ANNIVERSARY Countdown (Count-Up?)

Today is Friday, March 7th, 2014. We were married 986 days ago, on June 25th, 2011.


Sunday, October 30, 2011

It's Still October!!

We spent much of yesterday afternoon stacking firewood to dry, putting summer items like patio umbrellas and garden tools into storage, and retrieving snow shovels and containers of dried bark for kindling.  I wanted to get the garage clear enough to put Habañero inside, because there was a lot of snow predicted, and I wanted to be able to leave this afternoon without a lot of cleaning and dampness.

And it's probably good that I did that, because this is what morning looked like.

 
This image has not been Photoshopped.  It was not a hold-over from some prior winter.  We are not sending it back in time from January 2012 as part of our top-secret time-travel project.  This is what our yard looks like at 9:45 a.m. on Sunday, October 30th, 2011.

I mean, really... this is just unreasonable.

The cats do NOT want to go out this morning.  Their buddy the chipmunk is sleeping in, and they see no reason to go stand in four inches of slush.  Nor do I.

So I'll be driving back to Boston a little early today, so that I'm on the road during daylight and warmer temperatures; whatever melts this afternoon is going to re-freeze overnight.

October, the iconic month of autumn.  Guess I'll go shovel some autumn off the porch. 

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Seasonal Chores

Last week, it was in the 60s in Boston, but the weather was starting to make the shift from sunnycool early fall to rainywindy late fall.   I didn't expect that on Thursday night, it would snow. 

On surfaces without much thermal mass – on the grass, on windshields, on the raised porch – we probably got a little less than an inch of accumulation.  Wet, sticky snow; white slush, really.

We drove back to Vermont yesterday, in separate cars.  That trip takes us immediately northward, and the accumulations were more significant the further northeast we went.  The trees were laden, and there were several inches of snow on the ground in the woods.  Cresting over the Killington ski area, the temperature dropped below freezing, and the weather accountants reported that they'd received a good six to seven inches.

The rule of thumb in my Michigan childhood was that we would have had at least one visible snow by Halloween, but that snow wouldn't persist for the season until Thanksgiving.  I don't remember an October snow in Boston, and according to Weather.Com, it's only ever happened four times.

Our mechanic Mike was kind enough to fit me in yesterday afternoon, to swap out my summer tires for snow tires in the midst of an afternoon of late-month state inspections.  The snow tires are harder than my gummy summer performance tires, and they're mounted on black steel wheels with no hubcaps rather than the good alloys.  Habañero always looks a little disappointed while wearing utilitarian black wheels and those high-sidewall tires, like James Bond dressed in Carhart overalls.

Now on Saturday morning, it's 30º and the wood stove is lit.  The cars have a good layer of frost on the windshields.  Nora is outside with the cats, as they re-acquaint themselves with walking in snow; they shake their paws every few steps and attempt to pick their way from grass to grass, like stepping stones across a river.  It's time for me to get a haircut (the first since the wedding!) and work on the article I've promised by Tuesday.  My editor is 3200 miles away, where there is no snow and hasn't been since 1972.

I kind of like scraping the windshield in the morning.  It's one of those jobs, like painting or mowing the lawn, where you can see a sharp difference between where you've worked and where work has yet to occur.  There's also a cord of wood dumped on the garage floor that needs to be stacked, a different kind of job where the pile stays the same size for a couple of hours and then seemingly without notice you're down to the last 40 splits and it's time to sweep the bark and sawdust.

Friday, October 28, 2011





WELCOME to our fiftieth nation: Greece. We promised champagne and here it is! 





Monday, October 24, 2011

Domestic Expats, Chapter 2

It's been a marathon of interviewing.  Three last night and one this afternoon.  In each case, a 40 or 60 minute phone call on speakerphone while I type (horribly) to keep pace, and try not to miss promising conversational openings and inroads.  Then 90 minutes of cleaning up those notes, making words out of things like "jumco" (Humboldt County, missing the "h" by one key) and "dractions" for creations (just a flustered keyboard thrash).

People can speak a lot faster than I can type...

I have to do the clean-up right away.  Not merely because I'd never remember what "dractions" meant if I came back to it the next day, but because I have a gift for mimicry; I can hear people's phrasing, hear their word choices, and if I read that bad transcript right after our talk, I can make complete sentences out of their notes in ways that sounds like their voices.  When someone reads my interviews, people who know the subject will often say, "That sounds just like her."  I couldn't do that a week later.

So I did one interview yesterday at 5:00, another at 7:00, and a third by Skype at 8:40, with the fourth this afternoon at 1:00.  The back of my neck is sore.  And I have about 25 pages of notes that add up to... what?  Cliches, more or less.  The power of these stories will come through their words and experiences, but the "big themes" are the same we've always known.  Limited careers and limited ideas in the small town, fast pace and stress in the big city.  The appeal of magical landscapes, the sheltering of physical isolation.  The need for transition after high school.  The city for the young and on the make, the small town for raising the new family. 

I met John McPhee once.  He said that when he came back from one of his research trips, he often fell into a deep depression.  Not merely was the excitement over and the adrenaline dying down, but he felt like his notes were empty, like he'd missed the story and had nothing to say.  And after two or three weeks of fretting and grasping, one day the first 2,500 words would come to him all at once, and "the rest is just mechanics."  I have eight days, and I only have 4,000 words total.  And right now, I have nothing.  But at some point in the next few days, the frame will appear, and the article will write itself after that.

I have to believe that, right?

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Domestic Expats

Arcata, California has long held a very special place in my residential roster.  I had barely moved there in the summer of 1994 when I knew, almost immediately, that I was at home.  The fog clinging to the heavily forested mountainsides; the view from the living room window across the entirety of town and down into Humboldt Bay; the array of small shops lining several blocks of downtown.

That feeling has remained during the ensuing years.  I've never felt as "at home" in any place since my childhood house on Lemuel Street in Muskegon.  But, although the feeling of home-ness never left, I did.  I was in pursuit of academic work; I'd finished my Ph.D. in fall 1996, but continued to sell furniture for another full year as I looked for a job.  Every Thursday, I'd trudge up the hill to the Humboldt State University library to get the brand new copy of the Chronicle of Higher Education; and every Thursday, I'd walk home empty-handed.  It wasn't that furniture was bad; it was that I had my eyes set on a different prize than could be obtained in Humboldt County.  Although I had lots of experience in social research and in community study, I had a Ph.D. in Architecture, and that confused almost everybody.  Certainly there's no way to get a job in Sociology or Geography or American Studies; it's as though you're on some crazy game show, looking among hundreds of doors for a lock that your key will open.

There were THREE positions listed that year for faculty lines in Turf Grass Management... but I digress.

Anyway, I went away in January 1998.  I came back for a month in 1999 to do the research that became my second book; I came up again in 2002 to visit that same young man as he continued to go nowhere.  And I went back a third time in August 2010, with Nora, to attend the wedding of my friends Neoma and Ben.  Neoma had been in the high school where I did my first major research; now at 31, she had asked me to return for her wedding, and I had gladly agreed.

Nora and I flew in to San Francisco, and drove up the coast.  The Sea Ranch Chapel.  The Surf Motel.  Glass Beach.  Mendocino.  The Drive-Through Tree.  The Humboldt County Fair, and the ranchers in the tavern that night in Ferndale.  The Rose Court bed and breakfast in Arcata, where we stayed for six nights.  Ice cubes at Ramone's made of coffee, so that one's iced coffee didn't dilute as it melted. (I have never seen Nora as happy before or since as she was when ordered iced coffee and the counterwoman said "with ice cubes or coffee cubes?")  The Cypress Grove cheesemakers.  The outstanding Native American museum hidden within the schlocky gift shop of The Trees of Mystery.  An unending week of (re)discovery.

It was a beautiful wedding, under two huge redwoods in a campground near Patrick's Point.  And that night, when we got back to our B&B, I proposed, and Nora accepted.  Without that trip, this blog might never have had a reason to come into existence.

Last week, to my surprise, I got a phone call from the new editor of the North Coast Journal (formerly of Arcata, now in nearby Eureka), asking if I'd like to write a cover story for them.  Their staff writers were swamped with local investigative work, she said, but she'd had an idea for a feature article, and when she pitched it to the staff, a couple of them recommended that she call me.  The hook:  to talk with people who had loved their lives in Humboldt County, but who for one reason or another had had to depart.

As the saying goes, that hits pretty close to home...

So I've spent much of the afternoon lining up my first four interviews:
  • A law-school student at Syracuse who had gone to high school on the local reservation, now pondering whether to try to start a law practice in Eureka after graduation;
  • A musician who had reached the peak of the local music scene, and left last year to try her hand at the big time;
  • A young woman I'd barely met while doing the book 2 research and don't know well, now living across the state but still feeling as though Arcata was her home;
  • A young man who left Humboldt right after high school, achieved a long array of undergraduate and masters degrees (and is now considering a Ph.D. or Ed.D.), and has returned to Humboldt but isn't sure he can make a life there.
There really is something about that landscape, and the city of Arcata in particular, that has magical qualities.  There's a lot of poverty, a lot of drug use (and not just the marijuana that provides the county with most of its economic support), and a lot of rain... but those flaws notwithstanding, I've never experienced anything like this place's ability to draw one's devotion.

So tomorrow and Monday, I get to talk with four other domestic expatriates, to try to figure out what it IS about that place that's so deeply satisfying while simultaneously offering so little economic or career opportunity.  As the editor said while recruiting me, "I think of it as a story of unrequited love... a place that these people loved deeply, but that wasn't able to love them back in the ways that they needed."

Middletown Springs is a lot like that (at about 1/20th scale).  The people who are there are there for good; but there aren't four spare nickels to rub together in the whole region.  Most of our friends who live there are able to do it by virtue of retirement funds or inheritances or divorce settlements, not by money they have to pull out of the air month by month.  Like Arcata, it's a wonderful community held within a stunning landscape; like Arcata, it loses many of its younger residents to opportunities elsewhere.

"How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm, now that they seen Paree?"

"Go West, young man."

The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan wrote a book called Cosmos and Hearth, in which he argues that the natural arc of mankind is from the cultural limitations of home and hearth to the "cosmos" of the cosmopolitan.  Certainly that's been true in America, where the vast majority of us live within metropolitan spheres of influence; worldwide, it was only recently that half the population has become urban, a proportion rapidly increasing.  And while there are benefits of finance and of artistic exposure and of cultural diversity, there is also loss.

I wrote a haiku many years ago:
The road has been no friend to me.
It has more often led away than toward.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

What morning should be...

Warm under the blanket, the cat stretched and walked over to me. Jammed his head into my face. Stretched himself fully across my neck and chest. Lay down where it was hard to breathe. I moved him off, and under my armpit. Waited 'til he got up.

Cold downstairs with no wood fire yet. Took the magazine that I had lent Urs and she had returned. "You need to read it. "A story I had been trying to read before bed, but as always, I kept falling asleep a few paragraphs in.

The sun is out now-- the air that brilliant gold of autumn, leaf etched, against gray sky across the street. Storm grey. Then white clouds. Then gray again. There is a wind, still from last night when it blew open the front door. The door I can't open myself. Blown wide.  The leaves are skittering like mice. Blown into pockets of gold and brown beneath the apple tree and beside the cemetery wall.

The story by T. Coraghessan Boyle. "You'll never look at ravens the same again." Sitting in the deep leather chair in the living room. The dehumidifier behind me is cranking like an old person's wheeze and cough. Reading. In the morning. Before email. Before breakfast or cats. Like playing hooky. The cat again. Rubbing against my stretched legs. Jumping on my lap which he never does. Bumping my hand. Must be food he wants. Or out. T. Coraghessan Boyle in my lap. Published on brown paper. A fold-in. Like parchment. Like sheepskin. Like the story of the newborn lambs on a sheep ranch. And the cat again. Now on the top of the wood box. Doing what only he can do. Perching. No need for gravity. Two front feet on the edge of the wood box, no more than a half inch wide. One back foot joining the two front feet, and the fourth? Somewhere. Not planted. No need for gravity.

The wind again. Blowing in and making me long for an instant fire in the old Round Oak stove.

Reading again. The ravens and the lambs.

The cats want to walk in the wind.

What morning should be.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Two out of three ain't bad?

I think about funny things.  I've been at a small workshop in Washington D.C. for a couple of days, and pondering something about baseball.  There are thirty teams in the major leagues, and Major League Baseball limits each team to forty roster players at a time (including those who are on injured reserve or temporarily posted to the minor leagues).  So everyone currently wearing a major league uniform is one of the 1,200 best baseball players in the world.  Out of 6.8 billion people, 1,200 are playing in major league baseball right now (well, a month ago, anyway; now most of them are on winter break as we work toward the World Series).  That means they're in the top 0.0000176% in terms of global baseball talent.

And even some of THEM are second-string outfielders for the Houston Astros, who lost two-thirds of their games this year.

I was in a room this weekend as one of eleven senior college administrators--four professors and four deans and a provost and a director of undergraduate research--along with the executive director and a senior staff person from our national research organization.  Good people, smart people, real leaders on their campuses and in their fields. 

I had a long talk during a break on Saturday afternoon with one of them, who's also a very close longtime friend, about whether there are things that I'm doing that have kept me from being able to make stronger career progress.  I've had my Ph.D. for 15 years, Nora for longer, and neither of us have gotten hold of the brass ring that was promised.  We've both had peripheral contact with higher education: adjunct teaching, fellowships, oddball administrative positions at... well, anyway, nothing that looks like "Welcome to the Club."

And so we both wonder whether we've done things wrong.

When we teach, we both give our students acres of feedback on their work.  Nora writes more back to each student than each student writes themselves.  I spent two hours Saturday between work sessions writing praise and suggestions for my teaching assistant, who I'd worked with for a couple of hours before Thursday's class and observed for two hours during class as he led his very first seminar.

And so we both wonder whether we've done things wrong.

I had a student in the office last week who told me that my class was unlike anything she's ever had, that she tells her friends at other colleges about it and they don't believe her.  I ran into a former student of Nora's two days later, saying she was disappointed that Nora wasn't back at our school this fall "because I told all my friends to take her course.  It's a huge loss to our school that she's not here."

And so we both wonder whether we've done things wrong.

Nora spent much of today working on academic applications, and I talked with her late this morning.  She had to send writing samples for a couple of packages, and said "I was looking through my files of finished articles and chapters... they're not bad."  Damn right they're not bad.  It's her writing that got me to meet her in the first place.  Over dinner in Washington, one of our community was talking about a book that she had spent a long and happy day with; and another of our colleagues said, "Herb writes like that.  His writing is just beautiful; I could totally spend a long day with his work."

And so we both wonder whether we've done things wrong.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues against one of our most central cultural myths — that hard work and talent are foolproof means of success.  He says we've forgotten a third additional ingredient, which is opportunity.  Hard work and talent don't grow in arid ground.  But nobody likes to think that their success is in real ways out of their hands; better to believe (regardless of how painful) that you either haven't worked hard enough or don't have sufficient talent.

And so... well, you get the picture.

There are only 1,200 major league baseball players in America, so we can all be excused for not having had our backyard dreams fulfilled.  But there are about 420,000 tenure-track faculty positions in America, 350 professors for every weak-hitting, bench-sitting backup second baseman.  There are more tenure-track faculty in America than there are people living in Cleveland or Omaha or Miami or Atlanta.  We're a big enough city, taken together, that we could have our OWN major league baseball team.

I look around that room of eleven of us.  Ten have had tenure-track academic positions, and one has not.

Am I whining?  Yeah, probably.  I have a job that pays well and is indoors out of the rain.  I work with some really good people, both inside and outside my school.  I'm luckier than a lot of my generation, and a LOT luckier than the kids who are out in the rain in the Boston and New York protests, entering the worst economy since Hoover, many with tens of thousands of dollars of student loans that previous generations never experienced.  Hard work plus talent, awaiting opportunity.  Two out of three.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Hamotzi

There is a substantial quiet tonight. I am sitting by the woodstove after a day attempting to make the next phase of our work lives happen. I let the brilliant October colors pass, a rain storm, and the pile of wood linger in the garage unstacked,  while I worked at the computer and worked and worked and worked. And now it is dark and windy.

The morning was what I like to call a Dr. Seuss morning for those days when nothing goes according to the plan. I tried to replant the pulmonaria we had been given before the wedding, only to discover that the places I picked were either too rocky or already filled with bulbs awaiting next summer's growth. The pot returned to the front of the house and I planted the pulmonaria a foot from where it had started.

Then returning the shovel to the garage I decided to fill the wood cart with 43 logs for today's fire, and as I dragged the loaded cart to the doorway, the handle promptly broke, leaving me to carry canvas bags of logs into the house, where I stepped in several piles of unseen cat vomit.

But it has been quiet, and I have purged emails long ago defunct. I had kuri squash and a yellow potato that had grown in the garden, and there was, as always, something appealing about eating a meal grown here on this little piece of land. There were three tiny yellow and black rudbeckia blossoms that remain alive despite the cold nights and I brought them in and filled a tiny hand blown juice glass with water, and set them on the kitchen table.

H is in Washington at a meeting, so it will be the better part of another week before we are in the same place at the same time, and it will require another long car drive. And I am struck by how we have blended this sense of belonging to land we do not own, to a community we love, with the sense that we must be elsewhere part of every week, that we must build a business or our work lives "away." We live between longing and belonging and it sometimes seems we will never get the balance right.

I wrote some days ago about the work of writer Deborah Tall who taught me the words for that feeling, long before I knew how much her words mirrored my personal and professional world. In a blog post a few days ago, I  wrote about her search for her family story and the roots that had been buried under Ukrainian pogroms and the Holocaust. And I wrote about how familiar that search was, and how inexplicable.

Her last book "A Family of Strangers" arrived yesterday at the post office, and between transporting wood and pushing pixels, I read it as though it was water in the desert. She wrote:  

"Defined by our wandering, by our never quite belonging, Jews had to make good on restlessness, prove ourselves admissible. But in diaspora, one is by definition nowhere an insider, nowhere at complete ease. One straddles reality and memory, one foot deep in the past while the other fakes it in the present."

These are not her most eloquent words, but they deeply touch me as a person and as a wife. She speaks again to the core of what it is like these days to live apart, to live and work in different places, to hold the community of friends at arm's length, never to be in a place where we can sit at the table with our wedding plates and glasses and silverware, the beautiful wood boards and plates, candles and teapot that are the emblems of that day spent under Vermont's skies with people we adore. It is as though I were longing for something barely remembered, something deeply buried in a past that may not ever have been mine.

I am a newly-wed. I have nothing to compare this experience to. I don't know whether it is like this for others... whether the joy expressed at our marriage, by our friends, is in part a measure of these places in our lives when the work is not what we imagined, or the family struggles are what we cope with first, when the effort to make a life takes precedence over living it. I wonder whether this is what we promised each other--that we would still remain committed to each other, believing that against all odds, we can make a future out of a sometimes threadbare fabric. I wonder whether this is what we promised each other, when we spoke Susan Sarandon's words in place of the traditional vows:  

"We need a witness to our lives.... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'."

The rain has come again and it is splashing the old dried ferns, and the planks of the deck. And I am longing for something that doesn't feel so much like Diaspora.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Island or Oasis?

The Fall semester has been a little tough on both of us.  Organizational flurries, class preparation, responding to student work, extensive travel... we've both been running to keep up for the past eight weeks or so.

And one thing that happened a couple of weeks ago is that I no longer have home Internet or cable TV service.  My wonderful landlords, who lived upstairs in the second floor of a two-family house, have moved a few miles away to a new home, though they're keeping my house as well.  Mike was a huge television fan, and has loads of friends who are contractors and Comcast techs, and so he had the whole house wired and subscribed to a full-load cable package (though, oddly, we weren't subscribed to Channel 134, Neo Cricket... I've always wanted to learn more about cricket, and this channel had 24 hours a day of matches between Pakistan, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, and basically every place the British had colonized during the 18th and 19th centuries... but no luck).  So when they moved away, he canceled his Comcast subscriptions, and I've had a two-week blank spot before my own subscriptions begin next Monday.  And I still won't have Neo Cricket.

Plus they took back my TV-recorder box, which had two dozen pool tournaments saved on it.  I'd probably watched Jasmin Ouschan beat Ga-Young Kim in the 2009 US Open about ten times, another form of homework.

(The opening of her bio from Inside Pool... "Hailing from Klagenfurt, Austria, Jasmin Ouschan was born January 10, 1986. Her parents owned a pool hall, and she began playing pool at the age of 6." That's a universal line in every elite pool player's life story... Efren Reyes' uncle owned a pool room, and he started when he was five.  I wish my parents had owned a pool hall...)

It's been fascinating living in a house without Internet access.  I haven't done that since 1992.  It was a taken-for-granted pattern that I would come home from work, take off my coat and put down my briefcase, and hit the start button on the MacBook.  Being without it has been alternately stressful and peaceful.  Stressful because I'm not able to continue working as intensively from home as I had (it's remarkable how much work-related e-mail I did from home, in the evenings but especially on the weekends).  Peaceful because I haven't been part of the Internet's attention-deficit culture, the constant hopping from link to link to link.

I've kept up with reading The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, neither of which had made it to the active list very often when I had the web.  It's fun to read writers who have more than six paragraphs to do their work, and who take on large ideas and do it engagingly.  (If you don't read the New Yorker, I'd suggest finding a copy of the October 11th issue and reading Calvin Trillin's hilariously tangled story about turf wars among the cash-for-gold brokers of Toronto... nobody but the New Yorker would publish that.)

I've gone to bed before 11.

I'm very tempted to just leave it shut off.  But I do get more work done with it, and the World Series is coming soon, and Nora needs web access when she's in town, too.   Plus I haven't been blogging.  So on Monday afternoon, the Comcast technician will stop by the house with a new box and a new modem.  I hope I remember how much I've enjoyed not having it, and that Tuesday doesn't find me immediately turning the computer on the minute I get home from work.

Friday, October 7, 2011

The Wedding Table

It took me 20 minutes to drive 100 yards.

Today was a long, crazy day at the end of a long, crazy week.  Our workplaces are both resembling oatmeal cookies of bureaucratic inertia occasionally studded with raisins of pure, hostile delusion.  Following our pattern of alternating sanity, I listened last night while Nora described the tangles of her geographically and organizationally incoherent life.  And, although it was nominally "her week" to drive to see me, I decided to drive to see her.  And not entirely for altruistic reasons; my own week had been difficult enough that I was ready to be home.

So I worked half a day today (don't worry, I worked a day and a half on Wednesday and a day and a half on Thursday, so I feel okay about it), and took off on I-93 North at about 12:45.  If I were to drive that on a normal weekday afternoon in nice weather and one stop, it would be about 4:30 when I arrived.

It was 6:00.

First there was the usual traffic on 93 where it merges with 495, and again where it crosses the New Hampshire state line and goes from four lanes to two, and again at the toll plaza.  Then I stopped for gas in Bow, NH.  Then I drove across NH on I-89, and stopped again for some significant grocery shopping at the Lebanon Co-op.  Then I hit Vermont 4, which was the scene of some of the most significant flood damage of Hurricane Irene -- which, technically, by the time it arrived in Vermont was no longer a hurricane.  So hell-of-a-rainstorm Irene.  The road is now completely open again across the state, but narrower in several places than it had been, and still with construction crews in a few others.  So Woodstock to Rutland, usually about 45 minutes, was an hour and a little bit.

But then Rutland to Middletown... occasionally you get behind a tractor for half a mile, but otherwise, it's clear sailing.  Which it was today as well, until I actually crossed into the town limits of Middletown Springs, and discovered that today was paving day for the Four Corners.  All four corners.  Both lanes of all four corners.

So I was stopped behind a motorcycle, who was stopped behind a big asphalt truck, across from Vicky's Store.  I can walk to Vicky's from the house in two minutes.  But it took me twenty minutes to get through that intersection, with the construction crew begrudgingly giving a handful of cars the go-ahead for a blessed few seconds before the blacktop crew went back to work with shovels and skimmers and steamrollers.

Finally, into the driveway, where I did a quick walkaround to check for sticky hot tarballs on the fenders.  Then in to home.  To Nora, to Ed, to Simon, to the woodstove, to quiet.  We sat.  We talked.  We held each other.  And Nora said, "Let's open the box."  She had received a giant box from Simon Pearce, the last of our wedding gifts.

We opened the box, unwrapped the plates.  They had stopped making that pattern about the time of the wedding, but they made a set to fulfill our wedding registry.  Despite losing much of their production capacity in the hurricane.  There IS something about Vermont.

Nora set one white dinner plate with a celadon salad plate, and one celadon dinner plate with a white salad plate.  And then she had a vision.  So we got out the wedding silverware and the wedding champagne glasses and the wedding candles and the wedding cordial glasses and the wedding serving bowl and the wedding display board.  I went downstairs to fetch a bottle of our wedding prosecco, brought it back, opened it.  We lit candles, poured prosecco, and took some pictures, for us and for you.








A happy Friday to us all.  And thanks once again to all of you; you help us smile.  Remember when we wrote our letter to our friends about the things that we didn't really need, but loved? We said we'd have you at the table with us when we sat to our meal. It was lovely having dinner with all of you.  Slainte!


Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Harvest home

Fall is here. I have been going through a familiar counterpoint to the Spring cleaning cycle. It is the harvest of course, and the 'putting up' of produce from the garden. But it is more. I don't know if I have the words for it.

Yesterday, I 'canned' 5 quarts of applesauce from the tree in the backyard. The apples are yellow, and sweet this year. Sometimes they are only edible after a frost, and taste like Granny Smiths. This year they are more like a yellow delicious. I share in a statewide bounty and  have filled a plastic milk crate and three 27 gallon litter buckets, as well as a 10 gallon Rubbermaid container with drops and the proverbial low hanging fruit. Emmett has made several quarts with apples from the same tree, and I have yet to pick any of the apples that are out of easy reach. These are the blessings of sun, and soil picked out of rock-hard landscape a century or more ago.

I 'canned' 10 pints of chutney made with apples, onions and green tomatoes and huge amounts of spices. It won't be ready for another month, so I have to hope that the 3 pounds of still green Sungold tomatoes and the apples will be happy partners when I open a jar at dinner beside the wood stove.

I threw out some of my earlier efforts at 'canning', from before I knew to label everything with its contents and a date. There was rhubarb, one jar of that same chutney and a few jars of applesauce. Once open, I realized that they were probably made two years ago when Grazyna and Howard were visiting because one bottle of applesauce had a tiny stick of cinnamon that she had included in the ones she made. I wish I had labeled it because it was a good weekend with friends, and that tiny cinnamon stick was a marker.

There are more things to be done. The oregano and rosemary are thriving but need to be transplanted to pots as it is supposed to freeze tonight.The brussels sprouts will be ok in the ground, but the rest will be gone. The dahlias will be blackened, the nasturtiums limp.  I got an extra week out of the garden as I thought we would lose it all over the weekend with rain and very cold temperatures, but there has been a reprieve.  And I am feeling grateful for the slight extension on the fall. The leaves have not yet peaked. The grass is still green beneath the leaf fall. The mushrooms that I picked last week are still growing, though the Blewits that were intensely crayola blue have now gone to mauve and the caps are curling up rather than down. I have some remarkable spore prints from these and what may be a 'Xerula' that was growing beside a freshly cut maple tree. And I feel as though there is time yet. Winter is not yet here, though we have taken the air conditioners out and have ordered two truck loads of wood to add to our substantial pile in the garage.

I have swept, and peeled apples, and chopped onions and tomatoes. I have washed dozens of 'canning' jars, sterilized them, moved the antique plate set we bought at auction into the rubbermaid bucket in the basement. I have picked potatoes, made spore prints, brought in inside plants that were on vacation beneath the maple tree. And the garden is about to be done. With the ending of the season, I will turn to spinning rather than gardening. I will drag carts of wood from the stacked pile to the wood boxes, and will continue to sweep the debris out the door, only now it will be wood rather than grasses and leaf litter.

I said to Herb a few days ago, that this is an important time for me. I love Spring, and it has its rituals, but there is something about these last days before the cold settles in to the mornings, when bare feet on the kitchen floor is unthinkable; there is something about this time before cocoa and tea from our wedding gift tea pot, before wind that howls outside, before low sun disappearing early in the day; there is something in this I love. And it centers me. I don't talk much. There is no music on the radio. There is a sound of Fall that I listen for, as there is that cool edge to the dusk before the light is gone. And I find myself cleaning and washing and packing and sweeping and watching the leaves scatter before the winter.

It is as though it was a throwback to something ancient in my Ukranian family roots. It is as though the shtetl comes alive in me. It is not something I learned from my mother or her mother or my grandparents on my father's side. Deborah Tall has written eloquently of the search for a place of belonging. She has written:
After years of pursuing myself through the world, I am ready to pause, to arrive once more...at a here, and stay long enough so that “here” is all that need be said. I want to recognize my neighbors, not wake up in the morning and squint trying to remember where I am, not hesitate wondering how to answer when asked where I’m from. (16)
Pause for an intermission.... ( a glass of wine, a cigarette)

I thought of Tall's words when I wrote about the connection to some imagined shtetl and of some sense of belonging to something I've never known.  I thought of how she made her place in a landscape that was alien. I thought of how she had made her place in Ireland though she had grown up in suburban Camden, N.J.  I thought of Tall for the first time in many years, because she had written my thoughts on Ireland and on belonging, before I had the words for them. I have known her work, as long as I have known that I wanted to understand 'home.'

But I have not thought of her work for many years, so I googled her and found that she had died of cancer a few years ago. I googled her and found that she had written a book, published just before she died. I googled her and the book and found that the book was on the discovery of her Ukranian family roots. I googled her and found that hers was a Holocaust story of a family that fled the Nazis, a Jewish family that made little of their past when they settled in America. I found that they had reinvented themselves, as so many children of the Diaspora had done before them. I googled her and found that I knew her ...in ways that had nothing to do with having met.

I have a place in New York that is familiar, but not one I choose. I have made a place here in this town. I have a place now beside the man I married 102 days ago. But I find myself oddly drawn to a place I do not know, have never seen, do not intend to live. I find myself drawn to roots that may not be mine. I find myself drawn to the land and to this place, and to the apples and tomatoes of Fall. I find myself drawn and settled here, in the season, in between fall and winter.

And once again, this is a post unfinished, as so many others before them.

Monday, October 3, 2011

The First Hundred Days

Common wisdom has it that a new President is judged by the agenda he sets in motion during his first hundred days in office.  Nora and I have been married for 100 days as of about 5:30 this afternoon; how will history judge our record?
  • We continue to make one another laugh.
  • We continue to learn new things about each others' characteristics, even the ones we already thought we understood.
  • We continue our ongoing pattern of alternate sanity, so that at least one of us is capable of offering support when the other is experiencing lunacy (whether that lunacy is internally generated or externally imposed).
  • We continue to ask each other for advice, even about areas in which mastery is important to us.  We're not afraid to be learners with each other.
  • We have been strong in the face of multiple unknowns and uncertainties.  The world has thrown a lot of crap at us already in just over three months, and we have addressed all of it with agreement and unity.  When big things rear up, we face them together and without hesitation.
  • We've gone on dates once a week or so, leaving other stuff behind to just be us.
To borrow another presidential metaphor, "the state of our Union is strong."