flower day

“If it weren’t for the Chicagos and Detroits and Toledos, the terrible things would spread out across the whole country and make trouble for everybody else. Such places were collectors of badness in the way hospitals were collectors of the sick and damaged.”
― Stephen Dobyns, Eating Naked: Stories

i’m not from detroit – i’m from a small town further north, somewhat in the palm of michigan. i didn’t grow up in detroit, i didn’t go to school in detroit. i don’t live in detroit. detroit scares the shit out of me and depresses me and i don’t go there much. but some part of me just loves detroit. i understand the fascination with the ruin porn and the photographers who come from other countries to photograph it. the scope of it is beyond comprehension and what is left behind is nothing short of post-apocalyptic. the infrastructure is completely shredded, rife with rot and corruption.

but there are a lot of cool things going on quietly in detroit, and although it will take decades for any sort of real recovery to take place, there are days and events and places that make you feel proud of the folks who stand their ground and try to bring some sense of joy and community amidst the zombie rabble. detroit eastern market is one. their flower day market has become an annual pilgrimage, joining hundreds of thousands of people every year.

where i’m calling from

spring has arrived with both feet, finally, and although i have been completely enjoying the lush green, the ever-changing sky, and the mild weather, i have also been completely walloped with some sort of sinus issue. i’m not typically prone to seasonal allergies but all the news reports have been full of dire warnings about an especially horrible year for that kind of thing, due to our extremely cold winter (they even have a snazzy nickname for it – ‘ALLERGEDDON‘). i have yet to find any kind of med that addresses it without leaving me comatose yet waking up every morning with my face glued to my pillow is even grossing out emmett and sarge, and they have a high tolerance for that sort of thing.

in other exciting news, we have a new houseguest.

mommy duck (apologies for our lack of cleverness in naming) arrived on mother’s day. i was in the front yard when she and her husband (or boyfriend, who am i to judge) made a flopsy near-crash landing. her partner waddled across the street and stood in the shade of a flowering tree, looking annoyed, and she huddled at the foot of our birdbath for awhile. later, when i went out to continue unpacking the car from that weekend’s journeys, she had taken up residence in a corner of our garden behind a bush, quite near to the front door. she has since laid six eggs, and every day the nest is banked up a bit more, a neat mound of mulch and soft pinfeathers. i worried for awhile about her eating, and tried to leave her some food, but bread isn’t a good alternative for ducks, contrary to popular myth, and she ignored the millet. the red squirrels and chipmunks stole her cracked corn, and brought out her tail-fanning-hissing mode, so i have had to be content with leaving her a dish of water which she may or may not be partaking in.

all i know is that every evening around dusk she carefully covers her eggs, then tiptoes down the walk and flies away. we wait with bated breath until we know she is waddling back up to the porch and safely home.

our suburban yard is full of life. the boy hummingbird is back and although he is skittish, vastly more skittish than the hummers we had last summer, every now and then we catch a glimpse. i’ve learned how to mow the lawn, although i still have problems with the pull cord on the mower, and there are a lot of other encouraging things going on behind the scenes that i can’t talk about (won’t, actually) due to the whole personal life thing. but life is pretty okay right now, and would be much better if i could just master my triangle of death.

good stuff

one long digression

I had a couple of hours to kill while my bread dough rose (I am trying Jane Brocket’s bread recipe from ‘Simple Art of Domesticity’; I have tried it before but didn’t realize I had an uncorrected copy of the book with several recipe mistakes in it owing to the conversion between metric / standard measuring, and the bread came out like a dense salty rock. Loving Jane Brocket, I am giving it another go with the corrected recipe. Even if it doesn’t turn out, there isn’t much better than the smell of baking bread in the house).

I digress.

I decided to go running. I’m easing back into a more aggressive running schedule, wearing embarrassing calf sleeves to avoid my typical scourge of springtime shin splints. My running friends are all quite a bit ahead of me, already turning in fast times in events and sporting new running ensembles. This makes the competitive “what about me” part of my brain very anxious indeed. I like to think I am one of those people who feels good for my friends and proud of their accomplishments when they do better than me and that I can say graciously, “I’m only competing against myself” and to be fair, that is how I strive to be, and those are all the things I say OUT LOUD. Inside, though, I have to squash a feeling of dissatisfaction when I feel outdone, and it makes me not proud to say it about myself. But being competitive only makes me not want to run at all, oddly. I only run well when I run for love, and so I have to trick myself with encouraging words and the promise of photography to get my running shoes on when I am in this mode, otherwise I will stay inside and watch Netflix and feel gloomy and guilty whenever my gaze lands on my Mizunos.

I spend a lot of my time trying to outfox myself, it’s kind of exhausting.

I ran on the trails, which is Strictly Prohibited, and I got a lot of dirty looks from the casual ambling Sunday morning birders in their big hats and hiking boots, toting their enormous-lensed cameras; but I went along anyway, and didn’t feel very bad about it. I don’t think it hurts anyone, I’m a polite runner. Anyway, I thought, they can catch me if they want to stop me, and I put on a showoff bit of speed up a hill and then winded myself and had to walk for awhile, feeling slightly foolish.

Trail running is harder than normal street running, uneven ground and lots of elevation changes, so I didn’t care about my time, just being outside. We are a bit behind in our greenery, but it is there, the woods are coming alive with it. Red-winged blackbirds – my favorite springtime bird – sang their bubbling, burbling song in the reeds, the sun turning their black feathers glossy. The wind was up in the trees and clouds blowing a gale, it was one of those spring days when the sun comes out and is so warm that you feel like you could curl up in a warm patch of grass and fall asleep quite cozily; but then a dark cloud is driven across it and the world falls cold and chilly, and your nose starts to run. It was the kind of day where you run and walk and run and walk and you get back to your car and all you want is a hot shower and a hot cup of coffee and everything is happy, sunshine and shadow.

At the end of my run, I came across a couple of others to share the path with. The turkey, looking fat and brilliant in the nice light, edged past me and ran on frantically, no doubt sensing the word DRUMSTICK as it swirled through my brain. The sandhill crane, however, was unbothered; he groomed himself carefully and surveyed me with a blank golden eye, and caused ME to edge by, no longer sure that I couldn’t be caught if I tried to run.

on going out and coming home

I try not to talk much about a variety of topics on the internetz, including my work and my personal relationships and now, as she gets older, my daughter, whose life and image and thoughts and feelings belong to her, not me to share with the general public. But I’ve been through a lot over the past year, and there were many days when I just didn’t think I could get out of bed and face the day.

All my life, I have felt that I needed someone else to trust and to lean on, because inside I never trusted my own self to get me through hard times. I felt fundamentally unreliable and flawed. When I faced a challenge, I never truly believed I had the ability to get through it.

It’s a terrible weakness, not to trust or like your own self, and although I wish I could change many things that have happened lately, the silver lining of all of it is that I finally know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I can get through what I have to, and that I am more than I ever thought I was. Part of me hates to see that written out in black and white, because my old self would feel that was tempting the universe to knock my feet out from underneath me. I don’t think like that anymore. Now I think the universe is more receptive, it’s something that responds to the energy you put out into it, and gives it back, and if you wake up every day to see the beauty in what is around you and feel gratitude for it, and love the people in your life and what you have been given, and you work to be happy, the universe responds to that. The only person who is responsible for your happiness is you.

This is a long way of saying that I flew across the country this week, and visited new places, and saw new things. I spoke in front of groups of people and laughed with them and made friends. I wasn’t perfect, but I was real, and I wasn’t afraid, and everywhere I looked I saw sunshine and warmth and new things. I trusted myself and enjoyed myself and when I came home, I was so happy for the little life I have here. California was hot and dry and bright, the Santa Ana winds moving restlessly through the palm trees against the blue sky. Traffic wound in glittering ropes along the asphalt. There were people everywhere, great waves of people pressing in on all sides. When I wasn’t presenting, during our car trips and at the airport, I couldn’t even speak for staring around me.

And then I came home, and my world was small and damp and green, full of cats and a chattering child, cluttered with construction paper and crayons and toys. I dreamt last night of five cardinals in the branches above me, and picking up a small colored bird, thinking it was dead, and having it come alive in my hand, fragile and prickly. I liked coming home the best of all. It’s so strange to feel that at the age of 40, I’ve been newly born into something I never was before. I have such a short life left to enjoy, I’d better get to it.

commute

Great Salt Lake and snow-capped mountains, not a bad view during my morning commute.

Plus, the upside of traveling across the country in one day is that I had plenty of time to catch up on my reading – and I chose my books wisely. I finished Divergent, plowed through Goose Girl by Shannon Hale, which was amazing, and will hopefully finish the second Chrestomanci by Dianne Wynne Jones on my way home. Great books all, and combined with the view, made a long day relatively painless.

troubles melt like lemon drops

life imitates art, two smart sassy redheads and four charming handsome boys (two of whom have four paws, admittedly). mornings off – be they good friday or just a nice weekend – sometimes just mean classic movies in our robes in bed. i think philadelphia story is the perfect vehicle for james stewart, and had i been tracy lord, i can’t imagine picking dexter over him. any man who will carry you elegantly up through a nighttime garden singing ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ is, drunk or no, in my estimation, worth keeping.

good friday is rainy and damp here, but no schedule and no timekeeping and no chores except from the assembly of the traditional nine-egg lemon tart for easter. no one is ever excited about the lemon easter tart except me, but it i remember eating it in australia, in a tiny one-room farmhouse, and thinking how fresh and wonderful and perfect it was. it stays with me, those simple happy memories, and sometimes a ritual can just belong to one person. lemons are spring to me. lemons are the taste of new life and rising suns and risen sons and lime tinge in the trees.

blessed, and thankful for it.

and just in case anyone thinks we are very serious around here, this.

#catladyproblems, insert smiley face and xoxo here, darling emmett, our little lanky james stewart of the day.

spring malaise

“Perhaps what we call depression isn’t really a disorder at all but, like physical pain, an alarm of sorts, alerting us that something is undoubtedly wrong; that perhaps it is time to stop, take a time-out, take as long as it takes, and attend to the unaddressed business of filling our souls.” – Lee Stringer

I have a spring cold, and all of the suddenly nice days have made me perhaps a little depressed too. I know, I’m contrary. Worst winter of the decade, I’m fairly chipper, give me some sunshine and pollen and it brings me to my knees. I think it’s partially the uneasy feeling that I should be doing something that I’m not or enjoying the sunshine or riding a dappled pony through a field of daffodils or doing a triathlon instead of what I’m actually doing, which is usually sitting on the couch.

Some days there’s nothing for it except rest, and fresh food, and maybe flowers. I’ve also spent a fair bit of time on the couch with Season 6 of ‘Mad Men’ (and coincidentally, recently found January Jones has an Instagram feed, and if you can get past the endless parade of absolutely spectacular selfies, her hashtagging and commentary is pretty funny and clever).

I don’t get sick very often but when I do, I am a miserable human being to be around, disheveled and bleary and endlessly contaminating shared surfaces. So it’s nice to have one little soul in the world who can tolerate me at my worst. (As much as I love it, my neti pot does not have a soul, so it doesn’t count.)

It used to be Grey Cat, and I have been blessed by whatever benevolent wind blows around this universe to have found another.

Emmett, of course, in his softer moments when he is not trying to escape from Alcatraz or knock pictures off the walls or swing on my Japanese lantern or tear his litterbox apart or find some birds to chew on.

#thisiswhywecanthavenicethings

(suck it, January).

in like a lion, out like a – well, a lion.

it’s april 5 and last night we had a fire in the fireplace and the wind howled around the eaves. there were two nice days last week and i got out and ran on one of them, 4 miles at lunchtime in a chill windy sun. i love the sound of the red-winged blackbirds swaying in the reeds. i run down and around and up, over thawing mud studded with deer prints, curious bones being churned up in the roadside thaw, past fallen trees and a tiny mirrored pond that in the summertime will have a turtle sunning itself. then i come back and see the office building and slink between all the polite cars in the parking lot, smelling like a wet dog, blowing and sweating and still half-wild. it’s like my alter-ego, and i come back and shower and put my work clothes back on and sneak back to my office, feeling rebellious and pleased and only slightly apologetic.

every day that we see the sun, i try to get us outside, especially on weekends. i like this teetering on the edge of the spring precipice, oddly, because i know once the balance tips over things will go fast, the warmth and green will come in fast forward and before i know it be full summer, blooming towards ripeness and rot.

“He’s got that New Orleans thing crawling all over him, that good stuff, that We Are the Champions, to hell with the rest and I’ll just start over kind of attitude.” ― Chris Rose, 1 Dead in Attic

a week in new orleans – when one is supposed to be spending long days in an expensive, work-sponsored academy training – just isn’t enough. i need to go back, when i have more time and more energy to explore all of the little shining things and time-worn bits of a polished old world that peek through the dirt and the cheap beads and dive bars.

the hotel was on poydras street and i found it off-putting. it’s a big brand hotel and my room was cramped and dirty. the first day, i was too tired and out of sorts to do much more than sit through my classes and observe the view from my room.

on the second day, the sun was out and the sky was blue, and i escaped at lunchtime to wander through the concrete labyrinth of the warehouse district. i don’t know how people don’t just stop and stare constantly at the brick and beams and old things.

the sun was a nice visitor, too. after the hardest winter in michigan, i felt like i could dose on vitamin d for days and not get enough, my cheeks were pink and slightly sunburned and it felt wonderful. that night, we had a sponsored dinner at a nearby restaurant which, as one of my fellow attendees amusedly pointed out, felt like a VFW hall. buffet lines, drink tickets, and a zydeco band, a bare dance-hall feel, fried alligator and bread pudding. maybe we would have danced and drank more if we hadn’t all been strangers, pulled together from different parts of the country, a brief stop and three days of camaraderie is not enough to build real friendships on, funny how the world intersects our paths, for what meaning?

on the morning of day three, i was finally brave enough to get up early and explore before class, seeing the side streets of new orleans still unconscious and recovering from the evening parties that never end, a ceaseless engine of careless mechanical gaiety that brings new tourists every day, every week, every year. i feel sorry for the city, it must be exhausting to start that huge cheap engine without ever stopping to rest, like a terrifying carousel of lights and leering clowns and shrieking music, no respite. yet the city is long past caring, the streets aren’t friendly, they have seen a million like me and will see a million more, they are oblivious to their own tired beauty.

the coffee was wonderful, the cafe full of chattering staff in paper hats pulling chairs off tables, clattering, streets damp outside. a busker setting up with a trombone under a flowering tree, a wrought-iron fence, a brick sidestreet. the beignets made me feel sick, the heavy greasy sweetness, so i left the bag on the bench and knew someone would find them.

so much strange beauty and every day the sun comes up in humid, steamy splendor over the river, and there are so many sudden moments of quick passing loveliness. you could easily miss it.