Land Sighting

So last night went better. I managed to confine my panicking to the half hour before sleep, which I'm sure Andrew appreciated. Woke up early this morning, half hour before the alarm, which I hate, so rather than try to eke out a few more minutes of unsatisfactory sleep, I figured I'd get up and be productive. Kitchen's clean, litter scooped, and a load of laundry started. And yesterday, I made my first midwife appointment - January 11 - which also made me feel like I'd done something productive. If productivity keeps working like this at driving away nerves, you may arrive to the world's cleanest house. Not likely, but at this point, we are both free to look out at the distant shore and hope that what is there is exactly what we've been looking for.

Holy Crap on a Cracker!

Well, after a couple days of suspecting (first missed day was actually Christmas Day) and mostly keeping it to myself, I came home last night and took a pregnancy test. Which was positive. Which is definitely a good thing. We'd decided a few months ago that having a child was important to us for reasons that are now lost to me in my panic.

Don't take that personally if you read this some day, which you may very well do. (I'm pretty sure that once you get here, I'll always think of you as my best Christmas present ever!) After my mom, your grandma, died just before I turned fourteen, I found a stack of letters in her handwriting. They're on all sorts of different paper, in different inks, some very fully realized, while some trail off mid-sentence and are never resumed. They're all letters to me - to the me that I was when she hadn't met me yet, to the me that I was when she was waiting impatiently for me to move out already, and to the me that I became, the amusing distraction that kept her from finishing letters to the later me.

Other people reading this are probably thinking, "Oh, how sad," and it was, when it happened, but it's been a long time ago now, and I have to say I learned some important lessons from it. I hope to teach some of those to you - that you love people with your whole heart right up to the minute that they're taken from you, that you love them when they aren't always easy to love, and that your ability to withstand pain and sadness is so much greater than you can possibly imagine, but that when you need it, it will be there. But I also learned that life is unpredictable, and some day, as horrified as I am to admit it to myself, we may no longer be in the same place at the same time. (We'll always be together - the people you love and the people that love you are always with you. That's another one of those lessons.)

And I'd want you to know what I was thinking and to be able to look back on how I'd felt about you from the very beginning. I wish I had something better to report at this point than panic, but there you have it. It's not a terrible panic, and surprisingly, it's not a selfish one - I'm not thinking, "Oh, I'll never have a moment's peace again!" or "I'll not finish another book until 2025!" I'm thinking, "What if I screw up someone's life?" and "What if I make terrible mistakes?" Your father - you'll meet him later - is the kind of person who faces realities a bit bluntly. (In his defense, it was 3:10 in the morning when I woke him up in a tearful panic to question my decision-making skills and to inform him that I don't know the first thing about babies.) Anyway, his saying, "Well, you will make terrible mistakes" wasn't as helpful as he intended it to be, but he's the brave one. Or the one oblivious to enough of the world to be brave, says my cynical voice - sometimes looking closely at things only makes them more scary, and it's useful to have someone around with good gut instincts to follow when you start to cave in on yourself. When you meet him, you'll know that - that he's a good person to follow when you don't know what's best. (You can also thank him for not having a pregnancy test in your baby book - he made an "ew" face at the suggestion.)

From the minute I thought about having you, the world became a scary place. Not a scary place in terms of unattended swimming pools and lurking strangers, but scary in an everyday sort of way. I never noticed all the sharp corners and how easy it would be to burn your hand on the pellet stove and all the frightening openings between the railings on the stairs. Scary! There's the bathtub to slip in and the back deck to trip off of and a big bed to fall out of, and I'm going to be solely responsible for making sure none of that happens, which is an awesome responsibility, and if you are reading this years from now and don't see it as such, believe me when I say you're not ready to have children of your own!

But then I think about what a wondrous place the world is. Your grandma was so great at that - your grandpa too, about seeing how fascinating and interesting the world we live in is. To be able to share the mysteries of deciduous trees, to show you how tadpoles become frogs (your father was beside himself when he found out that next week you'll have arm and leg "buds" - he loves tadpoles and is so excited to be growing one himself), to explain hot and cold, to show you snow and flowers and birds, to be a tour guide to the most amazing place that we know about in the whole universe (at least at this point), that's exciting. People have children for different reasons - most of them egotistical, to be honest, but I'm not doing this because I'm excited about having grandchildren, or because I want someone to take care of me when I'm old, or because I just want to prove I can. I'm just excited about showing you where you're going to live and how incredible all of life is. Which is what I'm going to keep telling myself until the 3 a.m. panics subside!

June in Review

First, I finished Admission (Jean Hanff Korelitz), which was so interesting, just for the insights it offered into the logistics of handling thousands of college applications and the competition for spots in Ivy League schools, but there was a deeper philosophical layer that asked questions about what makes us exceptional, how important college really is in determining who we become, our struggle with being ordinary, etc. These deeper existential questions made it all the more disappointing when she headed for a conclusion so contrived that I couldn't have seen it coming. Still, Korelitz has an appealing writing style, and bad endings are a common flaw of first novels, so I'd likely give her another chance.

Alan Bradley's first novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, doesn't make any mistakes, so I'm not at all surprised that the publisher opted the entire series based on the first novel. Wiseass precocious kids, as long as you don't actually have to live with them or be the target of their snark, are a delight, and a little girl obsessed with chemistry, tormenting her older sisters, and solving a murder was so much fun. Flavia is one of my favorite characters in a long time.

I think I can knock my "grocery store" fiction out in one paragraph, and not just because they're both by the same author. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child just released their latest Pendergast installment, Cemetery Dance, and I also listened to Preston's Tyrannosaur Canyonduring my walks. I was a little disappointed with Cemetery Dance, partly because it felt a little rushed and hollow, but mostly because zombies where pivotal to the plot, but played such a small role. Zombies! If you have zombies and voodoo, you have a huge, rich history to mine for a backstory, but for the most part, nada, zip. Tyrannosaur Canyon was much smarter, full of the kind of esoteric knowledge and odd bits of information that I've come to expect from these guys. And it made me want to go walk four miles every day just so I could hear it all unfold!

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick was my midlist fiction gamble for the month, and I mostly just came away feeling "meh" about the whole thing. It was okay, but just okay, and I didn't care about or like anyone involved. (It is, by the way, an impressive skill to create a work of fiction in which there is not a single likeable character, but in which you are still interested. Ruth Rendell is a master of creating people that I can't stand, but I just want to see what they do to each other with their nastiness!) And, just when I was about to find some aspect of the book to hang onto, Goolrick tossed a huge plot contrivance in that the entire storyline hinged on and lost me. By that point, I just wanted to know how it ended, so I hung in there. Bad endings, first novels remix, but not enough in the writing style for me to make a return trip, I don't think.

Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot made for a nice listen while we were on the road. They were essays, so if felt a little directionless at time, and not nearly so funny as Assassination Vacation, but she's always entertaining.

Somewhere in there, Andy finished reading Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery) to me, and I realized why I was never interested in the rest of the Anne series. She grows up, learns to repress, suppress, sacrifice, etc., and just becomes someone else. She stops being Anne, which makes me just as sad as Matthew dying! We've moved on to Montgomery's The Tangled Web, a much more optimistic tale....

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was just okay. Seth Grahame-Smith takes Jane Austen's classic, turns the Bennet girls into zombie hunters, and adds scenes of zombie mayhem. Entertaining at first, even made me giggle occasionally, but it probably speaks to the enduring nature of the original that about one hundred pages in, I was more interested in sorting out the original storyline and digging out Austen's work than in Grahame-Smith's added absurdities. The central plot remains true and solid, though, so if this introduces more people to a classic, then it might actually be worth it.

I also made it through Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip in June. Strange and interesting contribution, although I don't think I found it as morbid or depressing as some people seem to. As a historian, I think I saw it more as a reality check, a reminder that life has never been neat, clean, orderly and happy for everyone. We tend to view Victorians as restrained, emotionally tidy people, and Lesy's collection of newspaper accounts from Wisconsin in the late 1900s makes it clear that suicide and marital discord and death and misfortune and insanity were just as rampant in society then as they've ever been. I was intrigued by the woman who never caused any other trouble, but had numerous arrests for smashing shop windows. She might go on my list of people I'd like to travel back in time to visit with....

Finally, I read Emily Chenoweth's beautiful book, Hello Goodbye, about a family struggling to come to terms with death. This was such an honest, gentle story about someone disappearing into illness, and even then, Chenoweth found a way to leave the reader not with the impression of death and diminishment, but with a life-affirming sense of love and family. My fourth "first novel" of the month, and probably the best.

Biographies

I've been doing research on Maxfield Parrish at the moment, and the whole process of compiling even the shortest of biographies is astounding. First of all, inaccuracies are rampant - not just for Parrish, but for everyone profiled. Was in '85 or '86? Were the problems health or financial? So many small details, crucial to the person living the life, just get jumbled up in a pile, mislabeled, misattributed, misinterpreted.

Of course, it's either hubris or ignorance that would lead anyone to believe the complexities of someone's life could be translated into a biography of any length, but especially a short artist's biography. And when looking back with no assistance to interpret a canceled meeting or a failed marriage, we draw the most ridiculous of assumptions from the smallest of inferences. It reminds me of high school, sitting around with girlfriends and trying to extract every possible ounce of meaning from something as mundane as "I'll call you later." Was he looking at you when he said it? Did he say "I'll call you later" or "I'll call you later tonight"? Again, hubris or ignorance to believe that so much could be mined from so little.

And, of course, we oversimplify, even as we over-complicate. So often, when we make plans, the end result is attributable to a dozen different factors - we're tired, we've had a cold, there's laundry that needs to be done, we don't like the people inviting us as much as we might, we've had a frustrating week at work, we don't have the extra funds for dinner out, etc. But historically, when we interpret people's lives, we just seem to give them only one motive. So few decisions boil down to just one pure reason, and it's this simplification that allows people like Jefferson and Lincoln to be depressive and selfish in the hands of one person while the same set of events with a different treatment makes them introspective and caring in the hands of another.

But in the end, my frustration with biographies is that they are frustratingly limited, perhaps inherently limited, in insight. Small details are left hanging everywhere! If you're going to make me believe that you can tie up someone's entire life in a biography, you have to chase down every loose end. Parrish had a long-term relationship with a woman, moving out of the main house, where his wife and children remained, to live with an "assistant" in his studio. After 50 years together, after the death of his wife, whom he never divorced, his mistress, now in her early 70s, left him to marry another man. A basic Google search for Parrish will reveal these details, but not a word about the late-date breakup. How can anyone not need to know what brought this about?

Perhaps that's the point, that the questions that determine our lives aren't even ones we recognize at the time or even see coming. In the moment, it's all so obvious that explanation is unnecessary, and to recreate a life in retrospect must require chaos theory. After all, we can barely know the people in front of us.

Weddings

I cry like a sap at weddings. Maybe it's because weddings are at the juncture of my inner cynic and my inner romantic, and the whole thing just wrenches me at that connecting point. So much of what is said at weddings is meaningless - not, of course, on the part of the couple, but in the larger sense. All those phrases like "till death do we part" and "let no man put asunder" just don't mean anything, even if we want them to. The small cynical voice in my head often adlibs a voiceover track - "unless that man is a divorce lawyer," etc. When people stand there saying the words, they may not want to get out, but in today's world, they know they can, and that makes things feel different. We pretend that marriage is permanent, we hope that it is, but in our hearts, we know very little in life is permanent or at least that very little has to be.

I think I cry because it's all so hopeful. All those hopes, all that faith in what you've told each other and what you hope for from each other, all that belief in the benevolence of an unpredictable future. There's hope in frightening qualities, and I think it only hits me harder as I grow older, because along the road in life, you see more and more of the damage people can do to each other. A wedding is, in some senses, an entrance ramp to a very dangerous highway, and after you've driven the highway for awhile, you witness carnage that you wouldn't have imagined, in places that you wouldn't have expected it. But a wedding is like watching people you love pull out onto that highway. You feel love and hope and fearful concern, you wish them all the luck in the world, and you're horrified by what they're going to see as they travel together. Unlike a wedding, a marriage never really has a happy ending - if you aren't separated by choice, eventually you'll be separated by circumstance.

May in Review

May was a bad month! Only three books, including one that I didn't really care for. (Also, apologies to my lovely fine-free library, because the spring publishing rush backed me up! No need to send bills - I'm returning them....)

Finally got around to Linda Fairstein's Lethal Legacy which has been lying around here since January. I always enjoy her books, aside from the ridiculously awkward attempts she makes at interjecting sex scenes, because she delves into the history of a different aspect of New York each time. And this time, it was the New York Public Library! And, as a bonus, map and print collectors. As always, I tend to wish I remembered as much about her plots as I remember about the institutions or locations she focuses on, but it's not a perfect world. Nice beach material at worst.

Laurie King's The Language of Bees was more enjoyable. Occasionally a little lighter on historic material than Fairstein, or at least less hard history in terms of dates and places, but much better for plot and atmosphere. I wish social clubs were still in vogue. (And I wish that people I'd actually find interesting would be members, if they were....) I did have the pleasure of dinner at the Queen City Club in Cincinnati while I was reading this, and the big paneled rooms filled with art and bookshelves, watching it rain while munching on macaroons (I would consider membership just for them alone), gave me a nice framework for the imagination during some of The Language of Bees. Also some great accounts of the challenges faced in the early days of flight. Flying over the crags of Scotland in bad weather in the 1920s - not for the faint of heart! I enjoy Mary Russell far more than Kate Martinelli for some reason; it may not be just me, as the two series feel so completely different that it seems they must have been written by two separate authors.

And after that, for reasons known only to Entertainment Weekly's best of 2008 list, I subjected myself to Disquiet by Julia Leigh, which was, at least, short. I hate it when I come away from a book thinking, "I just don't get it," but that's exactly what happened here. Not to fault her prose, which had lovely moments, but I'm not a fan of literature that feels obtuse just for the sake of being obtuse. I suppose at my heart, I believe that writing is about communicating, and I cannot for the life of me understand why someone would choose to communicate confusion or be praised for communicating vagueness. I think this comes back to Nancy's Pearl discussion about how readers enter books; people enter through four "doorways": language, plot, character or setting. All books, of course, have these doorways, but most books have much "larger" doorways in one area or another. And the great works of fiction - The Hobbit, Gone With the Wind, Huckleberry Finn - those books have large doorways across the board. I've found that of the four, language is least likely to induce me, at least without the accompaniment of one of the other three, and that was the case with Disquiet. Yet another example of good writing that does not necessarily make for good reading.

June is already much more promising with four titles polished off already, and two new gifts from the library!

Promise

So, last weekend, I went home, back to my old high school, and watched my nephew graduate. Weird in itself that I've been out of high school long enough for someone to be born and go all the way through high school, but more than that somehow. There are places and events that are so richly filled with memory that the thin membrane that is time becomes even thinner, and you can step back and see your old self.

I found myself sitting next to the me that I was at 17, at the senior awards assembly with a lap full of awards for academic achievements, national writing contests, and scholarships. (I'd had a good year - my brother, the chronic underachiever in high school, came home and told my grandmother she really should have come to the Hollie and a Few Other People Awards Ceremony....) I had (I think everyone does, really) all these ideas about who I was, who I would be, what the adult world was like. And they were, of course, all wrong. Thankfully, in some cases....

Perhaps this is all one of those issues of cosmic timing. I'd been reading Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz, an insightful novel regarding both the Ivy League admissions process and the expectations we have for life. Each year, exceptional kids rise through the ranks to apply for college, full of insight and idealism (and, in many cases, bullshit), positive that their feet are on the path to enlightenment and wealth and fame. We're also so convicted at that age in the belief that that path is the one, the only, the one true way, and anything else is destined to be disastrous.

Where, in the end, are all these exceptional people? That's the cruelest lesson for the overachiever - the reality that at the end of the day, even the most promising of students usually ends up married, living in the suburbs, overworked, semi-satisfied with marriage and career, underpaid, void of intellectual curiosity, and crafting in their children the same desire, the same search for exceptionality.

And so we question ourselves. How did we get here? Was it all because we chose one college instead of another? Should we have picked a different major? Should we not have changed our majors in our sophomore year? Could we have tried harder, taken more difficult courses? What was all that for anyway? Do we still contain that promise unrealized or did we just fool everyone around us into believe that we had any promise to begin with?

Graduations, I think, are more poignant than weddings. There's so much hope, so palpable and so many expectations that will morph into other things, if they survive at all. At a wedding, the hope is hope you place in another person - the hope that they will be all they say they will be, that they remain who you think they are. In some ways, it isn't as serious, because realistically, we all know that people will disappoint, will change, will require us to adjust or reshape our vision. At a graduation, that hope is for yourself - that you will be all you say you will be, that you will remain who you think you are, and when the adjustment to that vision comes, it is, by nature, much more personal.

Exceptional is rare, and for most, unsustainable. Some of us "peak early," achieving more noteworthy things in our junior year of high school than in the rest of our lives, while some of us just arc delicately through the rarified air of "exceptional," only to find ourselves at some point wafting down into mediocrity. Some of us achieve exceptional in our professional lives, but barely get off the ground in our personal lives as human beings. Some of us just burn up on reentry. As they sit there in caps and gowns, hot and excited, bored with everything around them but so aware, we wonder who is who. Will we ever know? Will they?

April in Review

Before it's May....

Let's see - started off with The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, the nonfiction account of a little Hmong girl with epilepsy and the treatment conflicts between her parents and her doctors. Religion, literacy, economics, etc. all played a part in the mess that Lia's life becomes, and you wonder how two groups who both want the best for a child can both be so wrong and so incapable of finding common ground to work together. Fadiman also exposes some critical flaws in mainstream medicine - the inability of many practitioners to treat patients as a whole, the inability of professionals (and patients) to accept death, the belief that modern medicine knows most and knows best.

I wondered if things wouldn't have gone more smoothly with some of the acceptance present in Franz Lidz's account of his uncles, Unstrung Heroes. The Lidz men all suffered from mental illness in some form, and as a result, often lived along the margins of society, but through Lidz's account of his uncles, frank and unembarrassed by their struggles and idiosyncracies, the marginalized of our society begin to seem more entertaining and interesting. Frustrating and unreasonable, yes, but also whimisical and unselfish. How can you not love someone who collects found shoelaces? Everyone, especially anyone struggling with mental illness, should have someone who loves them as Franz Lidz loves his uncles.

In a month that now seems filled with somber topics, I also waded into Annette Gordon-Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. All academic work should be so honest; Gordon-Reed admits from the beginning that her belief on whether or not Jefferson and Hemings had a relationship can change from one minute to the next, and that's an important admission, because her research is not, as is often thought, intended so much as to make a case for the existence of the relationship, but to expose and question the belief that such a relationship wasn't possible. For instance, scholars have historically been skeptical of the late-life remembrances of Sally Hemings' children, while accepting unquestioningly the accounts of Jefferson's grandchildren. Gordon-Reed, an attorney, puts the basic structure of trial evidence to work and rightfully questions inconsistencies like this. If we can't rely on the Hemings family oral tradition, why should we rely on the Jefferson family oral tradition? Sadly, the discussion often leaves little basis for the difference in treatment beyond race, but reading Gordon-Reed's lambasting of various historians and their sloppy scholarship will guarantee that you never read histories or biographies the same way again!

Part of the reason I only made it through four books this month was Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden. It was one of those books that I enjoyed so much, I kept picking it up and putting it down again, wanting to read it and knowing that would mean it would end. I read her first novel, The House at Riverton, last year, and found this to be almost as enjoyable, if a little convoluted. It's hard to avoid convolution when you have four female leads spread out through as many generations and on two different continents, a more ambitious undertaking than The House at Riverton, which was told in flashbacks, but mostly focused on one family, one manor house, and one generation. Still, it was just so carefully paced that I enjoyed moving through it and took my time. She's an Australian writer, and the recent globalization of publishing has added her to my list of authors to follow, along with Kate Atkinson, Steig Larsson, John Harwood, and Susan Fletcher.

Just My Imagination

So, once again, Mother's Day, otherwise known as the day I would prefer to spend under the bed. Honestly, I think about draping blankets over the side until they touch the floor and just crawling under there until I feel like rejoining the world. I cry every day for a week beforehand, feeling sorry for myself and then berating myself for being so silly. I wish I didn't feel this way, and I realize it's probably not very adult, but when everything around you is about celebrating something you don't have, that you barely remember having, avoidance does seem to be what comes to mind.

That's probably one of the saddest things about death. The reality is that the farther you get from it, the fewer people still care or at least are still aware. The people closest start off with the sharpest memories, and as time grinds the edges off, most people end up with memories that don't poke and prod at them very often. You end up struggling with something that's invisible to everyone else.

Lately, I shop for her in my imagination, ticking off books that I've read that she would have loved. (That is probably the greatest sadness for me - my mother was the only person I've ever known who read nearly as much as I do. I'm sure there are other people who do, but no one I've meet, let alone know well enough to chat with.) Imaginary retail therapy, kept to myself, seems to help. I can't buy for myself - unwilling to spend money on small vanities like nail polish, persuading myself that hard water would only damage a copper kettle, noting how infrequently I'd have an opportunity to wear a cashmere scarf. Besides, if she were here, sometimes I think I wouldn't want for those sorts of things. I don't know, but I suspect they are the kinds of things your mom buys you for no reason. Buying presents, however, would likely be the quickest path to bankruptcy for me, and I always see things that I would buy for Mom. Dichroic glass pendants, red brocade wallets, heavy pottery mugs with vellum-esque glazes. This year, I'd be leaning toward Sing Them Home, some pricey organic coffee, and one of the beautiful bleeding hearts from the Italian greenhouse down the road. Imaginary shopping for an imaginary relationship seems appropriate.

Of course, in my imagination, she's always whole and happy. Her eyes are bright, her hands don't shake, and she laughs. She squeezes my hand, tucks my hair behind my ear. She is who she was on the good days, and she gets to be my mother instead of me being hers. That's the best part about imagination: when you're telling the story, you can tell it however you want.

My Brother

Yesterday, my little brother had a birthday. He probably wouldn't want me to announce his age, but I will say that he's old enough that I don't remember his first one. That always amazes me, the fact that I don't have any memory of his advent in my life, because when it comes to someone's whose existence, whose entrance into the world, I'd want to celebrate, he's at the top of the list.

But, still no memories. I don't remember Mom's pregnancy, staying with grandparents while she was in the hospital, or the red, wrinkly, suspicious bundle that became my brother coming home. No, really - he was suspicious. Even in his first hospital picture, suitably dated by lighter-burned edges and shellacked wood plaque, he's turned partially away from the camera, squinting with his one open eye in a manner that clearly says he suspects everyone and isn't really sure about anything. Either that, or he's reacting like a hamster to the bright camera light, but knowing him as I do, I interpret it as a cosmic wariness that's never really left him. I don't remember being consulting on the naming of the at-the-time-hypothetical brother either, but have been told that I had creative suggestions. (I was two, I wanted a dog, I suggested the name Shadow - what can I say?)

Later, I remember his blue footie pajamas, his constant smell of baby shampoo and dirt, his fascination with tying knots in my jumprope and disassembling my dollhouse. I remember his presence in the dark, when we were both working hard to keep each other from being frightened. I can still conjure the memory of his hand in mine at a funeral, of the quick lie to cover for my mistakes, of Saturday morning arguments over channel 5 versus channel 12. I see a glib teenager vaulting off the edge of a moving haywagon to chase down my baseball cap and a little boy surveying a dammed creek with his hands on his hips. In my dark moments, I hear his voice in my head, the words he used to encourage me to throw caution to the wind when we were small: "We're Davises. We can do anything." Twenty-five years later, when I married, those words are the reason I didn't change my name.

Still, there's no milestone to mark his arrival in my life. Despite that fact that I have memories as early as 12-18 months and that he came along when I was 2 1/2, my mind didn't mark this momentous occasion in any meaningful way. Maybe that's as it should be. I have no first memory of him, just like I have no first memory of the other innate loves of my life. No memory of learning to read, no memory of first loving the presence of a kitty cat, no memory of my brother - he's just always there.

Innate love is a deceptive thing. People think unconditional love is something pleasant and easy, and perhaps it is for the recipient, but not for the giver. For the giver, unconditional love hurts. It worries, it disappoints, it frustrates, it angers, it infuriates. It's not that you don't experience those things with unconditional love, I learned early in life, it's just that they don't make it go away. People look for different metaphors for the enduring timelessness of love - oceans, mountains, rivers - but love's really not that elegant and majestic. In fact, if I search the landscape of my childhood for a symbol, love is multiflora rose - introduced without warning into my environment, it took root and spread with the tenacity of steel. You can hack a multiflora rose down to the ground, pour gas on the roots, set it on fire, and within months, it will be flourishing again. As mentioned, it's not elegant, but frankly, neither is love.

Productivity

Or the lack thereof. I'm just not feeling very productive today. And I'm not feeling very guilty about it either. It's not, of course, for lack of things to do. The dishwasher could be stuffed a little more and run, the laundry sorter's beginning to just morph into a laundry heap, recycling needs to go out, the stove needs cleaned in preparation for another bout of cold rain, spiderwort and lilies need planting, with so many cats there's always dusting to do. Then there are the things that don't have to be done, but should be: a draft of the column could be written, the refrigerator could be cleaned, the closets and cupboards could stand a spring weeding, the taxes need filed, the daybook transcription is languishing in ratty notepads, I could stand to get a little exercise and go for a walk.

Or, I could just lie here, watching the sun move across the floor, feeling a little hungry, but not motivated to do anything about it, and enjoy the cool, peaceful quiet. In twenty years, in fifty years, will I wish that I'd done more? Will I think, "My house could have been cleaner. I should have exercised more. I wish I'd had fewer weeds in the paving bricks out back." Are those the kinds of things I'll wish I'd done more of? Or will I think, "I'm glad I lay in the sunshine. I'm glad I took naps and noticed the peace in my life. I'm glad I read every day."

Why do we feel so driven to judge our lives by the way other people live theirs? (Although I suppose this is far better than judging other people's lives by the way we live ours....) I've clearly made decisions to avoid having other people's lives, so why do I occasionally feel like I should judge my life by those standards? My grandmother got up before dawn every morning, baked bread and pies, did laundry and hung it up to dry, packed lunches, prepped for dinner, cleaned floors by hand and went off to work, just to come home, fix dinner, wash all the dishes alone by hand, fall asleep working a crossword puzzle and go to bed, only to do it all over the next day. On her first day of retirement, she cleaned the furnace ducts. I don't think it made her happy. I don't think it even made her feel good about her life. In fact, I'm pretty sure that most days she felt sad or martyred. So why spend decades doing things just because other people expect you to?

Of course, somedays I think about her, and I feel bad - my flowerbeds are neglected, I don't have all my friends and family on index cards with notations of contact information and Christmas cards sent and received, and I frequently make cookies that are not uniform in size. Shirts in my closet (not ironed before they were put there) don't all face the same direction, the sheets occasionally smell a little musty because they spent the night in the washer, and I have blatantly ignored a cobweb by my desk for days. Would I be a better person somehow if my sweaters were ironed and organized by season? If my oatmeal raisin cookies didn't have a size deviation of more than one-quarter inch? If I had fewer cats and fewer books? And what kind of a "better" person would I be? Morally better? Spiritually better? What is "better" anyway? While I know a little organization and neatness soothes my soul, would I be happier? Or would I just be happier if I'd never been told that properly applied stamps had an equal border on the top and right side?

I suppose it's normal to question yourself, to question how you spend your time and your money and your energy, because that's what makes a person an individual, but at the end of the day, I feel comfortable just doing what I want to do in the moment. If I make myself do something, and later regret it, then those are two occasions of time lost, regrets felt. If I do what I want now, and later regret it, well, then, at least I have the comfort of having done what I felt like doing in the moment. The right to choose is about more than having or not having children - it's just that, the right to choose for yourself.

Recently, a retired college professor friend said to Andrew, "You're awfully busy doing all sorts of interesting things. Your house probably isn't really clean, is it?" Andrew told her that we do our best to keep it neat, but that yes, there's always some cleaning that needs done. Her response? "Good for you!" I just love that.

So, I suppose I'll go boil an egg for lunch, grab a book and some tea and maybe spend some time in a deck chair in the sun. Perhaps I'll need a few minutes of chanting, "That is not a standard by which I wish to judge my life. That is not a standard by which I wish to judge my life," but I think I'll manage to not to regret it.

March in Review

All over the place last month, running the gamut from new literary efforts to old classics, popular fiction to nonfiction, massive tomes to novellas!

The "massive tome" was Dan Simmons' Drood, which left me a little conflicted. Simmons chronicles the last five years of Charles Dickens' life, using Wilkie Collins as a narrator and inserting a mysterious London underworld character as Edwin Drood as the source of suspense. Collins and Dickens seem to have been the original frenemies, with Dickens feeling superior and jealous and Collins feeling inferior and jealous. The opium addiction that plagued Collins is also used to good effect in same ways, but in others, I felt a little annoyed by the implication that I might be spending so much time with an unreliable narrator. A deceptive narrator is an interesting device, but as a reader, I tend to resent it if I end up feeling as though I've been on a literary snipe hunt. Perhaps the basic issue was just that "skeleton" and "skin" weren't well-matched - the old silk purse/sow's ear dilemma. It was well-paced and atmospheric, held my attention for 750+ pages and was just enjoyable to read, but I think I wish he'd expended his efforts on a slightly sturdier plot.

John Harwood's The Seance suffered from some of the same problems, I think. Harwood's first novel, The Ghost Writer, was so ostentatiously cryptic that I still don't really know what happened, but it was well-written enough that I thought I'd give his second effort a try. I found The Seance more enjoyable, a fairly light Gothic tale with all the classic elements - ghosts, decaying family manors, missing people, fog, etc. My only complaint was that near the end, I felt that Harwood was intentionally trying to muddy the waters, for effect, not purpose. He's a very skillful writer and creates wonderful settings, but there seems to be constant obfuscation for obfuscation's sake. The Seance represented an improvement, I think, over The Ghost Writer, so perhaps he'll continue to evolve.

After all this literary second-guessing, I enjoyed a nonfiction break with David Grann's The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. Grann neatly conveys the story of explorer Percy Fawcett who, after several successful trips through the jungles of South America, disappeared with his son and a friend in the 1920s. Fawcett was one of those fascinating historical figures, an obsessive personality who followed his obsession literally to his death, and I came away wondering why it is that some obsessions lead to wondrous discoveries while others lead to madness and why it is so hard to tell them apart in the beginning. Some people persist and achieve success, while the same persistence in others, persistence in the face of ridicule and poverty and resistance, leads to destruction. As is often the problem with nonfiction, it can be difficult to get the story to conform to a traditional story arc, especially if your protagonist wanders off into the jungle and disappears permanently, despite the best efforts of hundreds of searchers to turn up some clue. Grann drops the story a little abruptly on the doorstop of modern archaeological efforts, and I would have appreciated a stronger connection, and think Grann would have achieved a stronger ending, with present-day discoveries.

So, I left the tropics and followed Lincoln Child to the Far North in Terminal Freeze. What can I say? No one writes great rip-roaring tales in the classic storytelling tradition like Child (and his writing partner, Douglas Preston). This was Raising the Mammoth meets The Thing from Another World. Scientists on a grant provided by a Discovery Channel-esque network find a prehistoric creature frozen in ice, native people warn them to leave it alone, the warnings are ignored and bloody chaos ensues. Formulaic - absolutely, fun - absolutely.

I followed that with Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, which was just sad. It's hard to discuss without giving too much away, but the cruel ironies, the damaging secrets and the unrelenting sadness made it one of those books you mull over for quite awhile afterward. Schlink has been criticized for a simplified version of events, and it is, despite some literary window-dressing, a simple story. He's also been criticized for encouraging people to identify with the perpetrators of war crimes, and he certainly does put a "human face" on them, but I felt one of the central questions was can you commit horrible atrocities without being scarred and damaged by them yourself? That's not saying the damages to victim and perpetrator are equivalent, but with the tragic stories now coming out of Africa about child soldiers forced to rape and kill, it is a question worth asking and one we're still struggling with. Sometimes I take away the smallest of concepts from books, and in this case, what I remember is how clearly Schlink defines our struggle to deal with things beyond our ken: "When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling that I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding." Those two sentences seem to sum up the ideological struggles to cope with no only World War II and other horrors of war, but of all our discussions of crime and punishment in our legal and penal systems.

Thankfully, Jan Elizabeth Watson's Asta in the Wings was lighter. Set in 1978, the story of Asta and her older brother Orion is billed almost as science-fiction. After being kept in a boarded-up, decaying house all of her life because of "the plague" that her mother says has killed off so many children, Asta finds herself forced out into the world with her brother after their mother fails to come home. Asta, a precocious and endearing little personage, is reminiscent of all sorts of wonderful precocious children in literature from authors like Louise Fitzhugh (Harriet the Spy) to Fannie Flagg (Coming Attractions). The book wasn't what I expected, because the premise almost seems to promise something more far-fetched, but it was delightful to just watch Asta move out into the world, trying to cope and to keep her brother close and to value her family, regardless of their oddities and dysfunction. Two things sum up how enduring Asta is as a character - early on, whenever she met someone new, I worried for her because of her lack of worldly knowledge, silently chanting, "Please be nice to her. Please be nice to her," and, at the end of the book, I found myself yearning for a sequel, wanting to see her evolve and reach out further into the world. Subtle, gentle and beautiful.

Somewhere in here, perhaps fittingly displaced amongst the clutter, was Franz Lidz's Ghosty Men, a brief biography of the Collyer brothers, interspersed with anecdotes of Lidz's own hoarder uncles. The Collyer brothers are true American Gothic - wealthy and well-educated recluses literally buried in a three-story house filled to the rafters with the detritus of decades. Homer Collyer, who had gone blind and suffered from crippling complications from rheumatic fever, lived with his brother Langley, whose paranoia allowed him to only venture out at night on junk-collecting runs, in Harlem. After an anonymous call reporting a dead body in the house, police broke in (through an upper-story window) and found Homer, dead only a few hours from starvation in the midst of mounds of booby-trapped rubbish and newspapers. It speaks to the incredible state of the house that it took police more than two weeks to discover the body of Langley, only a few feet away from his brother. He'd been felled by one of his own traps, buried under an avalanche of junk, leaving Homer, blind and helpless to waste away. Lidz tells the story with compassion, dealing out doses of his own family struggles with compulsive collecting, and the Collyers emerge from his treatment less horrific than sad, almost figures of tragic absurdity on the scale of Samuel Beckett.

Finally, Andrew read A Girl of the Limberlost to me. Perhaps no great shakes literarily-speaking, but sometimes a person just needs to have the kind of story where good people do good things, confront surmountable problems, and get the good things they deserve in the end. In a dark and cynical world, it's nice to visit with a character who believes in the rewards of kindness and sacrifice, who knows that dark times are just a reminder to keep your inner light in good working condition. Ask yourself the old question of whether you'd rather be smart, beautiful or good, and then go read about Elnora Comstock.

And with eight holds at the library and books piling up all over with the spring publishing rush, there'll be plenty more to talk about next month!

Empty Houses

Went with Andrew Monday to visit a consignor in Cincinnati. He's a spry elderly man in a big rambling house, and he's working on downsizing after the death of his wife in early December. He's managing well, perhaps approaching things from a very organized and orderly fashion in an attempt to bring some clinical sterility to the process. Things seem to be clicking along smoothly enough, but sometimes there's the faintest whiff of automation, like the house in Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," where mechanical detachment from the outside world just lets a system run on, oblivious to massive destruction.

Consignor work is so often sad, though, and sometimes I wonder how Andrew does it and manages to maintain distance. I want to list items, sign contracts, and then offer to bring over dinner or run to the post office. The houses are invariably fading beauties, lovely exteriors with rot creeping in along the window sills and underneath the bathroom tiles as steadily and fixedly as the weeds creeping up in the flowerbeds. Family support, if there is any, is distant and detached, aside from laying claim to the most valuable of objects. And in the midst of things, sort of a human version of "the last house standing" photographs from the Galveston hurricane, is one person, usually in need of a haircut, a good meal or a hug, shuffling back and forth through echoing rooms, selling off the archaeological record of their world, a world that has ceased to exist.

I suppose that's only to be expected. We aren't normally called in at the happy times in life, when people are newly married and trying to fill an apartment or when a baby has come along and changing tables are being purchased. Those people come into our world, pick things up, place bids, write checks and go home. It's only when the road narrows and darkens that we're invited into their world. Downsizing, death, divorce, disaster - the so-called "four D's of the auction business" - all those roads lead to the same place.

I probably find it sad too because I suffer from terminal empathy, and I can't approach the situation without picturing myself in the same place. Anxiety makes me a planner, hoping that somehow if I worry and strategize enough ahead of time, then I'll be able to avoid the worst. When Andrew's running late and not answering his phone, I don't waste time imagining horrible fates; I just assume the worst and then start thinking, "Will police come to let me know? Should I call my parents first or his parents? Should I call someone to go be with his parents before I call them?" It's as if I think if I have the answers ahead of time, then I'll be able to give them all at once and speed through the awfulness.

But then, I think about our house and all "his" things. No matter how many checks I write or how many objects I admire and bring home, I think of them as his, and I wonder simultaneously how quickly I can get away from all of them and how long I can keep them near me. Part of me would want to send everything away immediately and fill the house with the anesthetizing dullness of new furniture, making our house look like everyone else's, but I also wonder if I couldn't live out my days as the only living object in a shrine of early 19th-century furniture. I dread Andrew's business trips, because I can't help but think of them as dress rehearsals for some day, maybe years in the future, but some day that will come to exist. They offer practice runs, short introductions to how quiet the house is without him, for a time when I will be responsible for all the chores, for remembering garbage day, for filling hours.

Perhaps this morbidity, if that's what it is, will pass. I feel awkward and bizarre even entertaining these thoughts, let alone writing about them. They don't make sense to most people, and we all know that what doesn't make sense normally makes us uncomfortable. After all, we're 35 and most people would say we have our whole lives ahead of us, but I can't unknow what I know - that people can be snatched out of life instantaneously as neatly as if they had been erased. I wonder when/if I cross the magic line of 36 and a half if I'll feel as though the rockiest part of the journey is behind me, but I doubt it. I suspect that even my best efforts to brace myself won't make much of a difference; planning may smooth the road, but the scenery and the journey don't change.

Fickle

I've decided I'm just a series of contradictions. I've been so tired of the cold, but when it got to be 70 degrees in here, I was ready to travel back to January and sprawl in a snowdrift. I want time off, but with reduced hours, I've been at a bit of a loss. (In my defense, having time is much more enjoyable if you have money to pay for project supplies, for lunches out, for amusements of some sort!) And, in January and February, we were on the go, and all I wanted was to be at home, in the quiet with the cats and the books and tea made from our well water, and now we've been home for a few weeks, and I'm lamenting the lack of roadtrips, mostly just because I enjoy riding around with Andrew and catching up. That's all apt to be resolved in the next couple of weeks - Monday we go to Cincinnati, Friday we're doing research in Marietta, in West Virginia for the weekend, and in Chillicothe for the day on the way home Monday. Tuesday is Dayton, and then Andrew leaves bright and early Wednesday for a few days in Philadelphia without me, which will probably be just fine with me again by that point. We've also decided to scrap plans for a trip to Wisconsin at the end of the month, but the May calendar is already filling up.

Ditto for energy. I've not had any for so long, and now, with medical marvels, I'm awake, alert and actually feel a bit like a plant poking up out of suffocating dirt into the sun and fresh air. And now, of course, I want to rest. Not really, but it is a little odd; feels kind of like being attached to an engine that isn't racing, just slowly chugging along and towing me with it. I want to sit, I want to disconnect for a few moments, but the engine just keeps moving forward. Probably just an adjustment issue, but still - fickle.

John Henry's also fickle, which resulted in an interesting week. For two weeks, he was desperate to be rid of his plastic cone, tired of washcloth baths, eye ointments and citrus-flavored antibiotics. Monday, he got his stitches out and there was just the tiniest of divots near the end of the incision. The whole process was quick and painless. We were at the vet's at 4:00, out by 4:10, home by 4:35, and by 4:55, he'd ripped the entire area open again. It was gruesome: a big gaping hole near his eye, a fragment of skin between the tear and the corner of his eye (and between keeping his eye in his head and having it rolling around on his cheek), the loose end of a dissolvable suture flapping in the breeze, and the line of stitches holding his upper lid together widening like threads at a torn quilt seam. And, again, 4:55 - Dr. Fred's office was closing.

So, he got what he deserved. I left an message for Dr. Fred, pulled the suture tight and taped the end to his head with a neon blue bandage, and made him a temporary collar with kitchen shears out of a Cool-Whip bowl and duct tape. Fancy. When Dr. Fred saw him, he asked if we lived in Morrow County.... Anyway, J.H. spent the night (and $95 - the little turd is lucky that he can't mow the lawn), and now he's home again - complete with plastic cone, eye ointment and citrus-flavored antibiotics. I'd have cried if it would have done any good, but I just get to start the process over again.

At the moment, I'm not feeling fickle. I'm enjoying the calm that I'm normally just wishing for. It's raining peacefully and steadily, it's Friday, bills are paid, laundry's in the works, cats are napping and work isn't too demanding. But the line between calm and boring is SO thin....

Partly Sunny

Not sure where March has gone. Seem to have spent most of it struggling to stay awake, and I'm hoping the sun starts working on me soon the way it is working on the little green sprouts coming up here and there around the yard. Feel like I've had the flu since Christmas....

Part of this has been too much time on the road - two trips to Nashville in a month, both of them for just two or three days. (And not counting several trips to Cincinnati and elsewhere.) Twelve+ hours on the road in three days with two shows sandwiched in between is too much. Those are the trips where I come home, climb gratefully into my own bed, close my eyes, and see the interstate. It's like a horrible video game that won't turn off - flying down the highway, cars zipping in and out, green signs and concrete barrier walls whizzing by. It's hard to go straight to sleep without closing your eyes first.

Then there are just all the other little obligations in life - birthdays and laundry, phone calls and appointments, guests and cats. And taxes - blech. I hate taxes. I don't mind the actual paying of them, oddly enough - just the gathering of papers, the sorting of receipts, the compiling of numbers, and the fear that we're going to get audited or slapped with an unexpected payment that I won't have the money for. That appointment, mercifully, is this evening, and I'm hoping that it will just take all the money we have in savings and nothing more. The more part, I'm not sure where I'm going to get, so again, just hoping it doesn't come to that.

And, it's been a long week with John Henry's surgery. The laser surgery near his eye to remove his tumor has left him in a E. collar and surprisingly needy. I can't bear to turn him away, because I know he doesn't feel well, but his face looks gruesome, blood seeping out from around his eyelids, and he wants to be so close that you can smell the metallic odor of dried blood, no matter how much you wash his face. (And I'll not even go into the fact that cleaning his face makes me feel like I'm cleaning an Italian Renaissance painting - cotton swabs only, no cloths....) And his little collar is plastic and sweaty, so I wake up in the middle of the night, staring into this eye puckered with stitches, my arm numb and sticky from weight and plastic, and I just do my best to go back to sleep and not disturb him. Reminding myself that I should be flattered that my presence seems to soothe him is not much of a sleep aid. A long week, but only one more to go.

Things are beginning to look up though. Green sprouts in the yard are happy signs, and I discovered some crocuses down in the woods to relocate this fall. We also planted two little pots of evening primrose that a friend gave us back on the woodline. Hopefully, they'll get busy with growing and blooming - I put them in a space where they could easily colonize a four-foot stretch of bank. Web conference this afternoon, and otherwise a quiet day. Have hopes to put fresh set of sheets on the bed, wash the others and put them out to dry in the sun. And I was ambitious yesterday and made a big pot of vegetable soup, so I wouldn't have to cook tonight in addition to the tax appointment. (Optimistic - assumes that I will have an appetite after leaving the tax office....) I have small star pasta to add to it, which will be a happy addition. Holds on new books at the library, evidence of the columbine peeping up by the mailbox, and money-saving plans for a garden full of tomatoes for canning - all of which will translate to obligations and expenses in a few months, but possibilities are free!

February in Review

Only three books this month, but that's only because I'm strolling through Dan Simmons' Drood, and have been for a few weeks now. And, I suppose, I spent several days attempting to get hooked on Tiffany Baker's The Little Giant of Aberdeen County. I *wanted* to like it, but I just couldn't get there, and after more than 75 pages, when I still wasn't that interested, I just packed it in. There's too much already sitting around waiting on me to spend time on something that I'm ambivalent about!

First off, there was Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death. A friend enjoys the series, so I thought I'd give it a try. It was okay - good enough for me to pick up the second book at some point, I imagine. The series is set in England under Henry II, and the "sleuth" is a woman sent upon the king's request from the medical school in Salerno. Children are disappearing, the Jews of Cambridge are being blamed, because they get blamed for everything, and the situation is so tenuous that they've had to move into the castle for protection from the general citizenry. Of course, the Jewish population also pays a lot of taxes, and as a result, Henry would like this resolved ASAP. I usually enjoy historical fiction, but sometimes I struggle with not having a sense of how much is fiction-fiction and how much is historically-based fiction. This was one of those cases, but no real complaints when I remember that it's just a light read.

After that, I read Stephanie Kallos' much-lauded Sing Them Home. She's very talented, especially at character renderings, and something about the matter-of-fact way she does it put me in the mind of Larry McMurtry. Odd as it sounds, for a comparison, I'd say she's Larry McMurtry's Evening Star meets Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic. Just a light touch of magic in this story about three modern-day siblings reunited after their father's sudden death and still struggling with the disappearance and presumed death of their mother in a tornado nearly 30 years ago. The Welsh community of Emlyn Springs becomes a character, too, with deep-seated Welsh traditions for honoring the dead. The tornado actually serves as a beautiful metaphor for any sudden, violent death in some ways - you leave home when things are normal and come back that evening to find your life completely wrecked and a loved one missing, in a sense never to be seen again. Odd sometimes, how you have revelations (not really revelations, perhaps, but an emotional understanding of something that you've cognitively understood for quite awhile) when reading that don't seem directly connected to the book, but I just realized during this that my mother would never have wanted to leave me. Beautiful and sad - but that realization and the book.

After that, another book about mothers and children - Kathleen Kent's The Heretic's Daughter about real-life mother and daughter Martha and Sarah Carrier who were imprisoned during the Salem witchcraft trials. I don't think I learned anything new about the trials, but the only other fictional work on the subject I'd read was Arthur Miller's The Crucible. The Crucible is a classic with good reason, but Miller's really more concerned with the politics and parallels, while Kent, as a Carrier descendent, is focused on relaying her family history and applying a very human face to the tragedy. It's one thing to read about the injustices and the discriminations in the abstract, but Kathleen Kent does a wonderful job of drawing you into the lives of these two women and making you see the frustrations in the first person. That women were so often accused, especially if they were smart enough or persistent enough to actually heal a person or a farm animal, just seemed horribly injust - if you were lazy, indifferent or unlucky, you might be many things, but you weren't likely to be a suspected witch!

And this month I picked up the new Deanna Raybourn, Kathryn Stockett's The Help, Asta in the Wings, and Linda Fairstein's Lethal Legacy. And I have holds at the library on Terminal Freeze, The Reader, The Seance and much more. Add that to what I already have lying around....

Nest Building

On my walk this morning, I kept hearing rustling on the island, and finally realized that a fox squirrel was hard at work, building a nest in the cleft of a tree. I only meant to watch for a second, but got so entranced that I lost track of time. What a production! Unlike birds, who mostly pick up loose stuff and just fly off with it, the squirrel was wobbling out the the end of branches, gnawing off twiggy tips and hauling them back. And, of course, on the way back, there are twigs poking out in all directions that cause you to get hung up on things, so then you have to turn around and tug and tug. And if that doesn't work, you have to go back and gnaw some more. Sometimes the limb is so unwieldy that it's just easier to climb down to the ground, turn around and ascend again rather than trying to turn around mid-trunk.

Then, after all this work, you get the branch back to the aforementioned cleft, where you have been hard at work laying out a few base sticks as a platform. Shoving the new stick into place frequently dislodges other sticks that you've worked so hard to wedge in, and all your bouncing up and down on the sketchy platform doesn't help. This assumes that you even manage to get your newest stick in place - about two-thirds of the time you drop it and start all over again.

As if all this weren't bad enough, the birds were tremendously loud today, and in his behalf, I wanted to tell them to just shut up! There was a squabble amongst goose neighbors, and the seagulls were so bad that listening to Rush Limbaugh would have been preferable. (Actually, that's a very apt analogy - lots of angry squawking, very little substance, and poohing all over everyone else's existence without making any real contribution.) It's warmer, and the ice is thinning, and I think some of it was just self-encouraging chatter to keep up one's nerve while tiptoeing on the ice, but still - what racket! Personally, I also wanted to suggest that he reconsider the advisability of having geese as neighbors. It has to be like living next to an Appalachian trailer park when it's perpetually Friday and perpetually payday.

Anyway, I'm not sure what the squirrel phrase for "Damn" is, but I think it looks like this:


This is what my new friend did after several attempts at stick placement. On the one hand, he looked tired, but on the other, he looked for all the world like he was thinking very hard about the advisability of the whole process. In fact, I think he seemed to be questioning being a squirrel at all - seems like it might be easier to just go live in an abandoned hole or something. After a few minutes, he climbed down from his tree and went to rest in a leaf pile. I empathize - it's a terrible thing to be driven by instinct and training to do something that is so frustrating. Perhaps he needs a squirrel therapist to discuss his tragic upbringing with parents who taught him to base his self-worth on the quality of the nest he constructs. Will have to go check on his progress this weekend and hope he does not have a breakdown in the intervening days.

January in Review

Boy, am I running behind. Blame it on February being a short month....

First of all, I "re-listened" to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. If you don't already know what a genius Jim Dale is, then I'm not sure I have anything else to say to you!

New Year's Day, my husband allowed me to be a complete slug, and I sat in a chair by the stove with a mug of cider and a cat and ripped through Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I thought it was great. Nothing groundbreaking, I don't suppose, but it's what thrillers used to be back when James Patterson was still writing his own books. It's a good, solid story, carefully built with interesting characters, and I was hooked from the beginning, which is saying something, since Larsson launches the story with some corporate espionage/fraud. (Sorry, that's just me, but I need bodies - missing jewels, industrial spies, and military plots don't cut it.) It was a pleasure to read; not a literary novel, perhaps, but a strong story told well. I'm saddened to learn Larsson only left us with three before his untimely death.

Seems it was a month of good stories, or started that way. I moved on to Hannah Tinti's The Good Thief after that. I'm a little concerned that it's being billed as historical, because the historical details were hazy and sketchy enough that even someone with a decent grasp of early American history and material culture would have had a hard time placing the story definitively. But that's because it's a story! An orphan who lost his hand, a stranger with questionable motives, giants, dwarves, brawls - this has it all. Reading Tinti's debut tale was like sitting around the fire, listening to a storyteller spin a yarn with odd characters, larger-than-life adventure, and spellbinding twists and turns. It might say everything about this novel to say that I kept picturing it in my mind as a terrific project for Tim Burton....

After that I picked up Bottomless Belly Button, the graphic novel by Dash Shaw. This was my first graphic novel, or at least my first graphic novel that was more about "novel" and less about "graphic." It was a good choice, because although I've not exactly been converted to a graphic novel fanatic, it was an introduction to the subtleties that the medium can convey. In the right hands, I can see that it's a beautiful blending of books and film - delicate emotions and nebulous events that don't always translate well in either format (your book would be too wordy and your movie would have no plot) are dealt with so well here. It's actually the opposite of a story in some ways, more like little glimpses of how a family deals with the end of a story, and at the end, I realized it could only have been done justice as a graphic novel. Which is, I suppose, as it should be.

At this point, I took a brief break from my "best of 2008" lists to catch up with Linda Fairstein's Alexandra Cooper series in Killer Heat. What can I say? Linda Fairstein. If you've read one, you've read them all, and if you've read them all, odds are they've stewed into a composite novel in your head. Body, investigation, turbulent relationship with Mike Chapman, danger in isolated historic New York spot, and a last-minute rescue and resolution. Acceptable way to kill a little time, and her newest release, Lethal Legacy, takes place in the New York Public Library, so I had to get caught up for that!

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout's latest, was another "best of" title that I picked up, and I'm glad I did. "Gentle" might be a good word for the story, but not for the character. Olive is brusque, loving, cold, passionate - she's just a human, a normal person, who if treated as a survey topic would probably have an even smattering of responses in the love, like, dislike, and hate columns. She's us - average people who have good days and bad, who occasionally does something right, occasionally does something mean, and as often as not does one or the other completely unwittingly. All of that averages out to the human experience, and Strout's work is almost like a series of short stories, many NOT from Olive's point of view, that are strung together to give us a picture of who she is at some of her best and worst moments. It's almost as if a camera crew followed her around for her whole life, collecting bits and pieces that were edited together by someone with a well-balanced sense of things. You like Olive Kitteridge, not because she's likeable, but because she's very human, and we can all identify with her fits of generosity and viciousness.

After that literary pause, I took a complete turn off the beaten path and picked up Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle. I liked it, I think, although in some ways there are two works here - an anthropological one and a linguistic one, and they might have been better served by actually being two books. I fell into the anthropological track, and I felt jolted about quite a bit when late in the work the writing shifted to a more technical linguistic discussion, but regardless, the Piedans are people worth getting to know. They are truly unlike any other group of people I've ever read or heard of - they don't import knowledge, they have a remarkably simple language, and they seem to be so unconcerned with the distant past that their language doesn't even allow for a discussion of it. Everett raises a philosophical question - are we who we are because of our language or is our language what it is because of who we are? A "chicken or egg" question, one that leads you to wonder if a culture doesn't have war because their language wouldn't allow for the expression of it or if their language doesn't allow for the expression of war because they've never had one. Fascinating, but ultimately, not quite fulfilling. Perhaps I just need to go find a linguist to quiz at length to satisfy my curiosity....

It's Electric!

Karmically, we were due for a power outage. The remnants of Hurricane Ike whipped through here last year, and our power barely blipped. Especially "barely" in light of the fact that lots of Ohioans didn't have power for a week or more. Several ice storms and heavy snows this winter put the lights out in some places, but again, not even a dimming of the lights over here. So, when the heavy winds came through this week, it was kind of our turn.

Unfortunately, it is, of course, not the kind of turn you want - not like being next in line for an amusement ride. The power went out sometime after we went to bed Wednesday night, and naturally, this meant that I had a web conference scheduled for Thursday afternoon. Hooray for the community room at Panera! I ruthlessly (okay, not really) kicked a bunch of people studying some cardiology stuff out, recharged my cellphone and gabbed away with no problems, aside from the occasional advertisement for Panera because I was getting timed out and having to go back to their main page to get logged in again.

Then I spent the afternoon expending enough energy and money that I felt certain the power would come on again. (You know that old rule: if you want something to happen, make it as inconvenient as possible, and it will. Need 5 seconds at a stoplight to find your lip balm in your purse? Guaranteed green lights all the way to work.) Anyway, I remembered that our uninitiated gas grill had a burner on the side, so I lugged home a propane tank ($50). After work, we unearthed the grill in the barn, drug it around to the back deck, and fired it up. Fortunately, I'd made a pot of chili this week. Then, I found a paint bucket and an old five-gallon bucket, so we managed to pull enough water up out of the cistern to rinse dishes and flush the toilet. We also unpacked all of the freezer and refrigerator into a big Rubbermaid tub and iced it down. A positive there - we got the fridge cleaned out!

After a candlelight dinner (chili and a Mistletoe-scented Yankee Candle Co. candle aren't, perhaps, the most palatable of scent combinations) and a run out for ice and some hot cocoa, we headed up to bed. The cats filled in the little nooks and crannies around us like chinking between logs. I wore the work light on my head, so Andrew could read to me, and then I rolled up in a little ball and slept like a log. An occasionally chilly log, but a log nonetheless.

As I was paddling around in my thoughts while waiting for sleep, I was thinking about Fannie Flagg's character, Aunt Elner. You just have to love Aunt Elner, and one of my favorite things about her is her intense appreciation, an appreciation that only an old farm wife could have, for electricity. Thomas Edison is one of her favorite people, and every year, on his birthday, she turns on all the appliances in her house at the same time to celebrate. I thought to myself that I might just have to do that next year.

So, we woke up to power this morning. The electricity not only was cooperative enough to come back on, but considerate enough to do it enough before we woke up, allowing the water heater to generate hot water for showers. While Andrew showered and fed cats, I cleaned out the pellet stove and fired it up, and then he made breakfast while I showered. It's already almost 55 degrees in here, and after I settled on the couch with the heated mattress pad and a quilt, I remembered Thomas Edison, and thought I'd just see when his birthday was so I could be prepared. According to Wikipedia, it's February 11 - the day before our electricity went off. Perhaps he was peeved by our lack of appreciation. I've made a mental note to do better next year....

Minutiae

I think it's the smallness of winter that is draining. Everything about winter is so incremental and miserly; the thermometer (and thermostat) degrees that we were so generous with in August - 87, 91, what's the difference? - are now guarded so carefully, watched over and discussed. Rain falls and soaks, a deluge, but snow accumulates. And accumulates. And accumulates.

Then, it all goes away so slowly. A summer thunderstorm wets the earth and by the next day, it's hard to know one passed, but snow lingers. It's like the negative of a photograph. Instead of dark shadows, the hollows and ditch lines have white streaks and traces that hang on for weeks. And the dripping is interminably. Snow leaves as slowly as it came, one drop from the eaves after another.

At the same time, this smallness is what is fascinating, so delicate and precious. Tiny sand-like grains fall and fall and fall until they pile up inches thick! The cumulative effects of individual flakes is amazing and beautiful, and individually, they seem to be swept away so quickly.

I remember my first big snow. The winter of 1977, I had just turned three, and I had an impressive collection of miniature jelly jars, likely from a gift basket, that had been handed off to me as toys. In memory, it seems as if I spent hours going outside, scooping snow into a jar, and bringing it back into the house. No matter how tightly I screwed the lid on or how close I stayed to the door, within moments, I had a little jar full of water. I was entranced, over and over, by the science that reversed another science. It's hard not to be in awe of a world that produces miracles in a jelly jar.

December in Review

I don't know how I managed to read so much with all the holiday obligations. I can only ascribe my success to online shopping and minimal decorating. And sheer laziness.

A friend recommended This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, saying it was the best academic work of the year, and she may be right. In an age where making your name as an intellectual seems to involve creating obscure and/or incredulous spins on the staples of history, Drew Gilpin Faust comes up with a really smart and obvious discussion AND a really accessible doorway for readers: death. The work is structured simply, each chapter devoted to different aspects of dealing with death on such a spectacular and national scale, and the reader learns about the process of dying, killing, burying, numbering, etc. It's not a "pick a side" approach, and Faust uses numerous examples from primary resources on both sides of the conflict. I honestly just wish it had been longer, because she presented a number of topics that I would have welcomed tangents with interesting tidbits. I got another Drew Gilpin Faust book for Christmas, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, and I'm hoping it's as good.

After Into the Wild, I decided I really should read Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer's account of the disastrous 1996 climbing season on Mount Everest. It was just as enjoyable as his other work, but with a personal story to tell, he didn't spend as much time delving into background material and logistics as he usually does, which is where I learn the most. In short, I wish there'd been more history on the attempts to climb Everest, more details on Sherpa culture, and more discussion of the logistics involved in making a climb possible. However, in all fairness, I have to acknowledge that wasn't the story he set out to tell.

A friend loaned us The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, a glorious story by Kate DiCamillo. As one of us was coming down with bronchitis and the other was recovering, I spent a rainy December Saturday on the living room futon reading it aloud. Edward Tulane is an elegant, but exceedingly pompous, china rabbit. He thinks very highly of himself, but devotes little of his cold china heart to thinking of others, until he is lost and separated from the little girl who adores him. Through a string of adventures, in the typical fashion of children's classics, Edward Tulane learns that love is not just about being loved, but also loving. My only wish was to know more about the lives that Edward passed through after he moved on, but I suppose that's also part of love - parting and perhaps never knowing the fate of someone you cared for or someone who cared for you.

I had a hard time polishing off Tasha Alexander's And Only to Deceive, but perhaps that's because I love Deanna Raybourn and her Lady Julia Grey series accomplishes everything Alexander attempts to do, only better. Victorian lady seeks solution to mysterious death of husband, etc., but Alexander's heroine was a bit stiff and self-righteous. The character postures too much, and the right had all the markings of a first novel that hasn't been scrubbed down - bits of it felt like writing workshop exercises. Meh....

Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost was a different story - a great first novel that won a Costa award. Still, I fear she may suffer from being stuffed into a genre cubbyhole, because it's not really a true mystery in some sense. Regardless, her writing was wonderful, her characters were colorful without being too quirky, and she created a fairly successful atmosphere and setting as well. I enjoyed the sarcastic and snippy tone of her writing - would compare it to Kate Atkinson actually. I'll be on the lookout for her next effort.

I can't say enough good things about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Mary Ann Barrows and Annie Shaffer) or enough bad things about the title - it's quirky, but just too darn cumbersome! The book was wonderful, one of those books that I keep picking up and putting down because some subconscious part of my mind wants to prevent me from gobbling the whole thing up. It's all the good things the reviews say - warm, friendly, funny, touching and just perfect. Most of all, it's a book for people who truly love books, who understand how books can lift and inspire and serve as lights in dark places. With such a gloomy outlook in the world these days, I was so happy to read about goodness, friendship, survival and all the things that really matter. I can only hope that there will be sequels and other adventures for this motley cast of folks brought together by their love of books.

And finally, in a little afterthought, I picked up one of my mother's books that I've been toting around for 20 years but never read - A Bit of Christmas Whimsy by David Edman. It's nice, a little O'Henry-ish, what with the city setting, the "common" people, etc., and although the twist ending isn't much of a twist in today's world, it was a nice story about how things tend to work themselves out, regardless of our mucking about in them. Just what you'd expect of a little holiday novella, but I'm glad it's stuck with me through various moves and book weeds.

And now, off to finish a January book!

Warmth Returneth!

Heat arrived in our house for New Year's, after having taken its leave around Christmas, and if the old adage of my surrogate grandmother that what you do on New Year's day, you'll do all year holds true, I'm in for a good time. Personally, I think this was meant to discourage post-holiday/pre-return to school squabbling in children and excessive drinking in adults. (Who wants to spend the whole year arguing over a supply of AA batteries or hungover?) Anyway, I hope she was right! I spent the morning fussing over the stove (and she was right, because that's normally how I seem to spend a good bit of my year), but I spent the afternoon wrapped in a quilt, toasting my feet in front of a sturdy little flame, reading quietly and steadily through a really good novel. So, here's to doing all year what you did on New Year's day!