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/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.