Three Wishes for International Women's Day

I wish "women's issues" would become human issues. I'm tired of women being blamed for rape. I'm tired of women being blamed when contraception fails. I'm really, really angry about the sexual abuse of children. I'd like to see men and boys better educated on their responsiblities (and their rights).

I wish there were more positive role models for girls in the media. I'm tired of identifying with male characters, or with no characters at all, because female characters are flat, stereotyped, or non-existent. I am horrified at the pornification of nearly everything just to make a few bucks.

I wish my liberal, progressive brethern would examine their participation in and support of sexism. I've thought this long before last week's Ann Coulter bashing. The other night my boyfriend declared himself a feminist. Yet, when I was upset about being harassed on the street, his response was, "Well, you are a good looking woman," and excused the harassers. I'm tired of "boys will boys" excuses and "why can't you take a joke?" and "oh, I would never say that about you, honey." The fact that K. honestly, unironically applied the term "feminist" to himself is a glimmer of hope in what for me looks like a bleak landscape. I'd like more men to declare themselves feminists, and then actually walk the walk and talk the talk.

These are only three wishes. I have a lot more. They get complicated, though, and I haven't had time to hash them all out. It's taken me an hour just to get this. Some dinner would probably help...

Yule

“It’s the first day of winter,” my coworker moaned, dragging herself around like Chopin’s funeral dirge. “Such a long way to go ‘til spring.”

Interesting, how disconnected we moderns are, flooded with fluorescent light and weather porn over every forecast of snow, that many of us don’t know that this is the day the light begins to return. I point out to my coworker that the days start to get longer after the solstice as the sun swings north in the sky. She seems to find some relief in that, or maybe the peppermint Edy’s ice cream had the comforting effect.

On the way home, I stop at the market to check out the wreaths and garlands. Balsam, pine, and fir, I love them all, but cannot justify spending money on their organically-grown, fresh-cut, trucked-in-from-the-Upper-Peninsula prices. I breathe deeply of my favorite scents and buy some beef medallions instead.

At home, cold rain blows into my eyes as I clip a bough of holly to bring inside to deck my hall. The cat pokes her head out of the door as soon as I open it. The smell of my two-foot Fraser fir Christmas tree hangs faintly in the air. I set the holly on the cabinet and spoon out some special food for Sylvie. I watch her eat her treat with the swelling in the heart that an Italian grandmother must feel when she serves her signature bolognese.

The little steaks are delicious broiled with cracked pepper and minced garlic and with a side of asparagus tips, washed down with a brown ale of the “winter warmer” variety.

I wish I had someone here to share it with. I make my own meaning for my life, but it’s damned hard to do it alone all the time.

I open the small, mailable gifts from my far-flung friends. Soft gray cashmere socks with a blue snowflake pattern. Some incredibly good-smelling Finnish sauna soap. Bars of dark chocolate, fancy paper clips twisted into the shapes of birds, a disposable fountain pen. A card from Ozzie Paul in Sydney, who writes, “Spare a thought for those of us having to bear the long summer days.” I plug in the lights and arrange the gifts at the base of the tree around the beautiful sandhill crane book from D. & B.

The gifts are nice. I wish some of the friends would let me feed them more often.

Earlier Farm Boy told me solstice celebrations are “just as silly and mythological as the rest.” I told him I rather preferred some of the pagan holidays. He asked why. I responded that solstice is an actual, observable phenomenon, something to let us humans mark the passage of time. “Until the earth’s poles move again,” he said.

I suppose I need the silly and the mythological. I don’t have the fortitude to not believe in anything.

I light a couple of spruce-scented candles. I stare out between the slats of the blinds for a while, watching the rain come down harder, wondering if I chose this loneliness or if it somehow happened when I wasn’t looking.

Traveling with Everybody Else this Weekend

Be thankful.

A Thousand Cranes

The colored papers fluttered about like trapped birds. The raw wind and naked trees kept the real birds from venturing out from nearby deeper woods. One of the iridescent paper cranes reflected the scudding gray clouds, the twitching branches and waving dead grass, splintered images like shattered glass. I felt like my bones were stitched to the outside of my skin.

There was no grave stone yet, just a brass marker with his names and dates on it, cold and square. We all looked at each others' shoes, chilled by a force that might tear us asunder if we looked at each others' eyes. I pushed a dowel down into the soil, careful not to loosen any of the long strands of origami cranes tied around the top.

I stepped back and watched as they strained against the twine, as tethered as souls to earthbound bodies.

:(

To top off my many other issues, the wren box I hung in the viburnum has disappeared.

Epiphany

My heart felt pinched and dry today.

My eyes wanted to close and sleep sleep sleep, yet my nerves were trying to crawl out of my skin. I’ve got work trouble, home trouble, man trouble, want-to-go-to-Whitefish-Point-and-probably-can’t trouble.

My heart couldn’t pull anything more out of itself to keep going and started to build a wall of its own dry red dust so maybe it would never have to go out again.

Please, can we just stay in tonight?

Then, while opening a can of chicken to make tacos for dinner, a gentle spark sent all my heart wall dust crumbling to the carpet:

I am part of the universe.

The only time my heart runs dry is when I forget that.

Uncertainty

As P. so rightly says, “You never know what you’re going to wake up to in the morning.”

This morning, it was much less snow than was hyperactively predicted. I admit I was hoping for the five to seven inches of sleet and snow and a subsequent cancellation of my Satuday morning class. When I woke at 7:00 am and heard cars whooshing down the street, I knew the pavement was just wet and that the storm had not occurred.

There’s also a For-Sale sign in the front yard.

I knew in advance that the sign was going up. Still, it made my heart sink a little to see it there between the walk and the drive. The downstairs apartment has been empty for almost a month and the landlady has decided to try to sell the house. She has asked that any new owners give me 60 days notice of any changes to my lease agreement (or if they want to convert the house back into a single-family home), but I don’t know how much legal water that holds.

I really wasn’t planning on moving this year. I would be sad to have to leave this place, with its odd angles, tall windows, big bathtub, and garden out back. I would be really extra sad if I had to leave Chelsea. But nothing’s happened yet, and I can handle a move if I needed to go. I just hope I get to see the hundred bulbs P. and I planted in October bloom this spring.

I Miss My Brother

On this day, the day of my 100th blog post, I am thinking forward to Christmas shopping, prompted perhaps by retailers cramming it down our throats and a radio station already playing carols.

Honestly, I don't know if I can take 55 days of Andy Williams...but I digress.

My grandmother is really the only family member I enjoy shopping for any more. My mother says my grandmother is hard to buy for, but I don't think so. She's interested in her garden and the animals in the yard and in puttering around the kitchen, and she enjoys kitschy home and garden stuff. It's the other family members who are difficult to buy gifts for. Mom buys all her own Rosamund Pilcher and John Grisham books before anyone else even knows they're out. Dad doesn't fish or golf as much as he used to, and then again, he has everything already. My sister puts together wish lists of Chanel perfumes, pashmina sweaters, $40 tweezers, and cosmetic surgery, but I usually just get her a basket from The Body Shop.

The gifts I wind up giving seem generic and impersonal. I mean, I could do a $25 basket from The Body Shop for a Secret Santa operation.

Now my brother was the one who was fun to shop for. He was so much more engaged with the world and appreciated the weird, wild, and wonderful. When he experimented with Asian cooking, I special-ordered a rice steamer and some Chinese straw sandals. When he developed an interest in heirloom vegetables and seed preservation, I got him a do-it-yourself seed collection kit.

Last Christmas I found the seed kit, unopened, under the bed in what is now the guest room. My heart flinched - he didn't like it? Then I remembered that that particular Christmas was a month before he died, that he didn't live to collect any seeds, and that was why he didn't use it.

I slid it back under the bed.

This year, I want to get him this carnivorous plant terrarium. No one else in the family would think it's cool the way he would. The way I do. I've lost my ally, the other family member who thought like do, the one I could sit at the holiday table with and whisper snarky remarks to about the others.

I know the Salvation Army gets a lot of crappy toys from the dollar stores as donations. This year they're going to get a couple of carnivorous plant terrariums.

Not Much to Say

I’ve had some time off this weekend, to give myself an opportunity to de-stress, rest up, and get prepared for the busy months ahead, and to work on a couple of essays I’ve started.

I haven’t done any of that. My time’s been spent cycling through my bookmarks of news sites and blogs and sitting outside in the sun reading The End of Faith and The Geese of Beaver Bog.

I’ve been too distracted and restless to do much else. My jotted-down topics for lighthearted blog posts - a dream in which I was bald, a rant against drivers who don’t pull up far enough to let the car behind them reach the drive-thru window, my nominations for worst copy writing ever - seem woefully inappropriate. Anything I have to say about the Gulf Coast reduced to a third world country, or our preznit set to repeal the entire 20th century once he shoves his Supreme Court nominations through, is already being said, and said better, on other blogs. I really have nothing new to add. I’d just be another toad in the the chorus.

So I’ve procrastinated, and now I’ve got to do all my reading for class and everything else today. Someday I’ll get around to renewing my membership in the Two-Headed Turtle Society.

I’m not even back at work yet, and I’m already looking forward to my next break, the fall Point Pelee birding/camping trip. Actually, there was quite a lot of bird chatter this morning. With the air conditioning finally off and the windows open, the morning discourse is audible once more. A Carolina wren sang loudly while his mate churred back to him. Goldfinches burbled and the merry band of resident chickadees (who have already made short work of the sunflower in the garden) called incessantly. Earlier the bluejays noisily faced off with a squirrel; now they’re making their squeaky hinge calls. Some geese flew over, honking. I think I heard sandhill cranes croaking in the distance. But then again, sometimes I want to hear cranes so badly that I think I occasionally hallucinate them.

Hey Jimmy Carter

W. might want to borrow your sweater.

Update 4:20 - Yahoo! News done went and changed the headline on me. Original: Bush urges Americans to curb gas purchases

Rites of August

It’s August. Time for corn on the cob.

I come from a long line of prodigious corn-eaters. At one time, my small family, then consisting of me, my sister, mom and dad, Uncle M, and my grandparents, could easily put away two dozen ears at dinner. In recent years, as the family and times have changed, we’ve slowed down a bit.

Almost every late summer lunch or dinner included corn on the cob. With so many small farms in our region of western Pennsylvania, fresh corn was readily available at roadside stands or right off the back of a truck parked at the edge of the field. Brown paper bags originally filled with ears were soon filled with husks and silk of the palest green. We kids used to marvel at how fast my father could shuck an ear of corn, taking all the silk off in one tear. With our small hands, it took us a while to clean an ear, almost the same time as it took him to do six. We would “Ewww” over the worms and dad would cut them out with his pocketknife.

While we stacked the corn on a platter, hamburgers and hotdogs sizzled on the grill. The corn would be served as the last course. Apart from cucumbers, which my grandmother usually smothered in sour cream and pepper, there was never anything green or remotely like a salad.

The uncontested patriarch of corn on the cob was my grandfather. Pappap loved his corn, and his early August birthday coincided with the first fresh harvest. He would lean forward from his chair at the head of the table in my grandparents’ humid kitchen, grab the topmost ear from a steaming golden pyramid, and get to work. At least three sticks of butter and two salt shakers sat in strategic locations on the table. Pappap usually had his own. His preferred method of butter transference was to roll the corn right on top of the stick.

We all ate our corn the same way, like a typewriter. Left to right, carriage return, roll the top away to get to the next row. No one ever cut the corn off the cob. That would be sacrilege.

Conversation at the table centered on varieties of corn. My mother and I preferred “Silver Queen,” white, small kerneled, sugary sweet. But “Silver Queen” usually matures later, so in early August we were more likely to have what is called “Butter and Salt” or “Butter and Sugar,” for its yellow and white pattern. Sometimes I think we ate regular old field corn, waxy and with huge gold kernels that stuck to our teeth like caramel. My grandmother and father liked this best, joking that they would be happy eating with the cows. If Pappap had a preference, it never showed.

When the feasting was over, Pappap would heap his denuded cobs and destroyed napkins on his plate, exhale heavily, and wipe the butter from his glasses with the edge of his corn-splattered white t-shirt. Sometimes part of a kernel would hang from a strand of his silver hair. Picking his teeth, he’d push away from the table and say, “I need to take a shower.”

Tonight I truly felt his granddaughter, as I turned away from the table, two empty cobs on my plate, fingernail between my teeth.

Bomb Shelter Potatoes

Earlier this evening, something cracked. I’ve been feeling low for a while, but I’ve been putting on my brave face and trying not to let life suck ass through a straw quite so much. After all, life could be chewing my ass, and that would definitely be worse than a little sucking. Still, like I said, after work I broke, and I curled up in the middle of my bed and cried in a chest-heaving, nose-running way that I haven’t cried for a long time.

After I stopped, I lay there sighing and stroking the silver fur of my good and patient kitty, who was waiting for her canned food. I got up and walked to the kitchen with her wrapped around my left ankle. I spooned some gloopy, and evidently delicious, chicken-and-tuna stuff into her bowl and washed my face. I wasn’t sure if I was hungry myself or slightly sick to my stomach.

Comfort food is what I needed - something warm and filling and non-diet. Someone told me that when it comes to stressed-out eating, women tend to go more for fatty and sweet (chocolate, cheesecake) and men more for fatty and salty (French fries, pizza). Here once again, despite my obvious female features and mouth-foaming heterosexuality, I sift out on the same side as the boys. Fried chicken. Mozzarella cheese sticks. Macaroni and cheese.

Mac and cheese sounded particularly good. I opened the cupboard, replaced the blue plastic margarita glass that toppled out, and pushed aside the tea and sugar to see if I had any mac and cheese in stock. I didn’t. But I did find, scrunched way in the back, a package of instant mashed potatoes.

In the absence of macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, complete with a dammed-up lake of butter, started to sound pretty good. But were they okay? The potatoes came from my grandmother, who sends me home with bags and coolers full of food every time I visit. The last time I visited was Christmas, so the potatoes were at least eight months old - maybe older. She might have given them to me at Thanksgiving, or even Easter. It’s a bit mysterious why she gave them to me at all, since I have never prepared instant mashed potatoes for myself and have never (knowingly) eaten them at her house either.

I smoothed the rumpled bag, looking for an expiry date. There wasn’t one. I suppose they don’t expire. I suppose that’s why you can store them in your emergency kit, right next to the duct tape and plastic wrap. “With sour cream, chives, and imitation bacon,” the package read. Yummy. I boiled the water and dumped ‘em in.

While the potatoes rehydrated themselves, I sliced a cucumber from the garden and rinsed the last of the arugula that I bought at the farmer’s market on Saturday. On one side of the plate I had fresh, tasty, organic produce; on the other side, highly processed Frankenfood that openly admitted the artificiality of its bacon bits. I laid a knife between them so the potatoes wouldn’t eat the arugula before I did.

I created a satisfactory pool of butter and sampled my first forkful. They weren’t too bad, though they certainly were not my grandmother’s homemade mashed potatoes. They were rather bland and sticky, and the bacon bits didn’t do much for me. Nevertheless, I ate half the pot, pretending all the while I was savoring the finest macaroni and cheese, properly baked with bread crumbs on top.

As I sit here simultaneously working and writing this, the potatoes are resting in a cold lump in my tummy. Perhaps the bomb shelter potatoes will put me out of my misery. Perhaps I will explode like a sea gull full of Alka-Seltzer. Or perhaps it’s nothing a little vodka and tonic wouldn’t fix.

Today I Woke Up Sad

This morning’s dream was a documentary, set in a village somewhere in Afganistan; leathery old men, young girls with shiny black hair, lots of talking and gesticulating. I turned over and rubbed my aching sinuses, wondering how my subconscious came up with this this time.

The throbbing beneath my cheekbones echoed the distant rumbling of thunder. I knew this was a big storm just by listening - every two or three seconds, another low, rolling wave resounded. Going over the dream, I thought about the book “Kite Runner” that I read this summer, and then jumped to the installation of thousands of pairs of shoes on the Diag that I saw yesterday. Each pair of shoes represented an Iraqi civilian or American soldier killed in Iraq. I wondered if someone on the exhibition team had the job of watching the news or listening to the radio to find out how many shoes they would need to add the next day. I wondered if they had a big crate of shoes and military boots that travelled with them - how many would they need?

I sighed and put my hand down to pet my good and patient kitty, curled up by my hip, waiting quietly for her breakfast. The weather approached rapidly and soon I could see the lightning flashes even through my closed eyelids. Kitty doesn’t like the thunder, and hopped down to creep under the bed. I tend to sleep on the right side of the bed, as if saving the left side will make a lover appear. Well, they do say if you act as though you already have everything you want in life, it will come to you. A well-rehearsed fantasy of a man with strong arms starts up in my head, but the lack of a real partner hurts too much this morning, and I can’t have who I want and should stop thinking of him, so I turn the fantasy off. Who are “they” anyway? Do they know what it’s like to have a heart that feels like a boiled tomato when you split the skin and all the guts run out? I sighed again and rolled over to the left side of the bed.

My shoulders ache from all the time spent at the keyboard during the week. Some yoga usually helps for a while, but the ache soon comes back. I pulled myself into a modified “child pose,” knees to my chest, forehead to the mattress, arms stretched above my head. “Child pose” looks like a Muslim at worship. I breathed in long, slow, deep breaths to soften my belly and breathed out tension and affirmation that I am connected to the cosmos, and as such I am enough, and have everything I need to handle whatever life brings my way. As my breath curled out of me it carried little prayers, that my house would withstand the thunderstorm, that my heart would survive the storms of its own strange passions, that the world would outlast all the shit and hate and fire we rain down on it and each other, and someday heal.

The rain pounded at the windows and the thunder shook the house. I knew I should get up, feed the cat, do the laundry, go buy the newspapers, write this out. But I didn’t. I stayed there for a while, just another small mammal sheltering in her nest, another member of a race of wee, cow’rin’, tim’rous beasties whose plans gang aft a-gley.

Sanctuary

I first saw them, tall and stately, eight months after my brother’s death. I was watching the white edge of road ahead when Jack slowed the car and wordlessly pointed across me to where they stood ankle-deep in Pond Lily Lake. At the sight of them my hardened acorn heart split a little and put out a cautious root hair.

We parked at the sanctuary and squished our way up the hill. Woolen clouds were cable-knit across the sky. Mist settled on my hair, a network of diamonds I glimpsed at the edge of my vision. Jack set up the tripod and scope, focusing and turning knobs and cursing softly to his stiff fingers. There wasn’t anything to focus on. The wetland below us reminded me of a frying pan, pewter water, lead lid of sky, rim of copper cattails. No one else was around. A few chickadees jived in a dogwood.

Other soggy birders soon joined us. There were sighs and foot stampings. “The show’s a little late,” Jack murmured and wiped his glasses for the fifth time. It was getting dark.

A smoky smudge right on the horizon line sent the birders scrambling to their scopes. I heard a faint sound like someone running a thumbnail down a comb. The sound got louder, harsher, and the smudge resolved itself into a formation of flying sandhill cranes. Once over the frying pan they started to drop, legs dangling, like a platoon of paratroopers. The noise increased as more birds arrived, then more, and more, until long skeins of them wove across the sky in all directions. I happened to look straight up just as a pair coasted in directly overhead. Their soft gray bellies seemed close enough to skim my outstretched fingers. They held their black toes together like steeples. I felt like church.

"Happy 21st Birthday" read the shiny silver balloon expanding to block my view of the Farmer Jack employee’s face. I got that one and a purple one. The employee knotted lengths of colored curling ribbon around each and attached plastic animal anchors. I wrestled the balloons into the car and headed back to the apartment.

I let them float to the apex of the angled ceiling in the corner of the room while I filled out the card and folded the paper crane. I wrapped both items in Saran-wrap, punched a hole through them, and strung them on the ribbons. The balloons lifted towards the center of the room. The strange little airship passed its test flight.

The balloons bumped against the wall as I strode down the stairs and into the back yard. June 6, 2004, was a sunny day with wispy clouds breezing by. Gazing skyward, I took a deep breath and released it at the same time as the balloons. The crane and the card might have been heavier than I thought, for the airship didn’t soar like I had envisioned. It drifted away at a slow 45 degree angle, ribbons twining around each other like dancing snakes, balloons bonking heads, cargo flailing behind. It barely cleared the wires and disappeared over the trees, headed towards Dexter.

Happy birthday, Dan. My lips moved, but no sound came out.

Grus canadensis

We heard it before we saw it. A drawn out croak rolled down from the sky. I stopped with a boot-squeak against the snow. Their call carries for over a mile, so hearing doesn’t guarantee seeing. Still, I tilted my face and scanned the blue. My companion crunched several steps further, then stopped himself and half turned back. “What is it?” he asked. The dog continued nosing about a “sticker-pricker” bush, which would get her in trouble in about two seconds. “Cranes,” I said, simultaneously hushed and excited as I always am in their presence.

Just as I named it, it burst over the bare fringe of trees, one sandhill, alone – an unusual sight, since they typically travel in family groups. Its uncoiled neck strained forward; outstretched toes trailed behind. It half-flapped, half-glided, riding a current so high up that a gull flying nearby looked approximately the same size. The sandhill crane is no gull. It is as tall as I am, with a wingspan two feet more than that. They are one of the reasons I am here in Michigan.