Sock Paws

Do other people do odd things when they're by themselves? I sometimes wonder what strange things would show up if I were on camera during the day when I'm alone. Do other people dance while waiting for their bread to toast? Do other people walk up and down the stairs repeatedly while eating a banana? Do other people add sound effects to dishing up lunch?

I only ask this because it's very cold in our house today. (Day two with no heat. I don't want to talk about it.) Cold is just one of those things that you deal with in a patchy fashion - there's not normally a real plan to prevent being cold, so the end effect is usually something very uncoordinated. For instance, this morning, I realized that I was in green and blue plaid pants and a red, green and white plaid shirt with pink fuzzy slippers. That, in and of itself, is a bit odd although perhaps acceptable, but I also had mismatched brown trouser socks on my hands with my sleeves tucked into the cuffs. I will also confess that I didn't want the trouble of retucking them, so I just ate a few crackers out of the box with my sock paws. Reading was a bit tricky, until I figured out how to turn the pages with my bookmark. Clearly, one of the primary functions of society is to prevent exactly this sort of thing, but it's equally clear that inventiveness only happens when one is free from concern about what other people think. Is it just me, or is all of life contradictory? And even more important, is everyone as strange when left alone?

No Sleep Till ...?

I'm attempting to break a napping addiction. Between my medication, anxiety, the weather, the holidays, etc., I've become a nap junkie. In fact, I'm not sure that "nap" even covers it any longer. "Nap" is too polite a word for sleeping all night and then another four hours plus during the day.

It started off innocently enough - just take a little rest in the morning after a rough night of sleep. And the next thing I know, I'm going back to bed, sleeping until 10:30, working, taking another nap later in the day that's only as short as it is because Andrew comes home, working in the evening to catch up, staying up late because I can't sleep, and then starting the whole thing over again the next day. The insomnia at night has been useful. I read, I work, I wander around the house, but even when I do sleep at night, the next day I'm still exhausted.

So, operating on the theory that sleep begets more sleep, I'm attempting to break the habit. No caffeine after 8:00, and less of it during the day. A sleeping pill every night for one week to reestablish sleep patterns. Warm milk before bed, and bed at the same time every night. I've even gone so far as to create a success chart for myself and offer bribes for making it through January and February without sleeping. It's early days, so I'm still in that hopeful stage of withdrawal, the "this is going to be a breeze" stage. I feel like a Civil War soldier: I'll have this problem whipped and be home in time for dinner!

The reality, however, is that it's a little like not having electricity. You know how that goes when the power is out, and you think, "Well, I'll just fold this laundry, light a candle and make myself a mug of tea. Oh. Right. I can't boil water." or "It's a little cold in here. I'll get a blanket, put on a sweatshirt and turn on the space heater." I keep making these little plans for my day, doing this, then that, then taking a nap, then.... Oh. *sigh*

Monday

"Cross" is the only word for me today. And maybe "cranky." It's rainy, the temperature's dropped about 20 degrees in two hours, but I still don't get the benefit of at least having snow as the precipitation du jour. I'm behind on laundry and not interested in catching up. It took forever for me to fall asleep last night, just humming to myself in the dark, positive that the next gust of wind was going to remove a slate or the weathervane or one of those tentatively-attached limbs over the driveway. When I woke up this morning, it was from a dream of listing endless pages of auction consignments. Christmas shopping and wrapping is done, so I'm at the stage where I'm just worrying over money spent, which is compounded by the dread of estimated tax payments. I'd rather be reading the new novel I started last night or sitting around in my pajamas and watching Remember the Night, but here I am, neatly dressed so as not to scandalize any shipping agent who might be delivering package. And I'm stuck with the dull work of finishing up a newsletter, which mostly just feels like "blah, blah, blah" at this point, which my cynical self says won't even get read. And to top it all off, someone had the chance to throw shoes at the current president and they missed. AND this happened while The Daily Show was on hiatus. Tell me again why I got out of bed?

November in Review

My, but I was reading "smart" stuff last month! I polished off five books, including The Hemingses of Monticello, which was massive. I didn't finish it until November 16, and then after that it was like a dam broke, and the other four books quickly followed.

Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello was eye-opening, but I think in some ways, I came away with more questions about history than answers. If you asked me why we decided to cancel a trip to visit friends, there would be less likely to be one reason and more likely to be dozens of factors: the possibility of bad weather, the pile of laundry at home, a lingering cold, two extra-long days of work during the previous week, etc. For someone to assess that decision from the remote world of the future someday and to proclaim me a bad friend or in general poor health would be to leap a large chasm of my reasoning. I just came away by how tenuous history is, how fragile some of our assumptions and arguments are. That said, Gordon-Reed has written a fascinating biography of one of the most well-documented early African-Americana families, and she manages as best she can, considering how little we're able to know about their thoughts and motivations.

After that I chewed through Into the Wild, which I wrote about earlier, and was reminded again how much I enjoy Jon Krakauer's writing. It's a sad story, almost, oddly, like the story of the Hemingses - something that we can't explain and a position we find it difficult to put ourselves into as readers, but by the end, it's one that we can come a little closer to. It takes a great deal of compassion to make people capable of venturing closer to a position or act that they would reject completely upon initial examination.

Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates followed, and it was just what you'd expect - snarky, entertaining, filled with little oddments and insights. The Puritans were an odd bunch, and the discussion of their "city on a hill" and how we came to co-op that as an American vision, while neglecting the sense of responsibility they felt was fascinating. It's one of the basic elements of tragedy - good intentions that somehow result in abhorrent offshoots. I realize that history doesn't often come with nifty endings, tied up neatly in a timely fashion, but I did feel that things sort of fell of a cliff at the end. It was as if the contract was for 200 pages, and somewhere around page 197, there was a realization that things needed to be wrapped up. Leaping over three hundred years of history, the Puritans are linked to John F. Kennedy. I know 21st-century politics aren't really Vowell's bailiwick, but I still would have liked a little more analysis about how the path we set our feet on then got us to the path we're on now.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, we managed to sneak in listening to Kate DiCamillo's The Tale of Despereaux. I'm intrigued to see the movie, and all I can say is good for DiCamillo for avoid overly precious endings with everything too neatly tied up. (I know, I know - I'm nothing if not a walking contradiction.) Despereaux's big heart, bravery and commitment to doing the right thing were wonderful, and I look forward to seeing his big ears on the big screen.

Finally, I found Susan Fletcher's Eve Green. I made a note almost three years ago of the title after reading a pre-pub review in Library Journal, and it's stuck with me all this time. I was glad that it did. As someone who's so often homesick, not so much for family as just for a landscape and a way of life, Susan Fletcher nails down the desperate love of a place, and the beautiful part is that she doesn't even try to explain why she loves it. She just does. Love is like that. This was a gentle story that probably didn't fare well after being classified by many as a mystery. (Why, why, WHY do we have to overclassify everything?!) It's really the musings of a pregnant woman, looking back on her childhood, trying to make peace with the child she was before she brings her own child into the world. I loved it. Again, not a sledgehammer to the forehead, but a meandering story of memory and family and place. And confirmation that I really like Whitbread award winners, which I also made a note of. Let's hope it doesn't take me another three years to follow up on it!

Talpidae and Muridae

It might sound like a Shakespearean play, but it's actually the fuzzy infestation happening over here. One night this week, while reading in bed, I heard violent squeaking and rushed downstairs to discover that Charlie (aka Charles Manson) had discovered a mole.

What a mole was doing in the house, at night, I don't know. Running is certainly not the answer. Moles on a hardwood floor are less like pedestrians and more like curling stones, especially when an overzealous cat is involved. Fortunately, he found his way into the bottom of a milk crate of things set out for my brother, and I managed to carry him outside. Unlike mice, who are always looking for opportunities to escape, moles are actually very like Kenneth Graham's Mole: well-meaning, but not quick-witted. He stayed in the bottom of the milk crate, obligingly shifting out of my way as I removed every single object, and then he left by a hole in the side. I sort of liked thinking that after he hurried home, breathless and rattled, he slipped into a smoking jacket, propped his little webby feet on an ottoman, and had a cup of tea to soothe his nerves. He's rehomed now, snug under the brick walk, and probably working on his sequel to The Wind in the Willows as we speak. Written long hand on thick paper with a fountain pen, of course.

My husband actually asked me in all seriousness the next day if it could have been a vole. It was midnight, it was freezing, and I was standing on the porch in nothing but clogs and a fleece jacket, hoping no one was out and and about. I'm not sure whether I was more insulted that he'd think I wouldn't know the difference or that he actually expected me to have taken a closer look in that condition. While I always wanted to be as dignified and together as Badger, I'm afraid that I'm more like the washerwoman....

And today, after finishing my lunch, I noticed the cats starring at the bottom of my knitting basket. When cats stay awake long enough to do anything other than pester me, it's worth paying attention to. Anyway, they had cornered a mouse, who, when I moved the basket, darted around to the other side of the couch. While I went to empty my mouse-catching box (it's filled up after months of disuse), he managed to attempt an escape between the baseboards and the floor. I say attempt, because what he really ended up doing was getting his head quite firmly stuck. Panicked AND undignified, a combination I try to avoid, but then again, see previous mole-related exploits. He's taken up residence under the outhouse, hopefully consoling himself with some week-old asiago cheese bread that I put out as an apology for the rough treatment he received as our guest.

Honestly, I'm beginning to feel like a low-rent Marlin Perkins over here!

Cilia

Bronchial cilia and positive visualization - not so much these days. Normally, when I think about all my little cilia, I see them standing at attention, alert and bright-eyed, wafting with a hum of productivity and efficiency. Then illness comes along, institutes new policies that make no sense to anyone and requires that they fill out everything in triplicate, and suddenly, they're squashed under the bureaucracy of mucus, which doesn't do much for workplace morale. Blech.

Meanwhile, things to contemplate while lying on the couch: my next popsicle, a bath, and the mucus/bureaucracy metaphor....

Twenty Years

I don't tend to believe in accidents. Things happen for a universal reason, and I suppose that reduces to a religious belief, because what else is God but a sense of universal reason? That probably reduces to a rather bleak world view, too, because it implies that we have no control over what happens to us, but to me, it's how we react to what happens to us that shapes us. Circumstances are nothing; perspective is everything.

Anyway, due to a belief in cosmic reason, I thought it significant that I finished reading Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer's story of Christopher McCandless and his starvation in the Alaska bush, on the anniversary of my mother's death. His story is the perfect metaphor for her addiction. Addiction is a simultaneous running away from and running toward: fleeing a life that's too disappointing, that somehow doesn't measure up while running toward some ideal of self or existence, running toward something that explains or negates your current reality.

McCandless was a brilliant young man, disillusioned with the world, taking journeys that left him feeling isolated and dislocated from society when he encountered it. He was loving and compassionate, generous with his feelings and his possessions, while at the same time excising his parents from his life with a cold, calculated gesture. That was my mother's story as well - a brilliant young woman whose journeys with alcohol and drugs left her too raw to function in day-to-day life and leading her to make more distance journeys into their realm. She gave freely of herself, worked tirelessly to help her students, and at the same time, lashed out in ways that left those of us closest to her with scars, both mental and physical.

Like the McCandless family, I struggled to understand what would compel someone to retreat in such a fashion, to reject what seemed so obvious, to search for something that seemed so elusive and fleeting. After twenty years, I still don't really have answers, don't understand why the life she had was so uncomfortable, why she seemed to move through the world with raw skin, or what drove her to leave us time and again for something that never seemed to comfort her for long. The story of addiction remains as alien and inexplicable to me as Chris's story. While I can intellectualize the individual decisions and choices, can rationalize the thought process at work, I can't seem to reach a place where the whole process comes into focus, where the parts fall into place and become equal to the sum.

Searching for meaning is a complex concept. It's occupied the minds of philosophers through the ages, and perhaps we're not any closer to an answer, because the answer is different for all of us. Some people don't seem to search; they seem to abhor the effort, to lead the unexamined life in the ignorance we're told is bliss. Some people seem to know exactly what they're looking for and exactly how to get it, while others stumble around for awhile and find contentment, sometimes genuine, sometimes just out of the awareness of the alternative of continuing to search. Some people seem to have a sense of where a path will lead, while others don't seem to care, blazing new trails heedless with both awesome and awful results.

At the end, I suppose it doesn't matter. Both Christopher McCandless and my mother ventured into a place fraught with danger, a place where their families could not reach them and a place they could not have been called back from anyway. I've learned that I can't explain the results. I can understand the motivation, the search, that set their feet on that journey, and I have to accept that the path led out of sight, through terrain I can't follow, through a thought process I can't reconstruction. To understand that initial need to search is all I have, and in the end, all possible human stories are reduced to the same process - seeking and finding or seeking and failing. The inherent joy and tragedy in both deserve respect. We only hope that at some undefined end the seekers find satisfaction. After all, we're seekers too, and we need to hold onto that belief - that our lives will make sense, if only to us.

Woohoo!

I've been struggling for words since last night, which seems odd, considering how many feelings I've been bombarded by in the last 24 hours.

I believe we've elected a president that I actually feel proud of. Not the guy that was just less terrible than the other guy, not the guy who won by default for lack of real opposition, not the guy with great policies but a messy personal life, but a guy that I believe in.

We've elected someone other than the traditional white male. And that's huge for African-Americans, huge in a way that I don't even think I can understand, but it's huge for white folks too. We've developed a picture of racism in our country, a picture of ourselves as people we needed to be ashamed of, and last night proved that wasn't true. We're not who we've been told we are, we might not even be who we thought we were.

I've heard someone in politics talk about honesty and unity and hard work and make me believe that he meant it. Last night, I didn't hear someone who was trying to tie himself to a past in order to lift himself, but someone who was trying to tie us to our own past in order to lift us.

We've elected someone out of hope instead of fear. We've been in a dark and hopeless place, and worse, everyone keeps telling us that it really isn't dark and hopeless. Finally, someone shows up, acknowledges the truth, but says that there's a way out, that together we'll find it, that it isn't going to be easy, but that it WILL happen.

Everything seems trite, but I just can't express how proud I am that so many people opted to believe in the process, to believe in hope, to believe that the world can be a better place. We can be the version of ourselves that we want to be and the version of ourselves that we believe we once were, and I think we're all ready to do the work.

The Process

Our tiny little backroads township hall was packed this morning. Before the polls opened, the parking lot was full and the line stretched the length of the building. One man said in thirty years of voting there, he'd never seen so many people. We all stood around in the dark and the cold, making conversation with people we didn't know, and as the sun started to come up across the fields, I couldn't help but get a little teary. It's an amazing process, this election business, and after all these years, it still works. Americans can be oblivious and self-absorbed, but when push comes to shove, when we really believe it matters, we still come out, stand in line and participate in an orderly process with surprisingly little direction.

I find that the polls always make me confront my assumptions. There are guys in jeans and quilted flannel, John Deere ballcaps, women dressed for factory work, guys in ties - people getting ready to head off in all possible directions for the day, white collar, blue collar, unemployed. That's the beauty of the American election, that everyone has opinions and they're not always what you'd expect or at least not always held by the people you'd expect.

You can't vote if you don't have hope, if you don't believe in the future. Voting means not only that you care, but that you believe that something can come of that caring. As jaded as we are, and after such a battle, it's hopeful just to know that so many people still believe. And yes, this is sappy and idealistic, but so is the belief that people everywhere will think and care and do their part if you give them the chance. Idealism is worth celebrating at least once every four years.

Downtime

Quiet few days in the midst of so much travel. We drive to Massachusetts on Thursday and drove back on Sunday, but the Deerfield show was lovely. I didn't see much I couldn't live with out, but I saw loads of beautiful things I'd like to live with. I don't know the first thing about art. My only art appreciation class was in eighth grade, and what I remember most is a cute student assistant, a charcoal portrait of myself from childhood, and the orderly joy of a drafting table. Still, I love paintings. I could cover every inch of wall space with art and still fill racks in storage. This would lead to conflicts as I also need flat wall space for bookshelves, so it's probably a blessing that my finances limit me.

We stayed at Purple Gables in Amherst, which was cozy and peaceful. I had my same regrets - that we stay in lovely places that we really just get to sleep in. Saturday, we left around 9:00 a.m. and returned around 10:30 p.m.... And we got to see friends, and had popovers at Judie's. What more could you want from a whirlwind trip?

And I love traveling with my husband. I love that he talks and that he's quiet, I love that he can stop for all sorts of entertainment or ride for 13 hours to make it all the way home in one day. I love that he will drive 15 miles out of the way for local pizza of unknown quality or just grab a muffin at Starbucks and keep moving. His innate ability to be whatever the situation requires makes going places with him a joy. And I love driving. Driving has always been my healthiest form of avoidance. You feel like you're moving forward, leaving worries behind you. I always have a feeling of self-reliance when we travel; just the two of us with maps and no plans, free to wander and stop and look and talk and be silent. Of course, Andrew still laughs at me when I tie my head to the seat so I can sleep, but otherwise, we're quite companionable travelers.

Tonight, we have a charity auction, tomorrow an antiques show, and then in two weeks we're off to Delaware for a few days. We return home to a downhill slide to auctions and holidays and shopping, but right now, I'm sitting contentedly in the eye of the hurricane, which is a feat in itself. Normally, I can only dread what I know is coming, but I've achieved a Zen-like level of Now, drinking tea, finishing novels and indulging cats. For just a few seconds, the wisdom of the ages makes sense, and I can believe that there really isn't anything else - nothing exists but right now, and it's already gone.

Nothing to Read

I occasionally suffer from the syndrome of full closet and nothing to wear. This is my own fault. I shop at Goodwill and tend to purchase discount sweatshirts, and when the time comes to donate to Goodwill, I tend to pillage my husband's ratty dress shirts. (This is useful - the sleeves are long, so if I button the cuffs, I can tuck my thumbs through the cuff slits and have gloved hands in the winter. I'm thinking ahead!) I don't buy dress clothes often, and as a result, when I do it's with a complete abandon and utter disregard for anything but aesthetics. I have a nice selection of beautiful things that do not "go" with any of the other beautiful things. Anyway, a problem of my own making.

Which is why I was astounded today to discover this problem with books! Let me be clear - we are not short on books around here. The built-in shelves we designed were the first project we finished after we moved in - they're an impractical 11' high by a staggering 17' wide, and they stay full, despite my best effort to carve out some small spaces for decorative odds and ends. We have a database, so I can say with certainty that the number of books in this house tends to hover around 1400-1500. We have advanced reader copies tucked into every nook and cranny, and we "distill" our books regularly at Half-Price Books, converting four or five small boxes of books into just four or five books. And they know who I am at both local libraries.

For months now, I've been looking at the shelves (and windowsills) and thinking, "I'm falling behind! I'll never get all these books read!" And then all of a sudden, just yesterday, I couldn't find a single thing that fit. I had to resort to "trying" books on, retiring to bed with a large stack with everything from pop culture (Linda Fairstein) to the literary (Margaret Atwood) to the academic (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich). I like trying on books about as much as I like trying on clothes; I just want something to fit, and everything that doesn't fit makes me feel bad about myself. ("Too tight? Too fat!" becomes "Too weighty? Too stupid!") Still, at the end of the day, shopping for books is still better than shopping for dress pants!

Animal Magnetism

The first sure sign of cold weather is that I begin to sprout furry, purring, cat-sized tumors. They grow on my head when I'm sleeping, in my lap when I'm working, and I often even have a sweaty cat fur glove on my left hand when I'm reading. I wake in the middle of the night to discover fuzzy growths under either arm and on the tops of my feet, and while their locations may change, they never detach.

And it's not just cats that I attract. Of course, every insect in the free world has discovered the weakness of our defenses - worn sills, old caulking, paper-thin weatherstripping - locating a crack, crevice, nook or cranny to sneak in. Fruit flies, who ignored us all summer, now seem aware of their brief lives and have mounted an assault on three spotted bananas and a bowl of tomatoes with a vengeance. Spiders have set up housekeeping on every glue block in the place, leaving the floor around the furniture legs littered with carcasses and carnage. The skunk pillaging my compost bin has stepped up his efforts, and a mouse has set up camp in an eggshell half, probably consoled not only by the convenience of snacks but also by the warmth of rot. And then, there was the nest of baby snakes in the dryer vent.

Honestly, this might be a case of being careful what you wish for. I feel like my teenage wishes for popularity are being visited on me now, and I should have been careful to specify what kind of popularity. General popularity with the universe has its drawbacks vis a vis dryer vent snakes.

Fresh Eyes

My house is getting new windows! Well, not really new, since we wanted to preserve the original ones, but they are getting scraped clean and fresh white glazing is being tucked in everywhere. Primer and paint to follow!

It's really transformed the house, and with the blinds up so that we could remove all the storm windows, this place is flooded with light. Of course, with 8 4' by 7' windows, that's probably to be expected. Cats are writhing around on the rugs, delighted by the proliferation of sunspots.

I hadn't realized how much I'd avoided looking at the windows in the past two years. I'm always looking out, but that's really looking through instead of looking at. With dead bugs, flaking paint, and duct tape (The former owner was a big fan of three things: pneumatic staple guns, duct tape and stripping screws.), it wasn't exactly inspirational. But now, with fresh eyes for me and the house, it's a delight to go around from window to window.

Now, if we can get the sash weights reconnected, I will have windows that are a.) transparent and b.) open! What novelty!

Squirrel Trapping, Day One

In Which I Run Over the Trap

*sigh*

Don't Dress Your Cat in an Apron

I was thinking of Dan Greenburg's poem this weekend. We went to a nephew's football game on Saturday - he's in third grade, so it was more entertainment spectacle than sporting event, but still.... There were about a million flags thrown, which was probably a good thing, since the little boys were clearly learning the fundamentals of the game. Holding is a difficult concept to grasp, and pretty natural for a small person trying to stop another small person....

The bizarre part was that they also had cheerleaders, and sadly, it seemed that little girls were learning the fundamentals of the game too - "Smile! Don't look so angry!," "Watch the boys!," etc. And you could already see the competition developing between them - the pretty little girl with a perfect French braid who bossed all the other girls around and the little girl with grass stains on her knees and a messy ponytail. It made me sad to realize how much heartache some of them have in front of them, trying to be something they aren't or trying to figure out what they are after all they've been told they're supposed to be.

I still have my copy of Free to Be You and Me. My mother, a budding feminist, bought it for me for my first birthday, I think, and despite her best intentions, she gave off some of those messages, too. The men in my family ate first, talked first, read first, left the table first, and for years, I tagged along with them, leaving my mother and my grandmother to clean up after all of us. Any good survivor can tell you that it's important to ingratiate yourself with the power structure. Mental survival is a different story.

Anyway, I muddled through, breathing phrases like, "Patriarchal bullshit" under my breath. They'll muddle through, too, and figure out how to make a neat ponytail, how to smile when you don't want to, and how to reinvent yourself the first time someone gives you a chance.

Information Withdrawal

The last of Ike ripped through here Sunday, and we can count ourselves among the fortunate - no trees down and just a brief power blip. The cell tower that we draw service from was apparently having problems, so we found ourselves pacing around the first floor playing Hot and Cold with the phones, but that wasn't a terrible inconvenience. Cable was knocked out, but I have stacks and stacks of books to read and was happy to just be able to go to bed early and read.

The only problem? The loss of Internet access. I was completely undone. Not only could I not find out what was going on in the world, how bad the damage was, etc., but I couldn't help wondering what would happen if I wanted to know something. What if I needed to know what the largest city in Qinghai Province is? What if I wanted to see what the interior of a '59 Chevy looks like? How could I find out the average temperature in May in Minnesota? A thousand times a day, it seems, I satisfy my curiosity about something - the subject of a Charles Russell painting, the anatomy of a cat's jaw, restoring and repairing doors. Lately, I've looked up Parabolon magic lanterns, the hull dimensions of the HMS Erebus, and the history of the Pablo Allard buffalo herd. I've also looked up Clean House episodes, Nanci Griffith song lyrics and pictures of English bulldog puppies, just in case you thought I was over here overdosing on Wikipedia.

I was nervous until Monday morning when Google finally loaded again. Eliminating uncertainty, even if it's about small, esoteric topics, is a comfort, maybe even more so since everything in the world seems so uncertain. If small questions have answers, maybe big ones do too.

Excuses and Big Pointy Teeth

Honestly, I can find an excuse for reading and doing nothing all year long. In the winter, it's too cold and too nasty to go out, and in the summer, it's too hot and too nasty to go out. I don't need excuses in fall and spring, though, because it really feels like reading is what I'm supposed to be doing.

Actually, we've been doing work around the house, which gives me enough of a sense of productivity that I can lie around for hours afterwards reading without feeling guilty. We've been in the midst of a mechanical nightmare over here, I think. Last week, I took the washer apart to retrieve 30 cents from the valves of the drain motor. I was trying to get a nickel out and was struggling with a flutter valve that actually turned out to be a quarter, so.... Soapy water all over the floor and soggy underwear, blech.

And then the car wouldn't start on Wednesday, thanks to an ungrateful squirrel who sheered off two of my spark plug wires! It looked like the little maverick had taken a hacksaw to them. I had some stale pistachio nuts that I was holding onto until colder weather, but now I'm thinking of giving them to the raccoons. Or thinking of sitting on the deck and lobbing them at him. Wonder how effective a slingshot with a leftover broccoli band would be....

Reading Overdose

I have been chewing through books lately, and not keeping up with notes. I polished off three Martha Grimes novels - Hotel Paradise, Cold Flat Junction, and Belle Ruin. In all fairness, billing them as mysteries is a bit deceptive, because the mystery is only a fraction of the plot and the suspense is non-existent. There was something appealing about them, though - some writers move slowly through their material and you feel as though you're swimming through molasses - you just want to read the last ten pages and be done with it all already. Some writers move slowly through their material and you feel as though you're lounging around in an innertube on a lazy river - you know you're going somewhere, but the ride is so nice that you're in no hurry. I can't articulate why this works for some people and not for others, but I can say that it certainly works for me and Martha Grimes. Once I accepted the mystery misnomer, I was happy to just loll along with the plots.

Before vacation I also finished The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff, and I can't say enough good things about it. It's a model of what historical fiction should be. By anchoring his modern-day story with the history of the Mormon Church and the built-in mystery of Ann Eliza Young's fate, David Ebershoff makes you want to dig around for more historical dirt and more stories that are just waiting to be told. I'm sure many Mormons aren't thrilled with the story, as his "dressed-up" retelling of Ann Eliza's story doesn't always deify Brigham Young, but he manages to handle polygamy in a non-National Enquirer fashion. By the end of the novel, I was convinced that truth is so individual that there really is no truth. Personal truth becomes a burden when you feel that part of that truth is the need to hang it on others. A number of good novels leave me thinking about the characters, but few left me mulling over philosophical issues the way The 19th Wife did.

On vacation, I tore through Douglas Preston's The Monster of Florence, written in connection with journalist Mario Spezi. It was better than run-of-the-mill true crime, well-written and reading like a travelogue with quirky bits of information about the history and personality of Florence, although I have to say my heightened awareness of the Italian legal system has made me wary of travel. Truly, after finishing it, I found myself dwelling less on the unsolved horrific nature of the case and more on horrific lack of basic rights that we erroneously assume are part of all advanced nations.

After that was Charlatan by Pope Brock, a odd tale of the growth of the American Medical Association and the fame of quack doctor John Brinkley. Brinkley made a fortune from a number of questionable ventures, but none more questionable than his transplants of goat glands into humans, complete with promises of renewed youth, vitality and longer life. Medicine has come a long way in an amazingly short time, apparently, and so has common sense.

Oh, and Tana French's The Likeness. She's an amazing writer. Story is conveyed through plot, setting, character and language, and so many modern writers get by without the full package. (In fact, any number seem to get by on just one of the four, but that's not what we're here to talk about.) Language is sadly so neglected, and to be honest, many writers known to be gifted with the use of language never make the transition from "literary" to "popular," simply because they fail to create a compelling plot. Tana French is one of the few writers who shapes an addictive story, but uses language in such a way that I'm jolted with an awareness of it that occasionally overpowers my interest in her plot, her setting or her characters. In the Woods, her first novel, got a bad rap, because the publisher needed to pigeonhole it to market it, and it got stuck in the "mystery/suspense/police procedural" category. It is those things, but it presents two mysteries, and only solves one (the less intriguing one, you could argue). I'd read enough raging reviews to align my expectations before starting it. The Likeness is just as compelling, but more traditional - one mystery, one solution, and I'm already waiting for her next book.

The Dangers of Sentiment

Also known as Family Vacation. It always seems like a good idea, right up until the moment that it doesn't, but will magically seem like a good idea again by the time a vacation deposit is due. I've no idea how that happens. It's like my friends describe childbirth - nature intentionally allows you to develop amnesia, probably because family (like children?) is a necessary evil. Nostalgia and sentiment are always painted in folksy sepia tones, but those of us ensnared by them know otherwise!

Actually, vacation was okay. It was SO hot, with the heat index reaching 100+ nearly every day, but as with all things vacation, this has only served to make being home, where it is a comfy 80 degrees, delightful. We ate well, although a little morosely, as vegetarians. Fresh seafood was a powerful temptation, but we managed. We read lots. Lay about like beanbags, snoozing in the air-conditioning when the heat was too much. Found hundreds of shark teeth. Corrupted a small child as much as possible. Avoided my 15-year high school reunion. All in all, a success.

Cats and tomato plants are happy we're home. Both have been sprawling about in a disreputable, disorganized fashion in our absence, and I'm now whipping things back into shape. Am obviously having more luck with tomato plants than cats, but perhaps I should try binding them up with twine as well....

Futon Jenga

Well, actually it's Reverse Futon Jenga. Instead of removing parts, we're putting things in. That's the game we're playing at the moment. After five years, the wood frame on our Walmart-composition-board-came-in-a-box-for-$200 futon is starting to crack. Our solution? Stick a book in there! After some ominously cracking last night, the futon is beginning to visibly sprout books. Some people throw money at a problem, we apparently throw books at it. This futon does not know who it's dealing with! We have thousands of books - it's only got four so far, and some of those were just reading copies!

Strapless

After reading this, I want to go back to the Met and stand in front of Sargent's portrait of Amélie again. I have the distinct impression that if the gallery ever got quiet enough, you'd be able to hear scandalized whispers wafting all the way from 19th-century France. In 1884, John Singer Sargent submitted to the Paris Salon his portrait of Amélie Gautreau, a woman widely considered to be the most beautiful woman in Paris, a woman whose beauty made her the kind of celebrity that people filled the streets to see, and unwittingly, crushed his hopes of a career in Paris and her social standing.


Deborah Davis tells the story as a journalist, not as an academic, so it's more accessible than most books in the art history section. Occasionally, she takes a crack at being academic, and it's a bit jarring; I was happiest when she stuck to the E! News version of the story. As is always the case with sexual politics, Sargent eventually got a clean slate, starting fresh with wealthy clientele in Newport, while Amélie became a recluse. I was happy to discover that she did at least become a melodramatic recluse - banishing all mirrors from the house and walking on the beach only at night and swathed in white. Nothing tacky like hiding away in a hotel suite in your chemise, surrounded by empty liquor bottles and old newspapers!

It's hard to imagine Parisians being shocked by a wayward shoulder strap, with affairs, mistresses, and scandals readily accepted, but somehow everything unraveled from there. I thought of Willa Cather, O, Pioneers, I think: "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before." What happened was really just small decisions and unforeseen huge consequences, and it sort of makes even the most unadventurous life seem risky. Answer an email, take a part-time job, leave early, stay late and change your life. Reclusiveness starts to seem much more practical!

Charlie and the Water Fountain

Charlie, as I've mentioned, has a very tense relationship with the water fountain. He's not afraid of it exactly, just suspicious, and it clearly has a front and back in his mind, because he's decided that sneaking up "behind" it is the way to go. So, he tends to perch on the top and lean over to drink.


He looks a little spooky here, but is much cuter when sleeping in his basket, where he tends to fall asleep on his face.


I also need to post some pictures of the yard. The folks came up last weekend and in less than 4 hours cut down and disposed of three trees, including a 16'+ pine, trimmed a fourth tree back and cleaned out the porch gutters, put an outlet in our well pit (no more bailing! no more swampy dead spider bog water!), removed two large tree stumps/fence posts, and tore out about 8' feet of fence and attendant weeds. It's amazing what you can do with a chainsaw, a 4x4 pickup and some chain. Thanks again!

Literary Cowardice

No matter how much I chastise myself or how often I remind myself of Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, I find it virtually impossible to abandon a book once I start it. Sometimes I take a LONG break (Donna Tartt's The Little Friend still has my bookmark 158 pages in from a vacation two years ago, and I'm still interested in what happens. I've just been more interested in other things since then.), but rarely do I just give up entirely if I have any interest at all in how things turn out. If I'm 50 pages in and don't care two pins about what happens, that's another story....

So yesterday I started Karin Fossum's The Indian Bride. When we were on vacation, I noticed an interesting woman reading it, and judging both the person and the book by their covers, I thought it was worth a try. I actually started with her first book translated to English, Don't Look Back, and thought it was okay. I was a little disappointed, because she's Norwegian, the book's set in Norway, but really, there was absolutely no reason it couldn't have been set in a rural area of Iowa. (Just because I'm reading fiction doesn't mean I'm not expecting or at least hoping to learn!) And the translation is more than adequate, but a truly gifted translator is required if a book isn't going to come out with a slight woodchip quality to the writing - precise, bland, stiff. (I'm still not sure if Carlos Ruiz Zafón is a literary genius or if Lucia Graves is - go read The Shadow of the Wind right now, and develop an appreciation for why your college professors demanded a certain translation of Dante.) Still, it was okay, and when we stopped in the library over the weekend, The Indian Bride, her fourth book, was available so I snatched it up.

The story is that a confirmed Norwegian bachelor decides to get married, heads to India, finds a wife, and on the day she's to arrive, due to an accident, he's not able to meet her at the airport and she's later discovered beaten to death not far from his home. Small town, few but likely suspects, etc., etc.

I'm not giving anything away here - this all happens within the first thirty pages or so. I know because that's all I read. The bachelor is such a decent, kind man, so earnest and hopeful, and you spend most of the beginning of the book with him, viewing things from his point of view. He's just a nice guy, and knowing what was going to happen to him was enough for me. I felt so kindly toward the character that I just didn't want to see him devastated in detail. Imagining it was enough, so I skip to the end, figured out enough to determine who committed the murder, and put the book down.

I don't believe that's ever happened to me before, but I just couldn't bear it. It seemed sadistic (or masochistic) to stick around and watch him be devastated, watch what I had a vague sense of be writ painfully large, so I just bowed out, opted not to the take the journey. Of course, the character still has to, but somehow, not having a witness seemed better. You know how when you trip, the first thing you do is look around to make sure no one saw you and somehow that's a little bit of saving grace? It seemed to be a little bit like that: if I didn't witness it, then it didn't happen or it was less painful. Odd, but I don't know how else to explain it. Anyway, I'm a chicken or overly empathetic, but I know the end, and sometimes, knowing how things turn out has to be enough.

Sagas, Seeds and Strays

And 'sects. Insects, that is. Ants, the little interlopers, were after my candied ginger earlier, but I caught them in the act! Yesterday, they were investigating the cat food. The tastes of ants elude me....

Little bit of everything going on around here, as usual. I finished Kate Morton's The House at Riverton last week, and thought it was fabulous. It's drawn comparisons to Daphne du Maurier, and while it doesn't achieve du Maurier's eeriness, the plotting and the characters are worthy of the description. The story is told in a series of flashbacks by an old woman who started work in the local manor house as a very young girl. Early on, her life becomes intertwined with the youngsters of the family, and the story has all the great elements of a Gothic classic: death, secrets, unrequited love, deteriorating ancestral home.

The larger picture Morton offers is of England, and the world, really, dramatically changed by World War I. The war changed everything, and people still reeling from the devastation of war were dealt further blows by the rapid changes in society created by the Jazz Age, flappers, automobiles and other facets of the same new outlook. I actually preferred the original title, The Shifting Fog, a metaphor for the way in which we view history. We look back and make guesses based on glimpses revealed to us as the "fog" of time shifts, only to find out later that what we thought we knew wasn't exactly right. No matter how much we study and research, Morton seems to say, we never get a clear picture of the whole, just bits and pieces that we struggle to fit together. Anyway, Kate Morton has earned her place on my list of authors that I scan pre-pub alerts for!

Although it's a bit late, I planted some seeds yesterday. Nothing fancy, just a few beets and cucumbers, along with a few straggling carrot seeds left over from last year. And, just for kicks, I also planted a few zinnias, in the vain hope that I would actually be able to cut flowers and bring them in the house. Veterinarians will tell you that cats are unrelenting carnivores. If this is the case, then John Henry is not a cat, but some malnourished, splotchy groundhog. He is an herbivore, to his own detriment, but undeterred! He gnaws on zinnias, gums philodendron, and overgrazed my lemon verbena until it was reduced to a green stick instead of a plant. Of course, he doesn't digest any of this, but that's another issue....

The kitty that's been showing up outside probably wishes it were an herbivore. Poor little thing was SO hungry last night, and she got two cans of cat food, or most of them. I was able to get close enough to really see her face. Her eyes look clear enough, but her little face has been scratched up quite a bit at some point. She wouldn't allow me to open the door until recently, would just bolt off into the weeds, but last night she allowed me to come and go through the back door several times and even allowed me to wriggle up to her while she was eating. (I'm sure I was quite a picture, crawling on my elbows down the slope in the backyard, trying not to swat mosquitoes too vehemently, cooing quiet kitty talk the whole time.) But then, while I was finishing dinner, a raccoon swiped the last of her dinner and when I went out to scold him, he absconded into the brush with a little blue Fiesta bowl that I really like! Am going to have to go kick around in the weeds and see if it turns up. With my luck, once he decided on take-out, he probably hauled it down to the creek where he could wash and eat in peace! Raccoons are very cute until they aren't. Seems like so many things are like that: relationships, sugar, rollercoasters - really good right up to the moment that they're really awful. Why is that?

Home Again

Well, it's nice to be home again, even if all that has meant so far is a barrage of ants, yardwork, rain and a dead mouse. Vacation was good, though, and although I always approach family vacation with trepidation (I can't be well-behaved for that long!), it was fun. We ate well, despite Dad's constant commentary on how much we were eating and how little he normally eats, we slept well, we saw moose, the Maine Maritime Museum, a baby groundhog, and the Great North Woods. Personally, I'd go just about anywhere to see a baby groundhog small enough to fit in a shoe bobbling around with his little bottle-brush tail. And, on the last day, I managed to snag some white chocolate bread pudding from The Common Man in Merrimack. (Excellent restaurant, by the way - a small New Hampshire chain that is definitely worth a stop. Or two - they were our first stop and our last!) We spent our first two nights with Hilary and Derrek at the Admiral Peary House in Fryeburg up in the cozy North Pole room at the top of the house. We have to get back to Fryeburg for the fair in the fall sometime, in part because I believe it is the inspiration for the fair depicted by E.B. White in Charlotte's Web. I plan to visit for all the reasons Templeton visited....


After driving up Mt. Washington, only to be buffeted about by 60+ mph winds (pictures of the two of us staggering around like drunkards on the lookout deck at Mt. Washington in the winds will be here soon), and a moose tour in Gorham (where the moose were all confoundingly picturesque AND camera-shy), we meandered over to the coast and spent a night with Mike and De at the Five Gables Inn in East Boothbay. We visited the Breakwater lighthouse in Camden and the Owl's Head lighthouse south of Rockland, dawdled around the coast, gorged ourselves on one of Mike's breakfasts, and spent an afternoon at the Maine Maritime Museum, whose name belies their fabulous collection of marine and folk art.

Flights were uneventful and, even better, on time, and we straggled in on Sunday afternoon, grateful to be home again. Maybe that's the best reason for travel - no matter how nice the place, it doesn't compare to faded quilts, creaky floors and noisy cats. A few days away always renews my sense of appreciation for the peace and sanctity of my own home. With today's grey skies and endless damp, I plan to make a little time to curl up with a novel under a blanket on the couch and just be grateful for far-flung places and for home and for being able to find my way back again.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

After finishing David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, I find myself feeling a great deal like I did at the end of Peter Jackson's King Kong. It was a beautiful experience, with plenty to fascinate and delight, but at the end, when the lights came up, all I remember thinking was, "I'd forgotten how much I hate the story!"

Wroblewski's book is well-crafted, and on more than one occasion, I found myself really enjoying his use of language and description. While he creates a lovely facade, the bones of his story are straight out of Shakespeare's Hamlet. I'm always amazed by the ability of Shakespeare's stories to transcend time and place: Romeo and Juliet against the backdrop of an L.A. gang war, King Lear on a modern-day Iowa farm, and I even once saw a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream on skateboards. I'm never sure whether his stories are universal or basic, perhaps the gift is that they're both, but either way, David Wroblewski relocates the tragedy of a Danish prince to a dog-breeding farm in Wisconsin.

I believe what I enjoyed most about the book was making the connections between the two works. For instance, Edgar Sawtelle, Wroblewski's Hamlet, is mute, a poetic recreation of the original Hamlet's loss of a voice due to his lack of power and disturbed mental state. Through the translation, I also found myself discovering new perspectives on Shakespeare's motivations for Hamlet, and I came away with a better understanding of the original work. In the end, though, although I knew Hamlet was the foundation, I wasn't prepared for the whole-scale tragedy that plays out. I suppose that also speaks to Wroblewski's success as an author: through his depiction of Edgar, the character becomes much more sympathetic and his tragic tale much more poignant. A true literary journey, but before you start, brace yourself for where you'll end up!

Vacation!

Woohoo! We're off for Maine in the morning, and I'm excited about getting away for a few days and eating food that I don't have to cook. A little nervous too, about going away with the family. We've not spent this much time together in years, and I've been worrying about whether or not we'll like each other still. Fortunately, family doesn't have to like you, they just have to love you.

Beautiful trip Sunday and Monday through southern Indiana, where it was green and still and hilly. And taking a bath in a tub you don't have to clean (especially when you have water as hard as ours) is almost as good as eating a meal you don't have to prepare. We passed the Jug Rock near Shoals, Indiana, which was really unusual. This picture, compliments of Wikipedia, is from a 1920s postcard of the area, I believe. Good pizza at Bobe's in Washington, Indiana, where they're also generous with their oatmeal raisin cookies, and then a long drive home.

Tomorrow we fly to Manchester, New Hampshire and then drive to Fryeburg, Maine for a couple nights at the Admiral Peary House. I'm looking forward to all the touristy things we plan to do - the Conway Scenic Railroad, the Mt. Washington Auto Road, and moose-watching in Gorham, NH. After that, we're going to spend a night on the coast at Five Gables Inn, where we'll hopefully just do some lounging by the fire, watching the bay, and drinking tea. It's possibly my favorite place in the world, and normally when we've been there, we've got so much going on that we don't get to just sit and enjoy it. (But we have plans to spend a few days there this fall, too, just lazing around and eating big breakfasts!)

It will be good to be home again, too: putting up my retractable clothesline, finishing mulching the back flowerbeds, working on getting through several work trips in June, but now it's time to dig the suitcase out of the closet, pat the kitties on the head and check my "things to do before leaving home" list!

It Happens

Our cool spring has been such a gentle one for the little green growy things. The clematis is climbing the mailbox in exactly the cliched fashion that I had hoped for, the new lilac is settling in nicely, and the petunias are happily oblivious to the scorching they'll be in for in a few months. That must be the nice thing about annuals - if they had personalities, they'd likely be optimists, because they just simply don't know any better. Hostas are gradually spreading out in the back beds, and they make me wish I were a mouse or even a spider (*shudder*), so that I could crawl under those seamless verdant leaves and look out at the world through green light. The simple sturdy nature of hostas suggests that as perennials, they take the long view of things. Time passes, rain falls, autumn comes, and so it goes.

Gardening is a gradual process here, and while it's a result of small bank accounts, I like to feel slightly superior about it. We only have so much to spend on improvements each year, and so we buy smaller versions of plants for less money. The big payoff is not this season or even next season for us, but maybe a couple years down the road yet. A person would think we were annuals, with this kind of optimism.

Progress is slow, especially this year with the peonies. I say "peonies," but in reality, there's really only one: a scrubby, weedy thing that most people would take out with a weedeater without a second thought. But, I continue to insist that there is potential. Maybe next year. Gardening seems to be good for me in this respect. I have to take the long view, to wait, to trust, to expect the positive as well as the negative. As with life, all of the factors aren't in my control, but the evenhandedness of nature lets me believe that I have better odds than most gamblers. Bad things (aphids, droughts, nibbly rabbits) will happen, but nature will also offer good things (sun, rain, compost). Maybe this is why there is an unopened bag of 7 dust in the barn - introducing chemicals into the situation seems unsportsmanlike, cheating, putting your thumb on the scales.

Gardening seems to promote a balanced view of the good and ill in the world, and either way, the situation is reduced to "It happens." Bugs happen. So does sunshine. Perhaps that perspective is only one of the things the move away from land has cost us. Gardening reduces the frustrations of life to a microcosm. We do our best, sometimes things fail; we do less than our best, sometimes there's no harm done. The world doesn't always pause to reward our best efforts, but our lack of effort doesn't exactly throw the globe off its axis either. The future is not predictable, and we can worry and plan and be anxious, but it will remain inscrutable.

You watch and worry over a garden, and you begin to gain a sense of your place in the pecking order of things. We only control so much, we do what we can or what we will, and then things happen: seedlings or crows, beans or blight. Either way, we'll have to deal with the outcome. Sometimes, we get what we want, sometimes we don't. It happens.

Poets and Rats

Mother's Day isn't a lot of fun if you're not a mother and you don't have a mother. It tends to be like Valentine's Day was when you were a boyfriendless teen - you really just want to wear black, stay home, eat comfort food and be left alone. You're not able to just forget, to just let it slip past like an old anniversary. Hallmark commercials, road signs, store sales, everything gears you up to be sentimental about something either long-lost or little-desired.

Maybe it's just me. My mother's been "gone" almost twenty years now, but she wasn't always easy when she was here. I wrestle with that enough without being reminded every May. I don't blame her, really; not that it does any good to have unresolved feelings toward resolved issues. Some people just don't come into the world with any emotional skin. It's not their fault, it's not always something that can be rectified: life just causes some people pain, even the beautiful parts. Poignant, maybe - everything is poignant when you have no skin. My mother always seemed like one of those people, and all of life seemed to either fall short of her expectations or overwhelm her. Even with almost two decades to try to make sense of this, it doesn't make her memory any easier to hold up to the light for examination. That's been one of the hard lessons of my life: understanding things doesn't make them prettier or lighter to carry.

I always think of her in terms of one of the Stage Manager's lines from Our Town. When Emily asks him, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?", he responds, "No. Saints and poets, maybe--they do some." The awareness of life, realizing it, is so awe-inspiring as to be terrifying. It's too much to go through life so aware, and when you have no skin, you are that aware all the time. It's like looking at the sun.

I think of the rest of us in far less romantic terms, as rats in a Skinner box. Not terribly complimentary perhaps, but I once read about rats placed in Skinner boxes equipped with a button or a lever. Some rats pushed the button, and every time, they got a pellet of food, a reward. Apparently, it was too easy, and they lost interest pretty quickly. Others pushed the button, but nothing ever happened - no food, no response, and they also gave up what seemed like a pointless exercise. The rats that became the most engaged were the ones that got rewards randomly - sometimes they got pellets when they pushed, sometimes nothing. Sometimes they were rewarded after two pushes, sometimes a dozen later, there had been no payoff. I envision them like little gamblers in a rat casino, hunched over their buttons, oblivious of the passage of time, thinking that the next time, the next push, it would pay off, it would work, it would be the big one.

Making Mom happy was a little like that, and the randomness of it, the inconsistency of the response, turned me into a button-pushing junkie. The next thing I tried might make her happy, might relieve her discomfort. Or it might not. I was thirteen when she died, and looking back, I only remember feeling relieved. I felt relieved, in part, for me. I was transported out of the Skinner box, away from the lever that I tried by turns to win over and to ignore. It wasn't an option any longer, and with the lever gone, the responsibility to attend to it, to push it, was gone.

But, I felt relief for her, too. I knew that she wasn't hurting any longer, that she wasn't pushing whatever lever or button she had in her life, trying to get some response that she needed. Every Mother's Day, I miss her. Some years, I've been angry: at her, at the injustice, at God, but this year, I'm resigned. I may even be grateful. Even if she's not with me, she has what I would want her to have on Mother's Day - rest and peace and freedom from pushing a button, from waiting for a response.

In Remembrance

"Do this in remembrance of me." So much of what we do daily, good and bad, conscious and unconscious, we do in remembrance. The mass of contradictions, insecurities, prejudices and opinions that form each of us are about memory, about carrying on those things that symbolize who we are and where we come from. The body and blood of our lives is all about what we do in remembrance, in what we carry forth with us, in what we continue to do, regardless of persecution or loss of faith or just how inexplicable our beliefs are.

I will cry about debts and purchase a new book within the same 24-hour period, and when I sit down to read, I curl my left leg under me. I am comforted by the smell of beer, cigarettes and Spray 'N Starch. I feel the need to identify any plant life within ten feet of me to whoever happens to be around. I surreptitiously dig up small starts of flowers that do not belong to me. When the back of my neck gets tight, I try not to remember the Maker's Mark bottle in the pantry. My bookshelves have more than one "missing" library book. I look at the world and see herons, barn swallows, robins nesting. I turn up the radio for every Nitty Gritty Dirt Band song. Perfection is a quiet house, a good book and a hot drink.

I make private judgments about farmers with round bales, muddy lots, and more than two dress shirts. I will tackle cutting stovepipe, cutting trees, planting corn, snaking the toilet drain, and sewing a seam. I tell myself I can work longer, I can push harder, that I don't hurt, when most of me doesn't believe it is true. I castigate myself when I leave too much meat on an apple core. I read the classifieds, aware of what information is not offered. I appreciate a well-stacked wagon, and when I pass men in a hayfield on a warm June evening, I want to pull over, change out of my dress clothes, climb over the fence and walk away from every desk job I've ever had. When I nap, I hook my hand inside my waistband or my pants pocket. I'm happy to see fish sandwiches on a menu, even when I don't order them, and I tip waitresses a little extra if they call me "honey". I still cannot believe I live with a cat that gets two shots every day. Old farmers in work clothes from Sears, grease-filled arroyos on their knuckles and untamed ear hair get the very best version of myself that I can muster.

I have books with no covers. My only copy of To Kill a Mockingbird has a green cardstock cover, and since the last pages are missing, someone transcribed them with an old typewriter on a sheet of typing paper that is pasted in. Comfort food involves bacon grease or canned milk. When I pick flowers, I always leave the majority of the blooms and leave them on plants visible to the road - everyone should be able to enjoy them. I hate to throw away cards with pretty pictures. I hear a voice in my head scolding me when I take too much peel off a potato, when I use a paper towel instead of a dishcloth to wipe up a spill, or when I start reading first thing in the morning without "washing my eyes out" first. I never ask a host what we're having for dinner, no matter how badly I want to know, because you're supposed to be grateful for what anyone else shares with you, regardless of what it is or how it is offered.

I give up the comfortable seat, the last cookie, my time, my energy, even when I don't want to. I answer phone calls and listen to the unhappiness of other people, even on days when I can barely manage my own. I need all the cookies on the cookie sheet to be even and approximately the same size. I remind myself that "tall statues need broad bases" when I can't find a cute size 9 shoe. I've been known to cry in the grocery store when a little old lady with a kind face and White Linen perfume passes me. When I sing to myself around the house, I find myself humming old hymns. I feed the people I love, and of all my household jobs, I enjoying my time in the kitchen most. I'm always aware of the unkempt state of my cuticles. I apologize without thinking, because someone else's peace is sometimes worth more than the truth. I can't watch the Macy's parade or the Rose parade. I try to never go anywhere empty-handed. I can excuse any behavior from people I love.

Do this in remembrance of me.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

I'm not sure that this is as "novel" a concept as all the promotion might lead one to believe, but it was still a good read. Kate Summerscale tells the story of what is now a classic mystery setup: a murdered family member inside the locked gates of an English estate, leaving only the occupants of the house as suspects. The case is investigated by Jack Whicher, a member of England's relatively new detective force, and he's left with the unpleasant choice of implicating a person that society does not believe to be capable of murder or allowing a murderer to escape unpunished.

As with so many fictional mysteries, the setup is promising, and doubt is cast on all members of the family while journalists of the day hint at unsavory elements of middle-class life concealed by wealth and privacy, such as sexuality and insanity. Sadly, most of us are so used to being bludgeoned by details of such behavior on a daily basis, so the innuendos and implications seem very understated in the modern era.

Still, in a world so accustomed to police presence, Summerscale reveals interesting details about how police, privacy and the sanctity of the home were viewed in 19th-century England. There are also interesting tidbits about rural village life and the day-to-day operation of a middle-class home. In addition, there are numerous connections drawn between the work of early mystery detectives (Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and the case as well as with the authors' depictions of detectives.

Overall, it was well-crafted and interesting reading, although the literary comparisons grow a little thick at times. Perhaps, Summerscale's work almost makes her own point about why we hunger for mysteries, because although the story unfolds, the murderer is brought to justice and the detective recovers his reputation, the story still remains murky. The identity of the killer is doubted, the victim and the motive remain grey shapes in the fog that are only just made out, and Jack Whicher wanders off the pages of history rather uneventfully. We love mysteries, because we love to have them solved; their solutions confirm our sense of order, their motives reduce unthinkable crimes to attitudes we can fathom, and at the end of the day, we know who the "bad" people are. Perhaps it isn't surprising that a real-life mystery with such unsatisfactory resolutions spawned a genre dedicated to defining, illuminating and resolving.

Simple Pleasures

What a nice day it's been. Little of this, little of that, small happinesses abound. A mug of tea to start the day and the little cadre of joys caffeine brings: warmth, sweetness, and optimism. A flurry of editing that achieved neat rows of numbers and a sense of accomplishment at finishing folders of work, plus that safe feeling of earning one's keep and supporting oneself. Leftover pancakes (made from scratch, thank you very much) with homemade jam for lunch made me feel thrifty and brought the realization that I made enough jam to keep us in peanut butter and jam sandwiches for a whole year until strawberry season rolls back around. No small feat in our house, where rarely a day passes with a pbj sandwich for lunch! After lunch, I read a few pages from a new book, which left me feeling self-satisfied the way that only satisfy aimless curiosity can and feeling greatly relieved that I did not live in the filth and squalor of 19th century London. (Or 19th century anywhere, for that matter.) After a light lunch and light reading, I stretched out on the couch under a quilt, grateful for a cool spring day, and listened to the birds, grateful for a house with green space. If contentment has a specific feeling, it's dozing on a spring afternoon under the cool, worn weight of a quilt. And then a yellow cat joined me, curling up by my shoulder and resting his chin on my arm. He seems to be feeling pretty contented himself, judging by the soft sigh he gave after settling in and the whiffling little snores that followed. I felt flattered, honored by the willingness of another species to share a space with me and by the confidence he seems to have in my presence. A pot of vegetable soup is simmering on the stove, a person who thinks I'm fabulous is on the way home, reruns of Monk are in the DVR, the lawn is mowed, the laundry's (mostly) done, and the book window is filled with new books.

Life seems so good sometimes, but like one of those carefully crafted dollhouse miniatures; a painfully beautiful object with frail supports, a tenuous skeleton and piecework upholstery. So tiny and delicate that even breathing in its presence seems reckless, and the whole thing is a study in contrasts: so perfect and so pointless, so stable and so fragile, so gorgeous and so worthless. Sometimes, I feel like every day is a struggle to find my place on those spectra, to see my life as I see others. My inner life has so rarely been perfect, stable, beautiful, and each day I search for evidence, for a path away from worthlessness and pointlessness, even if it is in things that are the cosmic equivalent of grains of sand. Each day, I hope for the belief necessary to gather the good things into a small pile, a box of treasures, and I hope the intricate mathematics of my ratio holds: small grains of joy in relation to the smallness of life.

Entropy

I love my little house full of old things. Our life may have new "skin" - books, television, clothes, appliances, but we have old bones. The most beloved things, the things that make our house a home, are all old, even the cats.

The house is aging too. We living in a one-room brick schoolhouse, and this time of year, as everything is waking up, things start wandering through. Mostly, our tourists are just pillbugs and spiders and ants, with the occasional wayward mouse. (Mice tend not to spend much time here before deciding that it would be best to move on.) Small spaces between the floorboards allow admittance, as do gaps under the doors and holes in the screens, if there are screens. But the airy openness of our little house, for all its draughts and bugs, isn't something I would trade for the impermeable blister-pack construction of a new home.

Our furniture fits here, too. Hand-me-down chairs from our grandparents with faded, paper-thin upholstery. Piesafes with rusting tins and oil stains. Chests and blanket boxes with age cracks and blistered varnish. Ikea furniture off-gases chemicals, but our furniture seems to exhale, breathing a sort of world-weary sturdiness and peacefulness into the house. Somehow, things wouldn't seem as still and calm with laminated wood and particle board.

New things make me anxious anyway, truth be told. White tennis shoes, shiny new cars, fluffy untrampled rugs - a consumer's dream for most, but for me, just a panic attack waiting to happen. I do my best. I'll spend weeks watching my every step, avoiding close parking spaces, waiting for a cat to cough up a hairball, but I'm always relieved when entropy sets in. Truly, if you spill something on my new rug, I'll be a little disappointed, mostly in myself for allowing it to happen, but then relief sets in. Salt causes rust, people cause messes, life causes death. Of course, I have momentary envy when I see people with blindingly white sneakers, but honestly, I just don't want the responsibility.

Entropy is a comforting theory. Things deteriorating, winding down, aging, disassembling: they're just following the natural order. Trying to prevent this from happening is like trying to prevent John Henry from catching mice. (I can prevent him from eating them, but not from catching them, much to his annoyance and delight.) It is not a failure on my part, but rather a reminder that the world is functioning as it should.

Entropy is anathema to some people, though. They hermetically seal everything they own, agonize over bugs and damp and dust, tilting at the universal windmill of decay. My brother, for instance, loathes imperfection, and its presence in his life causes him endless agony. He purchases something new, and within days, all he's able to see is the tiny nick in the finish. I still remember admiring his new car for the first time. He pointed out an infinitesimal scratch on the hood, and I was both sympathetic and irritated. He sees it as caring for his things. That's just how he is. With each downward spiral, he becomes more and more dissatisfied, frustrated by ruin. Me, I see acceptance in deterioration. With each day, my responsibility as vanguard against damage lessens. Mentally, a scratch on something makes it one less thing I have to worry about. You do what you can, and you accept what you can't change. I see it as reality. That's just how I am.

So, I suppose it makes sense that I'm happy with my old furniture. Everything in our home lost its "showroom floor" quality a long time ago, well before I was born or before my grandparents were born, for that matter. There's no way I can be responsible. Our house has the graffiti of children grown, dead and buried, and in comparison, a scuff on a windowsill is merely the world continuing its work. I am absolved.

The Cat's Pajamas

I should start by confessing that we have entirely too many cats in this house. I'm not sure at what point "too many" starts, but five is beyond that point, that much I do know. Four of them are getting to be old codgers, slouching through feline middle age, sleeping extensively, losing teeth, developing paunches. And diabetes. And heart problems. The aggregate amount of energy displayed daily wouldn't trigger a motion sensor.

And along came Charlie Bucket. I'm not sure why we let him in the house, aside from the fact that he's floofy, absolutely adorable, was tiny, and was about to take up living like a groundhog under our deck in the backyard or dying like a groundhog on the major state route in the front. The other cats were not sympathetic. They did not intend to descend into their dotage with a Tasmanian devil in the house. Neither did I, but there you have it.

Mostly, he just engages in "normal" kitten behavior. He feels sudden compulsions to leave and enter rooms. He does laps around the house. He has strange prejudices regarding knit blankets, camera bags and the bathmat. He takes issue with how the carpet "looks" at him.

And then, there is his fascination with pants, or more specifically, with the inside of pants. Dare to go into the bathroom in our house, sit down to conduct your business, and begin perusing a back issue of Entertainment Weekly, and the next thing you know, you'll have a cat in your pajama pants. He just plucks the band back like a harp string, slips over the edge, and he's in!

If you try to get him out, he bites and retreats into the depths of one pant leg. Finally, you realize that even if you could grab him, you'd have a hard time negotiating your underwear and your waistband without having your legs scratched to pieces, so you decide he'll just have to go out another door. You slide one foot back inside the elastic cuff of your pajama pants, and attempt to get him to recognize light at the other end. He begins to crawl down your pant leg, gets halfway, becomes bored or disoriented, and lays down. In your pant leg, on the floor, looking like a plaid sausage.

You decide to extrude him, pick up the leg, and begin shaking. He slides further down and part of his head, including one ear, emerges. Suddenly, he decides he likes this. He's snug, you're close by, and he feels hidden and capable of surveying everything at the same time. You're losing feeling in your legs now, and you start to shake with more purpose. No luck. You reach in the cuff, past the little needle teeth, are thinking that this must be how a veterinarian feels, and draw one paw forward. He sticks the other paw out willingly, but then assumes an attitude reminiscent of Tom Hanks trapped in the rug in The Money Pit: two abbreviated arms, paws stuck under his chin, slight hysteria. You fight the urge to begin singing "The Name Game," because, at this point, frantic shaking starts to have some effect, but he continues to be limp, like a creature being born, as he oozes the rest of the way out of the cuff and flops onto the bathmat, blinking, confused, and generally disoriented.

Yoga pants are no better. He uses the wide legs to curl up in, and if disturbed, he assumes the stance of a small child playing "ghost" under a sheet - arms begin to wave above his head behind the fabric and strange noises start to come out of your pant leg.

The entire thing is both hilarious and frustrating. How do you explain to your non-catloving friends exactly how you sank to this level? Worse yet, the entire production is guaranteed to be a viral video, popping up on CNN, Youtube, and in email forwards everywhere. If, that is, you could bring yourself to go into the bathroom with a camera. I can't. And, Charlie apparently only performs on stage. It is no use to attempt to explain to your husband what he does. If you poke him into a pair of pajama pants fresh from the laundry, he'll crawl promptly down the leg and out the cuff, casting a worried glance at you over his shoulder as he sits down to bathe. As a result, Charlie gets to be a "monkey not seen" of sorts for everyone else, and you have the task of attempting to convey the monkey's charm through words. Words are amazing things, but they can only go so far and they make a poor substitute for actually having a cat in your pajamas.

Delayed Gratification

I'd love for this to be a book blog, but I never get far enough ahead! I have unread copies of celebrated books from recent years: Possession, Three Junes, The Known World. I've not been living under a rock. I know they're good. I know they'll be fabulous and I'll love them. But not just yet.... I have stacks of arc copies from library shows, and my "to be read" shelves are starting to outnumber my "have been read" ones. I keep hoping that I will find a mysterious wealthy benefactor or a patron and be paid to read, but so far no luck. Although, clearly, I need to cut back on the gothic.

Part of my problem is an overdeveloped sense of delayed gratification. A saint, who masquerades as a friend working in a bookstore, sent me an advance copy of Deanna Raybourn's Silent in the Sanctuary. I don't remember exactly when I got it, but it was an advance copy and the book was published in January, so, needless to say, I've had it for several months.

The worst part is that it has not been languishing on a shelf, but on my nightstand the entire time! I knew I was going to love it, I knew it was going to be over too soon, and I knew I was going to have to wait until next January to read her next one. Okay, maybe October, if my saintly connection holds up, but you get the idea.

I started it several times. I'd lie in bed, relishing the first few pages, put it down and begin to gush to my husband about how much I liked it, and just not pick it up again. I'm a horrible coward, I suppose, but I wanted to save it. Then, like a glutton, once I started, I devoured the entire thing this weekend and now it's gone. *sigh* And it's months until January or October.

The thing is, I'm inconsistent. I read a review, became obsessed with Dan Simmons' The Terror, used a treasured gift card to order a copy, tracked the Barnes & Noble order like the federal government tracking a shipment of uranium, and tucked in to it with gusto the minute it arrived, looking up only to rave or recite newfound knowledge about the formation of pancake ice. And instead of feasting on a good book, I have the nasty habit of snacking on less substantial fare. It's like planting a garden and then binging on canned corn, but not because I prefer the canned, but because I'm afraid of the day the real thing will be gone and I'll have to wait a whole year for more.

Anyway, Silent in the Sanctuary is that good. I enjoy a good mystery - not particularly high-minded of me, maybe, but there you have it. I like the puzzle, the sense of purpose in reading, and the fact that all mysteries are really, in some senses, the same story told over and over against a variety of backdrops. Mysteries are the kind of books one reads if one enjoys looking at changing scenery, I suppose, but so many of them have such artificial backdrops, the literary equivalent of bad matte painting or stereotypical casting. I can tolerate a weak plot or a weak structure, but both at once are too much! As a result, those dreaded mysteries referred to as "cozies" are right out. However, Deanna Raybourn has taken scenery that has, at first glance, been done, well, to death: Victorian England, manor houses, house parties, eccentric families, etc., etc., etc. However, with her research and humor, they're just terrific. This may be due to the fact that she has a Victorian-era heroine who is not a squeamish fainter bound too tightly in corsets or in social niceties, but an independently wealthy widow with an outlandish family, a reformed prostitute-turned-maid, and a pet raven. What's not to love?!

I have other books I'm excited about - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, The Likeness, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, The Matchmaker of Perigord. Oh, and I'm waiting on the library to call about my hold on The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher! They all sound delightful, and I have so many prospects that just selecting a book is becoming daunting. I'm beginning to feel like Smaug from The Hobbit, perched atop my book pile, admiring all my beautiful possessions and all their wondrous possibilities, so mesmerized that just staring and admiring eclipses all possibility of real enjoyment. But I may get to them while they're still timely! I may! In fact, just this week, I read the prologue of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, was entranced, gushed about it, and put it down. The potential seems so luscious that letting it ripen on the vine just a little bit longer can't hurt, can it?

Dirt

I don't know much about ancestral memory. I think I may not want to. That is one of the great disappointments of having a natural curiosity in all manner of things. I develop subject lust very easily, and sometimes, you seek out knowledge and develop a deeper romance with your subject, because your understanding has moved beyond the crush stage of love. Sometimes, though, you research and you learn and what you get for it is the squelching of the fuzzy, vaguely romantic concept you've always had. Kind of like when you adore someone, then find out that they're a Clay Aiken fan. It just calls everything else into question....

Anyway, if ancestral memory gets explained to me in the language of cellular biology and genetics, I'd probably just go blank and write it all off as a crock of hooey. Meanwhile, however, I am free to think of it in picturesque terms, imagining some blood memory transferred to me by peasants, the kind that you see in Jean-Francois Millet paintings. Sturdy, stoic people with their eyes simultaneously on the dirt and on God.

If generations of farmers don't explain it, I'm not sure how else to account for my sudden urge every spring to go dig in the dirt. I have no idea why this should happen. I never dig in the dirt with much purpose. I garden like some people diet - if I'm going to stick with it, results had better appear pretty quickly. And I'm no green thumb. I manage tomatoes, herbs, pansies if there's enough rain, but mostly, by July, somehow, I seem to have little to show for my efforts besides a few anemic hanging baskets of impatiens, no pun intended. Even if I fuss over little green shoots, it does no good. My sense in plants might be as good as my sense in relationships, because I somehow seem to find myself begging, pleading, worrying and fretting over only the most recalcitrant, ungrateful and unproductive of specimens.

My lack of success may be due to an embarrassment of riches. Maybe I just don't have any real sense of need. If I kill off five dollars worth of tomatoes, I'll go to the farm market. There's no sense that a lack of diligence on my part has any consequence, beyond the straggly brown detritus that is an embarrassing reminder of my inattentiveness. We'll not starve. On cold November nights, I'll not lie awake regretting my neglect of the carrots. And if they thrived? We might be wasteful, picking and eating what we wanted, what was attractive. There'd be no eleventh hour canning of produce, no neat array of 87 quarts of tomato juice, no pickling of excess cucumbers. We'd have little to show for the bounty aside from an obese groundhog. Or guilt would drive me, and there would be a series of frantic preserving efforts, consultations with the local extension office, purchases of a dehydrator, and I'd be stiff and irritated with resentment of lost weekends, unread books and unfinished knitting.

Who knows? If there is ancestral memory, perhaps my ancestral blood just doesn't take such vanity gardening seriously. You can't pay bills with petunias, can't sustain body and soul with a weeping cherry. Or perhaps, like most people of my generation, I'm just looking for a way to blame my failures, botanical or otherwise, on my parents.

Still, on Saturday morning, after lingering over an extra mug of tea, I'll put on grubby jeans and wander out to take stock of the green, growy things. I'll pull away dead grass, loosen up the dirt, assess progress, and wonder about the world's ability to annually renew life, in plants and in people.

Tea

I'd be a lousy revolutionary. I'd have gone right back to England for tea, Continental Congress be damned. (My husband points out that I would have been a lousy poor person, too, but I figure if a revolution isn't worth it, neither is a marriage for love. I'd have married for money. And tea.) I'd give up lace, recycle candle wax, send loved ones off to battle, but without English Breakfast, I'd have just stayed in bed.

I used to think I'd make a lousy addict too. Drugs never held any appeal to me. Honestly, if you cringe at the thought of nose spray, would you ever consider cocaine? I've shown a reliable and, my friends assure me, aggravating ability to smoke, smoke heavily, smoke daily, and then just quit. Coffee, meh. And then I discovered tea.

I wasn't raised to be this way. Tea of any variety other than Lipton in my hometown, if you can find it, implies a sort of frippery. We had brief dalliances with Tetley in 80s in the name of sun tea, and college professors probably accounted for presence of the 3 stale, faded boxes of Celestial Seasonings on the top of the grocery store shelf, but otherwise, it was Lipton. Iced, thank you very much, not hot. If you wanted a hot drink, you'd break out the Folgers Instant. We were not a family that put on airs, and honestly, who washes down a fried bologna sandwich with ginger pu-erh anyway?

I wasn't raised to indulge myself in any way, actually. I wear Levis, despite the fact that I have no ass and apparently everyone at Levis' does. Great Clips sees me and my split ends about every five months. My summer sandals? $2.99 at the Goodwill. Cotton underwear, Suave shampoo, Cheerios. An unpretentious existence. Until you come to the tea box.... Shiny golden cans of tea mailed from Maine, exotic words like "oolong," various black blends, a French press, tea strainers, tea sacs, organic sugar, antique silver spoons - a smorgasbord of paraphernalia to stoke my addiction.

I feel sacrilegious saying so, but truly, the most earnest moment I spend giving thanks to the powers that be every day is when I'm taking my first sip of tea. For that split second, all is right with the world. Within moments that sense of perfection is gone: my tea is cooling too fast, I get distracted, I regret not adding a smidge more sugar, but for just that ONE second, life is without flaw. I can see the appeal of chasing a high - spending 86,399 seconds of every day trying to repeat that perfect one second of warmth. Of course, in lieu of estrangement, foreclosure, and pox marks, I just end up over-caffeinated and slightly unfocused. The nickel slots of addiction, that's what I'm playing. Lightly tendered gamble, lightly tendered payoff.

Into the Void

Monkeys Not Seen seemed to be appropriate. Bailey White has a beautiful essay about a little boy who wishes to see a monkey, but the sheer excitement of the possibility of such a visit makes him so ill that it never happens. He spends his life thrilled by the near miss and imagining an intelligent, gentle creature, never knowing the reality of a caged, lonely, grouchy monkey. So much of life is the perception, not the reality, and the things we don't do somehow become luminous in our minds with some sheen of possibility, while so often we just see the flaws in the experiences we have had.

This feels a little odd, somehow. Like the first page of a new journal, there's the sense that I should say something profound, that I should make some meaningful statement. But it's not a day with much to say - clear sunshine, sleeping cats, faded quilts, dust piling up along the baseboards. Speaking, or writing, seems uncalled for, but otherwise there's just nothing. It's a still day in my little schoolhouse today. I can hear a cat breathing upstairs behind my nightstand, the tick of the crockpot on the kitchen counter, the hum of the dvr recording another Law & Order rerun. This kind of silence, at one time in my life, would have been filled with a burbling, muddy sluice of thoughts, but now, the interior of my mind is as still as the house, thoughts lined up on the floor of a clean internal room, like small, imperfect, nondescript pebbles. As a result, the urge to turn on a blaring soundtrack of 80s pop seems ridiculous - the image of Billy Idol screeching through the same internal room, for no one but a tidy line of stones seems bizarre, to say the least.

Sharing such thoughts seems odd, self-conscious, self-important, ridiculous somehow. Why do we do this, this cyber equivalent of scratching our name on a post, tucking a scrap of paper in a crack? An odd contrast between immortalizing our "monkeys not seen" and an apparent fear of a life passed unseen ourselves?