A Matter of Degrees

It's been almost a month since my last post and I don't know why I've chosen now to get back on board. I have ten minutes before I meet a client and have no idea what I'm even here to write. The two, maybe three, readers I may have collected in this blog universe have probably given up hope of ever seeing anything new here.

It's been cold and busy and my head has been somewhat dormant. I collect things throughout the day and shape them, like bread dough or playdough, into paragraphs that scatter like dust bunnies once nighttime falls. I formulate little things to write about......like, when the temperature drops to fifteen below.... the way the tires sound on snow that frozen or the way your lungs feel like freezing metal when you breathe. I wanted to write about the night that my cow, Patience, gave me a kick in the head and knocked me over and made me cry. I've been wanting to write about my daughter's new ambition to be an animal right's activist.

But I think when it's this cold, I get all caught up in simply breathing. I drink hot water with lemon because when I drink the well water my innards shake with cold. The thirty yards from the house to the car and then from the car to work are intense ventures. I'm just waiting for the mercury to get above zero so I can go buy those new cross country boots and get the fuck outside. My house is full of furballs because I don't dare leave my mangy old farm dogs out in this weather for any length of time. B and I have been dreaming of islands and surfboards and sunshine...planning our vacation this summer. Crafting the tunnel through which we'll navigate our way past winter.

And yet it's so beautiful. So quiet.
Everything is white and sparkles.
The stillness beats all.

More Highway Lines

Heading back to the hometown this afternoon after I pick Ella up from school. The car is packed, the christmas presents are wrapped, and the cell phone is charged. It takes seven hours to get there, maybe a bit more with the two or so stops we make along the way. For some reason, Ella is particularly drawn to a specific rest stop on the New York Thru-Way. It's one of those gargantuan stops that only sell Mobile gas. I'm not a big fan or advocate of anything big and conglomerate but if I am going to drink a cup of coffee on the drive, I'm as guilty as the next one for being a patron of Starbucks. And this gargantuan stop has a Starbucks. It also has an Elby's Big Boy, TCBY, Wendy's and a great sunglass stand. I don't know why she prefers this stop to others. There's a great little deli we used to go to in Saratoga and a little breakfast joint in Glenns Falls but she prefers the box store rest stop. The corporate toilet. Life's little pleasures.

It will be a quick trip to the parent's house. My mom is turning sixty on Sunday. My dad will follow suit soon in March. They've known eachother since elementary school, dated in fourth grade (whatever that means when you're nine years old....) and grew up in relatively the same neighborhood. Their lives are so very intertwined at this stage of the game that it's nearly impossible to imagine one without the other. That's not to say it's all roses. I think I've mentioned in prior posts how the dynamic goes. It's not easy. My mom is fairly high strung, hyper-senstive and controlling. If my dad's blood pressure were any lower than it is now, he'd probably slip into a coma. He doesn't say much, has a cute little chuckle, a mustache and levels at 5'2". I'm an inch taller than the both of them.

My mom is a Capricorn redhead who grew enormous boobs by fifth grade and used to beat up Gracey, the neighboorhood girl who used to taunt her younger brother and sister. My dad used to cyphon gasoline out of cars with his buddies and steal returnables to cash in for beer in junior high. He got sent home in the second grade with a note from his teacher, asking if he had a bladder problem because he was asking to go to the bathroom so often. He was smoking cigarettes. (which may explain the lack of height?)

My mom and her mother (now 87 years old) are not speaking to eachother right now. My mom is the only sibling who still lives in the hometown with her mother and I know the lack of distance has made it hard for them. They're such different people. My grandmother is active and independent. When my pop went off to WWII in 1939, my nan got bored without him and enlisted. She's just like that. She does what she wants to, when she wants to and that tendency has only been exacerbated with old age. My mom has always acted out of obligation, family priority and guilt. She has a golden heart but in making so many sacrifices (most of them unnecessary) she's acquired a steely kind of resentment for my grandmother. Their issues are decades old and won't likely be resolved within my nan's lifetime.

It's always a ride for me to go back home. To walk back through the tunnel of family history, to look back on my own tunnel and see where the grass has grown over the cement walkways and then where the cement is still drying. Every time I go home, it's like I lean over that wet cement and leave my handprint. The little girl elongates, expands her vocabulary, shifts her perspective. I find I'm becoming the adult in conflicts, the peace-keeper. The only one in the family who understands what an "I-statement" is. By leaving, I'm able to look at my mother as a woman. A human. Not the mother who still desperately holds onto that role. By coming home, I'm able to put it all into practice. The more handprints I leave in the cement, the better the practice gets.

I grew up thinking one thing about my grandmother and now, as an adult, I see otherwise. When I have conflict with my own mom, I don't share it with Ella. Her relationship with my mom is not my relationship. My mom is not the same person to her that she is to me and for that, I'm grateful. It's allowed to me step back and see the value in not tainting another's perspective. I'm sure I will, at some point throughout the weekend, play mediator. I hope I can do it gracefully.

Family waters are thick. Kind of like cement. I think I'll wear my mudboots.

Fair Trade

I used to spend an exorbitant amount of time writing in diners and coffee shops. This was back before motherhood, before I kept jobs longer than the average three-month stretch. This was before barn chores and a mortgage and before I went grocery shopping weekly at the same grocery store and even went so far as to write lists so as not to forget basic household favorites. This was before the household.

At that time, the bottomless cup of coffee still existed. Maybe it was because the kind of places I frequented didn't sell organic, fair-trade coffees. Maybe it was because my favorite place was a silver diner called Palooka Joe's and it's patrons were mostly the down and outs in the dowtown area. I would sit at the bar sometimes learning sign language from Michael, my favorite down and out. He had big aluminum baskets on both ends of his bicycle, worked odd jobs for money and had no sense of hearing. For a long time, our exchanges consisted of words cluttered on paper placemats but I had had a deaf boyfriend in high school and so had learned the ESL alphabet. It was slow communication but I had time and was open and he was homeless and weathered. He loved the opportunity to sit with a young pretty girl and I.... I just needed substance. I was desperately searching for anything other than the hum-drum, mundane reality of middle class white America and all that came with that.

In the closet in the guest room of our 150 year old, crooked farmhouse is a black and purple bag, stuffed to the top with fat, little CVS spiral-bound notebooks. None of them are dated, there are likely more than a dozen, and in order to put them in any kind of sequence I would have to sit down and force myself to read through them. Force myself back into that time in my life. I always tell myself that someday I will put myself to the task. But it's been more than a decade since those fat, little spiral bound notebooks and more than a decade of healing old wounds. My new journals are formatted differently. I've begun to think in full sentences, starting combing my hair, stopped taking so many drugs and gave birth to new muse.

But I do miss my homeless friends. I miss Benjamin, who, instead of introducing himself right off, walked up to my table at a little downtown deli and asked me if I was writing love letters in those notebooks. I told him that I didn't write love letters and conceded that I was writing poetry (something I rarely admitted at that time in my life). He took a deep breath, grinned, and proceeded to recite the Raven line by line. A few minutes into his performance, he held up one finger, turned around and ordered a cup of coffee and came back to my table and asked if he might join me. The friendship was sealed already but he gave me more of the Raven, his life story and there would be days to come where we would meet up on the square and I would play harmonica while he would play a borrowed guitar. Oftentimes, the other old buddies would be nearby playing cards or checkers on the stone benches.

Back then, I was dodging the ghosts of a love gone bad and a given up pregnancy. I was medicating myself with lots of weed, a little speed, alot of booze and music and sex and dancing. I've always thought of those years as the golden years, as the Great Distraction. I was dancing out there on the very thin limbs of my own branches. Dreaming of houses with no windows, no roofs, and many rooms. Dreaming of little girls that might have been my own. I was writing the story of my life in scattered sentences over drip coffee, good company and fried eggs. And late at night, after the bands had packed up, I'd walk barefoot into the dark alleys to find my old buddies on some abandoned porch and they'd scold me for wearing no shoes as I'd sit there on the broken step pulling a sliver of glass out of the heel of my foot. I'd loan them smokes. They'd loan me their stories. It seemed a very fair trade.

I'm sitting here now in a coffee shop in a prime tourist New England town, a couple of blocks from where I work. In the place of a fat, little notebook or a placemat, I have my old, slow laptop. I've graduated from see-through coffee to a chai latte and I'm not stoned. There are no homeless people reciting poetry to me, this is not a silver diner and I am no longer in an old blue-collar mining town. Just some nice tables and chairs and the constant drone of the espresso machine.

My fingers move much faster on a keyboard than they do with a pen and paper and I think now in full sentences. My attempts at making sense of my life come easier and my ghosts are so much more transparent. I shake their hands now, pull up a chair and offer to buy them all a cup of coffee.

Red Sun in Morning ~ Sailor Take Warning

This is what the sky looked like this morning.

Before we went to bed last night, we blew out the candles on the alter and went to sleep anticipating a very long, dark morning. Just as we'd thought, it was still dark when Ella came down for breakfast, when usually, by then, the sky has opened in morning light. She was off on the school bus and I was on my way to run a thousand errands, leaving behind my ethereal Thursday of alter building, woodswalking, tea drinking, and cow milking.

Solstice

I woke up this morning to do chores for Bill, to let him sleep in, and to watch the sky grow light. I crawled out of bed at 6:12 a.m., a half hour after the alarm went off, pulled on fleece and hood and socks and poop covered Muck boots. Milk pail in hand and dogs in tow, I stepped out the door to an eerily balmy morning. I could hear the cows ruminating in the dark, their jaws grinding thrice digested grasses like humans ponder reiterated good ideas. Over and over. The cats come pouring out of the barn when they hear the mudroom door pull open and MuShu, goopy eyed, club footed, tom cat, like ritual, comes halfway between house and barn and starts rolling from belly to back, from back to belly. Warm milk on his mind, stomach grumbling.

The barn on a dark morning is a sweet thing. First, I unplug the tick tick tick of the electric fence. It must be like the heartbeat of the barn to these animals. The constant dripping sink. I switch the radio button off so that VPR won't come on half way through chores. I can tell it's one of these mornings to maintain the quiet.

This summer we had ten cows on our farm. A mixture really of cows, heifers and bulls.

(Cow note: a cow is not technically considered a cow until after she's birthed her second calf. Young female cows are considered heifers. After their first calf, they are referred to as 'first calf heifers'. After the second calf, they've acheived 'cow' status. Bulls are just bulls. Through and through. I think if they're "nutted", they're called steers. I'm not totally sure.)

We now have two cows, four heifers, and one bull. Apple is the bull, the baby of the bunch, a deep shade of auburn and he loves to have this neck stroked. His eyelashes are long and gorgeous and he's like the baby brother of the bunch, taken care of by the pack of older sisters. Little do they know that by the end of spring, he'll be "bullying" them all out of grain and hay. He'll be mounting them with every 21 day heat.

There is a set of heifer twins just a bit older than Apple. They were born last spring on the organic dairy that Bill has worked at until very recently. Both Ella and I had yet to witness a bovine birth ( a freshening) and after the first girl came out, we were waiting to see the placenta birthed. Instead of the placenta, and to all our surprise, the second girl came out in the caul. Bill went into the stall and broke the bag open, her little nose lifted to the air, hooves milky white, all drenched in amniotic fluid. They look like dear, but a deeper shade of red. Dairy tradition is to name the calf a name that starts with the same first letter of it's mother's name. Ella named them Comet and Cupid.

Patience is our milk cow. She was the second cow to our farm four or five years ago and had her first calf here. Another auburn eyershire. We were eachother's firsts as far as milking goes and she was named aptly. Each of us needed a great deal of patience to get through that first winter. Eyershires tend to be nervous cows by nature, not as slow to react as other breeds. That first winter, it wasn't uncommon for her to spook at someone just standing up or just walking into the barn. To the slightest rattle of the milk pail handle. Oftentimes she would pull right out of her stantion, other times she would kick her left foot right into the pail. She had her second calf last winter, which I was alone to tend to for the first time, and she has settled gracefully into her second round of milking, motherhood and becoming the alpha of the barnyard. When she hears me walking out to the barn now, she starts her slow gaited ascent up the hill, past the apple tree, and to the barn gate. In the summer, when she's out to pasture, she waits at a standstill for me to loop the harness around her and walks sweetly beside me back to the barnyard.

It's rare that I'm not totally struck with wonder about having a relationship with an animal of this magnitude. Sometimes, when I'm sitting underneath her, cats rubbing alongside the pail, my fingers around her teets, squeezing in accordian rhythm, my head resting against her back thigh, I can feel the heat of her, hear her belly grumbling, digesting, and it just blows me away. I've spent the better part of two and a half years developing a trust between two species. An understanding.

I've also spent the better part of those two and a half years shoveling a ton of shit. There are mounds behind the barn, as long as a Ford F350 and 8' tall, growing taller still every year. A concotion of food scraps and poop. Leftover zucchinis sprouting out of the heap every summer and in the raw cold of winter, a plume of steam rising from it's mound.

But what comes of shit but compost. So, five gallon bucket after five gallon bucket, I guess it's worth it. I can live the metaphor.

Quote of the Day

And still, after all this time, the Sun has never said to the Earth,

"You owe me."

Look what happens with love like that.

It lights up the sky.

Not sure who said it. I think it might have been Rumi. Maybe Hafiz.

Heard it in a Solstice performance called Night Fires.

Mother Night

It's 10am on a Sunday morning and Ella is still asleep. Bill has left to finish the decking on the house we built last year and I'm alone with the woodstove and the laptop. Outside, grey clouds hang low and the grass, half green half brown, looks naked and exposed. There is a reason this season is called stick season. Everything can be seen through. Neighbors houses, utility poles, trees past trees past trees. Just waiting for snow.

There are four days until the winter solstice. The longest day of the year and one that marks the onset of more gradual light. We have a cut-out of Mother Night that we put on top of the tree each year, in place of a star or angel. In her arms is another paper cut-out of a beautiful sun.

The story goes that Sun, after a full year of rising and setting each day, becomes incredibly tired and doesn't think he can continue with that tiresome cycle any longer. So Night wraps him up in her arms for a good, long rest. All the children wonder why the night has become so long and they wait anxiously for Sun to reappear. While they wait they sing songs to encourage Sun and give thanks and light candles. All the candles were like little sparks of Sun's light and when Sun peeked out from the arms of Mother Night, he saw all those little fires and began to feel warmer and brighter and younger. When the children woke, they climbed a hill, faced East and began to sing to the sun. The sky grew from black to blue to bright and eventually Sun burst forth from Mother Night's arms, all brand new and ready to begin again.

Living here, not just high in the Northern Hemisphere, but in the cloudiest county in the state, I've had to adopt living metaphors to emotionally survive the long winters. It began in 2001, a particularly difficult year. I was taking a long walk when the first small flakes of the season started to fall. I was walking and watching them melt into the packed down dirt beneath my feet and realized that, come spring, all this snow would be melting into the soils, feeding the dormant life beneath and bringing new blossoms. New beginnings. In the still, thick, white of winter, even though we understand the cycles of the season, it's almost impossible to envision the landscape green and buzzing with life. It's a matter of faith and faith, as Ann Lamott puts it, is "just revolutionary patience."

So with those first flakes I cast my prayers. My deepest intentions. I sent them to lie dormant for the winter, trusting that when the Earth started the thaw, something beautiful would rise up where I'd left them. And I've done this now year after year, as a matter of survival. I've had to.
All around this river valley lie my prayers in little hollows, streambeds, compost heaps. Little vibrations of hope and ambition and release.

Going into this darkest night I feel the weight of it in my heart, in the atmosphere, in the hearts of those I love and it takes some strength to be able to just bend with it. To wait it out. I'm collecting my prayers and intentions, waiting to cast them with the first flakes, like gardeners tuck little bulbs into garden beds.

Thoughts on Ella

Sitting at the kitchen table last night, eating dinner, Ella asks me, very thoughtfully, "Do you think Dad is really a Jedi?"
"Do you think Dad is really a Jedi?" ~ I don't want to give anything away.
"Well, sometimes I do. But he's ticklish."
Like, a true Jedi would just use the force, right?

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When Ella was four years old and we were eating Chinese food, she pulled open her fortune from the cookie and handed it to me so that I could read it for her.
"You will marry Ellis Leominster" I read out loud, eyes wide, astonished!
Ellis is a toe headed, brown eyed little bad ass in her school that lives just down the road. He's so shy that he mostly just looks put out, but he's awfully sweet. And I really wouldn't mind having his folks as in-laws.
Ella is nine years old now and still she believes that that fortune was the real deal. At one point, I wonder, will she put two and two together? I don't know if her crush is just a strong crush or if that fortune has just written it in stone but I can't figure out how to go about it at this point. Just let it organically happen? Like the tooth fairy and Santa Claus? Can you imagine if she actually ended up with Ellis?


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How do people rationalize spending $87 on a doll that doesn't even do anything? Oh wait, it does stuff. It wears expensive clothes and collects expensive stuff. How on earth did I get myself stuck in this situation? If I'm going to spend that much money, the doll should be doing my dishes at night. Maybe feeding the dogs and bringing in firewood.

I've somehow ended up in the American Girl universe. I flat out told her that I wasn't going to buy her an American Girl for Christmas. No way. So, she says a few days later, "Maybe Santa will bring one...."
Then, in Pennsylvania, visiting my folks, she find the catalogue in my mom's pile (my mom is a consumer with perfect credit. You name the catologue, she gets it in the mail.) and she spends the entire four days with the thing under her nose. Not asking, mind you, for anything. Just looking.

Ella hasn't ever really asked for anything for Christmas. I don't think she realized until this year that that was even an option. And still, other than that American Girl request, she just wants "surprises". When people ask her what she wants, she tends to look at them like they're aliens. Like they're breaking the rules. Blasphemy.

Three or four years ago, she was looking through the very expensive, very dreamy Magic Cabin Dolls catalogue in the living room. She came tearing into the kitchen, all red faced, with the catalogue folded over to the page with the beautiful flower fairy ring that you can hang outside on a tree limb or over the bed. She was out of breath and all electric and I figured the next question out of her mouth (it being early December) would be, "Can I get this for Christmas?" But it wasn't. It was, "Can I rip this out of the catalogue and hang it on my wall?" Like, that would have been sufficient. It might have satiated her wanting.

So, I somehow ended up with a check from my mom, covering half the cost for the doll. In the hypnotic blur that usually happens during those visits, I somehow rationalized that buying an $87 doll is okay if I'm only covering half the cost. Like $43.50 is a reasonable price for a doll. And now I can look forward to scrambling around, looking for those homemade American Girl doll clothes so that I won't have to buy them from the catalogue. I'd much rather support some local granny. Too bad some local granny doesn't perfectly replicate American Dolls.

But I remember deciding to go ahead and buy that flower ring. At no point did it ever occur to her to even ask for it. But that Christmas morning, she unwrapped that thing and I still have yet to see her more thrilled. She was like a child on hyper speed. Her pupils dilated, she started jumping on and off the couch and running around the room, screaming, "oh my god, oh my god".

Maybe as a parent, I'm just trying to get that high again.

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Speaking of Christmas, Ella had another strange request. In my Buffy post, I'd mentioned my friend Teri, with the purple streak and the essential oils..... Well, I guess last year, after her mother passed away, Santa delivered a letter from her to her daughter. Her daughter told this to Ella and it got her thinking.

My great aunt Margaret was very much like a grandmother to me and was well in the throws of Alzheimers by the time Ella was born. But they're very much cut from the same cloth and if she had died before Ella was born I would be very convinced that Ella was a reincarnation of Margaret. They both have the same shaped twinkling eyes, the same coyote trickster personality. They have the same coloring, love of songs and poetry and jingles. They're baby pictures are eerily identical. They are always trying to pull one over on you and never ever give a straight answer.

I think because we talk alot about our ancestors, especially as Halloween draws near and we build our alter every year, Ella is very aware of these older relatives and their relevance in our lives. After her friend told her about the letter from her grandmother, Ella got it into her head that Santa must be able to do that for everyone.
She wrote him a letter yesterday and fastened it to her stocking with a safety pin.

Dear Santa Claus,

How are you doing? How old are you?

Can you get a letter from my aunt Margaret?

How are the reindeer? Can I give you this bell?

How do you get from house to house?

I wish you a merry Christmas.

Love, Ella

Help.

Rent-A-Center

I just spoke with my friend, D, who lost her mother this past weekend, out of the blue. She's still in Pa, dealing with loose ends, and the wake is this evening. As is par for the course with D, she's already found her sense of humor about how this whole thing has gone down. She's had to. It's her survival mechanism.

As far as D knew, her mother, Jean, had no life insurance. She'd left behind a house full of furniture from Rent-A-Center, a car payment, and credit card debt. In yesterday's run around to get copies of the death certificate to all of the necessary establishments, they went in to Rent-A-Center to check that one off the list. The clerk at the counter mentioned that it was good they came in, they would need a copy of that death certificate to cash in her life insurance policy.

"Her what?" She and her brothers stood there, thinking they had to have heard wrong. "Who the fuck gets their life insurance policy from Rent-A-Center?"
"Your mom," answered the clerk.

Fortunately, most of the furniture and appliances in her house had already been paid off, so the five thousand dollars from Rent-A-Center, of all places, will cover the cost of the wake and pay off the fireplace she had just purchased for her son for Christmas. He gets to keep it.

D thinks she'll photocopy the life insurance policy and put it in a real bling frame and keep it on her wall at home, as a kind of homage to her mother. With all the shit she grew up with and all the craziness of her mother that she's learned to laugh about with time, the policy really just kind of sums it up.

Buffy

Sunday morning I went to pick up Ella from a sleepover, leaving enough time to visit with her friend's mom, Teri, who I'd befriended this summer. She's a really dynamic woman, whatever that means, really. She's keeps a purple streak in her honey colored hair ~ to keep her connected to the divine, I think. She sells essential oils on the side and her scope of knowledge of how scents heal is pretty astounding. After twenty minutes at her kitchen table I concluded that I really don't like the smell of ylang ylang. I learned what oils aid in brain power, stress relief, sexual function. I smelled a $100 bottle of sandalwood.

The sun was in the sky, glaring off the snow and the girls spent the duration of our visit out there in their snow clothes climbing mounds, disapearing in and out of poplars and birches, being beautiful.

I somehow left there with the first disc of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I don't know how, really. It just kind of organically happened. I gave up watching television in 1992 and what I see of it now comes via Netflix. Old episodes of Punky Brewster, IMAX movies to watch with Ella, lots of independent (and some not so independent) movies. We went through the Six Feet Under series like junkies, willing to give up just about anything for just one more episode.
But never has it occurred to me to take on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The few fans that I do know are serious about it. Devoted. Die-hards. I guess Joss Whedon, the creator, has got a following.

Teri has been telling me about this series since we met in the summer. Her daughter talks emphatically about it. About the shadow world and the archetypes present within the show. I guess it makes for some great, productive, insightful conversation in their household. The only glitch for me is that I'm terrified of vampires. When I have nightmares they tend to be apocolyptic, not about monsters or demons and while I've only had less than a handful of nightmares about vampires, they've stuck to me like burdock brambles. Have you ever watched a billy goat chewing peanut butter? Like, that stuck.

So we signed on for episode 1 last night before bedtime (note: don't watch vampire flicks with nine year olds before bedtime on a school night). I just don't know. I can see the archetype thing, I think I'm even willing to see this first disc through, but I aint sold. Like, why did they have to name her Buffy? And why are their skirts so short? And why do the high school girls look they could have graduated with me in 1992? Crows feet, for god's sake.

I appreciate putting a female in the lead as the superhero against vampires. I think back in the 90's, or whenever it came out, that was a fairly revolutionary idea, and I think stuff like that can have it's positive effects as it ripples through commercial media culture. But when, within the first ten minutes of the show, Buffy stands in front of her mirror trying to figure out what dress she's going to wear for the evening and holds up the slinky black one and grunts, "slutwear", I don't know. Ella doesn't even know what a slut is. How do you explain that one?

We'll see. I'll have another report after Episode 2. When we left off, Buffy had been pummelled into a stone casket in the dark of a graveyard, the prince vampire's key assistant pouncing down. to be continued.....


or not.