http://www.cafemama.com sarah gilbert lives here, and discusses her inconvenient life as a mama, writing, cooking, running, knitting, sewing, biking, birthing, reading, or just thinking Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:53:00 GMT en-us http://www.cafemama.com/2010/jul/18_coping.html http://www.cafemama.com/2010/jul/18_coping.html Tue, 25 May 2010 15:29:00 PDT In the morning, it is easy. Or, it is not easy, being here, at home with these three boys and a husband far away. When it is hard, it blazes out, hot and dizzy and no rational thought can penetrate my thick, yeasty skull. My sinuses blouse with blood, angry; my eyes blear; I want to throw myself into a cool river, sewage or no, I want to lie spread-eagled on the kitchen floor and sob. Too much, too much! I harangue, I bluster; I wail to my heathen soul. It is easy in the long, winding wisping string of time. It is not easy in the moments. It is in the moments when I hear my eldest, suddenly scattering into a shellfish-like froth, kicking and writhing in an agony of mosquito-bite itches, just as I have found that quiet hummmm of focus to complete a thought, or just as I have picked up a particularly delicious piece of chocolate, or just as I have begun to chop an onion. I take my breath, I say, "I'm sorry, sweetie, I know how that feels," even though I have twice the mosquito bites, I empathize, but his undoneness exhausts me. It is in the close focus that I can see the grime, grime everywhere, in the corners of the baseboards and the tops of the windowframes, on the windows and the peeling-painted doorjambs, on the shins and fingernails and dimples of my boys. The cars have been kicked across the kitchen, again, by an angry boy (or two, on one day); they are under the dishwasher that does not work, they are nestled between the filthy garbage can and the filthier dustpan; they are behind the compost bucket. There are holes in the walls, where the plaster has fallen or been ripped to expose wiring or has been punched or just picked at, bit by ancient bit, by little fingers. There are weeds, weeds everywhere, bursting up between my strawberry plants and around my garlic and through the neighbor's fence and among the piled branches and despite the hard gravelly clay and through the woodchips and in great patches and strips in the wildest parts of my backyard. The tomatoes in the back are thirsty; the peach tree looks parched to death; the blueberries are choked by the raspberries and the zucchini was trampled by generous helpers. I set out, some mornings, some afternoons, armed with garden gloves and watering cans, buckets of dirt and rags of vinegar or dish soap, shovels and brooms and dusting cloths, long-sleeved organic cotton shirts and floppy hats. I scrabble, I scrape, I scrub, I scrunch up my nose and wrinkle my brow and think, too much, too much! I, publican-like, beat my breast, cry out, not worthy! And inside, there are screams, high-pitched and ragged, I say to no one, "I'm coming, sweetie, what's wrong?" and do not go right away, there is another weed to pull, a bucket to return to its compost-pile, and only then do I go inside to negotiate this desperate struggle over a purple Hot Wheels snowmobile. The boys are hungry, the clothes are dirty, the bills must be paid and the in-laws must be visited. The milk must be picked up, the playdates must be arranged, the cat food must be filled, filled again, filled again. None of this is negotiable, none of it is hard, unless I dwell on the must-ness of it all. And yet. The mornings are easy. We rise to NPR and happy games of Legos and bowls of sweet cherries, the coffee is dark and sweet as love, the pace is slow and we have silliness, brightness, beauty too. The days are long and they are filled with surprises of joy, brotherliness, vanilla maple ice cream and blueberry jam and kind friends and sweet words. There are struggles and choler and long stretches of spitting swearing agony, but when they are over, when they are spent, the succubus is gone and a wise-beyond-his-years child looks at me, and says in his quietest and most understanding voice, "please try to be calm," when I have become angry, of all things, over spilt milk. I stomp about the house one more time and hug the littlest, apologize all around, clean up the milk and pour another glass and thank him, thank them, thank God. When someone asks, I say, "I'm fine, I'm great!" because I am, because the boys save bacon for their brothers, because Everett's friends come over and look at me solemnly in gratitude when I ask, "do you want to eat that raspberry?", because the bicycle-wheel arbor is thick, dripping, tangled with grapes-to-be, because pedestrians laden with grocery bags slow down, stop, stare, point when they pass by our home, because my husband calls from his office in Camp Arafjan, Kuwait and we talk as if we were 20, still, because when evening comes the sun shines through the walnut leaves and into my kitchen in a way that lights my yellow bowl and my dining room table and my heart up like candles, because grace will see me through. http://www.cafemama.com/2010/may/25_oil_leak_a_sonnet.html http://www.cafemama.com/2010/may/25_oil_leak_a_sonnet.html Tue, 25 May 2010 15:29:00 PDT It was not this, this leak that garnered such a bleakstorm of uncompromising pressers. Reporters rapt with duty thus: bring us your best in blame, your scandals messier than the ones before. We ask for the blood of executives who, we're sure, laugh long in their pinstripes, wingtips now oil-strewn, mud- splat, soles mucked with fouled fishscale, choked birdsong. Not this, lack of governmental foresight, this splattering of lust for wealth, and less, this tangle of administrative blight, the slow looping stream of wide-eyed justice. 'Twas me, and you, our thirst, indelicate gulping, our leak, our spill, our oil-stained foot. This sonnet, written today with Mara in our Kitchen Table MFA class, is admittedly in need of a good edit, but it is at the same time a poetic version of this column on Daily Finance; its heart-cry is deep even though its form is lacking. Please write a sonnet of your own and, if you like, send me a link. Here are the general rules for a sonnet -- mine's Shakespearean -- if you decide to adopt another poetic form, I'll love it just the same. http://www.cafemama.com/2010/may/21_departure.html http://www.cafemama.com/2010/may/21_departure.html Wed, 26 May 2010 17:17:00 PDT I wake up at 4:33 a.m. and my panic is spherical, nebulous, I cannot see through the brackish shell but I know its contents are vast and viscous. Yes, he -- he should have been picked up at 4, on his way to the airport, and I cast about for clues -- no shower running, no phone ringing, no news network on TV. I disengage Monroe and, he cries, I say in my calmest desperation, "just a minute, just a minute," I check living room, kitchen, driveway. The door is unlocked; the Army duffel is gone; the Facebook status is mute. Gone. This is how it will be, then? I think to myself, wondering if he left sad or just rushed, wondering if he woke the boys, wondering if this would be the thing we'd all later say, if only. When a soldier leaves for war, there should be a banner sign and kazoos buzzing and smiles and tears and kisses all 'round. But here we all were, sleeping, the house, sprawled and half-blanketed, snoring quietly to itself into the rainy grey morning as he off-headed to ... where? This is, what it is, not the clean plot of most military stories, the reservist's life. No governor would speak on a loudspeaker to ceremony his departure; we did not even know to which country he'd be flying in seven more days. Iraq had been our certainty until Wednesday, when an early-morning phone call from a First Sergeant with a southern accent gave us a list, Iraq, Afghanistan, Qatar, Dubai. Or something. Somewhere... And here I'd gone, sticking a fork in the tangled spaghetti of the plot and not even waking up for that tearful goodbye kiss, yes we'd had an evening that was -- not miserable -- a soft lamentative dance of long errands, packing, dishes cleaning, a late and valiant dinner of sirloin tips stirfried with snow peas, sesame seeds, chicken broth. And white jasmine rice. It was a dish that, I told myself, was a symbiosis between the things he wanted and the places I wouldn't compromise. Local, grass-fed beef I'd ordered from the buying club, organic snow peas just-bought from the farmer's market, garlic from my garden, chicken broth I'd frozen. The boys ate, each in his own way, little piles of just-meat or just-rice or everything, hungrily, and Jonathan barely could. All that afternoon and late into the night and all through this day, in airports and on airplanes and in a hotel bathroom, he was throwing up, food poisoning or fear, both, fear-poisoning, stomach-lurching, emptying him of all but his shaky reminders, "when I come back it's going to be great." I had done all I could, I thought, we sank into bed at 11:30 and it was his last night and he was throwing up as I fell into my sleep in which panic spurted quietly, at regular intervals, a lesser geyser whose eruption no one ever greets with cheers, laughter, snapshots. And now, he was headed to war without a word. As the sun moved its way toward our horizon behind the clouds, I washed the dishes, slowly, putting things away with care and deliberation, as I washed jaunting into projects I'd thought I would do once he was gone and some I'd long delayed, rolling saved coffee bean bags into neat snail-shell packages, putting the seasonings only he used into a box, pouring bits of foods I'd never eat into the compost. I filled a garbage bag; I contemplated buying a new toaster; I put away his socks. I'd given him my phone, but it stayed off all day and all I could do was watch his flight's status on Delta's web site, maddeningly murky and long-delayed. As the boys awoke, one by one, and I began the normal morning machinations on this day everything changed, the status indicator switched to yellow, "in flight," and I had nothing to do but move through this changed world as before. But different. We were late for school and I was not rehearsing the reasons in my mind, it's ok, of course, I said to myself and that was all. As nine turned to ten a.m., the little ones and I shopped, I saw myself in the third person, there she attempts the escalator with one potentially autistic child and one headstrong one, see how her anxiety is, there!, comical, see how she buys a $169.99 gift for her soldier husband and but three dollars on cars for her boys. I said they could only get one Hot Wheels vehicle each; Monroe insisted on two, two of the same, Truman bought a tank with four guns. It could defeat anyone. Monroe spilled hot chocolate everywhere, across the floor, down, and up the escalator again, in the bathroom, all over his raincoat. It's ok, no big deal. It is nearly two o'clock, time to pick up Everett from school, when he calls, in Huntington, Alabama, not where he should be. The airport in Atlanta had closed-due-to-thunderstorm, and he had circled, circled, circled, until the airplane ran out of fuel and he had been diverted. "Why didn't you wake me?" I asked. "You looked tired," he said. We wind through our day, I bike with the boys past exhaustion, past chill, past sense and reason. He will not get to Ft. Benning until Saturday, noon; we will spend Saturday cleaning through the rainstorms; he will learn that he is bound toward Kuwait. This knowledge will be a comfort; he will be better, more solid, eating meal after meal at "chow" as we make toast with butter and raw Portland honey. We will fall into our beds at night, still wet from the rain and exhausted from the riding, we will sleep through the quiet shower-fall, car-wheels-on-pavement, as he awakes each sweltering, sticky morning for body armor fittings and small pox vaccines and regular sessions of shouting through which he will stand at attention with remarkable equanimity. And the next Friday, he will go around the globe as we sleep, rain-wet, muscle-tired, sad in ways we can't explain. http://www.cafemama.com/2010/may/16_counting.html http://www.cafemama.com/2010/may/16_counting.html Mon, 17 May 2010 00:29:00 PDT Four. Four days until we are four. Of course, we have been alone before. We are alone now, right this moment, the father of the house off playing chess with a neighbor while I write. It could be anything: a bike ride, an errand, helping a friend move, talking on the phone, washing his grandmother's dishes, a state away undergoing sergeant training meant to make him a "warrior leader," which stretches to all but emotional bone structure, taut skin of convention, duty. Five. Five, his years in service, E-5, his rank now. Five, Truman's age. I wonder in the times in between the countings and the accountings, what is left? And who was it that did the taking-away? Surely, we have only been withdrawing in these past years, and I do not list in my debit columns the service itself. Surely, we are strewn all over with the red of our deficit, blood or ink or the many jars of tomato sauce I canned (for him, for him!), when I put my hands to my face, some days, I pull them away wet and I expect scarlet. It is the color I see when I close my eyes, some nights, crimson, port-wine, rage. I draw in my breath and it is jagged with the effort, gasping into lungs who protest the overdraft. I search for my center, my mantras, my notes-to-self, but when the gyre's been tangled in knots, the innocence gulps sea water and I shout back, scream, wail, tear out of the house in my pajama pants and running shoes and rain coat, pull the hood down, ask questions with no answer, pray, not expecting anything in return. Zero. Zero dollars and seventy-six cents in our bank account. I spent that money, knowing; I wanted to buy happiness measured in pounds of sirloin-tip steak, quarts of ice cream, dozens of deviled eggs; I have no one to audit but me; he'll "give me everything," which might be, each month, four thousand, four hundred, thirty-one dollars and twenty-seven cents if I have found the right columns in the right tables, and will of course be enough. Enough. More! This is the low point, here, I swipe my pen for reminder, commemoration. Because I wish to be circumspect, persevering without perseverating, courteous and kind, it is now that I -- I wish to be mild, you see -- speak in the abstract, the hypothetical, the "one." I can understand how the wife of a soldier might, were she in the sort of situation I am sketching right now in the notebook of my imagination, be counting down to grief but also to equilibrium, to loss, but still, to accumulation. A wife might see her home as castle, fortress, stronghold; she might see a zealous and intemperate and occasionally calamitous force whip her papers, her quiet thoughts, her delicate accomplishments of parenting or householding into the air, so that they are just out of reach and the heat of her tears sears, her heart blisters, she might end up as the clock winds its way around, again, in the dark of the night, with a back that is aching from its daily work (of home, of satisfaction!) and a nature that is too raw to weather one more bluster, and she might not wrap this person in the embrace he requires, instead, she might wrap herself around herself and brace for the wind. Two. Two boys who, after tomorrow, will be categorized as "severe emotional disturbance" by the public school system; two boys whose eyes look at mine with such clarity, clairvoyance, then flash in an instant to an unholy mindless madness. Two who are angry; one who is unkiltered; three who need the bulwarks buttressed and the covertures conserved. Will I do this worthily, preserving, nurturing, husbanding my whelp and weal? Or won't I? We are counting "lasts," mourning and marking. Last Saturday morning, last Sunday night, I see my schedule scored with checklists and certificates and the creation of documentary security, and I fear that in all this discipline-making and family-supporting and country-serving a model has been molded, and is it the knight exemplar whose armor I wish to display in my Great Hall? Or will the sculptor wet the clay, again, rework, fire with the heat of the Biblical desert, return the armature fitted as a paragon of husband-ry? He is running out of lasts; the count is ticking down; with what sort of fireworks will the last moments be marked? rain-ripples on mudpuddle The numbers are easy, count down from four to none and then it's 400, the numbers are discernable, the same no matter how I look at them, recorded on papers that I must print 14 times. It is that which is uncountable that has us pushing as through a jungle blindfolded, the rain-ripples on a mudpuddle, the walnut leaves out my kitchen window, the dandelion seed-parachutes on a little brother's head, the number of stabs of sarcasm, the quantity of little hurts and healings, the length of the road back to joy. I know this: in his absence there will be loneliness and a sacred quiet, one year of one centering prayer. I will gather my forces, I will ride my ramparts, I will round we four into the sanctum and, one by lentitudinous one I will count back, again, to zero. http://www.cafemama.com/2010/apr/20_radical_me.html http://www.cafemama.com/2010/apr/20_radical_me.html Tue, 20 Apr 2010 23:29:00 PDT I have, of late, become reluctant to adopt others' monikers. As "foodie" and "locavore" became tinged with privilege, I -- always eager to join a movement or two -- have fallen in love with more inclusive and encompassing eponyms. "Urban homesteader" is one of my favorite, evocative as it is of that pioneer spirit infusing the stories I loved most as a child, Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Oregon Trail, plucky tales of girls who ran, jumped, forded streams, let fruit juices stream down their brown-in-the-sun cheeks, stitched hems on cotton lawn, cooked a whole pig, midwived their sisters, their friends. And descriptive: I love a descriptive name. A name, you see, should above all name. There have been others, of course, through the years that seemed to fit. I've known and loved "voluntary simplicity," "frugality," "locavorism." I've always subscribed to "feminist," though in a way I'd like to consider gentle, quieter, man-indulgent. They know not of what they fetter. One day, there was an email from she-who-coins. Shannon Hayes had, she told me, written and published a book. She had been given my URL, a "radical homemaker" if there ever was one, perhaps? Yes, I said, yes indeed. That sounds about right. I read the book quickly, gulping her interpretation of history, drinking facts and suppositions and bitty manifestos with my hands raised in "hallelujah." Here, the choir: there, the preacher. I claimed. It was about this time that a writer from the New York Times sat down, with (I imagine) Macbook in hand. In her pretty neighborhood in Berkeley, she, too, knew of these radical lasses, and they all had coops. That there were husbands and mid-six-figure salaries to soften the whush of the housework's whip in their Californian estates, I have little doubt; that they had loosed the bonds of corporate servitude, I doubt severely. But, they did have chicken coops, and organic kitchen gardens, and perhaps, foods cooked by their own hands. Without jobs of their own, they fit the bill, she thought. Peggy Orenstein shook off the wispy yokes of Latin roots and bestowed her own title, "femivore." I do not prefer to eat only of the female animal; nor do I associate with the pretty ladies of Berkeley who are represented so well by the stock model in her knotted charcoal shawl. It is not her name I choose. "Radical homemaker" is, perhaps, a bit prescriptive; I stumble under the load Hayes would place on my back. Not the work, certainly (and in fact, the work of the radical homemaker is, often, something less than the work I do; her homemakers, she says, need rusty cars, don't always garden, turn to their community for much of their needs); the bit that has me staggering is the privilege assumed. Much is made of her family's farmland, on which her home could be built; of the elitism described by the advanced degrees so many of her radical homemakers have. I do have an advanced degree, and an Ivy League one, too; I do have a homestead to call my own. There the elite-slinging ends. As a child, I was fed by food stamps, charity and prayers. I paid for my degrees on my own. My home, on a big lot in a busy street in a not-yet-up-and-coming neighborhood, was bought with on a modest salary and a lucky investment in eBay. Newly pregnant with my first babe, I sold my stock for closing costs; I began clearly the blackberry brambles by the time my third child was bouncing wetly in my belly. "Radical," I suppose, I am, and perhaps in exactly the way Hayes proposes. I believe in the life of the home; I reject the empty-sweet sustenance of corporations; I grow an herbacious front yard of change. I barter and I beg, I trade and I teach. I speak out; I plant my borrowed blueberry bush, a hope-offering to the rush and offgas of passers-by. Here, here! A fruit, an idea, a simpler way. "Homemaker," yes: I wash, I knead, I preserve, I dig, I hang. Leslie called one day, and asked me to describe my life in Hayes' terms. I did; she transcribed, and there I was. It's a snapshot of the radical me. It's a piece of myself, and as such, it's filled with all I wish I could be, and riddled with my flaws. Messy and hopeful. Intensely ardent. Possible, possible, possible. http://www.cafemama.com/2010/mar/31_all_the_pretty_stories.html http://www.cafemama.com/2010/mar/31_all_the_pretty_stories.html Wed, 31 Mar 2010 23:29:00 PDT She is still holding the phone in one hand, clasping the pole in the other, and she begins to cry silently in the bright lights of the last MAX train to Portland... When he says the word, "crazy," he smiles so that the lines on his face come alive, rippling, his ears anxious with pride... The women of Brooklyn weave into their lives a fierce ruddy self-possession, the pioneer spirit that may have come from Austin or Maryland or even New Jersey but lives and breathes and forges community in a way that their great-great-great-grandmothers might have known... He laughs in a way that I know he will regret, all of us look at him with something between pity and fear and a rueful admiration, the strength of him, the energy, the will of his anger. I have been reading. Last week it was The Gastronomical Me, MFK Fisher, and while at first I was ringed with her cavalier way of tossing cruelty and mortality and great loneliness into little food stories, I grew and grew into them until I knew that in every great joy is a memory of deep longing for it, in every achievement is many many days of meaningless, mindless struggle, for every meal there is the one who cooked it and all her hopes and agonies and loves. Her hungers, Fisher would have said. And Mara and I are letting this course guide us, our syllabus title reads, "Hearing and Seeing," and while I read I do not get faster but I slow down, sometimes reading a passage over and over until I get it right, looking up words and copying down sentences to remember, leaving them on the page to savor them in my memory like a dessert in an Allende novel. As I read I open my eyes wider and I see the stories around me. As I read I must often set down the book, turn off the podcast, stop talking, stop scribbling, listen, look, eat of the world. I am not the one to make up the stories; I am the one to tell the stories. And I must get the story right. I must tell it over and over again, starting at the middle and going right back to the beginning and then to the end, swooping in and out for a better view, asking questions and finding new ways to see the world through other's eyes. There are so many stories, too many stories, and the ones that come before me must be told again and again, they must be explored, spelunked, unraveled and then knit up again, each thread finding its place -- my fingers are not, not skilful enough -- I am left with so many bits and pieces, the most brilliant colors and fulsome textures, the hard parts that require cool fingers and rested eyes, a body at peace with its guiding mind. Here is Andre Bosman. I go to the launch of the Impossible Project's PX 100 film for Polaroid cameras expecting to be charmed by Florian Kaps -- I am -- I laugh and I scribble and scribble, bent over my notebook recording numbers (five mentions of the word "magic," 60 million vinyl records sold in Germany last year, twenty-one dollars, 10 million films a year) and funny things ("no one knows why people shake a Polaroid picture -- is it encoded in their DNA?"). But it is Andre who has my heart, it is his eyes as he tells the story, as he says, "I didn't know he had bought all my film!", that Fade-to-Black film that was an invention, sort of a mistake, and only Florian Kaps valued it enough to buy, sell, let artists around the world discover it. In Andre is the soul of "impossible," the soul of Edwin Land, the inventor of instant analog film, the soul of great and impractical inventors and artists. He is da Vinci; he is a boy jumping off a tree with duct tape wings; he is alchemist and fiscal conservative. He knew all along, all along how this might could work, no one listened, except the crazy ones who (after all) made it work. This is his story and I wish I had half the art, twice the time, it would take to tell it. Here is Kate Payne. I have met her somehow on Twitter and now we are in Manhattan at a tiny cafe that sells gluten-free, processed sugar-free cupcakes and I without exception love Babycakes, and Kate, and I listen to her stories as if they are already familiar. I see her and Megan Paska as the symbols of a new world: women who improbably seek to feed their hungers with their own hands, their own lettuces, their own hearts. We are talking of quiet simple things, bread-making and nettles and books and words, and they are memento mori of the way this city we are in has always worked. Capitalism! It is an idol, and you do not need to say "false idol" because there is no other God than He. Perhaps I am bending the air a bit here when I plant my flag on a rooftop in Brooklyn where the bees assemble honey from nectar they sip free from everything around them and it is the best honey in the world and I say here! Here is the mountaintop! And as I am walking back to my hotel I take photographs of these great and translucent buildings and I hold the community of women, all around the world, quiet at their stoves each night, feeding real hungers with real food and concrete love, in my heart. Here is my son. And another, and another, but this night I may only tell the story of one. I grapple with his story as I do with him; I live with him and still, it is but tiny pinpricks of light I am seeing too closely, only were I to rocket up to the very heavens could I comprehend its shape, its patterns and curves and beauty. I look at him as he puts arm under littlest brother every time he finds Monroe asleep, curls around him, protector, comforter, comforted. He feeds on this loud complex love, gulps it, I think perhaps it sustains him as he struggles with the Great Unfairness of the World. We are riding our bikes to school and we talk of things; he wonders why the drivers of cars do not care! about bikes, and ever so much less do they care about skateboards, and we consider how this will change and I tell him, be brave my son, for we are the pioneers. I tell him how strong he is, how strong and how brave and how sensible -- it is true -- and more so, he surprises me by signalling for me to cross a busy street (and knowing when to) because Monroe has fallen asleep on the bike, his head on my signalling hand. He surprises me by waking in the middle of the night and saying, "it's o.k., Monroe, your brother is here. It's o.k." And then he is angry, his anger is voiced in little spurts that are quiet or medium, and rarely, in great geysers and gushes of violence and shouts. It is always for the unfairness, the unfairness of the world, and my head aches because he has endured unfairness badly and has one day after school kicked and climbed and struggled and kicked again, knocking the corner of a partition surrounding the "chill space" square into my forehead, and for minutes and hours and even more than a day afterward I long to wail, cry. Later that afternoon we ride on the bike home and he is calm, introspective, sobbing quietly but without rancor for a few minutes over things he knows I will not give to him and all the while I am imagining the sweet release that would be a soft clean bed in a silent room and time and space to cry. I am home now, and I am cooking in ragged bursts, I am baking bread again, I am cutting purple asparagus from the garden, roasting it whole with gray sea salt and green olive oil and eating it hot out of the baking pan. I give the biggest spear to Everett; he eats it all. As Fisher writes, I will really look at things with all my brain, I will care for my food even if I have to eat it alone, "with death in my house or in my heart," with my story cut short, we are all hungry all of the time and I am foraging with all of the sight I can muster. Look, listen, love, eat, and you will be full. http://www.cafemama.com/2010/feb/14_in_the_closed_stacks.html http://www.cafemama.com/2010/feb/14_in_the_closed_stacks.html Tue, 16 Feb 2010 01:29:00 PST They are self-help books given with the intention of changing me; they are newspapers spread open to headlines of woe; they are bright empty foil wrappers strewn among my lavender, my rosemary; they are blemish, smirch, cicatrix. I am gathering, shelving in the "closed" stacks, sorting into the recycling bin, picking up with garden gloves. I do not want these facts in my brain. Still, they are handed to me, neat and ever-obliging, given perhaps as a swipe with some mad painter's rag smeared with pride, love, heart-rift vulnerability, a fib at indifference. They are stacked around my dream-sleep late at night, and as I awake barely in the hours when boys are stirring; they are shuffled in among my regular deck so that I draw them in the midst of jollity, a soul-stab; they are the cruellest long slivers slicing into the pads of my feet as I dance across the floors with dishes, with smiles. They have me screaming, holding fingers in ears, humming fit to beat the band. But the band plays on. Here is information I do not want in my brain: the wife of a man who has died in a combat zone will receive an immediate cash payment of $12,420 upon learning of her husband's death. This is called a "death gratuity" and is unlike other sorts of gratuities in that someone must die to receive them. Here is information I do not care to recall: if that death is due to "hostile actions" the cash gratuity is $100,000 and is payable immediately over and above the SGLI, Servicemembers Group Life Insurance, also due and payable in the fullness of time to me. Here is information my children should not have: that life insurance maximum is now $400,000 and that figure represents the amount by which their father's death would enrich our bank account, compared to the sixty or seventy or eighty thousand dollars we'll see if he does not. To their credit, they would much prefer the smaller number; on their behalf, I seek a Spot Shot for brains. Shout it out? Already, with the deployment now official and three months away, I have shuddered through the stories of the making of The Messenger, I know too well the differences between the way Marines and Army handle the families of their dead, I have a list of the possible reactions: say 'thank you'; refuse to let the soldiers in; fall into a pile of sobs; hide; slap them in the face. I have a stack of notes about the families in his unit and how they have fared after a mother or a father returns from war; the outlook is grim. Without wishing ignorance I still do not wish complete awareness; I do not need these numbers and timetables scrolling by the screen of my everyday in a ceaseless loop. In a world in which the future is ever unknown this is too much knowledge; how can I disavow that with which I am so constantly familiar? The facts keep clocking in, dutiful lineworkers in a factory running hot on all three shifts, and I'm the floor manager 24/7. I find myself, in the mid-mornings and wee hours, making reflexive movements as if to shake the clipboard clear, push the books off the back of the shelves, take a soapy swipe to my brain. It hasn't worked yet; I can't say I won't keep trying. http://www.cafemama.com/2010/jan/03_begin_again.html http://www.cafemama.com/2010/jan/03_begin_again.html Mon, 25 Jan 2010 01:15:00 PST If it is one thing it will be breakfast; if it is two, dinner. Three and four and five are lunch and chickens scratching and compost turning; six and seven and eight are reading, writing, sewing. Nine and ten, clean kitchen counter, well-swept floor. In this decade of newness, I begin again. I gather up the corners of myself and hold aloft, as I sweep in mess and disappointments and spoiled peaches and deep, clefting hurts and unwritten words and unspoken loves and tomatoes left on their vines and carefully-drawn plans, never referred to again. I sweep in these sentiments: no, I will not type them, they are in there and I will carry this bundle to the highest peak, the undead volcano perhaps, and I will open up my arms and let the corners go. There! My hands are brushing together, satisfied; I open my mouth and close it, letting tension flow from the muscles between ear, lip, rain off our steep roof. Splish splash pitter schweeep. I had gone to bed early, New Year's Eve, suffering from a headache that probably stemmed from indulgences in sugar, or argument. And so I was almost all asleep when the new decade struck, and as it did the fireworks began. At first it was just a pop-POPPOP! to the west and then another, south, and then all around me, popPOPpop-SHPEEEEEE-popPOPOPpop, near and not so near, as if the entire world was celebrating in one grande finale that was also an issuance, an embarkation. I had been feeling quiet, introspective, becalmed and with this aural consecration I rejoiced and gave thanks. I fell back into my sleep, full of hope. Despite it all. In our home, there is a presence, a cloud, that much though I swipe palm against palm, much though I practice with deep breaths and prayers and promises to stay calm, spurn anger, I cannot whish (wish) away. It hangs, dark and often pierced with thunder, lightning, maelstroms and hailstorms. I have no power over it; it is not mine. It is this which grips me: despite all our best ideas and identifications, simply knowing of what a loved one suffers is ineffectual, useless. I can name this, but I cannot mend it. I offer up cool and rational ideas, diagnoses, alternatives, perspectives; I give him his choices. In some moments, I am met with another rational adult. In others, I am only launching myself, arms akimbo, into the whirlpool. I grasp anything I can. And so, I wish to begin, again. Each day is new, a grey mystery of an opportunity to practice enough so it becomes both rote and referent, example and exercise. I wish I was going to church with my family each Sunday; I wish I had breakfast on the table every morning when the boys awoke; I wish I could go to bed each night with a clean kitchen, toys put away, knitting quietly folded by my cozy chair, bookmark progressed through a work worthy of my quiet time. I am grasping at this, getting a little at a time. I am working toward the goal. But while I work, it will be the briefest of quiet times, prayerful states: each morning, I look out the window and open my eyes to the sky, really see; and later, as I pour my French press pot of coffee into a mug, I inhale the aroma deeply, and I give thanks. I thank God for creating these berries; I thank him for the farmers and the buyers and the roasters; I thank him that, at least, I have this day to start anew. http://www.cafemama.com/2009/dec/31_pain_left_behind.html http://www.cafemama.com/2009/dec/31_pain_left_behind.html Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:37:00 PST "And you. You must have had at least one parent who raged," said our new couples counselor. Her office is in a very Portland old house, around the corner from the house where Jonathan spent many of his worst, bitterest, most painful times as a child. In the very Portlandest of ways, it is full of odd yoga classes, acupuncturists, Pan-Asian cushions and wall hangings, many sorts of green teas. I am only jarred for a moment as Jonathan says, "no! Her parents are wonderful!" No. It was, I realize in a reflective instant that shocks me back 10 years, him. My ex-boyfriend of nine years. The pain he caused me, the anger I nurtured, is still here, burbling in the pit of my stomach, spurting hotly from my throat, despite the genetic distance it is reflected in the eyes of these boys, this one, wise-beyond-years, blonde; this one, sweet-smoldering, brown-eyed, everyone's friend until; this one treasure-child, soul of my soul, onomatopoeic echo. When I left him, it was for the children who would one day call my womb home, the love I already had for them, I had far more strength and courage and power for them than for myself. It has been these past months and this ear-splitting now that I have known that I did not leave him, not well enough. I have brought him with me. His pain, his fury, his begrudging the world its ease, its happiness, its pretty light way. This has come with me though I rejected it always, fearfully at first and then with certainty, realization, conviction, love. That path was not for me. Yet it has continued with me, dogging my heels, a path that winds through my life of its own volition: a volition that is his and mine and that of all those in all of our lives who have sought power, control through fear and volume and insults and rage. 10 years ago, I knew, but could not sever this tie, still under the thrall of a love that was always wrapped, twisted with indebtitude, mutual suffering that was not mutually suffered, social and relational and physical power to which I never should have yielded. But did. Here, I tell myself, take back the power. Take it back with words and truth-telling, take it back with prayer and God-pleading and the strength you can find despite yourself, make this family anew. Find a new childhood for these children, still young enough to see the power of love and peace, still sweet enough to grasp my hand and walk with me to the places I want to take them, still wide-eyed enough to wake up on a morning and look out the window with me, see orange-touched clouds over apartment buildings and pine trees, sunrise coming and say "OH!" with light everywhere through them, to point in a voice that is clear-but-not-evident and say, "moon, mama! Moon!" Because this is a day in the calendar which engenders such decisions, I feel that I can gather 17-and-then-some years of this too-slow comprehension, to tell the story: "Jeffrey was not, was never kind to me," that I can form in myself a purging, I can order that demon anger OUT!, that I can pick up the Lego bricks and calendula seeds and fabric bits and apple cores of love all around me, that when I open my eyes each morning I can see every raindrop filled with strength and peace and ability to love this family through the hardest and most wonderful times, that I can snap its photo and let the words pour out until you can see this trail aright: I will leave this pain behind. http://www.cafemama.com/2009/dec/25_gifts.html http://www.cafemama.com/2009/dec/25_gifts.html Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:37:00 PST I am watching the boys play together with Legos and Legos and cars and tiny dollar store teddy bears, and while of course it is not going perfectly (there was sugar, and too little sleep, and these are these boys) I am in a rare mood, drunk on the buoyant nature of the day. I am flushed with a sense of greatest accomplishment -- never have I spent my money so completely and well, every penny nearly, and the boys all, to a one, thrilled. Everett's gifts were Legos and more Legos, from Grandma and Grandpa and me, as I am waiting to read to them it has been 24 hours of studious, joyous play only interrupted by a spare eight hours of sleep, he worked through the instructions on each and every set, completing one and going on to another. He is in the most serious rapture and both he and I can see day upon day upon year of like play to come. His dad, too, is only now returning from two hours of riding his new bike, purchased on Twitter credit, he said something on Facebook, this Christmas did not turn out terribly as expected, surprised by a gift beyond all of my capacity to love and give this holiday season. And there are books at my feet, a pile of best-loved Christmas books (must get the last reading in before it's too late), and it occurs to me how all of them end at the gifts, perhaps they're barely unwrapped but even in Corduroy's Christmas, the one with the little flaps to open and see what's inside, many of the boxes are still beribboned, unopened. The joy is so brief as to be unremarkable. But gifts! What is a gift without discovery, sparkling eyes, smiles that turn all the way to tears, the hug of a teddy bear so spontaneous it can't be captured on camera, hours-days-years of love, gratitude. I put the books down and ask my boys, "are you grateful?" and they are, yes, yes, they look at me with eyes that are true. "What are you most thankful for?" The answer is "Legos and trains and cars and bears and Bakugan!", socks too, everything, they say. We did not go around the table, this Thanksgiving, and say our thanks for things this year. Instead we tell ourselves that we will make our own book about the joy, not of anticipation, but of gratitude, for gifts given and received and used in ways that continue to surprise us. And as they are falling asleep around me, the deep breaths of better-than-anticipated, I think of my gifts, not those under the tree but each of these boys with their challenges, the language that I cannot understand, the tempers and the fiery anger, the sensivity and the constant motion, the great and enormous need that each of these boys has for me. I think that I had not anticipated any of this, no, it surprised me in a flutter of pages far beyond the ends of picture books, and what it has required of me: patience, presence I cannot bear, money I do not have, love I cannot give, generosity more than I can muster: for this, I am grateful. http://www.cafemama.com/2009/oct/29_walnuts_for_the_rich.html http://www.cafemama.com/2009/oct/29_walnuts_for_the_rich.html Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:37:00 PDT They are part of the percussion section of October's orchestra here in this corner of my block, and they are the snare drums. In a heavy rain storm or on a windy day, they report with their crack-crack-CRACKS so often I fear for my head as I walk to my bike in the back yard. It is how I know my neighbors' cars are arriving, the crun-crun-crun-crunchhhhh-split-crunK of walnut shells and meat, splattered, unrecognizable, over and among gravel. The bass of the apples and the bongo of the pine cones fall less frequently, but still: there is no doubt among the animal kingdom that the feast is upon us. In past years, I've stood one-legged at my kitchen sink, watching the squirrels industriously darting back and forth along the fence's rim, bringing their co-op share of the walnut tree's bounty to whatever storage spot they've reserved in my front yard. If the drumroll hadn't warned me it was time to gather walnuts, this would have. But in past years, I've watched the squirrels dart with longing, and then bought my walnuts, shelled, by the one-pound bag, at the farmer's market. It has not been from any sense of great personal wealth; on the contrary, I have felt poor, in time, in knowledge, in space. This year was ripe for a change. Liberated by my time in June and July picking green walnuts for nocino, when I first saw the squirrel dart past my window, nut in hand, I took a bucket outside and offered my seven-year-old a penny a nut. That first day, he made $1.10, and I picked up twice what he did; the second picking, he made $2.32. He won't pick up those with black muck still clinging to their shells, and I'm patient enough to rub it off with my fingers, a nearby leaf, or against pavement with my shoe (which, yes, stains one's skin, but I have no need for lily white digits), so I gather more than he does once more. Today he was busy in a fantasy game involving leaping off hills of dirt with a large stick, so I picked walnuts myself, and they were everywhere, so plentiful I was in mourning, waste everywhere. The neighbors had not picked up their share, not the next-door neighbors whose tree this was, nor the apartment dwellers whose cars were subject to herald by these underfoot delicacies. My back ached as the sun set, and I stopped just shy of my bucket's limit, five pounds of nuts. I would have had to pay at least $3.50 had Everett picked these. Inside, in my kitchen, I selected three dozen now-dried walnuts from the stainless steel rolling shelves where I'd left them to cure, a little more crowded than a single layer, less than the recommendation I'd seen somewhere of "no more than three walnuts deep." They'd been there not quite two weeks -- three separate sources say "two or three weeks" -- but my downside was tiny (harder to crack, is all). Standing on one foot, I inserted my walnuts into the garage sale nutcracker and Monroe stood next to me, hungrily eating the sweet-bitter meats as I removed the papery bits. A pound of walnuts, dry in their shells, yielded four ounces of meat (even accounting for snacking and a few imperfect nuts). I had plans: a conserve, with quinces and dark sweet honey from the farmer's market. Into my saucier they went, to toss over medium-high heat as they released their fragrance, I tasted and tasted and thought, I am rich! Rich in everything that matters. With my knife I chopped them and poured into the quince puree and watched, waited, stirred, expected, discovered. It is said that we must greatly change our world, turn millions of acres into arable farm land by magic and technology, if we are to feed the growing population. But I wonder: is there a way to eat differently, change our lives, embrace the richness around us, and feed ourselves with what's already here? Everywhere, as I run, as I ride, I dodge walnuts and edible chestnuts and acorns, on school grounds and city property and in parking strips and in front yards, piled into heaps for pickup and take-away, and I think, poverty! It saps me, this hungriness, this dereliction, this malfeasance. And it is not just nuts, it is apples and pears and plums and persimmons and figs and grapes dripping, drooping, fragrant, out of reach over an overgrown back fence. And I stir my quince-walnut-honey conserve, considering the limits of my new richness, greedy for more, more, more time to save the food, everywhere. http://www.cafemama.com/2009/oct/15_unpacking_words.html http://www.cafemama.com/2009/oct/15_unpacking_words.html Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:53:00 PST I raise my hand the first time, when Cynthia Whitcomb asks which of us in the packed "breakout" room at the convention center are writers. Yes, I think, of course, but something in me is tremuluous, uncertain. Really? The chairs behind me, beside me, even the wall along the side of the room, everywhere I see writers, many with nametags, bold print displaying the presence of an AUTHOR. ! I have no nametag. And then she laughs, and says she knows how to truly tell who is a writer and who is not. "Do you feel bad about not writing? Then you're a writer!" Her head is thrown back, and we are all laughing, and we are all feeling bad. I should be writing this very minute, I should not be sitting in breakout rooms on folding chairs, I should be writing. Whatever I do, wherever I am, the words are running through my head, sometimes darting in and out, squirrels with nuts, back and forth along the fence, scratching and twitching and flipping their tails; sometimes rolling, over and over, hula hoop down a hill, ungainly but constant, velocitous. I am coaching cross country, this season, and as I run with the girls and the boys I am hearing the awkward music of these words. They slip through the gaps in my breath, in my goofy-create-your-day sort of reminders, "relax your shoulders," I say, "let the tension drip out your elbows," "take control of your breathing," I tell them, "slow your heart down, you have the power." "Light on your feet, light on your feet!" I yell, and I am writing a poem, it has pounding-rolling of the outside edges of rubber shoe-treads and tripping over hazelnuts and rhthymic, hips opening, breathe-heart-knee-shoulderblade-beat. But I do not commit it to paper, or glowing late-night laptop screen, I fall asleep with sweat dried in the small of my back and hamstrings singing their ache, the dull all-the-time everywoman hurt of repeat 1000's and pushing bikes uphill with four gallons of milk and two boys. Into the half-sleep of motherhood it tumbles, along with an agonized story of a fractured relationship with... someone... and the sweetest reflection on love I call "no wedded bliss." I say to myself, she had such promise, and I stack those words in carefully tagged and hand-labeled boxes in the attic of my brain. It is in the state of my life, well-conceived chaos, boxes neatly packed, then rudely torn open by a child's hands, bits scattered in tantrums adult and toddler-like, stained with coffee and little gobs of over-ripened fruit. In my store-room are starts of novels which are actually memoirs and plans for community groups that are actually revolutions, uprisings, there is devastation there, world-changing, and all the time the quiet plink of melodic word upon word. In another room I listen to Hope Edelman tell of a memoir-that-was-a-novel, she talks of the "intimacy of fiction" and the "urgency of non-fiction" and how she was "tracing the landscape of the self" and how she turned to a notebook where she'd recorded just a few of the most unusual happenings, a session in Belize with a Mayan healer because "it was important for the reader to experience the events in real time." Splayed in my physical life are books, too, which inspire and destroy me. That I have not yet read each one, that the ones completed have not yet been reviewed with the seriousness of my sublimated lit professor self, twists in my stomach, bowl-weevil, wood-bore, powdery mildew of my brain. I have read Cheryl Strayed's novel and it astounds me with its humanity and with its complete and unconditional love for her characters. I buy the thick, substantial, melodic book Deeply Rooted, a book about "unconventional" farmers, because I have heard Lisa Hamilton read from it and I have cried, over farmers and North Dakota and East Texas and the beauty of her writing, I have read as much as I can and it has not been enough. I have read all but a few chapters of Langdon Cook's sweet collection of essays on foraging for food, and I am missing from it a narrative thread but am now considering the calendar and whether I might come to Washington to dig razor clams in winter, and go to a meeting of the Oregon Mycological Society. I buy Jam Today, A Diary of Cooking with What You've Got, a bit of a book by Tod Davies, who lives in Ashland, Oregon, and of course I want to love it but it is an inconsequential wisp of a food book and it needed to be edited and the tone makes me so unhappy. And it is supposed to be funny, this "Warning: There is no jam in this book," but instead it is infuriating. There should be jam. I am reading other books that are not good, or are disappointing, or are not what I would make them, or whose characters are flat and unsympathetic and whose sentences are too short, and the words fly around my head, those little black flies that are bigger than fruit flies but not big as house flies, bothersome and not worth being bothered by. There are books stacked on my night stand and on my dresser and on my book case and in my craft room, books everywhere, books worth reading, books I long to read again, books I never should have bought or should have returned to the publisher. And then Cynthia Whitcomb, describing the time when she read a play every day, and meant it to be for a month, then for two months, then a year, but it ended up being 500 plays, one per day, says something. "If you put in enough good stuff, then your brain will give you back good stuff," and it seems so simple. That night I pick up Hemingway's A Moveable Feast again, where I left off, in Paris, and as I read I discover that he has lost things he has written when a suitcase was stolen, I had forgotten this. So many of the stories he wrote, and the first novel, the carbon copies too. He is sad but, in Hemingway fashion, practical, terse, and makes plans. "I knew it was probably a good thing that it was lost, but I knew too that I must write a novel. I would put it off though... When I had to write it, then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice." And I am not Hemingway, this is no novel, but it is what I have to write. There is no choice. I must brush the apple peels and the shortbread crumbs from my words, I must wipe my table clean, I must pick them out of the unkempt piles in my brain, stack them again, color-coded, organized, a rainbow painted within the lines. Here is one, and there is another, and spandrels! persimmon! seedpods! conqueror of emptiness! In the spaces between nutcracking and terror-calming, preserving and stomach-filling, marketing and running and mess-cleaning, I eke out words, one by one by one, I will unpack them all, and those that are lost, I will replace with new ones, I will make them again, one day I will live in this house of my mind as if it is my Home. http://www.cafemama.com/2009/aug/14_family_biking_evangelist.html http://www.cafemama.com/2009/aug/14_family_biking_evangelist.html Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:21:00 PDT For almost a year now, I've had these words in my signature file: "mama . writer . photographer . sustainable food nut . family biking evangelist." It is not that this last thing, this way of transporting self, children, groceries, the occasional chicken or step ladder or eccentric collection of foraged foodstuffs, is the most important part of my identity. And yet. It is a part of my identity. It is important. It is, at times, a thing of empowerment, revelation, community, poetry, pure physical oneness with my world. It is how I get around; it is how I buy stuff; it is time together with family, adventure, exercise, neighborliness, environmental soapbox, 'Green Hour,' display of stubbornness, eccentricity. In so many ways, it is me. This week, in an almost incredulous series of events, I was denied service at a Burgerville drive-through. (Sorry, I refuse to call it a "drive-thru," much though this seems the accepted [mis-]spelling.) I complained mildly about it via Twitter. (Yes, I complain with shortcut spellings on Twitter, so, I'm a hypocrite when there's a character limit.) I was showered with solidarity. (Here too. And here.) I received a swift response from Burgerville. I wrote a long, long letter about my experience and my belief that changing this policy -- and making it into a formal "bikes allowed" policy -- was sensible, forward-thinking, rational, sustainable in a world where the car culture is spinning blissfully in willful ignorance of its imminent dwindling, demise. I received a phone call from the Burgerville manager; I received phone call after phone call from local media outlets; I was on TV twice, and evidently, the radio and a podcast to boot. Finally, a little while ago this afternoon, Burgerville's PR firm emailed me with a press release announcing the company's plan to formally allow bikes to order and pick up food in its 39 drive-through lanes. It quoted chief cultural officer Jack Graves: "We've been handling bikes in the drive-thrus on an ad hoc basis and Ms. Gilbert's experience helped accelerate our decision to develop a formal bike-friendly program." I giggled. I screamed. I was mawkish, treacly, bathetic, overwrought. I was glad. It is not this: that the allowance or denial of bikes in a drive-through is a matter of utmost importance. It is not. It is not that I plan to spend my afternoons from here forward riding through Burgerville drive-through lanes all over Oregon and Washington, ordering Walla Walla onion rings and milkshakes and perhaps the occasional cherry pulled pork sandwich. Much though that might be fun. It is not even that I believe I, as a cyclist or mama of three or cute redhead or denizen of Southeast Portland, have an entitlement to fast food ordered through a speaker, paid for and delivered through a window. But it is a symbol: of bike-friendliness. Of responsiveness. Of the power of words. Of rationality. Of a local company whose chief cultural officer is obviously not just a cute title. I am quietly, (but not that quietly) simply, (in the most complex of ways) pleased that I have made this difference. Even if it is not enormous. Even if its direct payoff is rather inconsequential. I do not want free cheeseburgers or attention to my blog. I like the peace. I'd rather eat ratatouille with tomatoes and peppers from my garden. But I don't really enjoy the world the way it is. I want the windows opened, the barriers taken down, people to get around more slowly and to talk more. I want it to be easier to smile at someone else. I want it to be harder not to know your neighbor. I want it to be safer, lovelier, more ordinary to ride your bike. This was what I wanted. Even if I didn't know it when I set out on my bike on a Wednesday. Thanks. http://www.cafemama.com/2009/jul/25_plums_from_heaven.html http://www.cafemama.com/2009/jul/25_plums_from_heaven.html Sat, 25 Jul 2009 13:10:00 PST We are looking up into the trees, from whence cometh our ripe plums, and our necks are aching. This is the day of our gleaning, and we are learning that picking free fruit has its rewards, both lascivious and beneficent, and its pains in the neck. The pains come first. We are a group of eight, or nine, volunteers who have answered an email quickly on this balmy Thursday in July, we have come on bikes and rattley cars to this corner of Southeast Yamhill (seven blocks from my childhood home), to stand on the sidewalk with odd harvesting sticks and try our mightiest to dislodge only the perfectly purpley ripe plums. Splat. Splunk. Slllshhhh.... These are the sounds of the perfectly purpley ripe plums hitting the sidewalk, the parking strip, the vines in the house's front yard, occasionally, our heads. We are not very good at this, yet. Perhaps it is a bit too early. The timing is the worst bit of gleaning; too early and you'll stand under the tree, frustrated as you stand on tippy-toes with your 12-foot stick to reach the uppermost, sunniest branches where the fruit can be seen, glinting ripely in the early evening light, ending up with a modest harvest. Too late and the orbs will be all underfoot, splat splunk slllssshhh, sticking to the grubby running shoes you've worn for the occasion, many split and wormy and gooey. But we are here for charity, and after all this is free, so we do not complain. I pick up the least smushed of the plums and figure I'll feed them to the chickens, or make them into jam. I set them in my upturned helmet. And we fetch the orchard ladders from Katy's pickup truck and climb for more. Katy Kolker is a little bit famous, in that Portland-est of ways. She's been quoted in the New York Times, and she wears a t-shirt that's so muted it screams "sustainable rock star," green on American Apparel heathery green. "Portland Fruit Tree Project," it reads, if you're up close, close enough so she can tell you something out of the Times, such as, "A fruit tree is really made for sharing with your neighborhood." She now works full-time for the Fruit Tree Project, which organizes "harvesting parties" where volunteers pick fruit from trees whose owners have (in her words) cried "uncle." Half the fruit is given to a food bank; the other half is divvied and sent home with the volunteers. The time is flying, and we decide that we've picked "all the reachable fruit" and head to the second harvesting outpost. I remove the several bruised and battered plums from my helmet and set it on my head, juice dripping into my hair. Oops. This spot is in my neighborhood, too, in the patio of an unusual business I've passed many times but never visited: a wine bar/nursery. I help move the lettuce and cauliflower seedlings out of the way as an older couple on a relaxed summer date look on, and we begin the most glorious harvesting exercise any of us could imagine. The plums are tiny, just bigger than cherries, and the harvest is immense; they are lined up on rows up and down every branch, a child's rendering of fruit, bounteous, bedeviling. As we stare up at the tree plotting our moves, they fall around us. I climb up onto the orchard ladder and I grab a branch and wait until the other volunteers are positioned below me with a tarp. And I shake. It is perhaps the most effective possible method of harvesting just the ripe fruit; the soft plums fall and the rest hold stubbornly to their stems. I yield the shaking ladder to another volunteer harvester and it is after dark when we finally call it a day, left to sort the plums into "OK," "good" and compost, and pick up the many overripe fruits we've crushed in our fervor. All this while I am drinking in the heady scent of plumminess and dreaming of preserves. After we've sorted every last bit and Katy's weighed the bounty, we stand around in a circle and say what we've enjoyed, and what we plan to do with our plums. Many of those assembled will take their seven pounds, eight ounces share home to eat fresh or to stew (with just a bit of cinnamon). I am making jam. I fill my bag with "OK" fruit, soft and split and oh-so-fragrant, and I breathe it in, I already know what I will do: I will slip off the skins with my fingers, I will squeeze the flesh from the stones into a bowl, and repeat, repeat, repeat, four or five or six pounds' worth of ripe, overripe, almost ripe plums, I will pour it into a wide stainless steel pot with a cup of honey and I will turn on the heat and I will inhale. The aromas of preserving are as varied as the stars, each one surely better than the one before, each one a spike in the ground, laying the tracks toward a more perfect pantry, filled with (isn't it?) all the earthly delights. I will swear that there is nothing that will bring me to tears as the scent of the first pot of strawberry jam, I will stir in calendula and borage blossoms, I will throw myself prone, weeping to the poet's muse, and then I will stare deep into the eyes of a currant's jelly and flit! my heart will be gone, again, besotted. Tonight it will be plums. After an hour simmering, a night standing in the refrigerator awaiting my whim, I choose vanilla, and I bring the plum slurry back to a simmer. I prepare the jars (rinse in hot water, a quick dunk for the lids, rings at the ready), I bring my water bath ever-closer to 180 degrees, and with a generous hand stir in the vanilla extract. Ahh! I have never known love as this before (if it were not for blackberry-gooseberry, sans seeds, oh! symphonies in your name, my sweet-sour). Into the jars, the plum vanilla jam, it goes, three half-pints and a pint, it is orange and glorious. Lids are secured, cans lowered into the near-bubbling vat of water, I barely glance at the clock to tell my beloveds how long they will tarry. For I have plum pickles with star anise to can, too. I'm going to need more jars. Where else can I glean? And where can I get one of those harvesting sticks? Ball lids, I set you as a seal upon my heart, for love of preserving is as strong as death. Oh, (pop!) my beloved is mine. This post was written as a guest post for Canning Across America, a group that is promoting a nationwide series of canning parties and events on the last weekend of August, 2009. I plan to have some sort of canning party, and in the meantime, I say: Viva la Canvolution! http://www.cafemama.com/2009/jul/10_speech_delayed.html http://www.cafemama.com/2009/jul/10_speech_delayed.html Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:10:00 PDT It is the next day, after his birthday, and months after I should have known that I realize that Monroe is not speaking in a manner that is "developmentally appropriate." It is insensible, mindless, blindness that has brought me to this day, as I stand hot and a little dizzy in Dr. Vestergaard's examination room, with three boys and one of them near-naked, and look at her in a jolt of acceptance. "A few dozen words," I say, and it comes to me. All at once. A few dozen? Barely four or five more than I'd acknowledged as Truman's sum and total at age two. Weeks ago, I had sat on my front steps paging quietly through my college sketch book, bought at the National Gallery gift shop, a green and yellow Georgia O'Keefe flower on the cover. In it I had sketched a college crush, a glass of water, my eye, a bouquet of flowers, a carnation on a sunhat. In it I had, in another decade, recorded every word that Everett spoke at age two. Hundreds. At the time, I read them and wondered at the different paths my boys have taken in the development of their unassailingly formidable intellects. At the time, I had not doubted Monroe's speech at all. You only need look in their eyes, to see, each will knock down IQ and aptitude tests with steely determination, it is there, deep brilliance, a heady serious soul behind each pair of eyes, green, brown, brown. Everett memorizes poems at two readings; Truman stubbornly "reads" every word of a book he's only heard twice; Monroe turns to the right page, "beep beep, ay!" he says, smiling at me. "Yes," I say, reading the rest of the garbage truck's dialogue. "Beep, beep, beep, hey! Beep, beep, outa my way!" Why then, why, does he converse in babbling and the occasional 'hi,' 'byebye,' 'moon!'? Why have I never worried? Why am I still not worried? Is there something in our water? It's not lead, at least, we were just tested and we passed, no reading, no measurement. I vault forward and back through my new parenting philosophies, the old masters, I look to neurological research (faulty braincell connections, it's all my doing?), I wonder as I do so often, what would Ma Ingalls have done?. Ma Ingalls would never have written all Mary's words in her sketchbook, I imagine, for a minute half-wondering if baby Carrie's dialogue is worth analysis. But then, in Ma Ingalls' day, the boy fish in the Potomac River weren't all laying eggs. She'd probably gone her whole life without tasting a soybean. No microwaves, no cell phones, no particulates, nothing but the occasional plague of locusts, polio, and such. Oh, what have we wrought? Perhaps this is why I haven't let it sink in: there are too many variables, too many possibilities, too many reasons to worry. In the pinball machine of my brain, theory and blame are zig-zagging so crazily I fear the cover of the machine will melt from the friction. Plexiglass dripping over levers and barriers and madly grinning clown faces, I must turn off the sound before it knocks me over too, he is fine, he is gorgeous, he is brilliant in his own time, I am not to blame. I am to blame. At least, for this: for what he does know, for squeezing him too tight, for raising a two-year-old who happily eats blueberry blossoms and knows all the places in our yard to find the biggest raspberries. For a child who is both quick to anger and quick to giggle, keening in happiness, for this force of human nature who has become Everett's raison d'etre, for a little boy who throws no tantrum as wild as the one in which he is being denied a bike ride, who is on the cusp of both learning to calm himself and ask "pees" for his most-desirables and to climb out the bathroom window by scaling the wall with his bare toes. Blame/no blame, I accept it all, it is me after all, me his mother, at age just-two his center, his sun and new moon, his teacher, his spiritual guide. I cannot escape my power over him, just as I cannot escape my love for him, my need to answer his cries, even when they send me over the cliff of maternal sanity. Nor can I avoid my culpability in this: not knowing, not realizing, not doing more. So I try. I struggle, I tell myself I'll call for the county's analysis, I put off calling, I read to him at night, I show him the moon when we are riding the bike and make the sign, right-hand fingers making a backward "C", looking up to the sky, telescoping. "Moon, moon, moon!" I say, and he says it back, "mooh, mooh, mooh!" so thrilled, so close to me, so culpable.