Stream of Consciousness

Domestic Diva

This Saturday has been a veritable celebration of domesticity. I pinned, ironed, and sewed a running stitch channel by hand to make my retro curtains for the breakfast nook. Finished the fixings for a chicken soup we started back before we moved and then decided to freeze the stock instead. This involved sauteeing vegies including onion, carrot, celery, and green beans, chopping parsley and adding it all to a giant simmering pot. Oh yeah, I even cooked barley to give it healthful hardiness. Now it's time for a little respite, nap on the futon couch with pesty cats.

Vernal Equinox 2008

...has been sun, rain, sun, rain, sun, hail, sun, more rain. And did I mention wind? La Nina takes her revenge? Brooding clouds drifting over the roof of our new house, passing, passing, and then a downpour that shakes the leaves of the purple blooming azalea, that make even greener the foliage of the hydrangea not yet in bud. I can hear the rain on the roof now, downpour, after a day of living, simply being. Everything from the dentist before breakfast to sorting through old photographs while vegetable soup simmers on the stove. A blue lupine sits in a pot in the garden, waiting to find its final resting place while four vivid orange and yellow tulips are in a clay pot by the front, hobbit door.

There are raindrops on the window, blown through the screen where I sit watching my reflection, watching the blue-white of this half-day, half-night sky. It does feel like a cold, wet Hawaiian island. Even the sounds out there right now are the wild windward shore winds and downpour on the fronds of a palm.

The Feast of Love, based on Charles Baxter's wonderful novel, and set in Portland, not far from our house is now on the DVD. Great way to spend a rainy evening...

An Addled Brain

I'm not sure if I can attribute it to being too fond of books, as the Lainie's Lady sent to me from Brisbane, Australia, by a friend says, quoting Louisa May Alcott, but today my brain has been addled by sickness and general aching malaise.

It's nearly dusk. The clouds above our stretch of houses here on this quiet NE 22nd Avenue hillock up from Lombard toward Alberta Park are a soft mauve and gray. This is peace, you know, this sitting here with Billie Holliday on the iPod, watching the light leach from the day, the blue-gray of Roy's house next door become flatter and purely gray. Even as I flail about, questioning and wondering, feeling another day gone, slipped away, out of my hands because of a body not cooperating, not allowing me to feel well enough to attend an event I said two months back I'd go to. Lots of issues with that, my feeling less-than-perfect, a party pooper, a lackluster disappointment. Planes circle, pass overhead, prepare to land.

There are pink buds on fruit trees in back yards and on the median between the sidewalk and the street. Our own garden bursts with pollen, ripeness from the giant maples. We're here barely two months in this home, this place I continue to unpack, sort, organize, and arrange.

Watching the Day Fade

Another day unfolds in my city life as I reclaim my order and my time after returning from a long, icy trip back east. This is the first day I've actually noticed, taken note of just how long the light actually hangs around now that we've had almost a week of the clocks sprung ahead.

It's been a lovely day. A visit with a good friend, another writer, in town with her husband for his conference. Lunch and coffee and interesting conversation, actually stimulating, making me think and reflect and consider opinions and wisdom received and learned from living this life, its unfolding of days. So now, I sit in the dining room, dinner en route from Hot Lips Pizza and watch the light leave 22nd Avenue as the earth turns, yet again, away from the sun. That's it, isn't it? The way the diurnal cycle works? The giant Douglas fir--likely planted when these homes were first built 70 years ago--with its broken still-hanging branch next door moves in the barest of dusky winds. The cargo feeder planes have stopped, cargo delivered and the pilots gone where? home? to the closest motel until they wake and do their cargo delivery thing again in the morning? There is so much I do not know about the world.

Today I know there was sun. And that the heavy rains from earlier in the day filled our new bird bath and the old one, no longer hanging but now a simple basin on the ground where it can serve as a cat water dish, and the broken pot G. left behind all those years ago when he fled Ithaca for Fairbanks. Shrubbery whose names I don't yet know seems to have doubled in size since yesterday afternoon. Spring: abundance, budding, blossoming here in my quiet city oasis.

A fire truck drives past. Soon we will have shades with cords on both sides that take them down from the top and up from the bottom. I continue to be amazed at how easily I've made the transition to this from life in the Coast Range woods. Is it all about being ready? to move on?

Rain

I was surprised to hear and see that it was raining tonight. OK, it's only March and this is the Pacific Northwest. But somehow all the blooming, the bulbs up and showy, the fruit trees, the camellias and almost the rhododendrons, had convinced me that winter was over which means sun instead of rain.

I went out to retrieve a box of recyclable paper now sodden and soggy because it sat in the rain outside the locked door to the garage. Went out to toss scooped scoopable litter so it doesn't smell up the house. Went out to stuff a bunch of envelopes to return to Federal Express into the front seat of the already crowded pickup. Went out to remember, after a day of desk drawer tidying, that there is fresh air out there and somewhere a moon and now a bird bath to entice the wee chirpers to our back garden. Meanwhile, a bird has been merrily sitting on top of the nesting box outside our front door. Moved in? While I continue to putter and sort and nail and order and re-arrange and make decisions of minimal consequence here in my life on the inside.

Three miniature jonquils grace a blue glass inkwell -- early 20th century for sure. I found it at the antique store in Montrose, Pennsylvania—Mary's, I think that's the name— that day I was driving the back roads to Ithaca. It was February 29th and I was racing the coming snow, a storm that would bring the return of the gray but stopping at yet another familiar landmark along that all-too familiar itinerary from all those years slogging between family and our gypsy life in central New York. Classical music on the radio, familiar mileposts and landmarks, and yet my own life, far, far away now from all that. Can a blown glass inkwell be enough to remind me, be enough to cause me to sentimentally reminisce? Maybe it is true that objects hold the meaning to so much of everything. If only the many that surround me could talk, share their colorful pasts...

'Til Tuesday

Comparisons are odious.
- Popular 14th Century Saying

Today I finally unpacked my fountain pen collection. I also hung a dream catcher that my old boss at Cornell gave me when I left my job there in 1998. Since then, it had been hanging in my writing room window, all those years in the woods outside Corvallis. Now, finally, it's back in front of me. It's quite nice to have most of the stuff in my study off the floor as well. Others might call it clutter but these are, indeed, my talismans.

What else unearthed today? A paperweight J.'s father gave me, dolls bought at Voodoo Authentica in New Orleans now on the shelf across from my trio of kaleidoscopes, the rosewood prayer beads and the ones John brought back in their silk striped case from South Korea now hanging from the shelf as well. Two small, white marbled stones. One's a pebble, really. The origami I bought at the Sacramento Amtrak station, the ones that later inspired a poem.

I also planted flowers -- primroses for color in the perennial garden. Anemone and ranunculae in pots. Tiny grape hyacinth in pots, too. Sat out in the garden with one of the cats and watched the cargo feeder planes stream in as they do, daily between 5 and 6 pm. That somehow was comforting. Talk about a desperado after all the bickering, unnecessary fretting, and manufactured stress of being with family in NE Pa. J.'s in DC, backup for some Senate testimony tomorrow AM. I'm listening to the Juno soundtrack, glad I've learned to be happy in my solitude in this all-too-short, too-often misunderstood and made-overcomplicated life.

Back from the Friendly Skies

I arrived back to sane, springing-ahead Portland last night, weary from my sojourn to home turf in northeastern Pennsylvania and a pilgrimage to icy, snow-drift and dreary Ithaca for a friend's memorial service on March 1st. It was a grueling trip. Lots of down time, time to observe the shabby, broken-down weariness of that part of the east. Time to obsessively read Philip Roth and reflect on my own exile, to make peace with why I can't truly ever go home again and, more and more, no longer want to. Maybe everybody else by their middle age has made peace with this scenario but me. And, perhaps in ways, I too already have. But this trip really brought it horribly home: the fearfulness, the general daily anxiety, the xenophobia about outsiders (and that catchall category can include just about anybody), the overall weariness associated with travel in a too-crowded, crumbling-infrastructure place. Highlights were the real bagels and pizza. And, of course, seeing Ithaca friends. It's good to be back even if my life here needs re-structuring, new priorities, and more unpacking awaits. The camellia is blooming and there are happy daffodils in the back garden yard. I may have to re-read Thomas Wolfe on home, place, exile, and family to re-gain some universally-acknowledged perspectives on why some of us, particularly the creative ones, often have to head, solo and unscripted, out into the big, bad world.