An embodiment of the phrase "populous solitude."


One of my least favorite facets of this spring has been falling far out of contact with so many people I love. Among these, perhaps the most surprising has been my beloved Brooklynite, to whom I wrote daily for many years, and for whom I now seem not to be able to make more than a message a week happen. (There are others; many of you are among my readers, and I hope you know the depth of my regret and the strength of my resolve that the second I slam out the other side of the long tunnel called second semester, I will start being a better correspondent--or, let's not fool ourselves, any kind of correspondent--again.)

Today I am thinking about my dearth of writing to darling ER (giggle, blush) because it is her birthday. I don't know how she's celebrating, but I hope that this message will help bring a beautiful day to a close. I hope, that is, that her birthday has been a beautiful one, the only kind she deserves.

I met ER (and no, those of you who know who she is, those aren't her real initials--they're her nickname's initials, silly) in summer 2001, when we were both doing research in England, I in London and she at Oxford's Lincoln College. Her brother, whom I knew through friends in Ithaca, said, "You and my sister would get along. She's in England, too. You should contact her." I remember nodding but thinking it probably wouldn't happen. But then ER e-mailed me, just after I touched down in South Kensington, and said, "You should come to visit." And so I did. And thank goodness I did.

We hit it off immediately, immediately enough that when I had concluded the second part of my research (in Edinburgh's National Library of Scotland) I stopped back through Oxford on my way to Gatwick to catch my flight home. By that time, ER's husband was visiting, and the three of us went out on the town for pizza in a restaurant housed in a medieval building, then tripped around the strange ancient alleyways of Oxford, in the half-dusk of a July evening. Almost immediately upon both of our returns to the U.S., we were writing daily, and she became my mainstay, my anchor, so smart and so funny and so wickedly hip and so devoted to literature and to teaching and so understanding of my ever-increasing weirdnesses (because my dissertation was just starting to heat up, and I still haven't worked out all the strange kinks that project got into my system).


On 9/11, she was the second person I thought of when the students from the class after mine started filing in, as I was erasing the chalkboard from my 8:40 a.m. Frankenstein lesson, and said, "Did you hear what happened?" (The first person I thought of: my father, who was in Mexico on business.) I remember writing to her the next day, "I realize that I don't even know enough about your social life to know whom you were able to call and be with." (Her husband, on his way to work when everything happened, didn't make it home from Manhattan until the next day.) A couple of days later, the packet of Frankenstein cartoons she had mailed that Monday arrived, Gary Larson's humor seeming even blacker than usual, the fat envelope feeling like a dispatch from a different universe.

By October, she was helping me develop my skills with making pie crusts and apple pie fillings. She was there when I had my first and only (touch wood) fender bender. She stuck by me, tough and bolstering and indignant and worried, when I sank and sank that fall, sank until things started to look very dire indeed. She was there to be overjoyed when I made some inexplicable turn for the better that winter.

I visited her in Brooklyn for the first time the next spring. I remember the excitement of the Manhattan Bridge crossing, the excitement of seeing her again after months and months, the excitement of exchanging gifts. I remember sitting across from her at the dining room table in the old apartment, facing the front door, the low bookshelf/divider behind me, and thinking, "It's like I just stepped out yesterday and then came back today; it's like I've been seeing her every day for months."

I then remember taking the Q back to Manhattan and going to the Stage Deli for dinner with her in-laws and her husband, and then I remember sitting on the sidewalk outside the Ziegfield waiting for three hours to see the second Star Wars movie. She and her sister-in-law were choosing color palettes from a book. I remember this so clearly: I sat facing 54th Street, hardly suspecting that in six months I would be staring down disconsolately at that stretch of sidewalk, watching from my hotel room as the Academic Mayhem utterly passed me by.


During that wretched few days in December, she helped keep me up. By that time, we had had not only the funny joys of the spring and summer (that was the year we acquired our matched set of pewter tadpoles, signs of so much transition ongoing, so much to come) but also the detonations of unexpected small tragedies in our lives--curious, careless neglect by people meant to be careful and thoughtful with us; inexplicably ambiguous treatment by people we thought were well-suited to us; unutterably swift onsets of ill pet health, followed by stealthy, sudden death and most poignant burial. We had held each other up with, among other things, a late-November photo-ramble through the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens (where I hope she went this weekend for the cherry blossom festival to which she introduced me). In my pictures from that trip, she is elfin, with a penumbra of sunlight. I can see how everything I looked at through the camera looked different because she was there, because we were happy and together. I took extreme close-ups of the roses that, strangely, were still blooming in November; she told me later that they were obscene, because we had read about someone's castigation of obscene flowers. We marveled at the truly bizarre sculptural scrapyard (replete with a scaled-down replica of the Statue of Liberty) lying at the edge of the parking lot. We kept wandering and looking until the daylight faded altogether, and then we wandered and looked our way home to the apartment they'd bought that summer, around the corner from the old place. We cooked dinner, as always. We watched the Sopranos, as usual. The three of us sat on the couch and read together, as ever.

During the Academic Mayhem, things were rockier again, and it was ER who showed up in her black cashmere turtleneck ("I got it on sale," she said. "It was ridiculously cheap") and said to me, you're allowed to be angry. You can swear if you need to. I swore and cried and swore, and then we strolled out onto the Avenue of the Americas and wove through the tourists and eventually caught up with her husband and ate Cuban food and watched The Hours. And it didn't make the Mayhem go away, but it reminded me that there was more to life than the Mayhem, and that there was more to me than the Mayhem.

By the next fall, so much had changed again: the dissertation finished and filed, the first job accepted and moved into, the second round of job applications coming together and heading out to try to win my fortune. A love stammeringly begun and ridiculously terminated. A career of sharpening and honing into muscle and bone, into an interviewing and teaching machine, begun. By this point, my pewter tadpole was paired with a blue-green glass frog, the gift she'd handed me the morning I braced myself for one final two-hour push on the dissertation, having sat up with it all through the night, trying to comb out all the typos and rough spots. The frog fits perfectly in my closed fist, in a way that comforts and calms beyond explanation, its nose presenting itself for meditative rubbing. The frog is in all of the pictures from my Ph.D. ceremony that next spring, because by then ER couldn't travel.


Just as I started toughening and hardening, she started softening and expanding. "I am, as you would say, growing a person," she e-mailed me one Sunday evening, and I yelped and whooped and exclaimed, finally knowing what it would feel like to find out that someone my own age was going to make a small child the luckiest, most loved person who'd ever lived. When I visited her that fall, carrying a red business suit smaller than anything I'd ever worn before, she was starting to wonder whether people could tell yet that she was expecting. Her weight was just shifting, her bustline expanding, her hips getting ready to widen. She couldn't walk very quickly, and I was embarrassed to have to be reminded, aloud, of how quickly she started feeling fatigue. At our favorite breakfast place, she needed -- needed -- oatmeal immediately -- immediately! -- and ate it, and ate half a waffle, and then barely made it home before the baby started snarfing and she needed to sleep. She kept sleeping and eating, eating and sleeping, and I kept marvelling at how much her body had just started doing its own thing, working on growing the baby without any apparent control on her part.

Her son was the first person who actually looked to me like a person in ultrasound pictures. My mother said, "Does that make you think differently about being pro-choice?" I said, "No. It makes it incredibly more sad to me to think of how impossible that decision must be when people need to make it, and how cruel it is to believe that people go into that choice thoughtlessly." I thought of the arrow pointing to the baby's head. "He already has such a big brain," they said. "We're very excited." (I have not yet mentioned that ER and her husband have the driest, best wit.)

By February, we knew he was a boy. Their plan had always been to have two kids, a boy and a girl. The boy would be named Thumbs. The girl would be named Kinky. I knew she wouldn't tell me the baby's real name. I bestowed a different name on him every day until he was born. My first suggestion was Samuel.

When I saw her again in April, for our birthdays, Thumbs was big enough that I could feel him kick, big enough that he bounced along as we laughed watching Mean Girls, big enough that going to the cherry blossom festival and then having ice cream in the sun knocked her down for hours, so that the apartment was a den of hot, crashed people (plus one hot, crashed cat). We cooked dinner, as always. We watched the Sopranos and, now, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as usual. We read together on the couch, as ever.

Samuel was born in mid-June, just as I was preparing to move back to Gambier. It turned out they had already decided on the name even before I started gifting him monikers in the late winter. Because of him I learned the suffix of endearment -eleh; we call him Sameleh. He has been a wondrous, splendiferous child since birth, and I hate that I am only a legendary auntie for him, a literary-godmother-in-waiting, a giver of tiny striped socks he doesn't remember (though also of The Foot Book, which I hope he still loves). His parents posted pictures of him once a month for the first year of his life, and so I could fantasize a sense that I knew how he was developing--what stages he'd reached, what foods he liked, what he thought about, whom he favored. I watched his face molding into his father's and his mother's at the same time. I found myself startled by the strength of my feeling for him and by the fierceness of my admiration for his mother. I find myself startled now, as I type, by the fact that in this paragraph she has become his mother; even at the level of my prose, she is no longer simply herself. She is always Sameleh's mother.


And yet--and this is why he is an incredibly lucky child--she is also, and always, a reader, a thinker, a teacher, a baker, a meditative quick spirit, a slow steady conscience, a creator, an instigator, a beauty, a scholar. One of my favorite pictures from the last time I was able to make the trip to Brooklyn, in October, is of her walking away from me with Sameleh, who'd just started walking, on her hip. She's exactly the same friend of mine she's been since that first moment in July 2001, and I, behind the camera, am exactly the same friend of hers I've been since that same moment. But now there's a small person balanced on her hip, holding in his hand the strange seed-pod he's picked up from the ground, and we're all three heading over to play on the slide, and then we'll watch the geese, and then we'll go home. And, a day's career of stacking blocks and running down the hall to slam doors brought to an end, the baby will go to bed with his nighttime rituals--the bath, the massage, the song from his mother and father, all a reassurance that the same love will be there when he opens his eyes again in the dark. And, the baby safely asleep, we will cook dinner, as always. We will watch a tiny bit of TV, as usual. We will read together, as ever. And I'll know, when I really ask myself for the truth--even when I worry or doubt that it might not be true, that my silence might alienate her or that her life might be too busy for me--that the next time I push the buzzer at their Brooklyn building and make my way to their floor, I'll hear the bolts slipping back and see the cat coming to greet me and hear my elfin friend's voice, all the same as if it hadn't been eight months since our last visit, saying, "You made it!"

Happy birthday, darling. Don't let that baby forget me altogether. Don't you forget me altogether, either, please.

Goose goose goose.


In my kindergarten, we had a linoleum floor with the alphabet printed on it in a twenty-six-person circle. This circle was where we sat when we did certain class activities, including something related to the Pilgrim and Indian costumes we wore for Thanksgiving, and including playing Duck Duck Goose. I always did like Duck Duck Goose. I can't tell you why. I did also love it when the chicks and ducklings we'd been incubating in the deep red incubator by the classroom door hatched. We sat on the letters in the circle and passed the duckling hand to hand around the circle, occasionally putting it down and letting it toddle along on its awkward legs and too-big feet. Just as it was coming to me, the duckling shat on the floor. I don't have a memory of holding the duckling, and it's possible that my kindergarten teacher and/or the aide put it back into its pen right then.

I think I would remember holding the duckling, because I remember holding other tiny animals--a black and white kitten named Winston, whom we almost adopted when I was about nine, for instance, but whom our older, tougher cat couldn't stand, particularly since Winston was the one who copped an attitude with Blackjack. I remember holding Winston, and other kittens, and feeling how near the surface of the skin their fine bones were, how soft and small their ears and nose and eyes were.

On my way to the grocery store Thursday night, I passed the Canada geese who live near my doctor's office, on and near a subdivision's pond. The geese were all sitting side by side along the edge of the pond, and sitting there with them were their goslings, still small and yellowy-fluffy. This afternoon, as I returned from getting ingredients to make pie for my department, I saw the geese and goslings yet again: the parents were waddling along, bending their long black necks and beaking the grass around them, while the goslings teeter-tottered along nearby.

Tonight we had a departmental dinner, which reminded me, as if I needed reminding, of how fortunate I am to have the colleagues I do. (And how blessed to have parents who kept their eyes out until they found a pie basket with which I could replace my old cardboard "Pie [Pah] Box.") And what a feast. Now, for some reason, the village coffee shop's counter instructed me this morning that


I suspect that this message may have had something to do with Kenyon's big semester-end festival (which just ended about fifteen minutes ago), or something to do with Tuesday's primary elections. Mainly, I suspect that I need to get a labeler of my own. It certainly did not slow down my inclinations to party with my friends and colleagues this evening.

Home again, I finished making the other pie that I hadn't had time to complete before we left for dinner. That first one was cherry. This late-night project: mixed berry. It has just come out of the oven and is continuing to bubble and cook its innards, there on my stovetop. I have yet to decide what to do with this pie, but I'm leaning toward taking it in tomorrow to feed people during the continuation of our weekend's departmental activities. Just when we were all maybe about to tire too much, here we are getting to talk to and eat with each other like full-on adult people, and it is a pleasure and a sustenance.

I too am not a bit tamed.


All the rest of you can just go on and feel envious, because I have a houseguest and he is très magnifique, as many of you know first-hand. Already tonight we have caused some more-than-sidelong, more-than-passing stares from students of mine we've passed on the street, for whom the sight of me walking with (!) a man (!) is not only unprecedented but also, I suspect, entirely unexpected. One student actually looked him over from head to toe, moving her head as she did so. Unsubtle in their friendly surprise they sometimes are not.

Today saw me completing one of my least favorite of tasks, lawn-mowing. But mowing the lawn enabled me to get a different perspective on my yard's flowers, on a day that began with another of those shock-sightings of feeding deer (in this season, munching on daffodil greens under the backyard cherry tree's hot pink). And somehow that different perspective helped me overlook the fact that my hands tingled for an hour after I finished the job. So:


The best part of mowing the lawn, though, was the smell. Wild chives have been growing in the yard all through the spring; I recognize their tall, straight spears, like grass but more so, and as I ran over one clump after another, an oniony scent filled the air, filled up the backyard like a deep light pool, swept over the red mower plowing through the green grass, swept over the woman in the green shorts and the red shirt, kept sweeping and filling as the sun hung high, hours before it was time to gild and fall.

What I'm working toward.


As I suggested yesterday, now is the time in an academic year when thoughts seem to behave like crazed starlings: when they're quiet, all billion of them in the same tree, it's not because they're really quiet. It's because they're saving energy for the next mad uprush from branch after branch beside branch, into the steeling expanse of evening sky. They'll cry their manic cries as they dip and swerve as a flickering flashing body, and then they'll land again and seem to be quiet. But they won't really be quiet. They'll be saving energy for the next mad uprush.

My crazed starlings are tiring, though, and so their mad uprushes don't go as far as I'd like, don't make as much noise as I'd have them do. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that some of them have left the flock and are genuinely resting quietly somewhere, waiting to be the birds I saw last night slipping and soaring singly through the evening air, wing-curve here, tail-flip there, motion and the near-silence of small sound, the joy of flight, the extravagance of simplicity.

I am down to seven class meetings. Of course, one of those meetings is three hours long. But down to seven nonetheless. At this time of the academic year, I also start to fantasize fervently about all that will start getting done once we're past graduation and reunion weekend--once we're firmly in the summer, the sun so high all the time, the front porch my favorite office. In the summers, I head to the post office shortly after noon, when the mail's in boxes; in the springs, at the point where we are now, I realize some evenings that I've simply not made it to the post office at all. In the summers, it is my job to read and write all day long. In the summers, I sleep enough.

This morning, my alarm woke me up from a dream in which someone stole my car while I watched.

Further proof that my father is cooler than cool: a mysterious package arrived on my front porch this morning. Inside? A Manfrotto car window mount for my camera. It is small and sturdy, metal and reliable-seeming. I feel a little bit of trepidation about putting my camera too close to the wind. But I am very excited at the idea of getting to do more vehicular photography without endangering myself.

Rematerializing at dusk.


I continue to be pretty tapped out, as far as writing goes. I'm not particularly happy about this situation. However, today, for the first time in a long time, I walked to class and got there early. In the evening, I walked to town and hung about reading there for awhile. These walks were little restoratives, at a time of year when I and everyone around me could use one or two restoratives. (Today was the day when we all acknowledged, out loud, over and over, that we're near the end: suddenly, everyone I talked to was talking about counting down, wearing out, struggling through, crawling along on all fours if necessary--about doing anything and everything necessary to keep all eyes on the page, on the prize, on the end that is near.) Another restorative: sitting in the sun, writing class-related e-mails, at 6:30 p.m. In the sun, I tell you. How warm it was, and how bright.

But now I'm simply tired, probably even too tired to indulge in another bath. One of my coping mechanisms for the semester's end has, somewhat inexplicably, become the late-night bath. Raise the body's temperature, climb into pajamas, fall fast asleep and dead to the world: not a bad way to end a busy day.

Also not a bad way to end a busy day: surveying the day's gallery of things my eyes have loved. May said surveying be not a bad way for you to start your day, you early-sleepers and early-risers.


And finally: I had a request earlier today for more dragon pictures, so when I set out from home before my morning class, I carried my camera in hand and at the ready. And lo, the dragon was gone again. I felt some degree of disbelief but no amount of peering and standing on tiptoe revealed his telltale purple horns. On my way back from class, I found a black and white cat where the dragon should have been. The cat was silky and friendly, and she squeaked instead of meowing. I used petting her as a subterfuge so that I could go up the driveway a little and see whether the dragon was hiding somewhere. But no--so it was good that petting the squeaking, serpentine-skeletoned cat was its own pleasure, really.

On my way home from the officehouse this evening, after the dogwood pictures, I looked to my left as I passed the dragon's home, and there he was, back in all his glory. Back in a new glory, in fact--one so good it made me guffaw there behind the wheel of my car (for while I was on foot most of the day, at this point I was not). When I walked to town only a few minutes later, I paused for this latest installment, which is not my finest photographic hour because the light was lowering but which I like nonetheless.


For those of you keeping score at home, he's sitting on the same stone circle on which he spent most of the winter--he's just further around the side of it, not front and center as in earlier materializations. Now, I'd say there are small mysteries to plumb here. Obviously someone else is carrying on a relationship with the dragon, and obviously it's someone who cares at least marginally for him, given that now he has his own captured castle, an arch of ceremony, if you will. What can it mean?

Her vagrant mind must be reduced to order.


It's been a long time since I felt really in control of and steady about much of anything, which is one of the reasons I am so faithful about these writings and images: they are a thing that happens daily, period. I know that the first couple of years on an academic job are challenging, and I do love the challenge. But I'm also pretty fatigued a lot of the time, and taking a bit of time to catch my breath always seems to leave me having to run even faster once I start up again. And so I look back over my day and see that I've read a book of Middlemarch for seminar (and found my evening's title therein), watched a film for my Tuesday class, had an essay conference with a student, finished reading an honors thesis, started reading Return of the Native for seminar, and responded to the first few of a batch of reading response papers. And yet I have a pile of things left to accomplish, and a pile-up of meetings and classes and even a college-related road trip to take tomorrow, all before my evening seminar meets.

All of which makes me smile to myself wearily and think, at least this work matters intensely to me. At least nothing I'm doing feels purposeless. At least I get to talk to my young ones more about cultural memory tomorrow; at least I get to discuss the ambivalent-making ending of my favorite novel with the seminarians. At least I get to listen to them prod and pull each other through Hardy's strange visuals of a region whose weirdness they'll be able to grasp, almost, because of where they're studying (and none of them have ever read Hardy, so they're learning a new narrative language even as I type). For example:

At dusk, a man has been watching from afar as a figure stands atop a barrow on a heath in the south of England, when suddenly the figure comes to life and runs down the hill "with the glide of a water-drop down a bud, and then vanishe[s]," justs as a troup of other people ascend the side of the hill:

The only intelligible meaning in this sky-backed pantomime of silhouettes was that the woman had no relation to the party which had taken her place, was sedulously avoiding these, and had come thither for another object than theirs. The imagination of the observer clung by preference to that vanished, solitary figure, as to something more interesting, more important, more likely to have a history worth knowing than these new-comers, and unconsciously regarded them as intruders. But they remained, and established themselves; and the lonely person who hitherto had been queen of the solitude did not at present seem likely to return.
And things only get more interesting when you know--as you do, once you reach this passage at the end of Hardy's second chapter--that this observing figure is none other than a man colored all red. His skin, his hair, his clothing--everything, all "a lurid red." He is a reddleman, a seller of redding, red dye with which to mark one's rams' breasts so that the ewes most likely to bear lambs will be marked. See how that works? "He was one of a class rapidly becoming extinct in Wessex," Hardy tells us, "filling at present in the rural world the place which, during the last century, the dodo occupied in the world of animals."

I do not hesitate when people ask me what my favorite Victorian novel is. It's Middlemarch. I don't know when Middlemarch became my favorite novel; it certainly wasn't the first time I read it, when I was forced (through its coexistence in my semester with Richardson's Clarissa) to read more than half the novel in one night. It might have been when I reread it for a teaching assistantship I held at one point. It may simply have grown on me reading after reading. Now I feel it like a revelation every time I pick it up.

But if you were to ask me who my favorite Victorian novelist is, I might have to say Thomas Hardy. There's a quality and intensity of vision in his novels that simply goes unmatched by anyone else, in my experience. George Eliot inspires and bolsters me, showing me how to live; Thomas Hardy enthralls and entrances me, seducing me with the peculiarity of the stern sights and psyches, of the whole and particular world he describes.

All of this is to say that if you read one Hardy novel in high school or in college and you remember him simply as "the pessimistic one," you should give him another try--not least because you might be surprised to find him also to be "the modern one," the one whose works feel psychologically recognizable. I suspect I will have more to say on this point as the week wears on and I continue pushing forward with this strange novel and its strange protagonists. For now, there's all that work to be done.

Drive-by shootings.


To understand my day, and maybe (for good or ill) a lot about how my life works, picture this scene: me, at the wheel of my trusty car, speeding into Columbus for a swift shearing, then dawdling my way back to Gambier, camera in hand, snapping haphazard images of rural quirks and decays that I wish I could frame better but can't, for lack of shoulders (and thus opportunities for stopping for a better look) anywhere on US-62. And yet all the while I'm rejoicing at the calves and the birds and the barns and the sun (so much sun!), things that one might think would encourage me toward quiet musing and reflection and austere serenity, I'm blaring the New Pornographers, my music find of the week. I'm not sure how I missed them all these years, but I'm missing them no longer. (If you want a starting point, I'd suggest Twin Cinema [2005].)


I just can't imagine that it's a very good idea for me to continue trying to shoot and drive at the same time, but I'm not sure how else to get the pictures I want. I'm going to let the back of my head work on this problem over the next few weeks, as I finish out my semester. Meanwhile, when I got home today and moved all of my pictures over to the computer so that I could get a better look at them, I cracked myself up with my crooked horizons and my missed barns. The missed barns are the funniest: I have no idea, when I'm shooting over my left arm, whether I'm aiming at the right thing, whether I'll even get the purported object of my image into the image at all. And so my barns tend to be to one side or another of the frame, or motion-blurred. And sometimes they're crooked as well, to particularly good effect when the barns themselves are already in the process of falling down in some way or another.


By the time I was halfway home from Columbus, I'd decided that I wanted to revisit a part of Knox County where I (silly) had driven last weekend without my camera. I made a quick but fruitful stop in Mount Vernon, the next town over from where I live, where I discovered a staggeringly named organization's headquarters:


As the Beastie Boys might say, "Don't ask me 'cause I just don't know." The only appropriate response seemed to be to buy a David Malouf novel and head out into the hills northeast of Gambier, where aesthetic intent seemed to be more under my control, given that I was actually able to park my car at the side of the road and deliberately aim my camera at things I wanted to capture.


Things got even more interesting when I took a short but adventurous road trip with one of my excellent friends, out to a colleague's house in the countryside. Because I wasn't driving, I was able to shoot everything as we moved. By the time all was said and done today, I had about 200 pictures--and a far richer visual impression of my home landscape. One of the day's pleasures was seeing so many young animals--calves and lambs--doing their best childish impersonations of loping along, or feeding. And the great thing about cows is that they'll actually notice when you drive by, if they're at all close to the road. I suddenly have a plethora of cow stories to tell you--including the one about the time my fourth grade teacher brought a cow's eye to class (they're not so hard to come by in a farming area), or the time twenty-eight cows ambled over to a fence where I was standing and watching them from afar, and lined up side by side, three feet away from me, staring and snuffling and elbowing each other in the ribs and rolling their eyes and chewing. But I can't tell those stories now, in part because it's time for you to look at some pictures of cows. Note the ones staring at us as we drive by, in the second shot.


We also did some high quality gravel road travel today.


Overall, if you were to ask me what I learned today, I'd have to respond "Green, and hills, and feeding calves." Not to mention Dorothea's wisdom: "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?"


Things were looking good in Gambier, as well.


And look, look. I admit that every time he vanishes, my heart aches a little. So far, though, he keeps turning up again. Does he not look pleased with himself, there beside the new hosta?


Lightning is flashing every once in a long while now, thunder following the light only after I've lost count of the seconds: storms are still far away but are clearly drawing nearer, a sure sign--as if my eyelid-dropping fatigue weren't enough--that it's time to read myself down for the night with Dorothea's impetuously generous heroics. If only I could stay awake long enough to read Middlemarch's climactic thunderstorm tonight, during our own storm--the rain for which is picking up, now that the rumble comes only three seconds after the flash.

Some falling, some rising.


When the ends of my weeks are occupied by grading (with all the actual grading and profuse not-grading that process involves), I find myself just plain tired. But today the dogwood bloomed in full force (and it's red--somehow I'd forgotten), and we had a low-rumbling spring thunderstorm, locatable enough by its sound that I could point to the clouds that were making all the fuss. And rain: first, drizzle; then, a torrent, a spraying, water water everywhere, bringing in its train a continued shower of fat, souring pink and white petals. On the ground, they grow thin and slippery, treacherous, their smell unplaceable. But today the dogwood bloomed in full force, as if in consolation.


Someone has moved the dragon yet again; he disappeared last night, but today he rematerialized, leaning up against a newly sprouted hosta, at a jaunty angle (which suits him).


We're on to our final book in one course, getting ready to start the final book in another, careening toward the home stretch in all. This morning, as we prepared to plunge into discussing the exhuming of mass graves in eastern Bosnia, ca. 1996, one of my students registered aloud the strangeness of having hit the end of the semester as swiftly as we suddenly have. Later, I realized that it's been a couple of semesters since I've been able to articulate for my students the nostalgia that I used to feel (and tell them about) well in advance of a semester's end. I still feel it to some degree, but that proleptic feeling of missing them is far less pronounced than is my elemental desire to make it through the all the work still before me, and to make it through in one reasonably rested piece.


I continue to marvel quietly at how much disintegration spring requires.

And dissolution, too. I forgot to tell you that two nights ago, I dreamed: a colleague (from another department) and I found ourselves the only two survivors of a sunken ship, some kind of exploratory vessel. We wore large diving masks and wetsuits. "Don't breathe through your nose," he told me. "That oxygen's all we've got left." Somehow, we were breathing through our mouths, and the air we were taking in was coming from our masks and was thus finite, but somehow we weren't dying (and I don't think we were even very scared; I seem to recall that we had tasks to complete and were going about completing them). And then we were taken in by people who weren't rescuers but were our friends. But we knew that we were going to be put back into the wreck, in our masks, to await a proper, foretold rescue. "Can't we just stay?" I kept asking him. He (and others) kept insisting that we had to play out the predetermined narrative.

This wet night, as I washed my face, getting ready for bed, the burble of the water from the bathroom faucet made a sound like the rained-upon red cardinal singing my afternoon at the top of the maple tree while I graded.

At the risk of belaboring a point:


Really, I hope you haven't yet had enough of these flowers, because (miracle!) they just keep showing up, turning out.

Last night, I was flipping through something--who even knows what, now--and saw the line "Poetry should show, not tell." I went through this phase a couple of years ago in which, inexplicably, I misread lots of things, as though my brain was having a good laugh at my expense. I misread most absurdly. I can't even give you an example, because they were all such strange and hilarious things, and they always flicked in for just a second, just long enough for me to register the misreading before comprehending what was actually in front of me. Those were funny days.

So, when I saw "Poetry should show, not tell," I was too too pleased with the fact that my brain went, "Ooo! I know what that should read! It should say, 'Poetry should know, not smell.'" Leaving aside the fact that good poetry should both know and smell (just as it should probably both show and tell), I have to say I'm kind of proud of that one, as a new general rule.

The fragility of growth.


Walking home in the near-silent cool night, after two hours of reading at the bookstore, I realized--right about the time I espied the dragon in his newest haunt, the center of a small stand of daffodils, and right about the time I realized that I was seeing leaves in the lamplight, not just branches, not just buds--that I have become a chronicler of growth. Perhaps I have always chronicled growth; perhaps that is how I became a teacher in the first place. One of my favorite pictures of my younger brother and me shows us, at nearly one and nearly four, bending our heads together intently over some thing I seem to be showing him how to do. In my weird fantasy world, I'm up to some mischief. In reality, I was probably doing something just as earnest as usual.


When my brother was starting to read, I set out to make him some little readers that would interest him in learning more words and getting basic sentence patterns and grammar under his belt. I sat with my mother's old avocado green electric Smith Corona, the same humming typewriter on which I'd clack and smack out my grad school applications not much more than a decade later, and I tried to type up stories that I could then staple into hot pink construction paper covers. I don't remember whether I ever finished even one of those little books. I know that I had expansive plans, plans to create a whole series, plans to win him over to words. I'm quite, quite good at expansive plans.


Given that today was a major day for students' registering for next fall's courses--our next semester breathing down the back of the rapidly departing current one, everyone fantasizing about what will be different next time, how invigorating it will be to have the summer to get everything back under control, how much more well rested everyone will be when these courses actually begin in four months--and given that the cherry trees bloomed even more today, it's no surprise that I'm meditating on growth. The lingering surprise for me this spring, though, has been the meditation on decay that's followed so fast on the heels of its familiar. I'm watching the tree in front of my house lose more and more petals; I watch from the windows of my kitchen while the petals fall like freakish overgrown flakes of some awful precipitation, and where the flowers' smell last week was heady, this week the browning petals simply smell of inevitable wrong.


One of my friends (who has four feet) is slipping into a struggle that, for now anyway, seems not to be overly painful but is occasioning varying levels of suppressed and not-so-suppressed anxiety and sorrow among those of us who love him--most of all, of course, in those among us who own him. It seems perverse that life should be getting so difficult for him just as it's becoming so profuse all over my daily landscape: everything hard-bitten and monochromatic has suddenly gained a softening coat of green; the leaves are making themselves visible more and more, replacing those tiny eccentric glories of seed pods and flowers I showed you all weekend. And just when the weather has warmed enough to make walking the paths at the local park his owners renamed for him last summer, his breathing has become too unpredictable for much more than the shortest strolls down the street. He might improve. He might not. I know it's a perennially human moment of suspension before an inevitability, but I find myself both solemn and hopeful, all at once. I want to believe that if I hope hard enough, and tell him that I love him enough times, and scratch the insides of his ears with my index finger enough times, a few years will fall away from his frame and we'll have him around longer.


When my parents got married, my grandfather gave my mother two pieces of advice. "Don't go to bed angry," he told her, "and in a fight remember that one of you will eventually need to be quiet." I've mistold this second part a bit, I think. But the first part is the one that's most important for me anyhow, because hearing that piece of advice helped make me receptive to a lesson my parents taught me: that it's essential to tell others how you feel about them whenever you can, lest something should happen to them without their having known how you felt.

Now that I write that lesson out, I realize how complicated and full of somewhat displaced sentiment it is. It seems clear to me now, looking at it in front of me, that the worry about things we never tell those we never see again couldn't ever really be about those other people. That worry must be about the ache left by our not knowing whether those other people knew something we needed to know they knew. In other words, our conception of them needed to include among its multitudinous facets the belief that they held a particular understanding of our feelings about them. And in fact, in recent years I think I've moved toward a similarly complicated way of thinking about why it matters to attempt the impossible process of communicating the ineffable: if something were to happen to me and others didn't know how I felt about them, it might be terrible in some greater or lesser way (depending on the person, depending on the feeling gone unconveyed).

These ideas have worked upon me in different ways over the course of my life. I've already told you the story about how I bade farewell to my classmates when I (always logocentered) left kindergarten for reading classes, and how I wanted to know that they were glad to see me return and had missed me while I was gone. I have a shadowy memory of an occasion sometime in my teens when one of my parents forgot to say good night to me, or (more likely) thought that good night had already been said, leaving me abject, unable to decide whether to knock on their bedroom door or simply to hope against hope that nothing bad would happen overnight. Long processes of saying good night are important to me: when I'm visiting my parents, I have a multi-stage semi-ritual to do, involving going back and forth from my room to theirs with the dog, who's game for pretty much any weird thing we ask of her, and getting many embraces from both parents. It's never really enough. I can never fully shake a lurking worry that four bodies will go to sleep in the house and only three will wake up. It's mostly quiet, brooding to itself in some far corner, not getting in the way of anything much. But it does stay there, quiet and brooding.


I'm feeling a similarly lurking, brooding fear these days about my four-legged friend, my favorite Ohio dog, the one who has thrown his head back in worried jubilation (for he is as big a worrier as I) at my arrivals for a decade now. And so it was with some degree of uncanny self-meeting--a feeling that's getting pretty familiar, these days--that I found this poem at the end of my excellent poet friend's gesture when I stopped by her office for a quick hello before I left the officehouse for the night, gave it over to the evening seminar students, the quiet readers and questing writers, filing in with their coffees and juices after dinner, slipping out into the half-dark for cigarettes at their breaks, working earnestly on the other side of illuminated windows for their three hours (I saw them when I went back later for the book I'd forgotten).


Question

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

-- May Swenson


I'm extraordinarily lucky in that my mournings have mostly been small and bounded thus far. My emotional limbs are all still present; I have not yet had to wonder how the world could possibly, conceivably be so utterly careless. But I feel as though I'm grieving in advance this time, sensing the textures of absence yet to be woven out of events yet to be lived through, and I grieve less for the furry one himself than for those of us who will still be here in the morning, after not all the bodies that went to sleep wake up.

For now, flowers are enough.


Though my tree continues to lay a fine film of itself over the ground below its branches, other trees in town--really notably, the un-weeping cherry trees, including the one whose branch I've run into all winter long--are still putting out first flowers. Trespassing is starting to tempt me. I've taken two flying drives out into the country to see what I can see, over the past few days, and I can imagine the day coming, swiftly on a hundred feet, when I'll want to get up the nerve to knock on a door and say, "Do you mind if I walk in your field?" I think of Annie Dillard, who mentions offhandedly in one book that she has done just such a thing: gone to her neighbors, said, I walk, I write, I'd like to walk your land. Tonight I felt funny enough ambling my car past the cows ruminating and reclining in the fields on either side of a zig-zag bend in the road. But I find myself wanting the time and the space for thoughts that are bigger, a plan and a project, a series of excursions to find the window-shapes on barns, the unexpected blade-shape on new field-growth, the unfathomably large eyes of livestock, and I'm not quite bold enough to try it without permission.

Six is the friendliest number that you'll ever know.


I'm up to writing #141, which seems fitting since I've been tagged by my Detroiter poet mom friend to reveal six quirks or strange things about myself, and one weird thing (this one's your bonus) about myself is that I often like to add up the digits of numbers, to see whether they're divisible by small prime numbers. I am taking up the tag, but I feel funny about tagging others, so I'm not going to do it. I didn't like selling Girl Scout cookies either (that's your other bonus).

Without further ado:

One. I speak to deer and small animals and birds that I see when I'm out walking around. I don't speak to them with any sense that they understand me or that they'll start talking--nothing mystical like that. I just greet them. Tonight, on my way home from school, I saw three fully grown deer eating in a neighbor's yard. Actually, they were probably eating my neighbor's yard. I said hello to them and reassured them that I wouldn't bother them. They didn't run away, though they did get a little skittish and move farther from the road.

Two. For a long time when I was little, I would go through funny phases where I'd hear people's words (ongoing conversations, for instance) being repeated inside my head by a high, thready voice, like an incantation of things yet to be made memorable. I used to wonder whose voice it was, or where it came from. I haven't heard it for a long time, and that's all right with me.

Three. I am fascinated by personality tests, especially when they confirm for me things I already know. I was once caught out by a test that is meant to keep you from faking: it measures not just what you're saying, but also the contexts within which you're saying it. That test really had me pegged.

Four. I have one hell of a sweet tooth. If it has sugar in it, I'll want to eat it. Sometimes I'm embarrassed by the amount of sugar I put in my coffee. Maple sugar candies, black liquorice, dark chocolate (especially with orange or orange flavoring), fruit slices (kosher ones are delicious, and available this time of year), chocolate covered cherries, and bridge mix are all favorites of mine, depending on how my tastes are running any given day. I also love the heels of bread. And if you can give me the heel of a good loaf of white or multigrain bread, spread with butter and then layered with honey (preferably from a honey bear), I will be one of the happiest people around.

Five. I love subways and commuter trains. I love the T, the Tube, the NYC subway, the Metro, SEPTA, BART, the Metra (double-decker cars? my world is rocked), the LIRR. I also love Grand Central Station more than almost any other public building I can think of, anywhere. I'm the girl who knows right where to take you so that you can see the spot they left behind after the restoration, so that everyone could see just how grimed things had gotten by the 1990s, and I'm the girl who will go back there whenever I'm in town and can swing a trip, just to look at the stars in the ceiling.

Six. I have at least one desk (or desk substitute) in every room of my house, except the bathrooms. Total number of desks in my house (counting my dining room table and my kitchen table but not my lap desk): eight. I am also obsessed with blank notebooks. I gather them together whenever I am in a city and can find a stationer's shop. Claire Fontaine, Miquelrius (leather-look, especially), and large-format Moleskine are my favorites, and I cannot abide wide-ruled or even college-ruled paper. Graph paper, five squares to the inch minimum, thick enough to take good ink. Or blank. Those are my requirements. I collect these desks and notebooks because, deep down, I think they'll help me become a writer when I grow up. My newest desk is bright red. I'm sitting at it right now.

If you want to reveal six quirky or weird things about yourself, consider yourself tagged. I'll even loan you my comments section, if you want it (if, for instance, six nascent revelations are threatening combustion but you don't have your own writing space).

The point of it all.

Today, the flowers kept turning out. But their purpose is now becoming more and more clear: they really are only the harbingers, only the first signs, not the things themselves. The leaves are pushing their way in. For my tulip magnolia, their pushing means that the petals were showering all day, even before the rain set in early tonight. I know, from past years, how short the lifespan of magnolia blooms is. And yet it's been a bit heart-aching to see how swiftly the overblowing has set in, how soon the rot--the petals cracking and browning even before they fall to the ground. Once they're on the ground, they get slippery and smell spoiled. And I know that the leaves are their own beauty, but I can't help rueing them just a bit. To watch flowers give way to leaves on tree after tree is to be staggered by the infinite repetition of short-lived loveliness.


Overnight, the dragon moved, and when I walked past his usual haunts this afternoon, I was more dismayed than seemed logical. I have known since December that his tenure in my (far) neighbor's yard is probably limited. And yet he has become such a fixture in that yard that I do not walk past his house without thinking that it is indeed his house or winking a greeting as I pass. I spent the rest of my walk to campus meditating on the all-campus e-mail I could send, demanding that someone return the dragon, even though neither the dragon nor the yard belongs to me. But on the way home, o frabjous day! callooh! callay! I chortled in my joy to see that he wasn't gone; he was merely hiding in a planter.


And this discovery, in turn, helped fortify me for more staring at my swiftly deflowering tree. (If you're wondering just how swift, please bear in mind that when I arrived home a week ago, the buds were just starting to emerge from their fuzzy winter shells. And so documenting the tree this week has become a way to track just how speedily some natural processes move.) See the leaves? They're curling out at the base of every single flower, and they're poking out of the ends even of the flowerless branches. By morning, between the push of leaves and the plash of rain, I expect that most of the petals will have come down.

Then there is a loneliness that roams.


Paul D sits down in the rocking chair and examines the quilt patched in carnival colors. His hands are limp between his knees. There are too many things to feel about this woman. His head hurts. Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the Thirty-Mile Woman. "She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."
If you still haven't read Beloved, you are missing, plain and simple. It is not a story to pass on.

What I think when I say "garden" to myself.

Mark Strand, from The Weather of Words

What a day for flowers we've had here. I'm still discombobulated from a week of long, hard work and small, fast sleep, and so I found myself a bit more wandersome than usual today--enabled, of course, by our high temperatures and clear weather. Whereas yesterday was humid and portentous, today was light and mild, diaphanous even, from start to finish. The tulip magnolia continues to become a different tree with each passing day, and I continue to stand under it snapping images and making my neck hurt and my eyes water. I haven't counted up all the pictures yet, but I must be well on my way to two hundred. Today petals are starting to fall to the ground; tomorrow we're meant to have rainstorms, and depending on how high the winds are, I may lose the better part of my flowers. The tree has been my focal point for understanding how swiftly spring has swept in and made itself discernible to us: as I know I suggested sometime last month, I've been feeling the momentum building for some time now, but this week has brought everything to visible life. And so (my belly still full of farfalle in walnut pesto with shiitake mushrooms, with Italian wine and Loudonvillean bread, with crème brulée and tawny port, my mind still full of our hour's drive home with a slightly waning moon rising over our left shoulders) I struck out into the streets repeatedly to see what I could see, and to meditate on rites of resurrection and on riots of color.

First off, someone has moved the dragon, which has me feeling a little apprehensive for his safety. However, he still looks cheerful about it, and blue and green do suit him. So I will remain vigilant but not paranoid.


On my way home from a film screening that my students and I dutifully conducted even though it was beautiful outside and the film was eminently silly, I continued to admire the diversity of ways our trees regenerate themselves. I'm glad the beautiful flourishes are the ones that somehow made it through evolution's indifference.


And I tell you, this tulip magnolia makes me feel downright pagan.


But some of my really pleasant surprises came as I wandered to the village market (that's what it's called, for serious) for a bottle of wine and then took the shortcut through the woods to get to my friends' house for dinner. For one thing, my neighbor's trees (which you saw back in January, when I wrote about how trees produce new growth) are now in full bloom.


For another, once I had the wine and had seen some tulips, I found not only a star magnolia but also a tree for which I don't have a name but that I think might be a weeping cherry; the latter was in a colleague's yard, and he said he didn't mind if I crossed the little footbridge from the road and photographed it. What I couldn't quite catch in this last image: the vista that will soon be obscured by leafy trees, the view out across our valley to more hills in the distance, and the contrast between that vista and the floaty verticals of the tree's blossoms.

By this time, it was getting on toward sunset ("the golden day is dying beyond the purple hill," sing Hem, "and soon beyond the meadow the silver moon will swing"; you should see our silver moon swinging tonight), and I was getting on toward my friends' Easter eve dinner (all three of us unobservant, religiously, but all three of us marking something, somehow, even if only the mingled deliciousness of lamb and good company and spring-sleepy dogs who love you). And it all kicked my mind back to the happy surprise of poems taped to the wall of the stairwell at work on Thursday, in honor of Mark Strand's visit to campus. Strand has come and gone, but the poems are still there, and I hope they've inaugurated a new tradition. My excellent poet friend (who is responsible for our new word/wallpaper) decided to hang up "A Poet's Alphabet," from The Weather of Words (2000), and it was a terrific choice. Each letter gets a musing that's just long enough to give one pause on the stairs but just short enough to pick up and take along to the second floor, or out the front door if one is heading down and out. "G is for garden" is an excellent one, as is "L is for lake" ("for a body of water, give me a lake, a great lake or even a salt lake, where water can be still, where reflection is possible, where one can kneel at the edge, look down, and see oneself. It is an old story"). But I might like "A" best (click on the image for a larger, readable version):


And finally. Finally. I know I'm throwing it all in tonight, but really, doesn't it feel as though it's about time? This morning, I checked the New York Times on the Web and found that Bill Cunningham's "On the Street" feature for tomorrow was up already. I love "On the Street" more than almost any other thing in the Times. Maybe more than anything, period. When I visit my beloved Brooklynite, I am always not so vaguely embarrassed that I reach for the Sunday Styles section first, when her husband brings up the paper, because I love to see "On the Street" in print. Just in case you don't follow it: every week, Cunningham takes pictures of people and their fashions, out on the streets, usually out on the Manhattan streets but occasionally in Paris. Apparently, he often frequents a single corner and just waits to see who and what will come by, and he often comes up with images that epitomize for me the difference between living in Manhattan and living anywhere else in the world. For this weekend, though, he's done something more outlandishly lovely than anything I've seen from him in my years of flocking to his work as soon as it's available. Behold, and I think you'll see why I loved this one. (And yes, my badass friend, the dog in coat is for you. I mean, not that I created this image. But you know that I would have tried to include a dog in a coat for you.)


source for this last image: The New York Times on the Web fashion & style section, 16 April 2006.

Exquisite comestibles.


After taking yet another unbelievable number of photographs of my tree (despite our intermittently loud and potentially flower-destructive storms), I went an hour northeast from here for dinner at one of my favorite restaurants anywhere.

Suffice it to say that now I am so tired that I have fallen alseep three or four times, just trying to produce this writing. My week has caught up with me, resoundingly, at long last. I want to sketch my dinner for you. Instead, you get an image of this barn that I saw on my way, until I'm awake enough to write again.

I think back through my mother.


A good friend of mine here became a grandfather about three weeks ago. Whenever I see this person, he asks me, "How's your eternal soul, person?" (He has been calling me "person" for thirteen years.) I tell him, and then I ask him how his eternal soul is. When I asked him that two weeks ago, he said, "I'm overjoyed, because Jenny Two Souls has now become Jenny One Soul, and mother and baby are happy and healthy."

Thirty years ago, at 6:03 p.m., Mama Two Souls became Mama One Soul and Baby (now Dr.) S (or Doctor Daughter, as both my birthday card and my beautiful office-delivered flower bouquet proclaimed me). I don't want to minimize my father's role in the process, by any means, but it occurred to me this afternoon that while I've told you how cool my father is, I've never really taken the time to do the same for my mother. And so, since today is also her thirtieth birthday, in a way--since she was born as a mother at the same moment that I was born as a person--this one's for my mom.

I've never asked my mom about the actual moment of my birth--about what it was like for her, I mean. You and I both know the story about how I was born unimpressed and went right back to sleep. And how the doctors said, "About your baby..." and her heart sank and then they told her that I had six left-foot toes and she thought, is that all. And how I came late and reluctant, how she suffered through false labor for a week and had twenty-four hours of my taking my sweet time (probably continuing to sleep, or maybe trying to read one last thing before realizing how late it had gotten). (I'm starting to tell you old stories over again. These must be the ones that really matter to me.) But the feeling of that first separation (and, I imagine, mingled relief and heartbreak and heartsoar and utter fatigue) is hers alone.

I don't remember anything for the first couple of years. But the first thing I do remember is sitting at the piano with my mother, learning to read a Richard Scarry book and mispronouncing the word "boat." In the memory, I keep saying "bo-at" and my mother keeps saying "boat." She never loses her patience.

She did lose her patience with me when I was little. She still loses her patience with me now sometimes, and I with her. This is because we are the same, my mother and I: we are both fast talkers, fast loud laughers, big with our love for the people we care about, big and hot and creative with our anger when those people get hurt. When we're not on the same page, I suspect that neither of us can really understand why that is, or how it could even be possible. How could one of us be so completely wrong? It doesn't happen often: my mother is always right. Except when I am.

I remember getting into the car with my mother after a late-term obstetrician's appointment, when she was pregnant with my brother, and having her ask me what we should name the baby. "Raggedy Ann," I said. I was two. "And if it's a boy?" she said. "Raggedy Andy," I replied. No hesitation there. And Andy it was. (She bowled a 180 the day before he was born and still managed to figure out which day would be the best day for me to come to the hospital to visit her and my new little brother.)

I have been with my mother for more than half her life. One thing I love about her is that she has always let me know that she's liked having me around. I remember when she told me about coming home with my dad, after the doctor's appointment that confirmed she was pregnant. "We just stood in the front hall and hugged and cried," she said. "We were so happy you decided to stick around." Tonight she said, "We're always so glad that you chose us." "I don't think I had a choice," I told her, "but if I had, I'd have chosen you."

Last July, my mother and I hopped a plane to Boston and hung out there for a week. It was a riot, a blast, a silliness and an adventure. Not once (that I know of) did either of us want to hurt or maim the other. We're that kind of pair. And I was so happy that she got to see whales when we went out whale-watching.

I remember sitting with my mom in the house on Fiddler's Green, watching her quilt. I remember being hugely proud of her when she organized her first quilt show in 1982. I remember being maybe even more hugely proud that an image of the two of us--a drawing copied from a photograph--was on that quilt show's program: in it, she works at a hoop, while I stand behind her, my left hand on her shoulder, watching over her right shoulder. She tried to teach me to quilt a couple of times, but I didn't have the patience for it. One night, sometime in the early 1990s, when she was working on a charm quilt (basically, a quilt of trapezoids, a scrap quilt to use up a plethora of fabric she had lying around), I crept downstairs one night and put a row of stitches in, where she'd left her needle for the night. For me, it's painstaking, awkward, clumsy-looking work. For her, it's art: fast, deft, confident, creative, beautiful.

My mother's pride in me has been one of my life's driving forces. I have worked my whole life to pay back the privilege of having been born to this red-headed woman, vibrant and vital like no one else I know. I still hate to disappoint her. She tells me I could never disappoint her. I have never doubted that she loved me. But I always want her to be proud. I always want her to have the best bragging rights.

When I was very small, I would get up early in the morning, when my father was getting ready for work, and I would climb in bed with my mother and we would lie around under the first quilt she made, a grandmother's flower garden bound in yellow that's now on my bed, well-worn. And we would say goodbye to my father, who would sometimes call me Martha, Junior. And then he would leave for work and we would lie around for awhile more. I think that sometimes we slept; I know that sometimes (probably all the time) I chattered.

I could have a two-hour phone conversation with my mother every night of the week.

When I was about four, I tried to get down my mother's bottle of Chanel No. 5 because I thought it smelled beautiful. But in climbing up on her bathroom sink to get it, I somehow managed to break her bottle of Joy, which is the perfume she has always worn, my whole life. And this bottle was new, and all that Joy went down the drain. And she didn't even get mad at me, at least not that I remember.

When Buffalo had its sesquicentennial, my mother took me to the park and we listened to the bells ringing for the celebration and fed stale bread to the happy swarming ducks.

My mother is my family's rock. As my father says, she protects us all.

My mother has an active revenge fantasy life. When someone wrongs any one of the three of us, she hatches the most devious schemes and plots--things one never, ever could or would do or say but that are secretly delicious fun to contemplate.

My mother taught me the meaning of devotion, all those years she drove me all over rural Indiana so that I could keep studying piano with the only Suzuki piano teacher in the area.


When I was little and experimented with biting by biting my mother, she bit me back, and that was that. People were shocked. "I wasn't going to have my child biting me," she said, calmly. My mother does not believe in arguing with little kids, and she did not need me to like her when I was a child. She was right to wager that I'd still love her (and would probably even like her a lot more) later.

When I was getting ready to go to college, my mother decided to make me a quilt. She picked out a pattern of triangles: Red Hot Mama. She finished the quilt on time; it is all reds. Many of you reading have sat on that quilt: it was on my couch in Ithaca. I also took it with me to England when I studied there, because it was that important to me to have one of my mother's quilts with me. When I was getting near the end of my Ph.D., my mother made me another quilt: it was on the back of my couch for the last year or so I was in Ithaca. When I moved to Gambier, she stayed with me for a week and made curtains for all my windows.

My mom and I used to work puzzles together at the round coffee table in our family room. Sometimes, I would hide the last piece, just to be sure I would be the one who finished the puzzle. We both have obsessive enough personalities that we could tear through 1500 piecers pretty swiftly, though we never did them upside down the way some relative of mine used to.

Before my parents had me, they flew out from Detroit to San Francisco with another couple for some early-twenties carousing. They had a picture taken of the four of them in some hotel-top bar. In the picture, my mom is wearing the floor-length figure-following flowered dress with the keyhole front and the nearly fully bare back (the one, the dress I wish she still had so that I could take it, just as I wish she still had the chartreuse leather jacket that I know she wore to the point of its falling apart), and she's sitting on my dad's lap. I always loved that picture. Not until I was in my twenties did I realize that in the picture you can see the shape of my dad's left-hand knuckles under the fabric on her left side, because he's slipped his hand around her ribcage, through the back of her dress. Knowing that has made me love the picture even more, because I love thinking of her being desired so much and loved so fondly.

There's a reason that some of my earliest words were "Pretty mama."

I look at those pictures of my mom from the 1970s, and I see a woman so young and so lively and so wicked-witted, with her wavy hair and her plastic glasses and her huge grin. I look at the sharp line of her jaw, the rise of her chin, the point of her nose, the flash in her eye that says, "I dare you."

I look at those pictures and I see myself, as in a mirror. Sometimes the resemblance is so clear that it's uncanny. And I am so grateful.

Happy birthday, mother of mine.

More of April's consolations.



This month really is the cruellest this year: I feel as though I'm on a rollercoaster with someone half-awake at the controls, and that someone is me and the coaster just keeps plunging down, and I just keep gritting and going and drowsing and doing. More and more, I'm grateful for the quiet noise of intense color in those Ottawan galleries. But look: today, magnolia and hyacinth and daffodils and treebuds, clamoring for notice, elbowing each other out of the way to get in line for the pictures, and the scent on the streets of the village is something I would put in this writing if I could. Six p.m. found me crouching beside flower beds, then coming home to be bowled over all over again by my tree. I must have taken sixty pictures of the tree alone. Not a single one is a particularly good picture, and yet they all look beautiful to me.

Within days I may be able to write lengthily again. For now, I give myself flowers on the last night of my life as a twentysomething, and I give myself the scent of the street and the lawn and the fallen petals after our freak flash-through thunderstorm, and you can share them, if you'd like, because I'm friendly like that, always did know how to play well with others, once I got over the initial awkward shyness.