Maybe my favorite place in the world.

November 7th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

For two years I pushed myself through my first graduate degree, and then two years of my second. By the time I had graduated, I wanted only to stay home. So that’s what being burnt out feels like. Each time I left my house, I was afraid it had caught on fire, and I would have to rush back home again. All this energy devoted to trying to just leave the house left me no desire to want an art residency — that would be too far away for too long for this phase in my life. I felt like I’d had a residency for two years, and then four years, both intense experiences back-to-back, and I was happy to find my own way outside of the structure of lectures and classes and readings and slide presentations. And then just as I was getting ready to want a residency, I got pregnant and suddenly didn’t want to leave the house again. But I pushed myself to apply and here I am at the Vermont Studio Center for two weeks.

In Portland I became suddenly afraid that I would give birth in Vermont and the baby wouldn’t have a blanket. (My friend gave birth at 30 weeks, after all, and another friend at 33 1/2. Today I’m 32 weeks.) Steve agreed to drive around until we found a store that sold a baby blanket. They were out, and I wasn’t exactly a peaceful customer when they told me, but if I give birth the baby now has a simple outfit and a pair of socks. Never mind he doesn’t have a car seat here in Vermont, or even a onesie. I could only take so much with me. I had to fit my Snoogle in my suitcase.

Settling into a space alone with a twin bed and the first snow. At least I am not afraid the house is on fire, I’m past that. I miss my life viscerally. I am grateful for these two weeks to reflect and meditate and see what writing (and drawing) comes. I’m afraid no writing or drawing will come. All these mixed feelings on the first day, I want to rush past them but I can’t and shouldn’t.

November 7th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

I grew up with a mother who believed in beauty.

The house was clean because it mattered, food was presented well, we four children were scrubbed and combed. That was her aesthetic, clean with a touch of ornate.

Most colleges don’t have this kind of beauty. My beauty was what I tried to make in my studio, and it was my dorm room. Not the first dorm room, where I bought everything from Target and my roommate didn’t clean (not that it’s about cleanliness, and I’m not an organized person, but some messes are project-oriented and some are just about moldy bananas). Not my second, though it was closer. It was my third dorm room, which had two windows, one that showed me the sunrise and one the sunset. This mattered. There was beauty here. It’s not about money — I don’t need the most expensive window or curtains or quilt or silverware. It’s about attention, aesthetic awareness, a sense of intention in arrangement and light.

For three years, after I moved out of my parents’ house and before that dorm room, there was such little beauty apart from nature. I didn’t know at the time how much that hurt, because I didn’t notice then that I was rotting from it. That sounds dramatic, but it’s not. It’s only now, really, that I think back on that time and feel sick inside. This isn’t to be taken lightly.

My brother calls elementary and high schools prisons. They have that same aesthetic of dorm rooms, and of many of the buildings in college: fluorescent lights, few windows, metal-rimmed windows at that, acrylic carpets, beige tile. I’m not sure how the highest part of a human can be nourished there. There was a lot of pain in that time of my life, and recklessness and insensitivity. I don’t like a lot of who I was then. And maybe everyone has to go through a phase like that, but I think it was made worse because I didn’t have beauty. People respond to their environment.

Now I am possibly obsessed with beauty. And I married someone who is the same. We seek it out until we are seemingly drunk with it. Our cameras near us, we look for the flower that means everything, and the way light hits, and we buy the softest blanket and the flower vase that complements the color of the windowsill. We think about this stuff desperately. It feels like I’m doing it to heal from something, to heal from that time when I didn’t have it and I felt myself rotting inside.

I want to make a college beautiful. It seems like if I did that I would save someone’s life. I would put a dog in all the buildings (they are physical beings who sense more than what can be seen), and paint the windowsills, and put flowers in the rooms, and make the windows big and wooden.

Steve and I have been driving for three days, stopping in Jamestown, NY, and Ithaca and Albany, then Amherst, MA, then Portsmouth, NH, and now Portland, ME. We have the dogs with us, so our choices for hotels are slim. We sleep under polyester bedspreads and accept the bad hotel art and the miscalculated lighting and broken heating units. There is so much inattention to the subtleties of what it means to be human, to have a body, skin, eyes that register and respond.  It’s been fine, we deal just fine.

But in Portland we’re staying at a place that pays attention to these small details, and the difference in my day is huge. Huge. I feel a lightness in my shoulders, space between the circles of my spine. My ribs crack from finally breathing. I feel hope and in love with the world. The world can be so beautiful. That feeling matters more than almost anything.

November 4th, 2009 | Category: happening | Comments (1)

Because who knows how much time I’ll have to prepare when I return home, I spent a lot of time this week getting ready for the baby. I washed a bunch of baby clothes in baby detergent. I bought a crib, a mattress, and a co-sleeper off of Craigslist. I folded lots of cloth diapers. Our washer and dryer were running nonstop for several days.

I’ve seen a lot of pictures on facebook of pregnant friends getting the baby room ready. It’s the husband who’s assembling the furniture in all those pictures. Which is wonderful, and Steve does a whole lot in our house, notably the garden (oh, and he’s the one who has the job that pays real money, not invisible blog money). But I for some reason am always the furniture assembler. I assembled our entire Ikea kitchen, like 20 sets of cabinets and doors and hinges and shelves. And I was going to assemble the crib.

I picked the crib up from a friendly woman who lived far away in the middle of nowhere, hauled it into my car with her help, then hauled it out of the car alone, two tails wagging at me. It assembled easily, and it really wasn’t a big deal, but when it was done I felt powerful. The hardest part was probably that it was a job for two: you can’t really balance one end of the crib while you’re trying to attach it to the other and it’s further away than your knee or shin or elbow or whatever might be able to hold it. And I should have asked for help, and Steve was right there. But something about those facebook photos seemed epic, all of them accumulating together, telling some important piece of a story of a way that we prepare for children. I was glad for my addition to it, standing alone in this mess of a room — Rosie’s old room, her bed still in it — filled with baby gadgets. A room entirely too small for all this stuff, with a pack-n-play my parents bought propped up on the bed, and a cosleeper with boxes of clothes inside instead of a baby, and then this crib I got off Craigslist, and my dog underneath my feet, and I assembled the hand-me-down crib that matches nothing, and I was sweating a little, big and awkward and overly proud.

November 2nd, 2009 | Category: house, the baby thing | Leave a comment

Last week out of the blue I was really sick. Who knows if it was a flu virus or maybe just food poisoning, but I thought for a good four hours that I might be having contractions, and I had to call the doctor and there was a lot of suspense and anxiety in our house. I spent about a day and a half in a good bit of pain, then a day and a half recovering.

Rosie and Steve got take-out thai food for dinner while I took some feeble sips from my chicken soup.

Aren’t you lucky I’m sick, you get your thai food, I said to her. She agreed.

Then she said, What, is Dad a bad cook or something?

Not at all. Actually the opposite. She knows that — before I came along, he cooked for her often. They were poor and it was mostly Kroger-brand mac-n-cheese, but still. He’s braver in the kitchen than I am, experimental and forgiving. He seems really happy in the kitchen, really jolly.

So you just like to be in the kitchen because it feels like your place as a woman? Rosie asked. She’s something else.

Actually the opposite, I said. And I really meant that. I usually feel like a man chef. I tried to explain to her what I meant, that for me it’s a place of bravery and creativity. It really feels like the maternal aspect is minimal. I have knives in my hand and I’m chopping and burning things. I’m usually barely referencing a recipe. I feel in charge in that space, and like I’m some sort of director choreographing vegetables. I’m usually listening to NPR, juggling all sorts of thoughts in my brain, learning and learning.

(michael pollan essay on cooking and bravery here.)

November 2nd, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

I did end up getting the h1n1 vaccine. I talked to the midwives a lot about it, and to a pediatrician, and I researched enough to feel that, while perhaps I didn’t make the best decision in getting it (who knows?), I most likely didn’t make a fatal one. Even if it does effect the fetus, I’m lucky that my fetus is viable right now — i am past the phase where everything integral is forming out of almost nothing.

But as I was researching, I was directed to this pretty great article from the Atlantic Monthly about the inefficacy of flu vaccines. It’s not about h1n1, which is a virus-specific vaccine. It’s about the flu vaccines that come out each year that try and fail to protect people from what they project will be the big flus of the year. I just love reading smart articles where common knowledge is cracked open and questioned rigorously and my head gets to spin.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1

November 2nd, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

I leave for three weeks today. Last night I walked around my house feeling the weight of that. When I get back I’ll be 34 weeks along. Most likely I’ll have plenty of time when I get back before the baby comes, but maybe I won’t. Last night I thought to myself, this could be the last time Steve and I are together in our house alone; this could be the last time I meander from room to room aimlessly and unwatched. Going from no full-time kids to a new baby isn’t something that goes unnoticed. And as much as we’ve been wanting it, I have moments where I grieve the transition out of this life that we love. I awoke and the sky was a fall sky, white-gray, so unlike summer, and Steve and I were alone and sleeping in a bit too late and the house was quiet. There was nothing we needed to do, just feel connected before the day sweeps us up. Sometimes we just get those ten minutes between the alarm sounding and sounding again before we’re off doing whatever it is we do in our days, those ten minutes to heal any possible rift quietly, just holding one another half-asleep, our higher selves doing the work of connecting and mending for us. I’ll miss those moments when the baby comes. I’ll miss moments like last night, Steve on his computer and me wandering about the house, packing and sorting and cleaning and drawing, time very still, every problem seemingly solvable, my brain relatively intact, well-rested and self-contained.

The leaves before I go:

November 1st, 2009 | Category: house | Comments (1)