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.