With my new shredder, I have cleaned out two huge file cabinet drawers' worth of old paperwork. Three bags are out at the curb already; another is half-full in the machine. All this grinding up has only made me remember more clearly all the mess those papers reveal.
More mess, more revelation: I am packing so early because it's easier to pack than to do my work. Nothing for it but to do better tomorrow, strange though it seems to ration one's preparations to move.
Ach: when I wrote last night that I felt today would be a day I'd be "on," I forgot that crucial maxim: be careful what you wish for. First things were fine; then they weren't. They weren't not-fine in any kind of horrific way, just in the slow grind of useless annoyance, the sources of which are largely under control (at least to the extent that they can be).
Though, to be sure, I want to give you every detail of the things that went awry today, there's just no need to go through it all again. Instead, I will say that today was one of those days that made me want a macro lens--for all this greenness, for all these small things.
As suddenly as they arrived, the multitudes who were here for reunion weekend vanished today. With the weather so cool and threatening rain, there was only one thing to do after I'd finished with the Brownings, after the last person had left, while the peonies keep blooming over and saturating the kitchen: slip into the bath with my Michael Chabon novel, then pad back downstairs to the porch to curl up under a throw and read myself to sleep in a wicker chair.
It's yet another day for recharging, one of those days when I putter and reset myself, sensing that tomorrow will be a day for being on. It's also been yet another day when I feel my time in this house growing acutely short: where else do the trees make quite this sound while I nap? Where else would I have an artificial moon just over my porch each night, making the front maples green and translucent in the near-dark? Where else will I find so many places to hear the rain's hiss and hit?
On the other hand, as I packed four more boxes, I realize just how much my study and all its books have come to smell like a basement, here in this damp, shady spot. And so it is that everything continues to be a trade-off: a changing in of comfort for vaster possibility, a striving to keep that curl, that little flourish of grace, now that it's time to find the new latching spot.
The middle of the day grew so fat and hot that it shuddered and broke right open, became a wet greenness, leaves silvered over and dripping. My dirty secret is that I was happier at the screendoor, bracing my hands against my back and watching the rain pound the magnolia tree, than I'd been all day. The broken-open middle of the day was cool and quiet. I framed possible pictures but did not take them. I pulled the extension cord onto the porch, cleared the past year's dirt from the top of a bookshelf out there, plugged in a lamp, and curled in the wicker chair, cardiganed against the damp, to read my way closer to the end of the Brownings' love letters. I've reached September 1846: they've sneaked Elizabeth Barrett out of her father's house and gotten married now; all that's left for them to do is finish planning and run away to the continent, to live their Italian love affair.
But back in July 1846, E.B.B. has written to Browning, "Don't let me slide out of your mind through this rift in the rock. I catch at the jutting stones."
A weekend like this one weighs hard. A weekend like this one leaves me rifting, feeling for stones that no longer jut, finding buds that will always be this highly scented, this tautly closed.
Back in 2001, my Ohioan/Iowan/Ohioan friend came to visit me in Ithaca, and we finally figured out how to watch movies. She and I have never been on the same sleep schedule. In college, we would talk at 10:30 p.m. or so, and I would watch her face close down for the night one feature at a time: mouth slackening just a bit, eyes glazing over lightly. Finally I would ask her if she was paying attention anymore, and she would respond that she was going to sleep, and I would go back down the hall and get back to work. One morning, she turned up in my room at 4:30, having been awakened by a nightmare. I was embroiled in a nightmare of my own, trying to finish writing a paper, and she had guessed rightly that she would find me still awake. Some mornings we would run into each other as she was getting up and I was going to bed.
During overnight visits, this had always meant that we couldn't watch movies together because she would fall asleep in the evenings. But during that one visit, we realized that if we just watched movies in the morning, we'd be fine. So, each morning we got up and watched one of the movies we'd rented; at some point, we'd pause and cook ourselves some multi-grain hot cereal and then watch again. Some mornings, she'd go back to sleep afterwards, and I'd read.
This morning I realized that if I write here in the morning, I'm not going to fall asleep over my computer, and this change may need to happen for the next few days at least.
The move from Ithaca to Rochester in 2003 turned nightmarish and unpleasantly hallucinatory by the time it was all over. I'm trying to prevent that on this go-round. My hope all through the spring had been that if I needed to vacate my house, I'd do so in July so that it wouldn't run into the summer teaching I do. But some unfortunateness led me to change my mind--which I think will be for the very best, not least because when the summer teaching is over, I'll be able to get back to reading and writing without the distraction of moving thrown in for fun.
But the almost-good thing about the Ithaca-Rochester move, I can now recognize, was that its speed didn't leave me time to linger and grow thoughtful over anything I was moving. (Of course this was only an almost-good thing, as it meant that I moved some junk I didn't need or even want.) Now, on the other hand, I can go more slowly through bookshelves and, later, drawers and old boxes, realizing how many things have lain dormant for years now. I also feel a growing desire to squirrel things away--to stash stuff where, possibly, no one will see it until I come home again.
For now, I'm focusing on the logistical challenge of packing and then distributing my boxes of books. This task is the one with which I began the exodus from Ithaca, too: the morning after I'd turned in my dissertation and taken the evening off for celebrating and for trying to catch up on sleep, I blitzed my study, looking for all 200 of the library books I'd checked out during my dissertation. I filled my trunk and my backseat with boxes and with my furniture dolly, and a friend and I ferried huge boxes of books into the graduate library. It was an August Saturday, dark with an impending storm, and no one was anywhere: it was the day after the August degree deadline, and we still had two weeks before the next semester would begin. And yet the circulation worker still looked at me skeptically when I told him I thought I was going to need my own cart for everything I was about to return. Finally he rolled one out to us. About fifteen minutes later, it was full and we were on our way again.
Nothing quite that dramatic is happening here, but I am remembering what it was like to try and locate books I might need during the Rochester year--after I'd packed everything indiscriminately. And so I'm trying to separate the books I want to have in the officehouse when I return from the books that are going into deep storage, maybe for a few years. And what the process is triggering in me is a high-octane version of what happens to me in bookstores: I see books I have wanted to read, and I have to have them, because I have to read them. Never mind that I know better: I know--rationally, anyway--that buying books does not create the time or the brainspace for reading said books. I build my library, and I feel just that little bit closer to having read what's in it.
On this packing excursion, I find myself thinking, "Oh, I can't pack that. Not yet, anyway." And so three shelves get cleared but another gets filled with the things that can't get cleared--things that, so far, tend to be either books directly related to my research (check!) or schlocky sensation fiction from the 1860s and 70s (double-check!) or prose works by poets meditating on writing and life.
When I moved out of the house in Rochester, I hired professional movers for the first time. As they carted out box after box of books--we're talking two tons of books, and this was three years ago--one of the guys hauling my stuff around realized that I'd moved it all down into the first floor of the house. "Do you work out?" he said. "How did you do that?" As I start lugging boxes containing 40, 50, even 60 books, conveying them from room to room or from building to building, I know at least part of the answer: it's not that I was so super-strong (though I was stronger then than I am now). It's that these are my books, and when you're in love you do what you need to do.
One of my students pointed out yesterday that there's something fitting about the idea of my things' being stashed all over Gambier while I'm gone. "I think it's good," she wrote. "Think about it as leaving a piece--or a few pieces [or a few thousand pieces, I thought to myself]--of you with the people and places that will miss you as much as you will miss them." Now, that's a good way of thinking about it, for which I'm thankful to her. I very much like the idea that I'm literally putting down (book-)roots before I jet out of here.
At the end of June, I will have moved out of my current home, and my things will have gone into basements, others' closets, the officehouse's various nooks. Thus, remembering well how awful it was (even with the more than capable help of many friends) to pack everything in only a couple of days, I've begun Project Exodus already. I sort through books and papers, box up what's ready now, try to consolidate what won't be ready for a little while. It's a process that manages to stir up a lot, both physically and emotionally; it's been taking it out on me every night this week. I'm not planning to pull this perpetual deferral trick on you for much longer. I promise.
My books are going into storage, 150 or so at a time, which means I'm postponing a more thoughtful writing yet again. For now, I must rest my biceps and my heart.
But right this minute, I am exhausted again. May the Newest Lexingtonian's wee hand tide you over to the morning.
I have more to say on the topic my title lays out, but I am tired out from having been on the road half the day so that I could spend the other half with my families, biological and otherwise. See, it hit me again, on my way up I-71 by the light of a sun that was setting fat and red over my left shoulder, on my way to spend the night at my flaming-sworded friend's house, how much my life has grown to incorporate an enormous extended family that has replaced the extended biological family to whom we don't speak. I thought about this on mother's day, when I called my mother (who will always be my only mother) first, then called my excellent friend and e-mailed my dissertation director--two women who did immense amounts to help me grow into myself. I thought about it when my Lexingtonian friend called me Auntie S. while introducing me to the Newest Lexingtonian (whose fingers and toes you can espy above). I'm thinking about it much more now and will undoubtedly be writing about it much more, as well, but not yet--not until I'm awake enough to do it justice.
Just over thirteen years ago, a professor I hadn't met yet posted a course description that sounded wonderful to me. It was for a course in late-eighteenth-century literature, with particular attention to travel. I was just learning Elizabeth Bishop's poems "The Map" and "Questions of Travel," and I remember clearly the evening I sat down at a vax terminal and wrote an e-mail message requesting permission to join her course. I know that I talked about having read Bishop; I may even have quoted a line or two--"Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today?" Fortunately, she e-mailed right back and welcomed me to take the course. It was a second semester course, about which I was writing to her in April, a good nine months before it was due to begin. And that e-mail exchange launched a friendship that is one of the longest and most consistent in my life.
You know this professor as my excellent friend, the person who feeds me excellent Indian food on Friday nights and then only teases me a little bit when I fall asleep on her couch (which I haven't done in quite awhile, I might add). I know her as the person who helped me learn to like dogs, because of her ferocious attachment to her furry boys. I know her as the person who always has a completely hip book or music or clothing recommendation; I have tried so hard, sometimes without even knowing it, to become as cool as she is, and yet she still almost always has the coolest new things first--not least because she kindles such affection and loyalty in her students that they scavenge for coolness and bring it to her, and I'll admit that they're generally more cutting-edge than I am, these days. In some ways, anyhow.
My excellent friend let me sleep in her guest room whenever I needed it while I was slogging through grad school and my dissertation. In fact, she helped me figure out where I was going to go to grad school; the place I ultimately ended up going was her idea, back when we were discussing where I should apply. She has weathered all kinds of crap with me. She is consistently level-headed and generous and honest with me--and with everyone who's lucky enough to come into her orbit. And we are in her orbit: she anchors more people than any of us knows, I think, because she is so stalwart and strong and self-sacrificing in ways that she may not even realize.
The year we all lived in England, while she directed my college's study-abroad program, she used to take us on trips in the little Ford Fiesta she and her husband bought. It had a rusty bottom; just before one trip, it tried to refuse to start. She called AA and got it up and running, and we puttered off into the countryside. She drove us to Wales; she drove us to the south coast in search of an image we'd seen in a book; she drove us to a wonderful inn unreachable without a car. Last week, my mother was remembering another favor she did for me that year: telling me, when I teetered on the brink of massive whinging about being fatigued and worried about work, "Go buy yourself a cup of coffee and a chocolate bar and get back to work. You can rest next week." It was that simple. She can see her way to the core of things like that, and she knows how to tell people--especially touchy smart young people--to stop making simple things more complicated than they need to be. And thus she's the professor students make mix CDs for, hoping that she'll ratify the ways they hope they're cool. She's the professor students end up coming back to town to visit, year after year.
My excellent friend has just finished having a birthday today, and I hope she did something that made her happy. (For my part, I have acquired Props that we will use to celebrate when I return to Gambier.) I hope this because she deserves to be happy. She has helped so many people grow up healthy and strange and creative and productive and able to investigate and reshape their lives as necessary.
And none of this gives you a sense of how much fun she is, especially when dancing in her kitchen, especially when growling at her dog, especially when shopping for shoes and capes, especially when playing ping pong. And none of this gives you a sense of how much I love and value her. She is truly excellent.
What better way to tell you about today than with a recipe? Only 3/5 of my family (counting the dog and me) will eat the end product. [Though my beautiful mother said to me on Sunday morning: you know, you could put a picture of the pie up, even though you've started eating it. So I know she likes looking at it, even if she doesn't like to eat it.] But oh is it worth the work.
Did I mention that I'm Back Home Again in Indiana, though not particularly because of tomorrow's race? We only eat the best snack foods here: homemade sangria, homemade guacamole, homemade key lime pie, and homemade...
Rhubarb Pie
crust: 2 1/2 cups flour, 1 tsp. sugar, 1 tsp. salt, 2 sticks butter, about 1/3 cup water
Mix together the dry ingredients in a large-ish bowl. Cut the butter into 1/4" thick pieces and break into dry mixture. Using a pastry blender (looks like this, if you don't own one already), cut the fat into the flour. Basically, what this means is that you should just keep pushing the pastry blender straight down into the bowl, using its little arms to cut the butter into smaller and smaller pieces and mix it with the dry ingredients. Eventually, the lumps will be mostly gone, but not all gone. When you get to that point, drizzle about 1/3 c. of water over this mixture and then toss it through the flour/butter mixture with your fingers. Don't knead the dough, and don't push it very hard. Just try to get the water worked all the way into the flour/butter mixture. If the dough starts to come together with only that much water, great. If not, add a little bit more water and toss it together some more. The dough doesn't have to be perfectly smooth at this point. But it should hang together when you split it into two evenly sized balls and wrap it in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge.
Then you can turn to your filling. If you're trying to save time, as I was doing today, you can mix the filling first, and by the time you're done putting the crust together, the oven will be warmed up and the filling will have sat for the proper amount of time.
filling: 2 lbs. rhubarb (try for the slimmest stalks--the ones about the size of your finger), 1 1/4 cups sugar, 4 tbsp. cornstarch, zest of one orange (zesters are wonderful tools; turns out I've been using mine upside-down all these years), tiny dash of salt
Cut the ends off of the rhubarb (and wash it). Cut the rhubarb into 1" chunks. Put them in a bowl and mix in all the other ingredients. Let stand for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.
(See how easy that is? It's so easy that while you're doing it, you can be telling your companions stories about people they've met but haven't seen for awhile.)
Your oven should be preheating to 425 F while this is all going on.
Rolling dough? It's not that hard. Make sure you have a large surface you can clean off and cover with flour. Flour your rolling pin. Shape the dough into a fat disk. Here's the fun part: each time you roll the pin over the dough going in one direction, be sure to roll it over the dough in the opposite direction, too. (Here's a diagram that shows you vaguely what I mean.) You don't need to be overly finicky about alternating directions, and sometimes the dough will seem to have a mind of its own. Just be sure you're rolling the dough evenly in all directions--rather than thinning it out in one way but leaving it thick in another.
If something goes wrong, ball the dough up and try again. You can also repair tears in the dough: dab a little water on the dough and stick its torn self back together. Be patient and feel your way with the dough. This is one of the very good parts, even when it goes wrong.
Once you have a bottom crust rolled out, fold it in half and transfer it to a 9" pie dish, where you'll unfold it. Put the rhubarb filling into the bottom crust. Roll out the top crust. Using a pastry brush or your fingers, wet the top of the bottom crust so that you can seal the top crust to it. Now, it's a little hard to explain to someone in words how to finish a crust--and not just because there are so many ways one can choose to finish a crust off. For instance, you can trim both the top and bottom crusts pretty close to the pie pan and then crimp them with a fork. Or you can trim them but then put a fancy crust braid all along the edge of the pie. Or you can do what I do, which is basically to gather up all the dough that's inevitably hanging over the edge of a pie--and make a bit, fat, rolled-over-onto-itself crust. Whatever you do, it will be fine as long as you've remembered to wet the bottom crust with water and seal the top crust to it by pressing them together before starting your finishing work.
Lightly beat an egg white with a fork and brush it over the top of the pie. Sprinkle about 2 tsp. of sugar over the pie. Poke the pie with a fork to create steam vents.
Now, bake that pie for about 30 minutes at 425 F. Then, reduce the temperature to 350 F, and consider getting some foil or a baking sheet under that pie dish in case the pie decides to let loose. Bake the pie at 350 F for about 30 minutes.
And that's your pie. This one is mighty tasty with vanilla ice cream. It also makes a fabulous breakfast once it's a leftover, which my pie now is.
Source of tonight's pie-rolling diagram: Gramma's Pie Recipes. The Joy of Cooking has an even better one.
The new baby's horoscope for today:
Think of your life as a good book. Sometimes there are twists and turns you didn't see coming, but when you think about it, you realize they were pretty much inevitable. All your hard work has prepared you for this.And yet yesterday's, for her actual birthday, is hilariously strange:
Why not ask someone else what they would do in your position? It's even more helpful if your reaction to their comments is, "Why on earth would you do that?" Now you know exactly what you wouldn't do. That's a start.And my (Taurian) Lexingtonian friend's horoscope for yesterday:
A change of setting could be just the thing to give you new inspiration that spills over into other areas of your life. Even a small step in that direction could spark a major sense of renewal. What have you got to lose?And today:
When you love something or someone, you have to give them a little leeway -- or they'll eventually take it. As much as you'd like to keep them close at hand at all times, it's just not possible or healthy. Lighten up.She has indeed lightened up, considerably, for the benefit of all parties. Everyone is healthy and happy. Such, such grace.
All day today, these buds were tight and sunsoaked, as ready as they'd ever be. And now? Welcome. Welcome.
[A follow-up for Friday morning: by the time I wrote last night, I was so exhausted that I fell asleep over the computer for quite some time. But of course what happened is that the baby was born swiftly and healthily in Kentucky. She is lovely, and her mother and father look lovelier holding her than they did before--something I wouldn't have thought possible.]
This afternoon, outside the officehouse, a goldfinch burst out of nowhere, detached itself from all the other brightness bursts happening all around us, pushing us into the 90s for the first time this year. It burst out of the blue, as they say, only today our blue was turning white, on its way to haze. The goldfinch burst out and lit upon a branch outside the office, and I knew that the only thing for it--for it all, really--was to put the rest of the afternoon aside and visit my beloved classicist and his brilliant artist-wife, who is experimenting with methods of making monotypes. Monotypes? I said. Let's see them. And so we three trooped out to her studio and I re-learned her system of figuring out what combinations of inks will make what colors, even before she makes prints. And I relearned why these two people are so crucial in my life. Think forward: this is what everyone has counseled, and I hear them and have started, slowly but surely, to redistribute my things.
And let's just say that once I've taken up my visiting fellow post (which is only a temporary relocation), I'm looking forward to being able to borrow this item when I want, as they say, "to get away from it all." Perhaps in a year I will be able to write O punter of my heart--and have it be a positive thing for a change. I suspect that stranger things have happened.
Soon, deo volante, a baby will be born in Lexington. Please think some extra strength in that direction--if, you know, you do that kind of thing.
Tonight I have made myself a cup of ginger tea and brought it to bed with me. Two floors below me, my laundry spins and spins in the dryer.
Tonight my bedside lamp has decided that its switch will no longer work. Thank goodness for the lamp on the other side of the bed.
Tonight part of me wants to write about rancor and frustration. But the better part of me wants to write about settling down, about quieting. My passport wings its way toward Chicago, along with my old passport (issued just before my nineteenth birthday) and bank statements and pay stubs--all documentation of the fact that I can support myself during a year in England and thus should be issued an Academic Visitor for More Than Six Months visa. Completing and mailing my application was one of the day's highlights, though not nearly as high as dining with my flaming-sworded friend and her excellent mother.
Some nights are just harder than others. Tonight I talked out my anger about a mid-evening confrontation, talked it out until it started to become energy, took that energy out to the garage and got the garbage to the curb, brought that energy back in to handle the laundry. Tonight I might have gone walking to the prairie again, had I not been waylaid.
But even later tonight, I am calming, calming, thinking of the prairie last night: the new grass, the old thorns, the interwoven rise of green covering the burnt-over soil. Tonight I am suddenly so drowsy that to write about calming brings on sleep itself.
The river will at first look brown, smell brackish. It will be a thing of summer itself, though the temperatures are low. The surface will pucker where kissed, shiver out ripple after ripple into the silvered spaces between the imaged banks. Then, in the branches of the reflected trees, a fat flip of silver, and another. And the river, though still brown, will turn to a sky of flickering fish, evening-slow and late-spring-gleeful. Even the brown will come to life: a catfish will skulk out of camouflage, lurk over the sand and shadow, show himself the leader of others, fat and grey-brown, bellying over the bottom, pushing against the current in a long strange line.
It will be there at the edge of a bridge that is hanging over an inverted world. It will be living where least expected. It will be the weary eye's evening meal, the cynic's flat rebuke.
The bright fish will flash their sides until no light is left.
"What do professors do during vacations?" a classroom of my students once asked me. "We get put back on our hangers and hung up in our closets," I told them. They waited patiently for the bad joke to end and the truth to be doled out. "We do pretty much the same things you do," I finally said.
On the day after graduation, that means: sleeping late. Talking on the phone. Driving to the city. Picking up friends at the dance studio. Eating too much at the Italian restaurant. Seeing a great new movie. Eating unusually flavored wonderful ice cream. Laughing hard over said ice cream at a sidewalk table. Driving home in the dark.
And now, going to bed early.
I sprinted all the way anyhow. It's what I do.
From my front lawn, I could see tonight's commencement-eve fireworks. A tree was in the way, but I didn't mind.
At the end of my review process this year, I was reminded gently that a career is a marathon, not a sprint. Commencement weekend: same thing. Three formal events today, three more tomorrow, and then the village will suddenly be largely vacant once more. Ka-boom indeed. I'm ready for sleep, and it's well before my usual bedtime.
Graduation weekend is upon us here in Gambier, and so my thoughts have turned in yet another way to beginnings, to the great pleasures of nurture that works, to the joys of small things' growing. Coming home from a reception, I started chasing a lovely view through the backroads near the village. I wanted the biggest sky possible for you, wanted to get the most variegated clouds in all their harmless drama. By the time I reached vistas, though, I was distracted by new plants: the corn started shooting up this week, curving and cutting green rows through our fields.
(Evenings like this, I wish you were here to drive the car while I photograph. Had I not been driving, I might have thought to change to my good lens. Or you might even have reminded me, and I might not even have bristled at the suggestion, because you would be gracious about it.)
But suddenly there were cows. And not just cows, but also frolicsome calves. And who can think about lenses when one is watching calves scamper and lope? And double back to pounce and ram each other in their play?
If you've never driven or walked in farming country, you may not know how attentive cows are to passersby. They will stare right at you:
Sometimes they will even get up and walk away simply because you're staring at them:
Sometimes they will stare and then turn away, acting like relatives who are vaguely embarrassed that you've turned up again despite their best efforts to freeze you out. (But when they look straight at you, oh, their hairdos. You will be so taken with them that you will compose only clumsy images that barely document what kept you in the road trying to greet the cows, what made you bid them farewell as you turned to drive away. The loose, over-wide roll of the eyes. The sideways movings of the jaws. The swatting tails.)
In the north of England one summer, I lived for two weeks at a university that bordered a farm. In the evenings, I would walk out across the university grounds and stand by the fence between the cricket lawn and the pasture where cows and sheep grazed together. On my penultimate night at the university, I wandered down to the fence without my camera. All the cows were far away in the field, feeding. One looked up and saw me standing by the fence, and soon they were all wandering my way. They jostled each other for position on the other side of the fence, one by one, until twenty-eight were facing me, pushing each other, sometimes trying to step up over one another, all staring with their great fluid eyes. There were no sounds but the hard grind of their teeth and their fast, steaming snorts. I could barely tear myself away. I could barely keep from reaching out to stroke their noses. They shifted and stared, pushed at one another without taking their eyes at me. They lined up one nose after another, two eyes at a time, stamped the ground. We all stared for a long, long time before I could pull myself away.
Days earlier, a cow had played a game with me for half an hour, approaching when I turned my back, then scampering away as soon as I turned toward her and took even two steps her way with my camera. I would turn and pretend to be watching birds; turning around again, I'd find her ten feet nearer to me than she'd been when last I looked. At one of these turns, I managed to photograph her breaking into a gallop away from me. I hadn't known full-grown cows could move so lightly.
Tonight, the cows I could not see mooed and mooed, while the cows staring at me just stared.
What I love about watching cows before they figure out I'm watching--cows in their off-hours, as it were--is the way they tend to one another. They are not delicate animals, in either their movements or their affections. Nor are they harsh. They're just direct: they will nose one another in the flanks, hit heads about the ears, push each other where and when pushing is required. They are solidly companionable, and that is its own great grace.
