I don’t know if I’m allowed to do this, just take a poem I find that I love and type it in this chronicle. It’s a poem by Keetje Kuipers. I love the simplicity of the setting — the blackout of a city — and how that scene draws out gorgeous metaphors. I gasped at the end.

Santeria for the City, Blackout, Summer 2003

This is what you must do first:
Peel the dragon fruit skin
from its flesh, separate pink
from pink. This last day is ritual you’ve learned,
how to say goodbye more completely,
how to banish what is loved.

The refrigerator must be emptied
and every pancetta risotto persimmon
that you bought in Little Italy China Town
Union Square, once wrapped
in sodden paper and pressed
into your hand, must be devoured,
finished, the core or rind
laid on the sill for pigeons and rats,
the headless that arrive and depart the city’s limits
each day, shadows on the wall
of a tunnel filled with hurtling
and plundered light.

As the body is a home,
as the city is a body,
as circuitry runs the lengths
of my arms, these streets – we are a flash
in the fuse box, a blown kiss
into blackness, the perfect thrill
of your last departure
orbiting its small plane inside you.

June 8th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

One source says I should eat more now. Another source says I should eat more in the last two trimesters.

The doctor’s office says I should eat Jello — sugar-coated horse hooves. Another source says I should have no sugar whatsoever at all at all.

One source says that even two cups of decaf increases the chance of miscarriage 2.5 times. The doctor’s office says I can have two cups of decaf or caffeinated coffee or 2-3 cans of Coca-Cola a day.

The doctor’s office says no soft cheese. Other sources say no unpasteurized cheese, but some soft cheese is unpasteurized.

One source says that when we drank raw milk, no one had lactose intolerance and our bodies could digest the enzymes. Another source says that raw milk causes listeria. Another source shows that listeria cases occur with pasteurized milk almost exclusively.

Another source says that listeria actually occurs mostly in salad. The doctor’s office says I should eat lots and lots of greens.

In France I would not be served raw salad at any point in a pregnancy but I would be served one glass of wine with dinner. United States sources say that any amount of wine is bad. Online sources say that one glass per week after the first trimester is fine. U.K. sources say that one or two glasses per week is proven to be excellent.

Some sources say that liver has too much Vitamin A and could harm the baby. Some sources say that I must –must– eat at least one serving of liver per week because the Vitamin A in liver is excellent for the baby, but the Vitamin A in some nonorganic sources could harm the baby.

Some sources say that Cod Liver Oil is what makes an infant’s bone solid and brains bright. Other sources say that Cod Liver Oil is extremely dangerous.

One source says that raspberry leaf tea brings blood flow to the uterus and helps a pregnancy carry to term. One source says that the tea can causes miscarriages and should be avoided until the last month of pregnancy.

One source says I should do as much research as possible. Another source says I should not research at all.

June 8th, 2009 | Category: overheard, the baby thing | Comments (3)

I spent far too long last night and some this morning researching whether or not Sarah Palin gave birth to her youngest son, Trig. I stumbled on a website that is rich with analysis: a summary in palindeception.com and the ongoing research in that website’s blog.

I know it’s silly, I know it doesn’t matter. I think I’ve just been thinking about how bodies change so much while pregnant — and then I remembered randomly how no one ever noticed that Palin was pregnant. She told her office in her seventh month and they were shocked. This is a photo of Sarah Palin supposedly 25 weeks pregnant with her fifth child:

Then in her eighth month when you’re not really supposed to fly, she flew to Texas from Alaska, where she began leaking amniotic fluid. She gave a thirty-minute speech anyway despite light contractions. Then she went to the airport, waited a couple of hours, had a four-hour flight, had a two-hour layover, hopped on another plane for four hours, then drove past three hospitals to get to her hospital forty-five minutes away from the airport. At that point she was apparently induced and gave birth to her son who has Down’s Syndrome. Not only was she not allowed to fly in her eighth month, but she traveled for twelve hours while having contractions at age 44 in a high-risk pregnancy (high-risk because of her age, because of the baby’s Down’s Syndrome, and because her contractions were a month early). At that point, she could have stopped at the hospital closest to the airport in Alaska, which is also the one that has the NICU unit and can handle all of her pregnancy’s complications, and a hospital at which her doctor is permitted to practice, but she drove past it to a very small hospital instead which has no facilities for her condition.

I’m not big on conspiracies in any way, but I remember hearing about her crazy birth story before she was such a public figure. Then I remember seeing pictures of her body unchanging throughout her pregnancy. And there are the rumors that her oldest daughter was the pregnant one and that Sarah Palin was doing this to cover for her daughter — who was absent from school for several months. If that’s true, I think it’s sweet. I might do the same for Rosie if I really thought I could get away with it, which seems unlikely. I don’t question her motives, I just question the sloppy deceit. If even I can smell a rat, it must not be hidden very well.

My research is tongue-in-cheek. I feel silly for spending hours on the computer researching this possible conspiracy, and I feel even sillier for posting it. I’m just saying.

June 8th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

This is the first year we joined a CSA (community-supported agriculture): The Community Farm of Ann Arbor. We picked up our first half-share (we’re splitting with our neighbor) of vegetables on Saturday. With the greens we gathered from their farm and from our backyard, I’m not sure how many salads Rosie will be able to stand. We got a small batch of strawberries this week, so red and too pretty to eat. (I was cleaning the kitchen this morning and wiped on the counter around them — a circular composition of light, circle containing color.)

June 8th, 2009 | Category: house, photograph | Leave a comment

I’ve been trying to get back on Eastern time, and meanwhile Steve caught his California nephew’s flu and so either really sleeps or really doesn’t sleep, all with short lungs and a beating head. I caught a small version of it that makes lights too bright and sleep only one inch deep.

Which explains why yesterday I took a four-hour nap, and in this nap I dreamt that I was hungry.  My sister declared this a pregnant dream. I was with my family — my sisters and brother — and I found a chocolate bar on the ground. I can still imagine tasting it now, it was in every way delicious. My family thought I was silly for eating a chocolate bar off of the ground, and my brother laughed as he went down to the lake and fetched me some Cheetos in a ripped-open bag. I went to eat those, too, but I woke up.

Which is when I decided that I should definitely make chocolate chip cookies. An excellent reason to wake from a nap. My logic for random baking: it was my sister’s birthday, and though I could not ship the cookies to her, I could eat the sweets in honor of her, and she could eat the photograph.

June 8th, 2009 | Category: dream, house, the baby thing | Leave a comment

He collects flowers, but I collect rocks and string and beach parts. Like penny-hunting, I feel as if I’ve been scouring the beach all my life. This is a truth I know because my energy increases: I feel most alive by a body of water.

In Oregon we stopped at the Pacific Ocean along 101 to walk a beach that wasn’t preceded by a cliff. There were pieces of sand dollars everywhere, but Steve got it in his mind that he was going to find a whole one. I really didn’t think he could — the waves were thick and fast, and I’ve only ever seen the whole ones in shops.

He did find one whole one. This is how he is. It was perfect, a perfect lotus flower on the front and a root drawing carved into the back. Amazing. Though it isn’t surprising I like the pieces of sand dollars best.

June 5th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

Walking through the world with Steve means that we stop a lot and pick flowers. He names them, I repeat their names and promptly forget most of them. I love how he loves flowers, and in some ways it’s a shared passion — I’ll draw those flowers when they dry into almost paper.

Entering a new hardiness zone means all sorts of flowers he’s never seen in real life — or that we’ve never seen thriving like flowers can in a maritime climate: in California, rosemary swells into bushes and fennel grows on the side of the road. Steve kept pulling over on the narrow Pacific Coast Highway to grab this or that flower or tree sample. He went too close to cliffs to pull off some succulents I can’t name. Be careful! I’d holler in a British accent, but always truthfully scared for his life (which I have felt more now than ever before, that he can’t die on me now).

By the end, it was difficult to see out of our rental car’s front window, foxglove and red hot pokers and rhododendrons reflected off the glass. The car reeked of hot eucalyptus. Pine cones rolled around and around.

June 5th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

When we stopped in Rome for our honeymoon two years ago, it was boiling hot and we could only stay for two days and three nights. It was our first stop on our trip to Europe, and neither of us knew Italian — we clung to each other, lost and sweaty. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember the hot trek from the hotel room to the Vatican, blisters on my ankles. In my memory, I floated to the Vatican. I must have worn that shawl I had to wear inside the church all the time, my memories are classic. When I saw the preview for the movie Angels & Demons, I floated over Rome again. Rome! I felt instantly flushed with memories of the sheer beauty of the city.

Traveling is uncomfortable, maybe especially while pregnant, but I have to do it because I won’t remember the uncomfortable parts. Switching time zones and then switching back makes me feel sick, I ate too many Doritos in the car on our road trip, and it all went by too quickly for me to feel fully immersed. But I won’t remember that. I just want to bask in our photographs already, standing over the pacific ocean on cliffs, standing under massive redwoods, breathing in perfect air.

June 5th, 2009 | Category: happening | Comments (1)