bly, Mary Oliver, and William Stafford are a few writers whose names can be found along the spines of many volumes on my bookshelves; the words and characters they have created dance up before my memory like sunspots, keeping me company, giving solace, or taking me for a wild ride.

I always have at least two books with me, (right now it’s Gilead and The Year of Magical Thinking; before that, What We Ache For and The Memory Keeper’s Daughter) so that I’m ready for when a few moments land back to back, as my toddler sleeps in the car, or while waiting at the dentist’s office. Also because I’m a mother, and a teacher, and my time is flecked with interruptions, I read copiously Online. Being able to peruse Anne Lamott’s essays at Salon.com, or David Sedaris’s most recent humor at The New Yorker Online, makes me giddy. Like the orange sections offered to runners at each marathon mile mark, the essays and reviews, political commentary and prose I read Online, are moments of sheer sweetness wedged between the must-do things of daily life: email and lesson plans for the week.

Now when I try to remember what the actual process of learning to read was like I cannot put my finger on anything specific. No ah-ha moment, no instance when words clicked into place, and suddenly became story. All I can remember is that before, the words of Frog And Toad flipped about on the page like fishes, and my parents were the keepers of the wonderment contained within each book. After, the stories were mine to devour whole, and hungrily, I did. Reading is still like this for me, vital and sustaining. It has become something almost reflexive, like breathing.

Morning writing

(Maple syrup on snow.)

Golden light fills my studio, the first of the morning. The sun, just up, climbs the rungs of the trees. Its smooth white disc of light is etched with a crosshatching of twigs, snow dusted and dark. Last night I made plans to wake up and write for an hour while the newness of day still holds some secrets in. So I am here, wearing my husband’s burly wool sweater and socks pulled up to my calves. My hair is still rumpled from sleep. I haven’t brushed my teeth. But something feels alive in me that allows me to fling a few unguarded sentences at the page.

After forty minutes of revising, the light spreading across my room has turned pale and bright with day. The sun has climbed sky’s ladder now, its face well above the trees, and the mountains look like cardboard cut-outs along the horizon, painted dusty blue. I go down to the kitchen where DH is mopping spilled coffee from the soapstone counter, and Bean, wearing his blue striped train conductor hat, is twirling about the room. They’ve made a fire, but it’s still cold. I pour coffee and maple syrup and milk into a pan and reheat it until the steam rises, and then pour it into a white enamel mug. With a stack of buttered toast, I head back upstairs, back to this desk piled high with books and papers where I wait for words to fit the empty spaces on the page.

After revising the entire essay, reworking sections again and again until the words fit together into a mosaic that I can understand, and that, at least in part, take on the shape of what I’m trying to know, they bust into my studio grinning. It’s 10am now and my coffee is cold. DH is ready for a shower, but before he goes he pulls me close, his hands traveling up under my sweater touching my hot skin. Bean circles my studio, a wreck after preparing for my showing. Empty frames litter the floor. Scraps of paper, one shearling clog, a case of rubber alphabet stamps. He sings, tunelessly, sweetly, as he collects and reorganizes the loot this space provides: tabs of watercolor paint, the wingnuts on the easel, a drawer full of cards, a futon frame without the mattress. He lies on it, his legs and arms spread out to account for the gaps. Perfect balance.

I finish reading This Autumn Morning, by Gretel Ehrlich. It’s an essay in the 1991 collection of Best American Essays, and it speaks to me in a language I know: one of loss and natural wonder both. As I read I relearn something about this art form that I love. That words can travel around and around the heart of whatever it is you’re trying to say, like the circles spreading outward from a pebble tossed. They do not need to go straight like arrows.

“Think In Ways You’ve Never Thought Before”

I went to hear Robert Bly speak tonight, and felt, after listening to him read in his Minnesota accent, from his newest collection of poems, utterly vibrant. It was a little like touching the glass on an observation beehive, where the warmth from the thousand beating wings transfers instantly into the palm of your hand. Like that: warmth saturating my being, making me huger for more than I already have—more words, more knowledge, more courage, more poems.

He said: “I asked William Stafford ‘how can you write a poem every morning?’ and Bill said, ‘Just lower your standards.’”

Then he said: “Start with anything—whatever happens, and write one every day.”

My favorite poem he read tonight was this one, from his book titled Morning Poems.

Things to Think
Think in ways you’ve never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

**
I’m making this my challenge for the rest of September. A morning poem every day. Some morsel that reaches out and touches wonder. Some collection of scraps that, when gathered together, contains the beautiful remnants of a day.

“You can say anything in language.” He said, daring us to try.

Care to join me?

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT by Mark Haddon

A wonderfully constructed story that it forces you to become attached to the strange habits and foibles of the lead character, Christopher, who is autistic. Without being pedantic or obtuse, the narrator’s voice is exacting and transparent, bringing you into a world where the color of cars passing on the street decide the mood for the day: red cars, good mood. Black cars = bad mood; and where the mysterious death of a dog leads to an unraveling of family complexities. It is a book about love and loss, and it made me contemplate again how people make sacrifices for the ones they love, and how misunderstandings almost invariably arise when words are not enough. Hadden’s experience working with autistic youths gives his character’s voice validation, and he writes with a lithe humor and sensitivity, even when exploring issues of depression, anger and self doubt. A quick, easy read, THE CURIOUS INCIDENT pulls you from one chapter to the next with wry observations about human nature, wit, and well constructed sentences.

ODE Magazine

Progressive, pragmatic, and full of ideas that matter, ODE is a magazine with an optimistic edge. Though it is sometimes funny and always well written, I don’t come away from reading it with my mind at ease. Each issue makes my head spin. I read to be made more conscious of the choices and beliefs I bring to daily life. I read to discover ways I can affect positive change in my community.

From an article on Non-verbal communication strategies developed by Marshall Rosenberg came these ten points, which I promptly cut out and taped to my wall.

1. Spend some time each day quietly reflecting on how you would like to relate to yourself and others.

2. Remember that all human beings have the same needs.

3. Check your intentions to see if you are as interested in others getting their needs met as you are in meeting your own.

4. Before asking someone to do something check to see if you are making a request or a demand.

5. Instead of saying what you don’t want someone to do, say what you want the person to do.

6. Instead of saying what you want, say what action you’d lik the person to take.

7. Before agreeing or disagreeing with anyone’s opinions, try to tune into what the person is feeling and needing.

8. Instead of saying “no” look at what need of yours prevents you from saying “yes.”

9. If you are feeling upset, think about what need of yours is not being met. Think what could you do to meet it, rather than about what’s wrong with others or yourself.

10. Instead of praising someone who does something you like, express your gratitude by tellng the person what need that action meets.