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)

November 1st, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

We grew pretty massive pumpkins last year, and Steve saved the seeds and miraculously they grew into pumpkins again this year. But we learned what the word heirloom means: it means that the seeds from a plant will make the exact same plant again. These seeds were not heirloom. Our pumpkins were pretty ridiculous-looking this year, and they certainly weren’t as big. Steve got jealous each time we walked by a neighbor’s yard with their extremely massive pumpkins, but I like ours. They glow all sorts of colors, and they’re funny.

Tonight we carved them. Steve and Jack worked on the biggest one, Rosie took a medium-sized one, and I took a regular green pie pumpkin. Steve and Jack’s has a pretty great scary face on fire on its front, and Jack made some sort of violent ghost thing on the back with repeated gashes across its forehead. Rosie patiently carved a very silly-shaped pumpkin, but its innards were so thick that carving a face was going to be pretty tough. She managed to carve away at the skin, which makes it look like a roasted and melting marshmallow, and also it’s wearing a hat. She’s been pretty mellow lately, and she’d mentioned that she didn’t want to carve anything at all, so I was grateful for this large offering of creativity. I made a self-portrait of a pumpkin inside of a pumpkin, which is pretty much the definition of this blog.

October 27th, 2009 | Category: happening, house | Comments (1)

I usually don’t like when writers say words can’t express… — and I didn’t like in an earlier post when I said that I felt that a photograph couldn’t do the season justice. I have to believe that words can express, and that a photograph can hold as much beauty and complexity as my eyes see, or at least close to it.

That said, these photographs don’t fully meet that challenge, as least not to me. (Uh, it might help if I walked outside — I just liked the grid.) But to me they’re better than nothing, for now. Color is blinding.

October 26th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

I’ve been looking for discounts on baby items on craigslist, and I found a co-sleeper for sale for half off. And better yet, it was just down the street, so I didn’t have to drive very far or have it shipped.

We’ve decided that the system that perhaps might work for us is to start with the baby in the co-sleeper — a small crib attached and directly in line with our bed — and for naps the baby could be in a crib in its room or else in a pack-n-play that floats around the house. I may even be okay with the baby sleeping right in our bed, but because we have dogs who are slowly being trained to not jump on the bed at night, I want the baby to have a place that is safe from them and from our semi-conscious selves.

I don’t feel any particular desire to push the baby into its own room too quickly — it’s harder for me, and a swift transition from nine months inside to a room on its own seems unnecessary. I don’t think there’s any prize for putting the baby in his own room the fastest — in fact, I actually think I may feel that the opposite is true (though I’ll have to see, I don’t know from experience).

Last night I drove down the street to check out the used co-sleeper, and what I found was this beautiful young family, our age and in a house that was simple and uncluttered and with a huge piano that took up most of the main room. The husband showed me the co-sleeper, taking it out of its bag and showing me how it worked and pointing out where it was worn from use. Then the wife came in and helped him disassemble it. They talked of their three-year-old, who has slept with them for most of his life and decided recently that he’s ready for his own room. No tears, no difficult transition. He was ready when he was ready.

So $75? I asked.

Yeah, does that sound right to you? the husband asked me.

Actually, the wife started to say.

Maybe less, because of the worn spots? the husband finished for her.

No, actually, I was thinking that she could just take it, she finished quietly.

The husband was quiet but seemed relatively indifferent. The wife helped me bring it to the car. She said she was just grateful that someone could use it and that it wouldn’t have to be in their house anymore.

Sometimes giving looks so easy. She just wanted to give. We were neighbors, and I was entering a life phase that she had just finished. She was sending me off into mine with a gift, from one family to another. I tried to offer to pay perhaps too many times, and I assured them that they had my contact information if they changed their mind.

It made it easier last night to give. To jump up and get Steve his tea, to take the dogs out, leaning over my obstruction of a belly to deal with their muddy paws. It made it clear that I also have to give like she gave. I’m already planning all the things I can give to a new mother once the baby or babies are grown.

October 20th, 2009 | Category: happening, the baby thing | Comments (1)

You can drive on the beach in Washington. 25 mph. That’s fast on sand.

We passed a dead sea lion. And a pile of salmon carcasses, congregated by seagulls.

There aren’t many houses with an ocean view at all. Some hotels, but not like I would have thought. Maybe because the water’s always too cold to swim in.

The beach is so long. I’m used to New Jersey. So long that if you lived right on the beach, you’d still have to hike a good bit to get your toes in the water.

In some ways it felt more like a desert than a beach. The water unreachable, sand stretching so far that nothing else is close-up even with a zoom lens.

I’m used to feeling the expanse of the ocean on one side and the wall of houses on the other, but here I felt little and a little, mostly wonderfully, agoraphobic.

October 13th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

We went to a beautiful wedding in Seattle. Fabric, wind, long poles of trees. A setting sun and a full moon rising. To go to a wedding is to witness with such empathy that I get married all over again, again and again.

October 12th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment