My daughter and son-in-law own a big-bottomed broad of a boat…stable, cozy (even a little gas burning “fireplace”) and curvaceous. During the holidays, we went out in Puget Sound looking for orca whales, and even though we didn’t find any, it was a spectacular experience. Freezing, but the sunset and Twin Peaks moody landscape made it magical. I hate cold weather and I’m afraid of water, but I piled on hat, gloves and lots of layers to sit outside in the bow until I finally lost feeling in my face. What I rediscovered was that when you surrender to being in the moment, the moment gradually overcomes your misery. I was without my constant companions — cell phone, books and laptop. No one to chat with because they were all wisely staying warm in the cabin. It was just me and smoky sky and deep silence, except for the sound of the boat and the waves we made. I don’t think I would ever be able to live in the Northwest (or Northeast), but winter in all its spareness and solitude is not possible to experience in the same way in the south. Just as I could never live on a boat but I can understand the relief of paring down your possessions to stow in a few cubbies, the freedom of drifting from island to island, the notion of pulling up anchor for the next best place. For a few hours, my life was unmoored … untied from Costco, CNN, the Comcast bill, dry cleaning, deadlines and the sadness of post-holiday sales (which it seems to me to be a bit like post-coital tristesse). We were messing about in boats and it was good.
Archive for ‘Home’
A Sea Change
December 29th, 2009Sunday Solitaire
October 18th, 2009
When the marsh begins to change color in the fall and it’s a chilly Sunday and there are candles flickering on the coffee table while I read and the wind shakes the porch chimes all day, I might get a little homesick. Not for a particular place so much as for things barely remembered, the whatever that’s always just over the next hill or beyond a distant stand of trees. Maybe my soul is homesick, longing for something it can’t name, something sensed but unseen. Sometimes when I’m meditating, a piece of music like Satie’s Gymnopedie No 3 or Ayub Ogada’s Kothbiro (which sounds like a vast lonely blue sky seen through a tall window) almost puts me in that place without a name. But then the timer chime sounds or I start wondering about what to have for dinner, and then I land back in my life with a gentle thud. Still me, still earthbound, still happy to be here. But always looking for home.
Late NIght in Fridaville
September 29th, 2009
Coming home in the dark, catching a slice of moon through the branches of the cedar tree, turning the key in the lock, dropping the suitcase, closing the door — home after days away. Home to boxes of new books from Amazon on the porch, mail from an old friend, piles of newspapers past with dire unread warnings (and yet the world kept turning), holy sanctified crisp clean sheets on the bed, the voluptuous curves of the overstuffed chair by the door. Did the house miss me as much as I missed the house? My tiny slice of home, snugged under the cedar tree with the red birdfeeder in its branches. Taking out the trash, I stand in the dark front yard and admire the lighted windows from the outside, the way I’ve often done passing by strangers’ houses in the night. But this time, they shine for me. Coming home in the dark.
Barefoot Weekends
September 11th, 2009
I used to want to go out on Friday night simply because I was released from work worries, and it was a relief to shrug them off and go out to play. I could have done that tonight and sometimes I like to go to the restaurant down the street from my office, sit at the bar by myself, have a glass of wine and write and watch people. But instead, I left the office and went to Whole Foods, bought the ingredients for a bison burger and sweet potato fries, came home and changed clothes, went for a power walk/jog, took a shower, put on my pajamas and walked around my house barefoot and pregnant with possibility. I could work on an outline for a journal course I want to teach; I could start a novel that just arrived from Amazon; I could watch a true-crime mystery on Dateline; I could lie on the couch and finish the NY Times crossword from last Sunday. Whether I do any or many of these things is beside the point. It’s Friday and I’m not expected anywhere, nothing is expected of me and I have no outsized expectations. I am barefoot until Monday.
Homesickness
August 24th, 2009
When I lived on an island at the edge of America, I don’t think I appreciated it enough. Yes, I loved the funky, stoned lifestyle. I loved knowing everyone I ran into at the post office or the convenience cum wine store. I loved the feeling of being cut off from the world of ambition, striving, getting and spending. I loved taking a jug of Bloody Marys to the beach on Sundays and sharing gossip, drinks, sun and sand with my friends. I loved living in a tiny two-room apartment that came with a cat and a wacky, legally blind landlord who at one point drove around the southeast with a round table in a trailer that swirled people around to adjust their chakras, chi or something ch-ch-ch-ish. But I didn’t fully realize how magical that time was until it was over. Until a big hurricane blew down the hippie era rentals and ushered in the McMansions that insurance payments built. Until the doctors/lawyers/trust fund babies took over. Until the last old-school, gritty bar closed down and a child-friendly restaurant moved in. I could have stayed on, struggling to find rentals I could afford, but I didn’t. Now I live two miles away — inland, as a friend of mine who still lives there says with pity. It’s no longer the island I loved, and I’m not exactly the person who once lived there. But every now and then, sitting on a dock in the evening with palmetto trees against the darkening sky, hearing the chink-chink of sailboat rigging in a breeze, it all rushes back like the tide. And it reminds me that sometimes we have to release the things we love in order to hold onto them forever.
My Old Kentucky Home
July 11th, 2009
When I was wandering around my hometown on a recent visit, I chanced upon folk artist Marvin Finn’s crazy, colorful chicken sculptures in the waterfront park. They remind me so vividly of my long-dead grandmother and her ongoing battle with her hens. She had a cantankerous relationship with them, because they were usually ornery and unmanageable and hid their eggs in the highest bales of hay stored in the barn. My grandmother was a devout and gentle Methodist, but she waged a lifelong war for her flock’s eggs and souls, all the while reproaching them for being a stubborn bunch of heathens and hussies. I hated reaching under an old biddy for an egg and getting pecked on the arms and hands, but even more I dreaded watching my grandmother chop off their heads for Sunday dinner. I still find it difficult to eat chicken without remembering the real blood and guts involved in getting it to the table. But these cheery sculptures also brought back the memories of fragile chicks keeping warm in a box by the kitchen stove, of the comforting cluck and shuffle of the hens as they went about their daily business, and of the ordinary beauty of their color and shapes. Returning “home” is always a similar mixture of warring elements for me–the blood and guts of the painful episodes in my life that took place there mixed in with the beauty of the landscape and the memories of people I once loved. I’ve finally given up trying to reconcile those two feuding family ties that bind. Like the chicken and the egg, the sweetness and the sadness are all part of the same dish.
Feed Me
March 16th, 2009
I just spent a weekend cruising design blogs and staggered off to bed on Sunday night satiated with Cute, Adorable and Fabulous. Is this what my life has come to, I wondered, as I fell asleep with visions of dreamy paint colors, amazing headboards and stenciled wallpaper swirling through my brain? I used to get in dramatic arguments with lovers outside Irish bars that involved smashing Irish Coffee cups and then falling into each other’s arms under noirish street lights. I stayed up late talking about T.S. Eliot and masturbation. I have been known to jump in fountains! But now I can be found lurking around sites that feature other people’s tragically hip lofts in Brooklyn and stuffed objects and artwork that feature hybrid creatures that are a cross between humans and bunnies. Yes, I would love for my house to be a work of art like the one created by Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell and her lover Duncan Grant, but I also want it to be organic, an outgrowth of my own personality, not something I have to study or emulate or copy from tearsheets. My iconic house memory is of my grandmother’s house in rural Kentucky. It was filled with inherited objects–silver, quilts sewed by long-dead aunts, furniture that had the patina of decades of use by ordinary families. It never changed over the years except for occasionally repainting or cleaning the wallpaper. It was timeless, solid, lovely, simple and hopelessly old-fashioned. Several generations had passed through it, sat in the chairs, leaned their elbows on the enameled kitchen table. Their spirits lingered. I want to live in that kind of house, not an Ikea idea or an easy-to-assemble resemblance. After my weekend of design dessert, I want a timeless, solid, lovely, simple and hopelessly old-fashioned supper of a life.
Happy Shack
March 1st, 2009
I spent too much time today trolling zillow.com trying to figure out what my 1,074 square foot house is worth now. Is my 3 bdrm better or worse than my neighbor’s 3 bdrm 3 blocks away? Is my lot slightly closer to the ritzy neighborhood I can’t claim to be part of or does it lean over into that lower-value neighborhood to the east? Why didn’t I add a bathroom when I had the extra money? What the hell happened to my equity? Unfortunately, what zillow can’t take into account are the number of porch parties held in this tiny house. The peace that blows through my prayer flags. The rosebush a friend gave me after my mother died and the note I wrote to my mother and planted under its roots. The nights listening to rain on the roof. The first dinner I cooked here for a new lover (okay, it didn’t work out, but it was still a landmark). The games of Scrabble and Cranium. Gin and tonic with my best friends on summer Sunday afternoons. Coming home from work and pulling the house around me like a security blanket.
A Little Bliss
February 26th, 2009
Most days are a jumble of good, bad, indifferent–I stutter through, beginning something, putting it down, getting interrupted, growing bored, picking up another thread and losing it, starting and stalling and forgetting where I was going when I got sidetracked. And then there are days like today, when I worked hard but effortlessly, when I worked steadily but wasn’t drained, when I was actually able to finish things I started. A day of small but measurable accomplishments when I burned creative fuel all day but had something left over to kindle a fire tomorrow. When I saw a visiting friend out the door tonight and came in from the dark, I felt as if I were seeing my home with fresh eyes–the shelves of books, the turquoise chair, a green and black ceramic bowl, pink tulips from the supermarket–all transformed and glowing in the lamplight. Nothing had changed except the way I saw it, and nothing about my day was extraordinary except that I was momentarily able to step back and perceive its shape and texture and realize what a gift it had been.
Christmas in Fridaville
December 22nd, 2008
I keep strings of fairy lights on my porch all year long, but they are so special at this time of year. The neighbors across the street have put up their lights, and this ordinary street suddenly seems hemmed about with magic and mystery when night falls. I wish the big live oaks that line our street could bloom with glowing Japanese lanterns and that there were spangled nets of lights strung above the roadway the way they do in the San Gennaro festival in NYC or in the shopping districts of London at this time of year. I’ll be digging in my closet to try and find the Pottery Barn lanterns I bought last year to hang from the crape myrtle tree by my gate and since we are having a warm Southern Christmas, I might sit on my porch, drink Champagne and get stars in my eyes.
