Seriously though, I'm sitting in red lamp light, drinking gin, stewing and thinking bitter thoughts while I idly stroke my certainly-evil cat. All I need is a lightning flash, and I think I can count on one soon.
In the meantime, since I refuse to say any more about a day that actually had a lot of good in it if I could stop finding myself so kin with the weather---a quote from Rilke, whom I dislike and think of as often overquoted:
...something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.
-Letters to a young poet
Monday, April 29, 2013
Monday, April 22, 2013
Let me start again. It didn't take place in the meadow and I wasn't pretty.
Virgo Moon today--my moon: stark, picky, angry, close to my smarting little heart. Soon, I'll go upstairs and fold and put away laundry. And maybe a little Ada Limon. Not sweet, understanding Sharks in the River but my original favorite, Lucky Wreck. (Ada Limon is the most attractive poet alive today.) Later, I'll stand out in the cold grass and see if I can see any shooting stars. I think to myself sometimes how obnoxious I am, and most undoubtedly be to everyone around me.
From The Great Erector of Invisible Pets:
I wanted to stand over it and wait
and when it was tired, I would let it rest,
when it was hungry I would feed it.
When it had questions, God damn it, I would give it some answers.
From The Great Erector of Invisible Pets:
I wanted to stand over it and wait
and when it was tired, I would let it rest,
when it was hungry I would feed it.
When it had questions, God damn it, I would give it some answers.
Sunday, April 21, 2013
hope to your god your good heart knows how to swim
Some dark spaces don't budge, no matter the sequence of events or arbitrary brand of good or bad day or particular mood. So you just have to choose the good things, ride them out; bring your own sun.
....sun such as spending every waking moment outside, scrambling up ridges or turning over stones. Taking a crazy load of close-up pictures of certain threatened, native spring ephemeral flowers to show off to one's botanist kid-brother. Another of these is cutting one's favorite pair of washed-out jeans from middle school into yet another obnoxious pair of daisy dukes. Or buying an unnecessary viking mead horn and blackberry wine to break it in because damnit, I can, and I will, and I did.
I still feel scared and grim and uncertain, but also I found a wonderful wad of salamander eggs. They were laid, I believe, by this type, which I feel especially akin to because they are about as long as my hand, and also once, on a 20-dollar-dare/because he could, my dad ate a whole one live.
(My favorite thing about this picture, in case you were wondering, is not the disgusting mass of live salamander eggs I'm holding with such relish, it's the fact that you can see from my hips I'm physically caught in the act of wiggling with happiness, which is a little embarrassing, but would probably make my dad feel he'd raised me up right.)
....sun such as spending every waking moment outside, scrambling up ridges or turning over stones. Taking a crazy load of close-up pictures of certain threatened, native spring ephemeral flowers to show off to one's botanist kid-brother. Another of these is cutting one's favorite pair of washed-out jeans from middle school into yet another obnoxious pair of daisy dukes. Or buying an unnecessary viking mead horn and blackberry wine to break it in because damnit, I can, and I will, and I did.
I still feel scared and grim and uncertain, but also I found a wonderful wad of salamander eggs. They were laid, I believe, by this type, which I feel especially akin to because they are about as long as my hand, and also once, on a 20-dollar-dare/because he could, my dad ate a whole one live.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
this is where you tell the honey from the killer bees (I'm glad you're on my side.)
Tonight, I'm brushing my hair and drinking bubble water. My hair is getting real long to the point that I can't just run a brush through it in the morning and let it go--it requires real brushing, like people do on Downton Abbey. I did almost nothing else tonight except this and exercise. I've been keeping blithely distracted. When I'm not isolating, I feel a little stresswild, sometimes with a shaky coat of denial slapped on top. It's an odd feeling. I'm reduced down to my simplest form. Coming through the window, open to the night, the sound of my neighbor yawning on her porch makes me yawn too. So I think of bed, go on brushing my hair, and keep the deal.
a long, boring post about fish
Running at the wetland this evening, the temperature and smell of the water bumped me up against an old, potent memory I haven't thought about in forever. I want to write it down here because it was so exact and strange, almost entirely unthought of, but perfectly conjured in my mind, triggered by the weather.
It was of when my dad used to take me flyfishing on the Yellow Breeches up in PA. I was fifteen or sixteen at the time, gangly, and perpetually leaning to one side or the other like most tall adolescents do. There's a picture of me from one of the trips and I'm standing awkwardly in the water on one booted foot, fly line spinning out in the current behind me, looking so utterly hapless and half-grown in a way that's strangely appealing to me, especially thinking of it tonight with all the significant, melancholy weight of my twenty-six year oldness.
We would wait until just before sunset when all the shambling, middle-aged yuppies would be packing up their expensive gear. The river had been featured in a national flyfishing magazine and had gotten too much recent attention for our taste. Still, it was beautiful. I remember the dark, thick weeds blown out by recent rain, mayapples sprouting in the woods, thorns new and soft on the cat brier the way they can be before summer really gets going. It was late enough in the season that the warming water had that distinctively rich, alive smell. You could smell it as soon as you stepped down the slope of the parking lot, into the vague, descending channel cut into the land by the water. It smelled like wet, dark green.
My dad had a secret weapon: the shammy fly, yes, this--a thin, floppy strip of off-white shammy cloth sewn haphazardly onto a hook. My brother and I mass-produced them. They were so hastily-made that they often disintegrated under the small, sandpaper trout teeth after a few good bites. I expect it was supposed to resemble a small worm or larvae of some nebulous but fatally-intriguing-to-trout kind. Allegedly, my dad received the prototype of this shammy fly as a gift from an old, wisened fishing wizard who seemed to be of the "teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime" philosophy, but the accounts vary wildly. The worst version of the storyI heard involved my dad's drunk friend crashing fully-clothed into the river to demand fishing advice from a poor old lucky sap, who then offered said fly in a desperate but doomed attempt to shut him up.
But this fly! Unlike most handmade flies, which are precise, accurate representations, this was a cheat, a generic trick, something failproof for any trout stream: clear, cloudy, hot, cold, running down, running up. And God, they'd hit it. My dad especially liked sneaking up on some poor idiot fellow fisherman's hole, watching silently as the increasingly-desperate and empty-handed man lashed the same empty stretch of water for hours. Then, just ever so casually, my dad would emerge from the bank, slip into the water, and drop a line downstream into the useless spin water. First cast--always. He seemed to award himself bonus points if the hooked fish then tore upstream and tangled in the line--or legs--of the other angler. It was a beautiful thing to watch.
But humiliating his would-be competitors aside, my dad didn't want the little stocky rainbows that would hit anything, or the shy native brook trout that could only be coaxed out in certain predawn hours. He only had eyes for two fish in the whole creek system--worthy opponents--the two 12-inch albino rainbow trout.
Even at fifteen, I had never seen albino trout before the Breeches, though I'd fished a lot of water. They were odd and strangely horrible, almost sickly golden against the general native brown of creek water. The fact that they were so large and distinctive meant they were smart, and had somehow managed to avoid their evolutionary curse for a number of years. My dad claimed he had hooked one, once, and before it had slipped the line he'd brought it in close enough to see that it was pitted with heron scars and old hooks. But always this mission, always this quest. In retrospect, it must've been a nice break, an excuse to take off from the likely strain of our often chaotic and ruinous family outings. We were not a happy family.
He would recommend a stretch of water and then abandon us, slip out of the water and walk for miles along the bank until he spotted them. I was a fearful, anxious girl and I didn't like him going off alone, especially in the growing dark. I was really too old to be this nervous, but it always hit me like a volleyball to the stomach as soon as I noticed him gone. It's not that I thought something bad would happen to him; he was so capable, so completely at ease in any kind of nature. I think it was more that I worried that after fishing was done and the rods were packed, he wouldn't ever return to our car out of the solid night. The river would just swallow him up as if it had a better claim to him than we ever had.
I remember anxiously following him once, choosing to go by water so he wouldn't hear my shameful approach. I waded dead up the center of the river, water to my chest. It was so deep and thick around me that I made none of my usual sloshing. The mayflies were hatching and they rose in a kind of living mist around me. Fish were rising too, brushing on all sides of me, but I wasn't fishing for them by then, only hunting for my dad. My feet groped along the pebbly bottom. Sometimes I'd stumble over submerged logs and catch myself in slow, horrifying motion, water swelling into my holey waders.
I knew I'd found him when I saw the thin, fine draft of cigarette smoke drifting along the black surface of the water, cloud-like. I couldn't really see him, waist deep silhouette standing under a willow that draped into the creek, but I could see the red cherry of his cigarette every time he drew on it. I didn't speak or approach, I just lingered there, the current breaking around my form. Even now, here, imagining it is reassuring.
All this seems fairly garden variety, doesn't it? Thinking about it, I realize I have turned into an adult who is very much like my father, which sounds complimentary, after this gushing, adjective-reeking missive about his fishing talents and mysterious airs. But I don't mean it like that--I'll never catch any albino trout. But sometimes I too find myself erecting flimsy reasons to be alone in the woods, to follow some compulsion off the agenda. I don't know. I appreciate it more in my dad now, and forgive him for it. Tonight I looked up pictures of a offshoot river named for a british soldier's wardrobe malfunction in the middle of nowhere PA because of him, and I couldn't believe how well I remembered it all, the power of place. And I'm cutting myself some slack.
It was of when my dad used to take me flyfishing on the Yellow Breeches up in PA. I was fifteen or sixteen at the time, gangly, and perpetually leaning to one side or the other like most tall adolescents do. There's a picture of me from one of the trips and I'm standing awkwardly in the water on one booted foot, fly line spinning out in the current behind me, looking so utterly hapless and half-grown in a way that's strangely appealing to me, especially thinking of it tonight with all the significant, melancholy weight of my twenty-six year oldness.
We would wait until just before sunset when all the shambling, middle-aged yuppies would be packing up their expensive gear. The river had been featured in a national flyfishing magazine and had gotten too much recent attention for our taste. Still, it was beautiful. I remember the dark, thick weeds blown out by recent rain, mayapples sprouting in the woods, thorns new and soft on the cat brier the way they can be before summer really gets going. It was late enough in the season that the warming water had that distinctively rich, alive smell. You could smell it as soon as you stepped down the slope of the parking lot, into the vague, descending channel cut into the land by the water. It smelled like wet, dark green.
My dad had a secret weapon: the shammy fly, yes, this--a thin, floppy strip of off-white shammy cloth sewn haphazardly onto a hook. My brother and I mass-produced them. They were so hastily-made that they often disintegrated under the small, sandpaper trout teeth after a few good bites. I expect it was supposed to resemble a small worm or larvae of some nebulous but fatally-intriguing-to-trout kind. Allegedly, my dad received the prototype of this shammy fly as a gift from an old, wisened fishing wizard who seemed to be of the "teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime" philosophy, but the accounts vary wildly. The worst version of the storyI heard involved my dad's drunk friend crashing fully-clothed into the river to demand fishing advice from a poor old lucky sap, who then offered said fly in a desperate but doomed attempt to shut him up.
But this fly! Unlike most handmade flies, which are precise, accurate representations, this was a cheat, a generic trick, something failproof for any trout stream: clear, cloudy, hot, cold, running down, running up. And God, they'd hit it. My dad especially liked sneaking up on some poor idiot fellow fisherman's hole, watching silently as the increasingly-desperate and empty-handed man lashed the same empty stretch of water for hours. Then, just ever so casually, my dad would emerge from the bank, slip into the water, and drop a line downstream into the useless spin water. First cast--always. He seemed to award himself bonus points if the hooked fish then tore upstream and tangled in the line--or legs--of the other angler. It was a beautiful thing to watch.
But humiliating his would-be competitors aside, my dad didn't want the little stocky rainbows that would hit anything, or the shy native brook trout that could only be coaxed out in certain predawn hours. He only had eyes for two fish in the whole creek system--worthy opponents--the two 12-inch albino rainbow trout.
Even at fifteen, I had never seen albino trout before the Breeches, though I'd fished a lot of water. They were odd and strangely horrible, almost sickly golden against the general native brown of creek water. The fact that they were so large and distinctive meant they were smart, and had somehow managed to avoid their evolutionary curse for a number of years. My dad claimed he had hooked one, once, and before it had slipped the line he'd brought it in close enough to see that it was pitted with heron scars and old hooks. But always this mission, always this quest. In retrospect, it must've been a nice break, an excuse to take off from the likely strain of our often chaotic and ruinous family outings. We were not a happy family.
He would recommend a stretch of water and then abandon us, slip out of the water and walk for miles along the bank until he spotted them. I was a fearful, anxious girl and I didn't like him going off alone, especially in the growing dark. I was really too old to be this nervous, but it always hit me like a volleyball to the stomach as soon as I noticed him gone. It's not that I thought something bad would happen to him; he was so capable, so completely at ease in any kind of nature. I think it was more that I worried that after fishing was done and the rods were packed, he wouldn't ever return to our car out of the solid night. The river would just swallow him up as if it had a better claim to him than we ever had.
I remember anxiously following him once, choosing to go by water so he wouldn't hear my shameful approach. I waded dead up the center of the river, water to my chest. It was so deep and thick around me that I made none of my usual sloshing. The mayflies were hatching and they rose in a kind of living mist around me. Fish were rising too, brushing on all sides of me, but I wasn't fishing for them by then, only hunting for my dad. My feet groped along the pebbly bottom. Sometimes I'd stumble over submerged logs and catch myself in slow, horrifying motion, water swelling into my holey waders.
I knew I'd found him when I saw the thin, fine draft of cigarette smoke drifting along the black surface of the water, cloud-like. I couldn't really see him, waist deep silhouette standing under a willow that draped into the creek, but I could see the red cherry of his cigarette every time he drew on it. I didn't speak or approach, I just lingered there, the current breaking around my form. Even now, here, imagining it is reassuring.
All this seems fairly garden variety, doesn't it? Thinking about it, I realize I have turned into an adult who is very much like my father, which sounds complimentary, after this gushing, adjective-reeking missive about his fishing talents and mysterious airs. But I don't mean it like that--I'll never catch any albino trout. But sometimes I too find myself erecting flimsy reasons to be alone in the woods, to follow some compulsion off the agenda. I don't know. I appreciate it more in my dad now, and forgive him for it. Tonight I looked up pictures of a offshoot river named for a british soldier's wardrobe malfunction in the middle of nowhere PA because of him, and I couldn't believe how well I remembered it all, the power of place. And I'm cutting myself some slack.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
photopost like a toolbag
A new annual or 5.
White raspberry citrus sangria with edible violets.
First attempt at essential oils--one lavender and one magic herb medley. I know, I know.
Garden things starting to come together.
Friday, April 12, 2013
offerings
Hi, I’m Jess. Although I have not posted in a while, I am still alive, and I will try to make this fact up to you by posting a solid, long post and then a series of shorter, shittier posts in the following days: a sort of offering.
Offering is a word my mother uses to describe what she perceives as inadequate but deeply felt gestures of material affection. It first entered her vocabulary when one of our dogs was little, and learned to solicit attention by blatantly “stealing” everyday objects around the house and offering them to a non-dog family member, expecting praise and attention for immediately yielding up the goods. My mother is very earnest and thoughtful, and she often buys small unasked-for but deeply sweet tokens for people she cares about—in the case of me, her sole, weird daughter: wool socks, peanut butter cups, and another bottle of a certain Virginia grown raspberry wine that despite being outside of both our usual tastes, we once drank cheerfully in one sitting the night before legends. (She must’ve saved the bottle.)
Anyway, I don’t have a metaphorical raspberry wine of a post, but I’m not as good as my mother and will likely never be. That said, I will tell you about my day, which is as noble a thing for a blog to do as any.
My day begun very early, with a storm that woke me. I could hear the sudden rain like a physical presence, and I almost got up to be nervous or excited about it. I couldn’t get my hair to behave at all, so I let it down and went into work fairly early. Outside, the rain had cleared and everything seemed greener than it had. Spring has come rather all of a sudden, which I prefer vastly to coming not at all, which is how it seemed to me last week.
Work this week has not been optimal, but this gave me renewed resolve to spend much of the morning rapturously eating a donut instead of stressing out about what could not be helped . All in all, it was one of my better workdays, although whether or not that had anything really to do with work is debatable.
I am alone tonight, and this has its own kind of peaceable quality to it. I got home and drove out to the mountains for a run. I wanted to run longer, but I had company at my little wetland park and it unsettled me to see another unapproved human in my secret wonderful alone place. Ducks are nesting there now and the bloodroot is blooming. It is one of my favorite spring ephemerals; I knew it first by its Algonquain name, puccoon, which they used to dye their skin. It has these little ghostly white flowers, and I don’t think I would’ve noticed them if it hadn’t been for just that perfect smoky blue twilight color in the air, where anything with a trace of silver will show.
After my run I went to rite aid. I bought makeup remover and a small tube of plain hand lotion. Then I came back here and cleaned up a bit. I did the dishes and scrubbed the floor and fixed myself cous cous and vegetables over a bed of spinach. I felt extremely smug about the healthiness of this meal and considered posting it to facebook, where my mother would see and be able to approve of me.
Now, I don’t know. I’m sitting out on my porch alone, a girl and her little fire, which I have built to be just enough fire for one person,. The air is getting cold and I’m thinking how that storm must have been a cold front, even if the temperature didn’t plunge. The air is drier now and with some purpose. The wind is moving the sick tree over my head and a stray cat just startled me a bit. I am not so sure I’m ready to go in.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
twice-borrowed words
Don't let the solstice fool you:
our lives will always be
a stew of contradictions
the worst moment of winter can come in April
when the peepers are stubbornly still and our bodies
plod on without conviction
and our thoughts cramp down before the sheer
arsenal of everything that tries us:
this battering, blunt-edged life
-Adrienne Rich
our lives will always be
a stew of contradictions
the worst moment of winter can come in April
when the peepers are stubbornly still and our bodies
plod on without conviction
and our thoughts cramp down before the sheer
arsenal of everything that tries us:
this battering, blunt-edged life
-Adrienne Rich
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Monday, April 1, 2013
on that thing today that I'm not thinking about
A friend who is much smarter than me told me once how foolish it is to mark sad anniversaries and it's something I've taken to heart.
Instead of thinking about and fixating on bad things that happened in the past today, I've tried to focus on the good things in my life, the better people here now that I love dearly. Those blessings are not acknowledged enough for all their great worth and it is good to have an opportunity to do so. Much better than obsessing on a hurtful thing that I should fucking let go of already.
That said, it's emotionally exhausting to actively not think of something. I know things take work and patience and this go around has been so much better than the last. I got through most of it. But by the end of the day, I feel pathetic and burned down, useful for nothing.
Instead of thinking about and fixating on bad things that happened in the past today, I've tried to focus on the good things in my life, the better people here now that I love dearly. Those blessings are not acknowledged enough for all their great worth and it is good to have an opportunity to do so. Much better than obsessing on a hurtful thing that I should fucking let go of already.
That said, it's emotionally exhausting to actively not think of something. I know things take work and patience and this go around has been so much better than the last. I got through most of it. But by the end of the day, I feel pathetic and burned down, useful for nothing.
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