Images from last winter. Winter: sadness and beauty and strangeness and silence. A planet where it snows all the time. Summer is always different: each shift in climate and each year passing brings different flowers, more or less flowers, taller trees. But each winter looks the same to me, this return to a quiet and weightless world.
The very tall dead deciduous tree that Steve painted blue this summer. And though it’s not living, things are living on it. He went down into the woods yesterday and this is what he found. Nature is incredible.
Steve unplanted the dead blue tree, rested it on the ground, and in the freezing cold he wrapped it with red lights. Then he replanted it with the lights on.
A fellow writing resident at the Vermont Studio Center gave some of us a recipe he got from his mother in law. Just the recipe, in Spanish, “Pastel de Yogur y Nueces” — no photographs, a lot of Spanish words in the recipe, and no description of what the outcome would be. We all agreed to make the item this weekend, and to document the process.
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.
For the homeless writing workshop this week, I had two men attend and I gave the prompt of writing something that happened to them recently, but to write it in the third person.
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.
Coming down into Detroit, at first the sun was setting above this thick blanket of clouds that stretched indefinitely and it was gorgeous, it really looked like I was looking directly at a sheep, and everything was a little bluish but it was still bright out.
Then we descended through the clouds and it felt like we were submerged underwater and I kept trying to take a breath to reassure myself that I wasn’t really drowning. And then I suddenly saw a sliver of sunset and realized that I could see again and we were in between two cloud blankets — a field of clouds above us, a field of clouds below us, and we hovered in between with a hot pink sliver of sun.
Did you know that there can be two layers of clouds with space in between? It was surreal. And still bright because of the sunset.
And then we descended through this second cloud layer and I took lots of breaths again, unable to focus, my eyes filled with clouds.
And then very suddenly it was dark outside and we were looking over Detroit with all its lights on.
______
Steve picked me up at the airport and we drove home, together again, home again. After spending two weeks without someone, having that surreal experience of knowing someone you love only by their voice, and then returning and finding that that voice is attached to a body, it’s a head-spinner.
We went in the house and I whispered hello to the cats, barely perciptible. The dogs were locked in our bedroom, and when Steve walked in the bedroom door you could hear Moby already moaning, moaning like a human bound with duct tape. I don’t know if he smelled me or just knew that I was home. He bounded out to meet me, desperately. He fell to my feet and rolled over and rolled back up and licked my face and moaned and fell down again, trying so hard not to jump on me and unable to fully obey Steve’s orders that he blared from above while we huddled below in a puddle of tongues. Joon pranced and licked, pranced and licked, pranced and licked, pranced and licked.
I’ve read that dogs don’t know time — you can be gone an hour or a week and they won’t know the difference. That’s not true.
Moby has been at my feet ever since, making up for lost time.
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.
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.)
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:
