All of our dinnerware is made by Heath Ceramics.

So beautiful. Solid and simple. We have the Chez Panisse line.

They’re a company that throws each bowl and cup and plate in Sausalito, California. We went to visit the factory there. Jack had to go to the bathroom, so he got to see the workers throwing pots. We touched every item in the factory store and finally settled on two blue water pitchers. And I bought a t-shirt. And I bought a bookbag for the house, though I don’t think I’ll get to use it because right now it’s on Rosie’s shoulder and she’s walking out the door to go eat at the Chinese Buffet.

Ah, home. So different from our dinner at Chez Panisse just a few nights ago, which we visited mostly to see our plates in action. Heath Ceramics! Chez Panisse! California I miss you.

I loved the mysteriousness of making something without knowing at all how it would turn out, and the camaraderie of all of us baking in our separate kitchens at the same time — it reminded me of Julie and Julia, but better — and I loved the silly competition that comes from that knowledge that we’re all making the same thing. And most of all I loved the arbitrary measuring device the recipe called for: a yogurt container. Or not so arbitrary, because the recipe called for yogurt, but rather a measuring device that is extremely specific to the recipe: form and content merged.

This was our mission:

1 yogur—one container of yogurt: this container will be the measuring cup for the rest of the recipe.

1 vaso de aceite—one of oil [we always use olive oil...but I think you can use whatever you want]

4 huevos—four eggs

3 vasos de harina—three of flour [white is best, or a mixture. I was out of white last time and used all wheat flour...still good, just need to make slight adjustments on everything...obvious, I guess]

2 vasos de azucar—two of sugar

1 royal—one package of baking powder. If you’re like me and don’t have little packages that are sold everywhere in northern Spain, you’ll want to use about 1 tablespoon of powder.

Horno a 170 grados—set the oven at 170 c….what is that, 300 something? Maybe 350?

the ingredients

the helper

the measuring device

steve pops in with some frozen sage from our garden

frozen sage

a prop

licking the bowl

describing the process to them

apples on top

sprinkled cinnamon

what to do with the leftover apples and the cinnamon residue

helper

recipe

working while it bakes

i cooked it a little bit too long, about an hour.

perhaps we’ll have it for dessert.

One of the homeless men created a tent city: a collection of tents, heated with kerosene, with a no-drugs policy. It’s not permanent — it’s a place for people to stay while they save money and find a solid job. The goal is for the tent city to rotate around the town so that no one piece of land is overburdened. But who will house the homeless on their lawn?

The tent city coordinator is looking for churches to offer their lawns, which frankly is a lot to ask of any church, but who else would they ask? In the meantime they stayed for awhile on a plot of land behind Arborland, behind the Toys R Us, a 50-acre no man’s land that has no function but to be a woodsy gap between the shopping center and a new neighborhood. The owner of the land, when asked by the homeless if they could stay there, said he didn’t necessarily allow it but he wouldn’t call the police. But when the police called him, the story changed. And so Caleb Poiroir, the tent city coordinator, has been arrested for trespassing and is going to trial next week. (Some of the story is posted in this article in the Ann Arbor Chronicle.) These people now have even fewer options on where they can sleep, and this morning I scraped frost off my car.

I don’t know what the answer is. But at the homeless writing workshop I lead on Tuesdays, I gave one of the men the opportunity to think of a prompt for us to write about. Usually we write something abstract or something that has more to do with the mechanics of poetry and language, but he chose the topic of Caleb Poiroir. Homelessness in winter. Conversation has never been so active.

It made me realize how many logistics are involved in homelessness. When I have to pee, I use my bathroom. When I have to brush my teeth, my toothbrush is right there. I shower, I wash my clothes, it doesn’t create any stress inside of me. But these men don’t know where to shower or where to brush their teeth. They have to plan carefully when and where they can go to the bathroom. And they have to figure out how to sleep without getting snowed on. If I had to figure out all those logistics each day, I’d want to drink, too, at least to keep warm. And I’d have trouble thinking about holding down a job. I’ve seen from these people and even from Steve’s past: when you get knocked down, for whatever reason, it is exponentially more difficult to get ahead. Each burden is linked to another burden — you can’t get a job if you can’t wait for the phone call because you don’t have a phone and you can’t apply for a job when you haven’t even had a shower besides — and the road back to civilization takes so long and has so many weights holding you back, reminding you of your past, cutting wounds into prior wounds. And when life is that hard, the things that to others seem so easy — looking presentable, being on time, being socially attuned — take so much energy, and it’s easy to let people down and fall behind again.

The tent cities have worked in other communities. There has to be a way for it to work. We can’t let people who are less fortunate freeze to death. Protection from the most severe elements seems like a basic right. Especially when these people are organizing it themselves, not asking for any money, only a place to kill a little grass for a month. And grass is a pretty silly idea anyway.

Steve grew up with a Christian Scientist stepfather, so when I say my throat’s starting to hurt he says to me, No it’s not. Which is sometimes helpful, because really the more I pity myself at a certain pivotal point is going to determine to some degree whether or not my body and mind coordinate and I get sick. But usually it makes me feel frustrated to hear that. And this time my throat really was hurting, and by morning it was difficult to swallow.

And maybe I’m a weakling, or maybe my immune system is dealing with enough right now so anything else on top of being in the last month of pregnancy is going to push me over the edge, but this cold I cannot take. It has inhabited my whole face and chest, for Friday and Saturday and Sunday and now Monday. Coughing hurts my pelvis. I feel vulnerable and helpless, unable to take anything to help the symptoms and unable to both sleep and breathe at the same time. Pregnant, I can’t even take Afrin, and my neti pot isn’t working.

So last night I felt my strength cave. I just felt so bloated in every way — too big to bend over to get anything on the ground, too swollen in my face to leave any room for my brain. I crawled into bed before 11pm after a night of whimpering. I’ve been so good for a whole year, I whimpered. No wine since December 2008, I whimpered. No chance for a hot toddy now. No peanut butter or chocolate in the house at all. No cheetos in the house, even. No Robitussin. I poured honey and lemon down my throat. I sipped my chamomile tea and Steve kindly rigged his computer to point silly television at me. The television was so imbecile, all this yelling, maybe that’s why the baby turned and kicked and kicked. I found some vanilla ice cream and swirled it with sunbutter. I found some stale pita chips from a few months ago and munched on those. How come there’s never any junk food in our house? Steve tucked me into bed where I read a book about all the terrible things that could happen to infants before I turned off the lights and twirled the sheets as I slept fitfully.

The piece of brightness: Steve was on the phone with Jack before he came over to our house on Saturday, and Steve mentioned that I was sick and Jack’s alarms went off. He knows that pregnant people aren’t supposed to get sick. This kid who appears to be on a different planet most of the time was suddenly having compassion for me and the baby. He asked a million questions, he wanted to make sure I didn’t have a fever. When he walked into our house it was the first thing he asked about, and later while we were swinging at the park he asked again, wanting to know how I thought I got sick and what I thought about the baby’s health. I had no idea he cared that much, or really that he even noticed that I’m going to have a baby at all.

I didn’t realize it would be so hard to explain this prompt. It’s so early in the morning and I was trying to explain how we usually talk about ourselves in the first person, I, but novels are usually in the third person (he/she). I wanted them to step outside of themselves and see themselves from a short distance away, to see what new details emerged. I explained it several times, offering lots of examples, and once we started writing one of the men seemed to give up and I felt sorry for offering too difficult a prompt, but he went back to it. I became worried that I might be dealing with people with multiple personality disorder, and that I might split these men in thirds accidentally with my assignment.

One of the men wrote something where he was in the third person, but there was also another character, I, who was looking at him. Which is essentially how I explained what third person means. This man works so hard to see how others see him already, the assignment actually fit his temperament.

Another of the men stepped outside of himself and wrote something without action, but essentially he evaluated his personal progress in life. He looked at himself critically from a distance.

And then when he spoke about what he learned, it was clear this idea of the third person was incredibly tangible to him, more tangible than any definition I could give. He spoke about the need to listen to people, to be able to step inside of their experience and feel what they’re going through, and to step outside of himself to really hear another person’s story. It was profound and strange. He said, If you want a friend, you’ve got to be a friend. You’ve got to be that third person. I’ve not thought about the third person that way, as a friend, an outsider capable of flitting in and out of others’ minds to aid them, like a ghost of us that can disobey borders.

I offered the exercise because most poetry has a character called I in it, if there is a character. I recently read a book of poems where the character was instead he even though it was pretty clearly the poet’s life. It really removed the poems from the realm of confessional poetry, even though they were pretty confessional. That one small pivot shifted a ton of details and emotions and the way I approached the poems.

(so I tried it in workshop, too)

She saw her house for the first time in a long time, and it looked clean. Light hit in the kitchen from the winter sun. It only happens in winter. In the summer, leaves obscure the sky and so she cooks her meals in shadows. She saw her plants–she had forgotten about green. The color lit by winter sun is a stained glass window of photosynthesis.

.

She remembered where the silerware was, but she didn’t know where her husband had put the spatula. She noticed the empty boxes in the pantry–empty cracker boxes and candy wrappers–from where the teenager had snuck food (someone might have heard her throw away the box so she left it empty, taking up hollow space). She noticed the empty refrigerator.

.

This house had gone on without her–the dogs lived and the plants grew and the leaves continued to fall–but the kitchen had suffered. It was the only part of the house that crumpled a little in her absence. She refolded the cloth napkins and recycled empty boxes and made lists of what was missing–eggs, butter, milk. There hadn’t been an absence of butter in this house for years. She felt strange without it. She fumbled on how to make pancakes, settling for canola oil where the butter should have gone and grumbling as she stirred.

.

She stirred and the dogs made pinwheels with their tails below her. When she bought butter she would give them some. She would carve it into wafers and drop it tenderly onto their tongues, sorry for having been gone so long. In the meantime, canola pancakes fell like leaves from her plate toward the floor, never hitting the floor.