This weekend, we went to Binghamton to help Kevin's brother build a patio. And we brought a bunch of friends. And for reasons unknown, I had this very regressive day; all day, little sensations of childhood kept coming to me, like it was the summer of 1992, and I was back by my parent's pool and doing little kid things. I don't know, it was strange, so I kept talking about it, and Stephen suggested it would make for an interesting mini-memoir essay, and I agreed. So here goes--a little free-write on Saturdays of summer and youth, with no pre-thinking.
I Spilled My Juice
I didn't want to track the dirt in from the backyard, and I was tired of taking my shoes off every time I had to go inside, so I took them off permanently and let my feet enjoy the cool of the shaded dirt. I stretched my toes wide open and pressed them into the lawn, where patches of grass were struggling to grow. Mostly it was still just bare, dark brown, feeling like it had rained two days ago dirt, with the perfect balance of hard and soft, giving beneath my feet but not mushy. So I was sitting, bent over at the waist, on the bottom stair, checking out the way the dirt never seemed to absorb my toeprints, when Lindsey yelled that she'd heard the ice cream truck and the girls went running.
We paused on the sidewalk in front of the house, our ears pricked for the tinny, circus sounds of summer's vehicle, trying to figure out which way around the block the driver would come. I followed Lindsey and Ashley, past Lindsey's grandma's house, and around the corner, still close enough that we could find our way back. My feet were still bare, as they always are in summer, and even though it was the first really hot weekend of the year, the bottoms must have still been callused from last summer, because the cement sidewalks and the little road pebbles and the hot asphalt didn't bother me at all, or I was just thinking about what kind of ice cream I should get.
I hung back behind the other two girls while ordering our ice cream. I rolled tiny chipped bits of asphalt under my big toe, sending them flying into the gutter with little flicks, as the bare, exposed yellow sun penetrated the skin on the back of my neck. Frustrated, I brushed flyaway pieces of hair back off my sweaty forehead, feeling a light smear of dirt left behind. My old, pilly t-shirt clung to the center of my back, and I wished for a pool, for the deep, cold water to wash all of this sticky season off my too hot, too pale skin. A moment later, walking back towards our house, a giant styrofoam cup full of mint chocolate milkshake in one hand, I giggled with Lindsey and Ashley and felt more cheerful with every sugary slug.
to be continued...
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Friday, April 18, 2008
I recently remembered something I'd been interested in writing many years ago, which I had all but abandoned. I love to watch this show on the Travel Channel called "Mysterious Journeys" which explores various mysteries of the Earth or human history. A recent one, on Easter Island, was fascinating. Yesterday, it was on the Nazca lines, a series of astounding geoglyphs in Peru, which I studied back in my college anthropology days, and became a little mesmerized by. So, I took some notes while watching and jotted down a few random thoughts to explore, which may or may not become an essay.
Notes on the Nazca, Dreaming
I have dreams of flying over Peru—dreams of a landscape like watercolor, with muted grays and smears of the palest, sandiest pink. Tiny stone brushed like paint across the Pampa, the desert, the back of my forehead. Time does not mask all; time does not reveal all truth. There is such a thing as a thing we do not know.
Ages ago, a people called the Nazca worshipped the desert and the rivers of secrecy that flowed in an unending pattern beneath, and they danced these paths into reality on the surface of the malleable Pampa. By their own feet, hands, brooms, they strode across their most sacred and enormous of canvasses and swept away the tiny grey pebbles that hid the pink sand below, in order to map out water, fertility, worship and balance.
On the great and wide vista of the Pampa Colorada, in the silent heart of the Peruvian coast, for centuries, the Nazca carved themselves and their community onto the desert like a strong wind. Their marks, though they seem so ephemeral, so delicate, have lasted for so long: between 1,300 and 2000 years have passed, slowly and definitely since they were danced across the wilderness. The windless and arid ground tucked into the hidden spaces of our globe. In a place seemingly so sturdy, so permanent, so unchanging, a wild history embossed like a breeze, like a ballet, like time or water.
Massive lines. Simple lines—straight or curved, arching and aching, twisting and forming shapes that were so familiar to the people who walked them. There are enormous trapezoids and quadrangles, swept clean of stone and appearing flat and depressed into the landscape they identify. The long beak of a hummingbird artfully graced into the sand stretched for hundreds of feet, alongside a monkey’s spiraling tail and the bowed body of a snake. They are so vast; they consume the desert in my mind. I picture a crowded Pampa, stuffed full of vivacious imagery, from centuries ago, from another world.
The endless lines pointing the way to an unreachable horizon, the animals and shapes: they all embody the concept of flight. They seem to have been created from the air, or by the air.
It cannot be that they were created by people who would never see them: and yet, it is.
People like us, people we were in another lifetime, people who could be our ancestors. People with a sort of broom, with devotion and a long walk. They had only the most basic surveying tools and they swept the stones as they walked and walked the desert. The people of Nazca swept the sand for years at a time and, for nearly a century, diligently preserved their mineral artwork. This desert that they worshipped, the desert that was their mother and goddess, the desert that sustained them, somehow, the desert of animal mystery and ancient instances.
And the most compelling truth of the creation of these magnificent and enduring lines is their mystery. Anthropologists, scientists, researchers and villagers have speculated for centuries; they furrow their brows over the hundreds of intersecting and unswerving straight lines. The ambiguity of geometry is that all the maps in the world cannot reveal to us the furtive truths of our own human past.
We forget this, in our age of information, technology, fingertips to research to answers. We forget the parts of ourselves we will never understand because we cannot understand not understanding. From long ago there are stories of ourselves: mysteries. For they are the stories of ancient people, the stories of civilization from thousands of years before ours, stories from a social structure so foreign, they seem like myths. We know of their pottery, their dances, their garbage pits and domesticated plants and animals; we know nothing of their hearts.
These lines have, since they were first seen from the air in the 1930s, represented all that puzzling, frustrating, terrifying anonymity; they reflect the void on and on into endless, frightening darkness. But if we are willing to listen, they could also teach us a great deal; they teach us of depth and understanding, of acceptance and movement, of penetrating embrace.
Notes on the Nazca, Dreaming
I have dreams of flying over Peru—dreams of a landscape like watercolor, with muted grays and smears of the palest, sandiest pink. Tiny stone brushed like paint across the Pampa, the desert, the back of my forehead. Time does not mask all; time does not reveal all truth. There is such a thing as a thing we do not know.
Ages ago, a people called the Nazca worshipped the desert and the rivers of secrecy that flowed in an unending pattern beneath, and they danced these paths into reality on the surface of the malleable Pampa. By their own feet, hands, brooms, they strode across their most sacred and enormous of canvasses and swept away the tiny grey pebbles that hid the pink sand below, in order to map out water, fertility, worship and balance.
On the great and wide vista of the Pampa Colorada, in the silent heart of the Peruvian coast, for centuries, the Nazca carved themselves and their community onto the desert like a strong wind. Their marks, though they seem so ephemeral, so delicate, have lasted for so long: between 1,300 and 2000 years have passed, slowly and definitely since they were danced across the wilderness. The windless and arid ground tucked into the hidden spaces of our globe. In a place seemingly so sturdy, so permanent, so unchanging, a wild history embossed like a breeze, like a ballet, like time or water.
Massive lines. Simple lines—straight or curved, arching and aching, twisting and forming shapes that were so familiar to the people who walked them. There are enormous trapezoids and quadrangles, swept clean of stone and appearing flat and depressed into the landscape they identify. The long beak of a hummingbird artfully graced into the sand stretched for hundreds of feet, alongside a monkey’s spiraling tail and the bowed body of a snake. They are so vast; they consume the desert in my mind. I picture a crowded Pampa, stuffed full of vivacious imagery, from centuries ago, from another world.
The endless lines pointing the way to an unreachable horizon, the animals and shapes: they all embody the concept of flight. They seem to have been created from the air, or by the air.
It cannot be that they were created by people who would never see them: and yet, it is.
People like us, people we were in another lifetime, people who could be our ancestors. People with a sort of broom, with devotion and a long walk. They had only the most basic surveying tools and they swept the stones as they walked and walked the desert. The people of Nazca swept the sand for years at a time and, for nearly a century, diligently preserved their mineral artwork. This desert that they worshipped, the desert that was their mother and goddess, the desert that sustained them, somehow, the desert of animal mystery and ancient instances.
And the most compelling truth of the creation of these magnificent and enduring lines is their mystery. Anthropologists, scientists, researchers and villagers have speculated for centuries; they furrow their brows over the hundreds of intersecting and unswerving straight lines. The ambiguity of geometry is that all the maps in the world cannot reveal to us the furtive truths of our own human past.
We forget this, in our age of information, technology, fingertips to research to answers. We forget the parts of ourselves we will never understand because we cannot understand not understanding. From long ago there are stories of ourselves: mysteries. For they are the stories of ancient people, the stories of civilization from thousands of years before ours, stories from a social structure so foreign, they seem like myths. We know of their pottery, their dances, their garbage pits and domesticated plants and animals; we know nothing of their hearts.
These lines have, since they were first seen from the air in the 1930s, represented all that puzzling, frustrating, terrifying anonymity; they reflect the void on and on into endless, frightening darkness. But if we are willing to listen, they could also teach us a great deal; they teach us of depth and understanding, of acceptance and movement, of penetrating embrace.
Monday, April 07, 2008
OH MY GOD.
I just received what is quite possibly the greatest email of my entire life. My essay "Wish List" (you can find it in two parts further down on this page) has been accepted for publication in a future issue by The Diagram, my NUMBER ONE FAVORITE online lit magazine.
I cannot believe it--this is the long-shot version of my publication hopes come true. It is the one mag I've DREAMED of getting published in! There is almost no way my life could get any better right now.
(I know I said nothing personal in this blog, but this is writing-related, and amazing.)
I just received what is quite possibly the greatest email of my entire life. My essay "Wish List" (you can find it in two parts further down on this page) has been accepted for publication in a future issue by The Diagram, my NUMBER ONE FAVORITE online lit magazine.
I cannot believe it--this is the long-shot version of my publication hopes come true. It is the one mag I've DREAMED of getting published in! There is almost no way my life could get any better right now.
(I know I said nothing personal in this blog, but this is writing-related, and amazing.)
Sunday, April 06, 2008
I found my old memory stick today, hidden in my pencil holder! So I poked around, and found this essay bit I wrote a few years ago, on an assignment about women writers who inspired me. I tinkered with it a little, and actually really like it, so I thought I'd post it here...
American Letters
“The world needs a new ecological wisdom…It needs to be faced with its injustices, to hear voices that speak for the voiceless and powerless. It needs conscious women."
~ Sue Monk Kidd, Dance of the Dissident Daughter
The fields here lie in a different time. Snow dusted over the brown remains of an autumn harvest, crisp beneath my boots. I feel the crunch of snow pack through the soles and into my ankles. To my right, against a row of short pine trees, a tractor sits like an extinct species of great beast—the powerful limbs so frozen and dormant, an history iced over. The blueness of this winter sky, the speckled yellow-brown poking through the snow, always the snow, like a museum against the mountains. I never see people in this field—sometimes cattle, black and lazy, sometimes a brown, thick horse, but never farmers, workers, never overalls or red flannel. No movement, just waiting.
Are there still men who rub brow dirt between thick fingers, who smell the wind and whose brows are wrinkled with thoughts of drought? I turn, searching the fields again for a glimpse of Antonia Shimerda, brown face bent towards a plow. I see tracks cut into the earth, and I wonder where these women have gone.
Miles to downtown, where I park parallel in front of the wine bar, as jazz music lining the sidewalks. Dim lights, record players and fancy cocktails in glasses with thin stems shift among the customers inside, slowly, like the steady, underground pulse of fields growing into mountains. I’ve changed out of boots, into kitten heels and a tea-length skirt. I am standing on the edge of an era, here on the sidewalks of Montana, waiting to learn of which memories this country will be made.
This open land, some of the youngest, truly, on this continent. The stories of cowboy and Indians here come from grandfather’s mouth. Prime rib dinners six dollars, rodeos and prospectors. Parents who have lived “boom and bust” cycles of a mining town and strange metal ladders that bend in half and plunge through the ground searching for black gold, light and heat. We are so young, yet it seems ancient—trapped in traditions we haven’t the generations to understand. Frozen in history while future decisions lie around our ankles. Our exploring hearts lift our eyes to the horizon. We still think of the future as something distant, something to be rounded up and tamed. We are still learning this country; we are tripping over ourselves.
Which pieces of the big sky are small enough to be built upon, drilled into, mined or clear cut? What are we willing to demand of this Earth, who has given us so much> Has the West forgotten its past, the godmother and guardian who fed our ever-expanding families and manifest destiny dreams? Here we stand, like eager teenagers in the face of history, prepared to eat her up beneath our shopping malls and casinos.
The field near my apartment is peppered with stakes and orange tapes. A bulldozer waits for the spring to thaw the ground for development. Development—a conservative word for pounding of earth, pouring of concrete foundations, and the transformation of the land into moderns houses. This is the very dirt of our history, a living museums, an open space book with the lessons of women and men to guide us into a conscious future. Our youth and innocence is just behind us, and this legend still flows in our blood.
Pioneer women from all of Europe, from factories in Virginia and cabins in Northern New Hampshire have made this journey before me. I wore a short sundress but felt the rustling of petticoats around my ankles, the depth and strength of blistered female hands on my shoulders, as I hear the whispers of Willa Cather in my ear… “we belong to a world split in two”.
Willa and Antonia were both women of fiction, women of a transitional time. They were transistions, characters in an American drama which I am just learning is far from over. We put our feet in the dirt, all three of us, and tried to understand what she was telling us. The ground beneath us offers her protection to the infants of hope and exploration. She promise us so much.
My pioneer women knew the sacrifice of their Mother. Antonia knew how to coax life from the expansive fields, worshipping with her own blood, her family and smooth skin. Willa could see the meaning in the rhythm of red wheat swaying. Like drinking strong wine, she took life in two hands and moved poetry from the struggle of every existence side by side, man and Earth.
These were powerful days, strong as wagon ruts in the dust, and just as ephemeral. But these women still live in the winds of the West, holding freedom and creation on either hips, birthing a new country with a weathered smile.
I want to protect this, my adopted country, from the demons of itself. We are all pioneers, founders, first families to the land on which we build our homes. The shoulder of Antonia Shimerda, the horse-drawn travels of Willa Cather, have much to teach us, their daughters, of the possibilities in this new country. They embraced the simplicity of life on Earth, of life with the earth. I stand and face winter in Montana, and feel the wisped grey hairs of females past brush my face with America’s potential.
American Letters
“The world needs a new ecological wisdom…It needs to be faced with its injustices, to hear voices that speak for the voiceless and powerless. It needs conscious women."
~ Sue Monk Kidd, Dance of the Dissident Daughter
The fields here lie in a different time. Snow dusted over the brown remains of an autumn harvest, crisp beneath my boots. I feel the crunch of snow pack through the soles and into my ankles. To my right, against a row of short pine trees, a tractor sits like an extinct species of great beast—the powerful limbs so frozen and dormant, an history iced over. The blueness of this winter sky, the speckled yellow-brown poking through the snow, always the snow, like a museum against the mountains. I never see people in this field—sometimes cattle, black and lazy, sometimes a brown, thick horse, but never farmers, workers, never overalls or red flannel. No movement, just waiting.
Are there still men who rub brow dirt between thick fingers, who smell the wind and whose brows are wrinkled with thoughts of drought? I turn, searching the fields again for a glimpse of Antonia Shimerda, brown face bent towards a plow. I see tracks cut into the earth, and I wonder where these women have gone.
Miles to downtown, where I park parallel in front of the wine bar, as jazz music lining the sidewalks. Dim lights, record players and fancy cocktails in glasses with thin stems shift among the customers inside, slowly, like the steady, underground pulse of fields growing into mountains. I’ve changed out of boots, into kitten heels and a tea-length skirt. I am standing on the edge of an era, here on the sidewalks of Montana, waiting to learn of which memories this country will be made.
This open land, some of the youngest, truly, on this continent. The stories of cowboy and Indians here come from grandfather’s mouth. Prime rib dinners six dollars, rodeos and prospectors. Parents who have lived “boom and bust” cycles of a mining town and strange metal ladders that bend in half and plunge through the ground searching for black gold, light and heat. We are so young, yet it seems ancient—trapped in traditions we haven’t the generations to understand. Frozen in history while future decisions lie around our ankles. Our exploring hearts lift our eyes to the horizon. We still think of the future as something distant, something to be rounded up and tamed. We are still learning this country; we are tripping over ourselves.
Which pieces of the big sky are small enough to be built upon, drilled into, mined or clear cut? What are we willing to demand of this Earth, who has given us so much> Has the West forgotten its past, the godmother and guardian who fed our ever-expanding families and manifest destiny dreams? Here we stand, like eager teenagers in the face of history, prepared to eat her up beneath our shopping malls and casinos.
The field near my apartment is peppered with stakes and orange tapes. A bulldozer waits for the spring to thaw the ground for development. Development—a conservative word for pounding of earth, pouring of concrete foundations, and the transformation of the land into moderns houses. This is the very dirt of our history, a living museums, an open space book with the lessons of women and men to guide us into a conscious future. Our youth and innocence is just behind us, and this legend still flows in our blood.
Pioneer women from all of Europe, from factories in Virginia and cabins in Northern New Hampshire have made this journey before me. I wore a short sundress but felt the rustling of petticoats around my ankles, the depth and strength of blistered female hands on my shoulders, as I hear the whispers of Willa Cather in my ear… “we belong to a world split in two”.
Willa and Antonia were both women of fiction, women of a transitional time. They were transistions, characters in an American drama which I am just learning is far from over. We put our feet in the dirt, all three of us, and tried to understand what she was telling us. The ground beneath us offers her protection to the infants of hope and exploration. She promise us so much.
My pioneer women knew the sacrifice of their Mother. Antonia knew how to coax life from the expansive fields, worshipping with her own blood, her family and smooth skin. Willa could see the meaning in the rhythm of red wheat swaying. Like drinking strong wine, she took life in two hands and moved poetry from the struggle of every existence side by side, man and Earth.
These were powerful days, strong as wagon ruts in the dust, and just as ephemeral. But these women still live in the winds of the West, holding freedom and creation on either hips, birthing a new country with a weathered smile.
I want to protect this, my adopted country, from the demons of itself. We are all pioneers, founders, first families to the land on which we build our homes. The shoulder of Antonia Shimerda, the horse-drawn travels of Willa Cather, have much to teach us, their daughters, of the possibilities in this new country. They embraced the simplicity of life on Earth, of life with the earth. I stand and face winter in Montana, and feel the wisped grey hairs of females past brush my face with America’s potential.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
When I wake up on Red and Judy's farm, in the white, slanted-ceiling bedroom tucked in the upper corner of the house, I wake up into a book. I am a character, a blonde barnyard girl with pigtail braids and muddy-kneed overalls. I stretch, imagining chores I am not actually responsible for with romantic mis-idealism: milking the cow on a little three-legged stool, or pulling smooth white eggs from beneath obliging hens, my freckled hands rooting around in the straw, until I discover the treasure. I can feel the egg cradled in the palm of my hand, as the clear autumn sunlight reveals the floating dust above my homemade quilt.
We eat pancakes for breakfast at a table under a vaulted, exposed-beam ceiling, and I marvel at the strange farm decor: carved wooden roosters perched atop a cabinet, peacock feathers displayed proudly in a vase, as if they were fresh-cut daisies. The butter is almost pure white, and, rather than stick-shaped, sits in heavy spoonfuls in a glass bowl, a wooden knife for spreading. I pour more of the strong maple syrup from an old rust-colored glass bottle; it cuts straight through the pancake, spreading its espresso, wooden flavors through the fluffy batter, making each bite spongy, sticky and ready to dissovle without chewing into my mouth. Today, I am going to uncover the secret of this strange recipe, so unlike the lighter, sweeter grocery-store plastic-bottle lookalike. Red is taking us sugaring.
Red's name came to him honestly, an Amish-style ring of beard circling his chin the color of his hen's breast-feathers. Several years before this day, when I was only seven and met
We eat pancakes for breakfast at a table under a vaulted, exposed-beam ceiling, and I marvel at the strange farm decor: carved wooden roosters perched atop a cabinet, peacock feathers displayed proudly in a vase, as if they were fresh-cut daisies. The butter is almost pure white, and, rather than stick-shaped, sits in heavy spoonfuls in a glass bowl, a wooden knife for spreading. I pour more of the strong maple syrup from an old rust-colored glass bottle; it cuts straight through the pancake, spreading its espresso, wooden flavors through the fluffy batter, making each bite spongy, sticky and ready to dissovle without chewing into my mouth. Today, I am going to uncover the secret of this strange recipe, so unlike the lighter, sweeter grocery-store plastic-bottle lookalike. Red is taking us sugaring.
Red's name came to him honestly, an Amish-style ring of beard circling his chin the color of his hen's breast-feathers. Several years before this day, when I was only seven and met
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