Alina's Adventures

The rise of forced birth and the shame of female bodies.

I stand by my choices and honor the choices of others.

I didn't want to write a book about miscarriages, terminations, adoptions, trafficked bodies, and pregnancy-- but I could not stop. The stories kept coming. 

My home state of Alabama is a hub for gun rights, recreational violence, and misogynistic billboards that strip the personhood of women. It comes as no surprise:

Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.

Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.

- The Guardian

A female body is punished for failure to make her body a good house. Meanwhile, in Alabama and all across this country, corporations secure more rights to dump and damage the environment, to poison the groundwater that causes birth defects and countless cancers, to get away with mangling fetuses and sickening children leaving citizens powerless. Power-less. Unable to stop them. 

Why are the crimes of the rich being leveraged against the bodies of the poor? 

Why should anyone pledge their allegiance to a flag that represents the reign of bad stewardship and lack of corporate accountability?

National Advocates for Pregnant Women’s one-of-a-kind study identifies hundreds of criminal and civil cases involving the arrests, detentions and equivalent deprivations of pregnant women’s physical liberty that occurred between 1973 and 2005, after the decision in Roe v. Wade was issued. In each of the 413 cases, pregnancy was a necessary element and the consequences included: arrests; incarceration; increases in prison or jail sentences; detentions in hospitals, mental institutions and drug treatment programs; and forced medical interventions, including surgery. Data showed that state authorities have used post-Roe measures including feticide laws and anti-abortion laws recognizing separate rights for fertilized, eggs, embryos and fetuses as the basis for depriving pregnant women – whether they were seeking to end a pregnancy or go to term – of their physical liberty. The findings make clear that if so called “personhood” measures are enacted, not only will more women who have abortions be arrested, such measures would create the legal basis for depriving all pregnant women of their status as full persons under the law.

The study found in a majority of cases, no adverse pregnancy outcome was reported and that where an adverse outcome was alleged, state authorities were typically not required to provide expert testimony or scientific evidence to prove that the pregnant woman’s actions, inactions, or circumstances would or in fact did cause the alleged harm.

The study documented cases in which fear of arrests and forced interventions deterred women from seeking help for themselves and in some cases for their newborns. These findings are consistent with the medical and public health consensus that punitive measures, and the legal arguments supporting them, will undermine rather than further state interests in child, fetal, and maternal health.

This study found that far from protecting patient privacy and confidentiality, professionals in the health care system were often the people gathering information from pregnant women and new mothers and disclosing it to police, prosecutors, and court officials.

National Advocates for Pregnant Women

I am a mother like any other shuffling between head lice and heart ache. Nothing about this choice is easy or predetermined. Every step we take is a gift and a source of wonder. 

If you'd like to hear voices tied to wombs, consider picking up a copy of Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus, my hybrid poetry collection published by Finishing Line Press. 

Love, always, Alina.

Every day, I miss my mother.

Prophet sneaking into our morning bed...

 

Describing grief is like allowing a bathroom stall to open as you pee-- to permit the stream to continue, pee anyway. No one knows how to respond or help.

Should they step up and close it?

Should they hide you?

Is there something inappropriate in the witness of others?

I think of Rilke, run his words through my teeth like a bit, a formal restraint on what I might say or feel in public.

"You said live out loud, and die you said lightly,
and over and over again you said be."

The mention of Mom at odd intersections, junctures between chocolate and winter coats. Last year's coats she purchased. Red wool dress coats with black velvet collars, a vestige of elegant and the fear that the girls will grow, outgrow the memories of her nurture and care. This world we walk into, soldered. The sundriness of year-old grief.

Last year's coats, her purchase: red wool dress coats with black velvet collars, a vestige of elegant and the fear that the girls will grow, outgrow the memories of her nurture and care. This world we walk into, soldered. The sundriness of grief rings hidden inside the heartwood of a tree.

And Audre Lorde, on what a poem can be about:

… that to put myself on the line to do what had to be done at any place and time was so difficult, yet absolutely crucial, and not to do so was the most awful death. And putting yourself on the line is like killing a piece of yourself, in the sense that you have to kill, end, destroy something familiar and dependable, so that something new can come, in ourselves, in our world. And that sense of writing at the edge, out of urgency, not because you choose it but because you have to, that sense of survival — that’s what the poem is out of, as well as the pain… Once you live any piece of your vision it opens you to a constant onslaught. Of necessities, of horrors, but of wonders too, of possibilities.

The possibility that she is wandering through Greenland, snapping those photographs of a melting world, and this frozen girl need to find her....

And so I wake....

I hear real peace comes from loving one's fate, not just accepting it, because life is as it is and how one responds is what yields happiness or discontent. Loving your fate without trying to fix it, without asking the universe to be anything it's not, is easier to phrase than to feel, except as desire, and, ironically, the desire itself contradicts the lesson. I find it a state of grace hard to reach. Like trying to frame problems as invitations not challenges. 

Diane Ackerman, Dawn Light

Springtime, blooms, and all these pretty fences.

 

To avert my gaze was to fall back into something from which I had been rescued, a hole filled with nothing, and that was the word for everything about me, nothing.

Jamaica Kincaid, "On Seeing England For the First Time"

The tulip trees can't help themselves this morning, brimming with buds. It is beautiful-- the fresh neon green of spring, the ground smothered by lavender lyre-leaf sage.

Somewhere in Syria, families are desperately seeking a way to salvage and save lives. The US President issues symbolic bombs in response to a chemical gas attack. One bomb begets another and families continue to suffer. We are willing to drop bombs but not to open our borders. Eager to display vengeance and project power without showing the kindness of an neighbor. 

Bombs have never been enough.

Max's tulip by the Funky Little Free Library.

Max crows with pride over the tulip he planted two years ago-- "Look Mom, it's finally bloomed! Two years and finally, a flower." If only we were willing to grant as much as Syrian families. A tiny plot of soil in which to grow and thrive. Not the destruction of their homeland but the opening of ours.

Despite our religions and morals, we humans remain the world's most territorial mammals. Our commercialized selfishness stares back from billboards, reassures us that "our way of life" is deserved, a birthright. 

What have we done to deserve the safety we steal from others?

 

The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart-- idea of thing, reality of thing-- the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness.

Jamaica Kincaid, "On Seeing England For the First Time"

What are we refusing to see when we lament the images of dead Syrian children? 

What darkness do we invite between ourselves and our fellow human beings?

When you sigh with relief that Assad got bombed, how do you describe this emotion to your children? How do you celebrate a bomb? How do you justify the fence we maintain against refugees? 

What blooms in this hardened soil of the American heart?

Hanging out at Hurricane Creek before the clean-up.

Tulip trees 

When the King walked through the door at 5:45, I was ready to catch the sunset at Hurricane Creek. The kids were hungry, but I crossed my fingers and decided to see if the magic of a place might distract them. And it did. 

"Where are we going? What's the rush?"

"I want to catch sunset. I want to catch the way it intersects with the moon at Watson's Bend. I want to smell dusk and the first blush of tulip trees budding."

The King shrugged, changed from his work clothes, and hopped in the car. 

Micah at That Bench

On the drive. Micah reminisced about Mr. Jimmy Watson, and how he attended the clean-up and sat on that bench.

The bench that has become That Bench. Jimmy's bench.

She raced to find it-- her first stop. 

The girls watching Smoky Joe descend towards the creek.

Then back towards the tipi, where Smoky Joe was making his way down to the creek.  

The waters were higher than I've seen them at Clean-Up-- not beginner's waters but swift, high, voracious waters swirled by multiple eddies and rifts. 

John threw a few sticks and Smoky Joe retrieved them from the water. I don't think you realize how quickly water moves until you toss a stick and lose track of it almost immediately. Fortunately, Smoky Joe swims fast and knows his way in high waters. He retrieved two sticks before clambering out of the water to shake his fur dry. 

Micah wandering towards the tipi.

A mysterious yellow flower on the upper banks.

Moon rose behind yellow flowers.

John re-discovered a soft turtle shell from the year before.

The underside of the soft shell turtle.

Max can't stop laughing about Smoky Joe's antics.

The moon rose along the ochre cliffs.

Very high waters downstream from the Bend.

Sunset... setting the woods on fire.

Max regals Renee with stories of feral cats.

Milla emerges from the tipi to announce the first sparks of a kindling fire.

A fire that ended with laughter, joy, and gratitude. 

What you will see when you arrive-- John's tipi, brought from North Dakota to Tuscaloosa. 

If you can make it to the clean-up, please come. 

Learn more at the Facebook Event page. 

If you can't make it, please consider donating anyway to help us sustain the work of our Hurricane Creekkeeper in a very challenging time for waterways and water protectors. We need your help. 

Renew your membership or simply make a one-time donation online. We thank you. The water thanks you. The silent, ignored natural world thanks you. Our planet counts on us to preserve more than we destroy, and to honor more than pillage. 

Aldridge Gardens Plant Sale on April 27th.

A great resource for gardeners, naturalists, and home educators seeking to engage the native plants with their children and families. We had a great time last year-- and our blueberry bushes are flowering!

Aldrige Gardens also offers a menu of special field trips that can be scheduled in advance. 

Experience Their Outdoor Classroom

Curriculum-based outdoor field trips for elementary school students are offered from mid-September through the end of October, and mid-March through the first week in May. Due to the size of the gardens, we request that no more than two classes (or 50 children) attend on the same date. Please provide one adult chaperone for each 10 students. A fee of $4 per student is requested to cover materials. A picnic area is available for outdoor lunch after your field trip.

Field Trip Objectives

Although all Aldridge Gardens Field Trips can be adapted for a particular grade level, listed below is the grade level(s) each field trip is designed for and correlated with the Alabama State Course of Study:

Meet the Trees (Kindergarten)

-Observe, compare, and describe the properties of trees, and parts of trees.
-Compare changes in parts of trees through the seasons.
-Acquire the vocabulary associated with the properties and structures of trees.
-Use oral language to describe observations.
-Observe animals that depend of trees for food and shelter.

Habitat Hunters (1st through 5th grades)

-Discover ways animals use and depend on plants as well as ways woodland plants depend on animals.
-Observe ways that plants and animals in a forest community are interdependent.

A Worm’s-Eye View of Soil Science (2nd grade)

-Demonstrate an understanding of the concept that plants grow best in good soil and that good soil is made by combining sand, clay and humus.
-Differentiate among the properties of soil (color, texture, water absorption, temperature).
-Identify soil types/components (sand, clay, humus).
-Recognize the role of soil in supporting plant growth.
-Use appropriate tools to gather, analyze, and interpret data.
-Relate structure to function in plants (roots for support in soil).

Worms (Vermiculture) 2nd grade continued

-Demonstrate an understanding of the process of composting.
-Demonstrate the ability to perform safe and appropriate manipulation of living organisms.
-Identify characteristics and behaviors of worms that help them survive.
-Describe how worm offspring are similar to parents (size, shape, color).
-Describe interdependence of plants and worms (recycle plants into nutrient-rich humus, tunnels create spaces in soil for air and water).
-Make compost tea bags.

Plant Propagation: Making More Plants (3rd grade)

-Identify the basic parts of a plant and the function of each part: roots, stems, leaves, flowers.
-Identify the basic parts of a flower and the function of each part: petal, stamen, and pistil.
-Propagate plants using three different methods of propagation: seeds, cuttings, and division, and take their plants back to class.

---

Teachers: How to schedule a curriculum-based field trip

Field trips are scheduled weekdays from 9:30 - 11:30 a.m.

Maximum number of students per day = 50

$4 per student. (Free for teachers and parent chaperones.)

Field trips are scheduled from mid-September through mid-November
and mid-March through mid- May.

To schedule a field trip, please email Debbie McDonald, Education Director, Aldridge Gardens at dmcdonald@aldridgegardens.com, or call her at 205-682-8019 Ext. 104.

You will be contacted within one week about your field trip request.

Please include the following information:

-Teacher Name
-Cell or Home Phone
-Preferred Email Address
-Name of School
-School Address
-School Phone
-Name of School System
-Grade Level for Field Trip
-Number of Students for Field Trip
-Month You Would Like to Schedule

Include field trip topic you would like:
-Trees
-Habitat Hunters
-Worms and Soils
-Plant Propagation

Picnic Area is first come, first serve. Please inform Jim if you plan to use the picnic area.

Saturday mornings also offer guided bird walks for Aldrige Garden members. 

The month of March...

Flew past. The month of March beat its wings overhead in a migratory fashion and sought shelter elsewhere.

These days fly by so quickly it's as if time, itself, has chosen an alternate nesting ground. I can watch it pass, admire it's movement, make efforts to pull together a shrine to its moments. 

I've always been prone to this persistent tug to preserve those moments at the cost of full inhabiting them. As a child curled beneath the dogwood with her journal, thinking myself Harriet the Spy of Springtime Events, I remember the compulsion to record changing azalea colors, the scent of fresh bark, the way grass turned neon after rain.

The same inability to let time pass without remark.

The same urge (oh unquenchable urge) to make something more of the lovely singulars.

This hunger that leads me to the page, the photo, the collage, the trail, all of it, onward. 

 

A molehill is, in fact, a mountain to some living being. 

And a moment is a monument to this restless mother. I can't help saving what I love. Savoring it as we live it. Holding the words in my head for someone that might seek them later....

A new poetry micro-chap.

I have a new poetry book available from the beloved Anchor and Plume out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Ipokimen is an intersection of hair, ether, and poetry where cover art concept and design came from the combined neuro-cellulotic wranglings of Alice Gancevici and Remus Puscariu. Artist's statement involves a set of principles intended to generate a plethora of images/hieroglyphs. Dimitrie Cantemir approved this unique use of hair, programming, and hiero from the soil in which he rests. 

 

THE POEM AS A TUFT OF HAIR

there is a number of cut hairs each time, this is the number of lines in the poem.

each hair has a number of segments – words.

each segment has a length of letters.

this gives the total length of each hair.

once chipped away from a healthy head of hair, each falling tuft is freed to behave as designed.

the behaviour is given by different patterns found in the poem, such as

— number of repeated words

— number of repeated letters

— original position of a letter or a word in the poem vs their new position in an alphabetically sorted list.

— forces of attraction from similar words (curly or straight hair) or lines (separated or dispersed strands)

— the random position where the tuft lands in the grass.

So basically we made an algorithm, in a software called Processing, to visualize, based on a set of rules, your poems in written form. 

The cover and back matter was created from these soft-stills. I'll have a few broadsides which additional stills from the vaults-- the secret stills, if you will, international bootleg. 

 

Ipokimen would be nothing without Alice and Remus doing complicated things on their computers.

 

Ipokimen includes a poem about a friend named Amber who is a fellow head-trauma-recovery patient. 

 

Ipokimen is cute and cuddly like Pokemon but also hairy. 

 

Ipokimen is hairier than Harry Connick Jr.'s exposed chest. 

 

Ipokimen is coming.

 

The spirit of Dimitrie Cantemir approved this unique combination of hair, programming, and hiero from the soil in which he pretends to rest. All dead people pretend to rest to make you feel more comfortable about what they are actually doing with their afterlives. 

Like all small presses, Anchor and Plume relies on your support to support poetry. And poetry needs all the support it can get in this difficult times.

Alina Stefanescu's Ipokimen is the newest addition to our pocket book series—a short sampling of poems in a smaller size. In this small collection you'll find a series of poems inspired by the collected words of Transylvanian polymath Dimitrie Cantemir. Ipokimen is Greek for "thing lying underneath another, such as matter under form, wool under dye."

Thank you so much for considering a purchase.

Relics from daily life.

My mother, the immigrant-- and her immigrant children.

 

I. 

Milla wanted to go and look for "birds and fishes". The vast disparity in habitat descriptions did not in any way impinge upon her consciousness. So we started walking near the nature preserve, our hopes set fast on birds and nests. The stroll gradually found itself unfurling into a saunter. Our arms swinging, mid-chatter, over stump, settling between giant roots.

In the tonal center of a wood song, Milla discovered a relic. The fossil of games once played. A slimy old blow toy. It was only a matter of time until she named this "new bird"- "birdie", of course. Perhaps we see what we seek when we forgo the literal for refuge in the figurative.

 

II. 

We made clay hearts from the plaster given to us by a grandparent. Now we wait for the plaster to dry. Some of our clay hearts are bigger than others. We started with the same amount of plaster but the end result varied.

Don't get me wrong- there's no normative message here. Only that some hearts overflow their designated boundaries. And that it is the overflowing hearts which tend to be more buxom and enticing to the appetite. On the other hand, big hearts take no account of private space. In crossing boundaries, they don't bother to ask permission- they just puff and thrive, assuming bigger is better when it comes to la coeur.

I have a hard time unpacking the concept of "social equality" to my children under these circumstances.

And equity is a brick they've never seen used in the world's richest country. We still build on the backs of our brokenness. 

 

III.

I will never forgive them for the way he looked in that wheelchair, his young beautiful body folded and crumpled. I refuse to forget the way he said, "Go on now, my life is done- you've got yours left to live...".

He knew I would never believe him, even when the news of his suicide took on the face of type font. He was my friend. We grew up playing in the woods together. And I was pregnant with a baby boy- a young American who might one day be called to give his life for something as convoluted as terror. Those were the days when everyone was afraid that their sins might catch up with them. People kept looking for the morning-after pill to chase away the nights.

I promised my friend that his death would be for something less abstract that nothing. I promised to tell others what he learned firsthand- that war is a game in which even the good guys cheat and the only rules are bullets and the hand that needs them. And that terror begins at home.

At the protest, only a few cars "honked for peace". The most vociferous commentators were young men in trucks blasting rap music- the statistical stereotype of southern boys. I was unprepared for the kind of language that a peace sign could provoke:

 

"Freedom isn't free, so fuck you!"

(My son cringed to hear it- "Mom, those boys are mean.")

"Stupid people like you should get shipped to Saudi!"

"Hey lady, you need a good screw!"

"America's going to whip all those Arab asses out there. Eat that!"

 

Nothing is simple these days. The truth is too expensive for us to accept- the cost paid in lives for lies too devastating. No, son, those boys aren't "mean"- they're just scared. And excited.

My son looks up at me, his eyes wide and brown- "This is kinda how those college boys acted when we went to that football game. But war isn't like football, is it, mom?"

I shook my head.

I shake my head.

I'll never stop being sorry for what we've done and what we're doing.

IV.

The echo of a laugh is anything but light.

 

50+ essays and articles to self-educate on fascism, populism, and modern totalitarianisms.

These are days to love the world enough to understand what we are up against. These are days to take your children to marches. To teach history with protest signs. To give young persons a voice that is their own-- a voice they trust against conspiracy and cynicism.

These are days to explain why black lives matter. To articulate the backlash against black lives matter as a fear of accountability. Because it is. Because the white majority is so afraid of losing its privilege that many have voted to eviscerate freedom instead.

These are difficult, heartbreaking days that demand perseverance and self-education. It is time for Americans to learn what this country was founded against. It is time to acknowledge the demons in our closet-- the ugly parts we let out in this election.

For the ugly parts of America own us now. #notinmyname is no longer enough. 

Here are 100 free articles and essays that shed light on the present. Fellow homeschoolers, we have a special responsibility given the complicity of Homeschoolers Defense League and similar organizations. If you have limited toilet-reading time, here's a key:

* must-reads        ** inspirations & hope    *** the evil we must resist

1. Reinhold Niebuhr, "Pawns for Fascism" (circa 1937)
2. George Saunders, "Who Are All These Trump Supporters?" (The New Yorker)*
3. Tony Judt, "Ill Fares the Land" (New York Review of Books)
4. Hannah Arendt, "Dream and Nightmare: Anti-American Feeling in Europe" (Common-weal)
5. Masha Gessen, "Trump: The Choice We Face" (NYRB Daily)
6. Umberto Eco, "Ur-fascism" (New York Review of Books)
7. Marco Roth, "Caucasian Nation" (n+1)*
8. Kieryn Darkwater, "I was trained for the culture wars in homeschool, awaiting someone like Mike Pence as a Messiah" (Autostraddle) *
9. I.F. Stone, "The Rich March on Washington All the Time" (I.F. Stone's Weekly)
10. Stephen E. Hanson, "Picking Up the Pieces" (Los Angeles Review of Books) 
11. James Palmer, "How can a first-person shooter have a victim complex?" (Aeon)*
12. John Mueller, "Bands of Brigands" (Lapham's Quarterly)
13. Suzanne Moore, "Why did women vote for Trump? Because misogyny is not a male-only attribute"' (The Guardian)*
14. Andrea Pitzer, "Enemy Aliens" (Lapham,s Quarterly) 
15. Mark Lilla, "Arendt and Eichmann: The New Truth" (New York Review of Books)
16. Marian Wilde, "The bully and the bystander" (Great Schools)
17. I. F. Stone, "Washington After Stalin" (I.F. Stone's Weekly)
18. Tony Judt, "The Problem of Evil in Postwar Europe" (New York Review of Books)
19. Jeff Sharlet, "Hell House" (Lapham's Quarterly)
20. Ta-Nahesi Coates,"The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration" (The Atlantic)
21. Livia Gershon, "Bring Back Women's Lib" (Aeon)
22. David Helvarg, "Defending the Earth from Donald Trump" (Progressive)***
23. Dan P. McAdams, "The Mind of Donald Trump" (The Atlantic)
24. Mark Greif, "Over My Dead Body: Political theology of the GOP" (n+1)
25. Matt Taibbi, "The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump" (Rolling Stone)
26. Gabor Hamai, "Towards An Illiberal Democracy" (Osteuropa)
27. Richard B. Spencer, "Long Live the Emperor!" (Radix Journal)***
28. Kristin Dombek, "The Two Cultures of Life" (n+1)
29. Sara Lazarovic, "An Artist Went to the Women's March and Sketched What She Saw" (Yes! Magazine)**
30. Molly Ball, "President Trump's Perpetual Campaign" (The Atlantic)
31. Fred Banson, "The Priest in the Trees"(Harper's) **
32. Char Adams, "What every white woman attending the Women's March needs to know" (Bustle)
33. Dan Mistich, "Lee Bains Talks Trump, Resistance, and the Southern Thing" (Flagpole)**
34. Williesha Morris, "I'm pro-life, Christian, and I support Planned Parenthood" (Huffington Post)
35. Zaid Jilani, "What the Santa Classification of Martin Luther King Jr. Leaves Out" (The Intercept)*
36. Bradley Burston, "He's a monster. And now he's President of the United States" (Ha'aretz)
37. Martin Luther King Jr., "Beyond Vietnam" (4 April 1967)***
38. Masha Gessen, "Autocracy: Rules for Survival" (NYRB Daily)
39. E.J. Dionne, Jr., "The Ominous Inauguration" (Commonweal)
40. Bill Moyers, "Donald Trump's Demolition Derby" (Truthdig)
41. Rachel Shabi, "Wrong Side of the Fence" (Aeon)
42. Brian Whitmore, "Moscow's Balkan Mischief" podcast (Radio Free / Radio Liberty)
43. Bobby Azarian, "How fear of death makes people more right-wing" (Aeon) ***
44. Stephen Piggott, "Jeff Sessions: Champion of Anti-Muslim and Anti-Immigrant Extremists" (Southern Poverty Law Center)
45. "Darweesh v. Trump" (ACLU)
46. Jim Wallis, "Resistance is Patriotic-- and Christian" (Sojourner's)
47. Mostaffa Hasoun, "I Went Through America's Extreme Vetting" (Politico)
48. Juan Cole, "Torture produces fake news: That's how we got into Iraq" (Truthdig)
49. Jennifer Berkshire, "The Long Game of Betsy DeVos" (The Progressive)
50. Michael Lovelock, "The Makeover Trap" (Aeon)
51. Julianne Ross, "The 8 Biggest Lies Men's Rights Activists Spread About Women" (Mic)
52. Adam Piore, "Why We're Patriotic" (Nautilus)
53. Claire Landsbaum, "Men's Rights Activists Are Flocking to the Alt-Right" (NY Mag)***
54. B. A. Brown, "Illiberalism Rising" (The Hedgehog Review)
55. Robert Westbrook, "Virtuous Reality" (The Baffler)
56. James Macauley, "Shadow and Substance" (Aeon)

 

As for action, here are ten ways to make a difference right now. To commit your life, time, family, and heart to a better America.

1. Comment on the DAPL.
2. Plan a data rescue event (especially great for homeschoolers).
3. Since public oversight is being gutted and dismantled under the new cronyism system, citizenship demands more of us. Use your blog as a platform to make FOIA requests about your local Republican leaders. Here's how. 
4. Call your congressman every single day to protest the cabinet appointments.
5. Join a local Pantsuit Nation or Nasty Women group. Believe me, there are many wonderful "nasty children" as well. And bad hombres abound.
6. Support the NAACP. Today. Now. 
7. Watch SNL. Watch Aziz Anzari. Watch Trevor Noah. Support stand-up. Support satire. Laugh and cry. Then wake up and keep fighting. Your Trumptivist friends will never have the decency to thank you. But who cares? This isn't about you. This is about AMERICA. 

A few photos crushed against songs, upstaged by lyrics.

Mama and her little sister, Sanda.

I can feed this real slow,
if it's a lot to swallow..."

 What I want from this is learn to let go
No not of you, of all that's been told
But killers reinvent and believe
And this leans on me just like a rootless

Well, I tried to control it and cover it up
I reached out to console it
It was never enough, never enough

 

So come let me love you
Come let me love you
and then
color
me in

What I am to you is not what you mean to me
You give me miles and miles of mountains
And I'll ask for the sea

 

How to give thanks that is not focused on stuffing our faces with turkey.

There is so much to sift through and so much to process during this holiday. I am balancing love with the selfishness of wanting to be "liked" or hoping that I can love others with no cost to my social life. And I am learning that it is not possible.

I came across an article in Commonweal which reminded me of my friends who oppose abortion, and the challenges they have faced from their evangelical communities after voting for Hillary this year. Though I am not Catholic, this article spoke to me and for me. Stephen J. Pope urges his fellow Catholics to put their allegiances in order:

Premature calls for political reconciliation miss the point. At times like this, we need to remember that Jesus himself was divisive: “I came to set men against their fathers, daughters against their mothers, daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law” (Mt 10:35; Lk 12:53). Jesus was clear that those who follow him should expect strife. When they stand in tension, fidelity is prior to reconciliation—and even its necessary condition. Forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing are central to the Gospel, but they are corrupted when not coordinated with fidelity, justice, and truth. All of us must be willing to support reasonable compromises that advance useful public policies, but only within the bounds of what is consistent with universal human dignity. We must try to understand everyone, but not turn a blind eye to bigotry. We must will the good to offenders, but not reconcile with unrepentant racists. Instead, we must struggle against injustice and those who promote or countenance it. As John Paul II insisted, wrongdoing “must be acknowledged and as far as possible corrected … [because an] essential requirement for forgiveness and reconciliation is justice.” We are light years away from justice.

Non-violently resisting the actions of a morally dangerous president does not warrant treating his supporters unjustly. It is indefensible to bully those who voted for a bully. We must instead listen with compassion to his supporters to better understand their concerns and aspirations. St. Paul hit the right balance when he urged the Ephesians to “speak the truth in love” (4:15). None of us knows all truth and none of us loves with perfect purity of heart. We must all repent, exercise humility, and honestly admit our own blind spots. At the same time, we can neither ignore the grave threat of the “Trump movement” and his “alt-right” allies nor downplay the complicity of those who support them. Doing so is denial and moral evasion. This is the time for soul-searching repentance and prophetic honesty. Loyalty to Christ comes before loyalty to any other cause, including that of the “rulers of this age” (1 Cor 2:8).

Reconciliation is the end—not the beginning—of a process that leads all parties into greater truth, justice, and solidarity. Karol Wojtyla did not reconcile with the Communists, Bonhoeffer did not reconcile with the Nazis, Romero did not reconcile with the Salvadoran oligarchy, and King did not reconcile with the KKK. Neither did they enter into dialogue with those who were brutalizing the marginalized. They spoke the truth to power, witnessed to God’s solidarity with the poor, defended human rights, insisted on justice, and called their opponents to conversion. We should expect to be called to do so if the incoming administration attempts to realize Trump’s worst instincts. Twentieth-century Christian prophets were able to do what they did because they participated in networks of solidarity—the Polish trade union movement, the German Confessing Church, Salvadoran base Christian communities, and Southern Baptist churches. We too need to cultivate such intentional communities of conscience.  

A personal need to feel reconciled with what has happened should not trump our commitment to justice. At the risk of displeasing the turkey lobby, I need to remind myself gratitude should not be limited to one day of the year. Or one week. On that note, it's important to discuss the extent to which this election tossed large segments of our country into a trash-bin.

Jenee Desmond Harris points out that many of us will not be able to "play positive" this Thanksgiving. The turkey worship comes at the price of national repentance for what we have done in electing a divisive, threatening, cruel bully to lead this country:

That’s why I’m unsettled by the barrage of articles helping people “go cold turkey” and “table political talk” to avoid “ruining the day.” These articles have become a predictable staple of post-election, pre-Thanksgiving content. The timing makes these pieces completely understandable, and there’s certainly an audience for tips and tricks to change the subject back to turkey when controversial conversation topics are raised (always by some belligerent uncle at every holiday table). 

But this genre of advice ignores the perspectives of many nonwhite, non-Christian people in America. This type of oversight, harmless as it may be, is the kind that will become even more essential to avoid under Trump’s administration and the discrimination against already marginalized groups it threatens. 

This holiday season, plenty of people will need to talk about politics, if only to feel less alone in the world, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

As for talking, there is an irony in pilgrim propaganda and turkey wreaths given the continued abuse of Native tribes in this country. I encourage fellow homeschoolers and mothers to mourn and protest the economic racism of Standing Rock. Here is a free Standing Rock Syllabus to explore the issues with your family. Our America was built on suffering and untruths. The only way to remedy this is to do better. Whitewashing history and lying to our children about some golden age in which Native Americans "knew their place" does not equip young persons to be better citizens. Instead, it equips them to perpetuate the historic mistakes. 

More than ever, I believe HISTORY BEGINS AT HOME.

Our America is better than this: My hopes, fears, and HOPES.

Inspired by local PRIDE celebrations last month. 

It's been a difficult week for this country. It's been a difficult week for our children as well. For the first time, my kids watched the presidential debates as part of a homeschooling exercise. The Eldest was horrified by Trump's bullying body language and the girls could not believe a man like that would be elected to represent what they believe is the greatest country in the world.

On election night, as they looked at us in horror, we sent them to bed and promised it wasn't going to be as bad as it looked. Then the man and I stayed up and realized it was. We held our breath and gnashed our teeth and stumbled our way through a 10th wedding anniversary. 

The good news is that we are coping and learning more about how to save our communities. The bad news (at a micro-level) is that my kids don't think America is great anymore. My kids think America is mean and nasty and what it takes to lead America is even meaner and nastier. 

And so I find myself arguing with my kids about what makes America great.

And realizing (again and again) that no politician makes America great-- what makes it great is the diversity of its people.

For the record, I'm not going to engage any discussions on how Trump doesn't mean what he said. If he didn't mean what he said, then everyone who voted for him knowingly elected a liar. (Even though polls report that what voters held against Clinton was the belief that she lied.) Somebody is lying. Many are lying to themselves. There is a lot of lying going on and it's pretty ugly. I'm not going to be part of those lies. I'm not going to bring those lies into my house and foist them on my children. 

Again: I'm not going to lie to my kids to explain why friends or family voted the way they did. I think it's best done directly, person-to-person. That's your job, not mine. You can tell my kids why and let them ask questions.

I will not be an apologist for your vote.

I will not tell them that you didn't mean all the racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, classist, sexist, cruel things he said.

If I do that, I will lose their trust. They heard his words. They believed him. That has become a national problem. 

And then there is life, itself, which leads children to draw their own conclusions based on experience.

Today, between ballet lessons, the kids wanted to do something to tell all the people who are scared and hurt and suffering that this is still their America. Their urge was inspired by a faith which holds all persons equally and considers every human to be equally deserving of life, liberty, and opportunity. So we got a small box of chalk and sat near the Bama Theatre in Tuscaloosa where teen beauty pageant contestants were prepping for tonight's event.

The kids wanted to draw on the white, unbumpy sidewalk but I urged them closer to the street so we wouldn't interfere in photos and poses. The message was simple-- to assert love and solidarity with all the persons threatened by Trump's election. That's what they wrote.

And yes, pageant queens whispered and muttered things like "snowflake" and "crybabies". Milla wanted to know why they kept walking past and taking pictures of us. I told her they were curious.

One mother (who walked past at least four times glaring at me as if I was a demon) said to her daughter that "they must not be Christians". 

Because we wrote "This is all of our America. We love you." 

 

And so it went.

Later, as I waited for the kids outside the ballet studio down the street, aware that several "homeschooling friends" had recently de-friended me because I did not vote for Trump, trying not to make things awkward for those persons whom I see every week, a beauty pageant boyfriend tried to erase the words with his shoe as the beauty pageant contestant giggled. 

I did not cry. 

In the car, we talked about voices and democracy. Milla liked the idea of being a snowflake and Micah was annoyed at being called a crybaby while not even crying.

Because everyone in my family knows I'm the crybaby.

I'm the one who cries in church or at movies or concerts or sunsets or a luna moth drying its wings on the wall. 

But the love letter made them feel better. It gave them a voice, however tiny. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit we don't give kids much of a voice in this world which surrounds them. We pretend they can't hear what we're saying and then-- if they ask-- we say, "Oh, nothing honey. I was talking to Daddy." Or maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm the only one that tries to be a parody of fair-and-balanced. Which fails. 

Despite my fear and discomfort and sadness at losing friends-who-weren't-friends to begin with, I'm holding out hope that our voices can make a difference. 

I want to encourage everyone to get some chalk and some hope and hit the streets with love. Write some neighborhood love notes to counter the messages. Don't get bogged down in arguments about safety pins. Don't sit around and entertain the mansplaining events which have become rather prodigious. Attend protests.

Get involved in local activist groups and DO STUFF.

Do more. Don't stop.

Don't debate whether it's too small an act or too fancy or too whatever.

JUST DO IT. Keep doing it.

This is going to be a long walk. Don't bail out or burn out or get consumed by your anger. Be angry and let yourself experience it but don't let it own you.

Trust love, justice, and solidarity to lead you. 

I repeat: love, justice, and solidarity are companions you will never regret. 

Don't worry about what people say. It's not your problem or my problem.

Our problem is this: showing love, creating safe spaces, and fighting through activism and engagement to make America great. Guess what? No one else can make America great EXECPT US. 

Claire Datnow's wonderful, Alabama-based eco-mysteries for middle schoolers.

Pond Slider Turtle, Limestone Park, Alabaster
(photo taken Boris Datnow at bioblitz in Alabaster, Alabama)

At the Alabama Writer's Conclave last month, I had the exciting opportunity to attend a workshop on eco-Mysteries and ecological fiction sponsored by the amazing Claire Datnow. I learned about how her love for Alabama's ecology led her to write eco-fiction for middle-schoolers in order to empower, inspire, and educate them about ecological principles. And then I bought all the books in the Adventures of the Sizzling Six for my children.

The first book in this series, The Lone Tree, is only $2 on kindle and $7 for print. Here's the synopsis:

They thought it was going to be a boring summer. It wasn't! When six determined teenagers decide to save a magnificent old white oak their adventures begin. Can they save their tree and the animals living in it? Will they get to build their secret hideout in its great branches? What could go wrong? The Sizzling Six will have to reckon with a ticked off neighbor on the city council, an unusual teacher, a thickheaded bully and his ditzy girlfriend, a mysterious dreamtime eagle, and an awesome night bat.

Given the extent to which young people (especially young females) are bombarded with advertisements and media which celebrate looking "cute" and trying to "make boys like you", Claire's fiction provides a counter-narrative in which the heroines are driven by eco-fascination and the desire to preserve something they love. 

Because what Claire writes is not likely to be bestseller Y.A. material, we have to ask ourselves more about this amazing woman that spends her time reaching out to Alabama's youngest citizens. Claire in her own words:

Born in South Africa, I immigrated to the US having lived in California, Minnesota, Alabama and Canada. I am a mother, grandmother and wife, and my family is the core of my life. All that I see, feel, experience feeds and inspires my writing. What I have learned in college and through wide reading informs my writing. I earned MA degrees in education of the gifted and talented, and in public history.

The series of YA Eco mysteries for 4-8 graders, The Adventures of The Sizzling Six, reflects my passion and awe for the natural world. With the trusty aid of Boris Datnow, my technological guru, the third book in the series uses QR codes to transport readers from the printed word on the page to video clips that let readers see and hear what the characters in the story are seeing and hearing! My memoir, Behind the Walled Garden of Apartheid, drew inspiration from a beautiful country scared by the iniquities of apartheid. The Final Diagnosis: What The Autopsy Reveals About Life and Death is a tribute to my husband, an autopsy pathologist. My historical novel, The Nine Inheritors, pays homage to my grandmother and two aunts and all those killed in the Holocaust.

What's next? On my trip to Australia, I found inspiration for the fourth book in the eco mystery series for middle grades, The Adventures of The Sizzling Six: Who Kidnapped The Koala? My newest books are published as Enhanced e-books as well as electronic books.

On her website, Claire offers an incredible amount of resources and activities for home educators. In her words:

Each time I write a new eco-mystery for the series, The Adventures of The Sizzling Six, I am amazed at what I learn about the species central to my story. I have developed this unit to share the excitement of learning with students. It is my hope these lesson plans will inspire them to take action in their own communities, and, ultimately, become wise stewards of the earth’s precious natural heritage.

Feel free to download and print the curriculum unit How to Become and Eco Detective. Lessons can easily be correlated to the Common Core State Standards Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects. You can also print up the Role Playing Cards and the Driving Questions for use in your classroom.

I would be honored if you would share your students’ work with me at: cldatnow@me.com

Free handouts and teacher activities including Eco-mystery Writing Contest. But my favorite by far is the printable Lessons for How to Write Eco-mysteries, a free printable PDF packet. If you take nothing from this, print a copy of this packet and plan a roam school today. 

Since Max enjoyed Claire's mysteries so much, he did a little email interview with her. I am so grateful that she took the time to answer his questions. 

MAX: Did the oil spill from the Canyon Gulf really happen, or was it based on the Deepwater Horizon spill?

CLAIRE: Indeed, the oil spill in my eco mystery is based on the Deepwater Horizon explosion that occurred on 20 April 2010. NOAA continues to assess the fish, wildlife, and habitat harmed by the spill along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, and Florida.

MAX: What Functions do Diamondback terrapins have as a keystone species?

CLAIRE: So why all this effort to save one species? If terrapins no longer live in the marsh the eco system will become less stable. These terrapins can be considered a keystone species—if you take them out, certain invertebrate species, like snails, will keep on increasing, and they will eat more and more of the marsh grasses that many other species need to survive. That will cause a shift in the important balance of living things in the eco system.The terrapins help to maintain a healthy salt marsh that is a nursery for crabs, fish, oysters, and a large variety of aquatic life. (Max, you will find the more answers to this question in the eco adventure.)

MAX: Is Shelley Island a real place?

CLAIRE: Yes, the island is based on the site of Cedar Point along the Alabama Dauphin Island marsh where the female terrapins come to lay their eggs in summer. (For more information Google Cedar Point along the Alabama Dauphin Island marsh.)

MAX: Are all your stories set in Alabama? 

CLAIRE: They are all set in Alabama with the exception of The Adventure of The Sizzling Six: Who Kidnapped the Koala, which is set in Australia. The inspiration for that book came while I was visiting my family in Australia.

MAX: Why did you choose southern ecology for the subject of your books?

CLAIRE: To do research for my eco mysteries I need to visit the habit of the species I will be writing about. It’s easier for me to explore Alabama as I live in this state. I also interview and consult with conservationists and wildlife scientists who live in Alabama. 

Claire and her spouse, Boris, are currently traveling in Greenland, Iceland, and Labrador. Anyone who knows Claire imagines her explorations are probably sparking new ideas for eco-mysteries to come. 

I am deeply grateful to Claire for the time she took to speak with me and with Max-- even more grateful for the beguiling, ecological stories she writes, stories I can share with my children to inspire them to be the change they want to see in the world. 

Facebook Author Page

Claire's other eco-mysteries, including one about the Cahaba Lily

Darryl Patton, "The Southern Herbalist", shares his plant knowledge in Hoover tomorrow.

Tomorrow afternoon, you have the chance to learn about wild foods and foraging with Darryl Patton, "The Southern Herbalist". Darryl will take kids and parents on a fascinating tour of Southern plants  that can serve as food and medicines. 

"Wild Plants: Earth's Free Feast and Pharmacy with Darryl Patton" will be held on January 30th from 2 to 4 pm in a classroom at Hoover Tactical,(yes, it's a firearms store, which of course makes me a little uneasy)near Hoover, Alabama. But I'm going to trust the sponsors, including Sheriff Mike Hale and Fresh Air Family's Prepared, Not Scared safety/survival courses for kids and adults.

The cost is $10 for members and $15 for non-members. But I think the experience is worth it. Here's why...

Mr. Tommie Bass, Lookout Mountain's herbalist

The Southern Herbalist has learned from those who came before him. Darryl's book, Mountain Medicine: The Herbal Remedies of Tommie Bass, takes us through the life and mind of a man who grew. There is a wonderful 

I first met Tommie Bass as a result of several people telling me stories of the ‘Herb Man’ up in Leesburg not far from where I lived. It seemed as if I were constantly running into people who either knew of him, or had family who knew and had been treated by this white-haired gentleman. Reading about him on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in 1985 had also served to pique my curiosity.

My first trip to his home was one which I will never forget. It also served to show me a little of the extent to which he is known and respected in his community. Even without an address to go by, and I had no trouble finding his house. All I had to say was that we were looking for Tommie Bass, the Herb Man, and people immediately told us how to find him.

For the next two hours, I was treated to fascinating stories of Leesburg and Lookout Mountain in the first half of this century, stories of herbal treatments, and even a couple of songs played on the French Harp. It turned out to be the most interesting day of my life.

I found Tommie to be the most humble and guileless person I had ever met. There is nothing pretentious about this man. What you see on one visit is the same person you see on subsequent return trips. His overriding concern is to bring some ease to his fellow man. He is not out to make a dollar at the expense of others’ ailments. He is a seeker of neither glory nor fame.

Mr. Tommie Bass

Among Tommie's remedies:

 For sinus trouble, he may recommend drinking a tea of Wild Cherry Bark or inhaling the steam from a boiling pot of ‘Rabbit Terbaker.’ Overweight folks will be told the wonders of Chickweed and Queen Anne’s Lace. “They’ll do the trick!”

Women suffering from what Tommie calls ‘Women’s Trouble’ need to know there is nothing like Red Maple, Black Cohosh or Squawvine tea. Pokeroot is good for the itch and, “Of course,” says Tommie, “Yellowroot will cure stomach ulcers.”

To hear Tommie tell it is to know that Wild Cucumber Tree bark and Prickly Ash are the most wonderful things in the world for arthritis.

Kids and adults can prepare for this event by listening to Mr. Bass talk about mountain life and herbs right here. I think hearing his voice adds another layer of value to his words.

Darryl shares thoughts on Eastern Red Cedar/Juniper. 

For those familiar with Euell Gibbon's incredible Stalking the Wild Asparagus, I can honestly say it changed my son's life when he received it as a gift from our dear neighbors, Doug and Carol Brooks. Now you can sign up for a free newsletter combining Euell and Darryl's wisdom, as well as enjoy archived issues online.

Other great resources and online treasures from Darryl include:

A-Z Herbal References Guide, with a heavy focus on Alabama
"How to forecast weather by nature" 
"The history of using sassafras"
"Stalking the Wild Day Lily," an adventure
The mysteries of rabbit tobacco (Pseudognaphlium obtusifolium)
"Beautyberry, herbal bug repellent", one the Eldest will love
Darryl's list of links

That poetry book in the pipelines.

Gnome and the King discuss "is" and "ain't".

I haven't been blogging as much, and I miss it. I miss the soft chorus of voices and faces from around the world. The wisdom of other mothers. The creativity and ingenuity of fellow females.

One big reason for the diminished blogging involves my first poetry chapbook coming out in March. It's called Objects In Vases, and many of you will recognize not my only voice but also, I think, your own inside its pages.

I am grateful for a generous, kindhearted, and (yes yes yes) homeschooling editor, as I am grateful to the publisher, Anchor & Plume, for making this such a beautiful experience in a challenging year.

At first, I wasn't sure whether to blog this book-- partly because I fall prey to the suspicion sometimes that poetry is extraneous, a luxury, an aspect of life we don't need, a facet of leisure. That is what I think.

But it's not what I believe. I know better than my cultural conditioning which tells me poetry doesn't matter. I know the first written history began as poetry and that poetry, whether in the form of psalms or sonnets or lyric, feeds a space in us that no sitcom or self-help book or video game can oblige. A space that is aching to be spoken and engaged.

So this is my first poetry book. It comes from the "wrack" (to borrow from poet, Mary Ruefle) and glory and ruin of homeschooling my children. It comes from the giant slalom of daily married life. It comes from the negotiations between my Alabama self and my native Romanian. It comes from the ordinary and everyday menu of successes and strife. It is a story of what it means to be a female- and a question. It is about you. And me.

I would be honored if you considered sharing it with others. You can pre-order a copy for $9 right now and it will magically appear in your March mailbox, just in time for spring. I will also have a free poem study handout/activity available on this website in late April to use with one of the more lyrical poems from the book. 

Your support means more than I can say. Or write. Please consider supporting other amazing authors featured by Anchor & Plume as well. Thank you. And thank you. For being a face and a name in a world of beautiful stories, a moment on our planet's wild heart.

Ice skating adventures in Pelham.

Booted and ready to test the ice...

Late last year, we went on a ice skating adventure at the Pelham Civic Center, which has special hours and classes for homeschoolers. 

Then begins the extensive period of wall-crawling...

Gnome on a roll...

The excitement of letting go of the wall... that first taste of possibility.

My mom's favorite saying- "Try, try again..."- echoed in my head as I skated. It made me happy to hear her words coming from my mouth when I most needed them. When Gnome fell on her stomach and the effort of encouragement was too heavy in comparison to the familiar ease of soothing and kissing and saying, "Okay, we don't have to keep trying..."

But the image of her laughing, skating, beckoning from across the ice. "Look kids, pretend she's over there. Skate to Buni." Because Buni never stopped trying. Buni never gave up.

Prophet has a ball...

and Gnome celebrates being wall-free.

I am so grateful for the opportunities to slip, fall, and fumble with my kids. And I am always deeply grateful for the friends which make such goofy joy possible. I miss you, Amy Lewis Sides.

Beautiful holiday crafts and gifts to make with family.

Not even the mantle is ready....

The holiday overwhelmingness hits home. So not ready this year. Ready to sit and drink mulled cider while barking orders to invisible elves and then begging them to forgive me for being such a pain.

When the Christmas blues hit, it's time to give up on the mantle and aim towards the crafts.

Beautiful things to try as you sit by the fire and offer alternatives to sibling rivalry fests... And yes, they are free. Because have you ever known me to point to you towards something that costs money?

First, from Third Floor Orchard...

DIY map notebooks 

Toddler art dishware

Now, from the lovely small & friendly...

Toddler art dishware 
Tiny pinch pots 
DIY stamped dish towels
Salt dough picture frame ornaments
Simple ribbed knit hat pattern

Snowman garland

From This Heart of Mine...

Clothespin family portrait
DIY frog flower bowls 
Gold leaf plaster votives  
DIY dipped towels & painted spoons  
Winter wonder wooden snowman garland

DIY dresser drawer labels

From the whimsical & lovely Crafting Connections...

Abstract painted scarf
Collaborative accordion picture books 
Little library mini-project 
DIY dresser drawer labels 
Nature table boxes 
10-minute shadowbox

How to celebrate the year's most wondrous night... our winter solstice.

“Though my soul may set in darkness, 
it will rise in perfect light. 

I have loved the stars too fondly 
to be fearful of the night.”
Sarah Williams

Bela Bartok's "Winter Solstice Song"

The purpose of a ritual is to set it a part from everyday life and to create a sacred space. Tonight, we read the story of the Holly King and the Oak King by candlelight. We vow to live only with candles on the coming day. 

 

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me
there lay an invincible summer.”
Albert Camus

We put our hopes in the ever-widening circles and ripples which lead our hearts and minds outwards. We tell stories and discover the ways in which our own stories build upon the stories we taste, touch, and feel.

"The Yule Faeries" by James Claire Lewis

The story of the Holly King and Mistletoe, an annual telling and retelling for us, is central to the celebration.

And so here it is... our guide of readings and rituals for one of the year's most beautiful days. Please download it, use it, enjoy it-- add, subtract, build as will.

Celebrate the season of light.

And never, ever, ever, ever fear the darkest night.

To download, just right click and save as.

Winter Solstice Family Guide (PDF)

Inside the guide, readings and traditions to celebrate yule. For example, you will find a meditation on darkness as well as a wishes for the year.

To burn what is past and yet to remain somehow lit by it.

Happy Solstice and Merry Yule everyone! From our embers to yours.

DIY holiday dioramas.

This holiday season has been a challenge. Traditions which assumed mom's presence gape open, untouched. So much of what we know and love requires reconfiguration.

A frosty tree ornament.

With an oft-heavy heart and un-nimble fingers, we try to make the best of things. The best being, of course, what is here.

Frosty & his acorn-capped friend.

Crazy glue plus various odds and ends, including a small selection of martisorii from Bunica, became dioramas.

OUR DIORAMA INGREDIENTS

Box tops or boxes

Crazy Glue (brush-on is best)

Handmade paper

Scrap paper

Glitter + glue

Wooden circles

Acrylic paint & brushes

Old wrapping paper pieces

Wooden craft figurines

Cotton balls (for snow)

A bag of fake plastic trees (pace Radiohead)

Lonely Lorraine alone in the woods.

The beginning of a dio-drama...

How to reconcile the characters of Lotte and her little cousin, Bette?

These two are waiting for the right box.

Perhaps we've been playing a little much early Harry Connick Jr. on the house radio, but it seems like the recipe for dioramas is a lot like the recipe for making love: a little bit of me and a whole lotta you... just add a dash of stardust and really strong glue.

 

This year's holiday playlist.

One tiny beautiful world filled with all sorts of brothers and sisters.

A beautiful gift for the girls from Suebee and Pops.

And now, some music....

"Elbows", a poem by Minnie Bruce Pratt.

I've been immersed in a mind-bending book by Alabama-born author and poet, Minnie Bruce Pratt. Titled, s/he, the book explores her life as a fe/male and poet and mother and partner. It is beautiful, heart-wrenching, bone-on-bone stuff. I am so grateful to have discovered her. And for the way in which she expands my love for life and all the variants of the lives we try to lead.

Pratt has two sons from a prior marriage to poet Marvin E. Weaver II which ended in divorce in North Carolina in 1975. She lost custody of her children because the state criminalised homosexual activity at the time.

Without further ado, here is...

 

Elbows

 

Cover your arms.
Don’t let your elbows
show.

That’s what my neighbors
down in Alabama tell
their daughters
so no elbow
plump or thin
tan or pink
will entice others
to passion.

But if I thought
my scrawny, two-toned
elbows would lure you

if I thought
my skinny, sharp-boned
elbows could secure you

I’d flap my arms
like a chicken
like a pea-fowl
like a guinea hen

when next I saw you
honey
I’d roll
up my sleeves and
sin
sin
sin.

A short fiction inspired by "Light Enough To Travel", a Be-Good Tanyas tune.

 

I was listening to "Light Enough To Travel", a song on our wedding CD, when the story took shape. Remembering how important it felt to never be owned by Things.

To remain free of Objects.

To keep our love and our lives light enough to travel.

 

 

And then I imagined vows of poverty which intersected somehow with Haiti and mission work. People who were not us but romance can make us anyone. Anywhere. And so I wrote it.

 

 

Read the rest of "People We Saved" online in the latest issue of Gravel Magazine, where you will also find beautiful moments from Kathleen Brewin Lewis, Lee L. Krecklow, and Ege Al'Bege, among others. Meanwhile, here's an old Be-Good Tanyas mp3 for your downloading enjoyment. Right-click and save.

Only In the Past (mp3)

What P. and the kids did while I made a fool of myself at the Alabama State Poetry Society retreat last month.

Feeding creatures at Oak Mountain.

Gnome gets up close and personal.

Nothing like a goat.

The latest issue of Kindred on my dresser.

You can purchase a copy from Anchor & Plume.

I have two poems in it, among many other beautiful pieces.

Cultivating empathy for the dyslexic child.

When she was a toddler, we used to joke, "Prophet help, Prophet help..". Because she always wanted to help. And she still does.

Reading Robert Frank's The Secret Life Of A Dyslexic Child and imagining how the words jumble and rumble for Prophet as she reads or speaks or tries to understand directions. 

How does it feel to have a bibliomaniac mother who loses herself in books and novels? How does it feel to watch others delight in the written word? How does it feel when family or friends ask what books you're reading-- given your age? How does it feel when people say, "oooooohhh", and change the subject? How does it feel to be the target struck in the center of their ooooh?

Set apart. Ceaselessly self-conscious. Fearful of frustrating others. Angry at your inability to control how the world perceives you. Lonely. Despairing.

The emotions run the gamut from tears to rage, and I think we do a better job of soothing a tearful child than honoring the humanity in an angry one. Robert Frank encourages us to let our child know it is okay to feel furious or sad. Denying the existence of those feelings- or suggesting there is some way to be the kind of person who doesn't get angry- is counterproductive and reduces the likelihood that your child will trust you enough to share her emotions.

I want Micah to share her emotions with me. Most importantly, I want her to share her worst emotions with me. Not her sunny, happy, look-mommy emotions which make the world a brighter place but her impossible, threatening, throat-clenching emotions which make the world a darker place for her. Because these are the emotions she most needs to share. These are the emotions that feel like prison until we can sort through them with someone we trust. 

She is confident on creative, tactile terrain. Like designing her derby doll at the Druid City Brew Pub.

Since Frank can speak about dyslexia from the first-person, we are offered a glimpse into how it feels to navigate a dyslexic world. A few insights from the book followed by my applications: 

"...even though he doesn't know this himself at a young age, he wants his parents-- and everyone else in his world-- to know that his dyslexia is real, and it's not going to just go away."

I told Prophet that her dyslexia is part of how she was made. That our culture values literacy, and this says more about our culture than it says about her.

That she is more valuable than our culture, and that she needs to believe this because it is true. No matter what others say. Her dyslexia can no more be "fixed" than the color of her eyes. 

"I encourage you to take the competition out of the learning process or your dyslexic child may always feel intellectually inferior. Encourage your child to think of her own strengths rather than dwell enviously on the strengths of others.... Learning should not be about competition; the current sensibilities toward that kind of thinking are especially detrimental to kids with learning disabilities."

I told Prophet the she is learning to read at her own pace, and that her relationship with written text is not anyone else's relationship with written text. She does not need to read like other people or enjoy the same books as other people or compare her reading journey to that of others. Her journey is her own, and no one else can map it for her. 

"One of the most important things you can do is to help your child find ways to tell others about his dyslexia."

I told Prophet that fear is always the enemy of our best self. Fear lies to us and teaches us to hide. Eventually, if we take fear too seriously, we becomes the patrons of fear, inventing apologetics for fear.

Eventually, if we hide the truth long enough, we become liars.

We talked about how confidence, and explored how to communicate our own strengths and weaknesses to others in a way that helps them listen. How it's better to laugh at the ways of the world than cry-- but that, often, we may have to do a little of both.

I told her about my challenges with calculus and how thinking about it competitively made me feel like a failure. Even though I wasn't a failure. Even though all I was doing was learning, which involves making mistakes and moving forward. Learning is all about failure. I told her if she wanted to remember anything from our conversation, then it should be this: Fools never fail. Wisdom is what grows in the richly-composted soil of many, many lessons and mistakes. The sturdiest plant, and the wisest mind, is one nourished on past refuse and error.

"The best way to deal with academic competitiveness is to counteract it with your own family's outlook on the value of learning."

I told her that it wasn't fair to tell people she couldn't read (which she says to others regularly). The right thing to say is that she's learning to read. That is the true and honest answer. 

A few additional things I learned which gave me awesome opportunities to seek insight from Prophet about her experiences and how they did or didn't match up.

1. Dialing a phone number can be hard for dyslexics. And kids who reverse numbers will often make the same reversal mistake again and again. Like a loop.
2. Standard forms and permission slips look like a minefield to dyslexics. All the fine print and instructions can be quickly confused or muddled. 
3. When a dyslexic person hears a long list of items or directions to follow, the information may become mixed up in her mind. What looks like hesitation to follow instructions may actually be an attempt to sort the various pieces of info in her mind. Similarly, she might have trouble relating chronological order. 
4. It's easy to miss the point or purpose of a story or what has been read. In a classroom setting, this can be especially alienating since you realize that others understood and you are left with an anxious blank.  
5. Prophet has a hard time retrieving information she has filed away in her brain. Rather than offer a simple answer, she usually weaves a web of associations and arrives at the "correct" answer by process of elimination. Frank explained that this challenge also occurs with properly recording and organizing materials in folders or notebooks. 

I sit in the yard and draw up various game plans, though no game plan will resolve her feelings or make the dyslexia less punitive in our uber-literal, success-driven culture. 

As she works her way through piano lessons, where musical notes alternate with letters and numbers and changing signs, two large black crows exchange carcass data overhead. The crows overheard.

She enjoys reading to Gnome and cousin. When the book is very familiar. When the words have a rhythm she can memorize.

Signs of dyslexia (Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity)
What does it feel like to have dyslexia? (ICM)
How it feels for a dyslexic to read (Thoendel Learning Center)
Through your child's eyes (Understood)
Two poems about how dyslexia feels (The Guardian)
ipad apps for dyslexia (Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity)

A handy list of notable dyslexics to inspire and encourage

Pablo Picasso, Spanish artist & sculptor
Leonardo da Vinci, artist and inventor
Thomas Edison, discoverer of electricity
Richard Branson, entrepreneur
Sally Gardner, children's book author & illustrator
Ansel Adams, photographer
John Britten, inventor
Jack Horner, paleontologist
Lewis Carroll, author & mathematician
Terry Goodkind, American author
Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, Inc.
Rebecca Kamen, artist & sculptor
Walt Disney, 
Albert Einstein, Nobel-prize winning physicist
Anthony Hopkins, British actor
Mirelle Mathieu, French songstress
Paul Oakenfold, music producer
James Russell, scientist & CD inventor
Erin Pizzey, founder of Women's Refuge
Chuck Close, contemporary artist
Hans Christian Andersen, fairy tale author
Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of telephone
David Rockefeller, American business executive & philanthropist 
John F. Kennedy, US president
Eileen Simpson, noted memoirist
Avi, Newbery Honors winning author
Nikola Tesla, scientist & engineer
Gustave Flaubert, French author
Roberto Bolano, Chilean poet and writer
Philip Schultz, Pulitzer-prize winning poet
Pierre Curie, Nobel-prize winning physicist
Ted Turner, president of Turner Broadcasting
Henry Winkler, actor & children's author 
Rehn Guyer, American toy inventor
Joss Stone, British singer
Frank Woolworth, founder of Woolworth's
Dave Pilkey, creator of Captain Underpants
Molly Sliney, champion fencer
George Bernard Shaw, playwright
Zhang Shang, dissident & human rights activist from China
Benjamin Zephaniah, British-Jamaican writer & dub poet
Bob Weir, Grateful Dead guitarist
Florence Welch, British singer of Florence & The Machine
Woodrow Wilson, US president
George Washington, US president
Agatha Christie, mystery novelist
JF Lawton, screenwriter
Richard Ford, Pulitzer-prize winning author
Henry Ford, entrepreneur & automotive innovator
Erin Brokovich, environmental hero
WB Yeats, Irish poet & playwright
Robin Williams, comedian
Whoopi Goldberg, comedian & entertainer
Jay Leno, comedian 
Ann Bancroft, adventurer & record-breaker 
Paul MacCready, "engineer of the century"
Peter Lovatt, dancer & academic
Noel Gallagher, songwriter & musician 
Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA
Michael Faraday, inventor of the Bunsen burner
Darcey Bussell, British ballerina
John Irving, screenwriter & novelist
Willard Wigan, micro-sculptor
Andy Warhol, pop artist
Ignacio Gomez, muralist
Robert Rauschenberg, American painter & graphic artist
Fred J. Epstein, innovative pediatric neurosurgeon
Octavia Estelle Butler, first sci-fi writer to receive MacArthur Genius Grant
Robert Clark, photographer
F. Scott Fitzgerald, writer
Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip
Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg 
James Anthony, youngest pilot to fly solo around the world
Fannie Flagg, author of Fried Green Tomatoes
Jules Verne, science fiction & steampunk pioneer

Discovering a time when Leonard Michaels lived in Tuscaloosa.

Because I have never read a writer who can put so much tension in a single sentence and call it "prose". While searching for his essays online, I found a passage in Mary Ward Brown's Fanning The Spark: A Memoir, which describes Michaels' sojourn at the University of Alabama. 

All the exquisite writers who have walked along the Black Warrior... what would they recognize of our town if they returned? What unique history have been we preserved in the rush for Progress?

"I’d go mad with concern over semicolons. Conjunctions ruined my sleep. I wanted no needless sound in my sentences. I hated to use adverbs because of the “ly” endings. They seemed like sloopy trailers. They made the sense mushy and weak and artificial. I didn’t want to mean anything beyond what could inhere in the particular limited aural sensation. Idea and sound had to be exactly the same length, or the same density, as if a word could be flesh. That used to be my idea of real writing. Sculptural."

Personal rants aside, here is "The Lost Interview" from The Paris Review as well the relevant local history excerpt:

 

A paean to unpretty meadows.

I don't remember where I read that our conservation ethos is biased in favor of pretty places. Maybe it was Muir. Maybe the comment was actually about wilderness. Either way, it struck me as an unethical approach to conservation. Similar, in a sense, to deciding which kids should receive life-saving treatments on the basis of their good looks. 

I've seen this ethos hard at work in the case of Hurricane Creek, where some folks say the Eastern Bypass will be a boon for development. Then, behind a cupped hand, those same people whisper that Hurricane Creek is "a working class creek"-- and obviously "it's no Cahaba River". To preserve a wild area requires the discovery of some rare lily. Some impossibly perfect beauty. Because only the pretty people are worth saving. Only the tourist dollars count.

Which leads me to a poem. The poem inspired by the desire to honor a meadow, regardless of its economic value to so-and-so apartment magnate. To honor even the un-pretty meadows. To ascribe value to even the unsexy lives.

Today, the awesome Matrix Magazine published the poem in question-- "I Don't Think We Should Use Words Like Meadow Anymore". Here's the first stanza of my paean to unpretty meadows:

 

There is a meadow across from our subdivision which does not belong to anyone. There are no lawnmowers on this meadow where a coterie of crows conduct their general assembly each morning. There is a four-way stop sign but the stop looks ashamed and some say there is a ghost that haunts the meadow and what the stop sign feels is akin to dread.

Read the rest online.

 

Like historic preservation which aims to preserve the antebellum mansion without an eye for the dogtrot cabin made from nearly-extinct longleaf pine, conservation can be driven by the desire to save what rich people believe deserves saving. Preservation can be a way of maintaining social status. Certainly, the choices made by state historic preservation commissions determine what our children are allowed to value of the past. So it's debutante balls and fainting couches and Scarlett O'Hara swaying at the top of a staircase. Most developers do very well for themselves and usually, they are the ones who have a money-making plan for the meadow or creek in question. Oh Progress, thou art a fine and wealthy god indeed. A god of brass placards and community development. A god to which our politicians appeal again and again behind closed doors and in open chambers-- the god to which some consecrate the awful tornado of 2011.

Speaking of tornados, there's this book you should read (edited by Brian Oliu) titled, simply, Tuscaloosa Runs This. I'm about to start quoting from it. I'm about to agree wholeheartedly with Andrew Beck Grace (and perhaps the whiskey-scented ghost of Walker Percy) when he writes:

"I'm the Southerner who, like an anthropologist living among the natives too long, informs outsides on their customs, their rites, their rituals, their speech."

In other words, I may live here and hike here and dream my way through life here but I'm always a foreign entity. My "ain't" lacks a certain spittle. My "cain't" never could. So I'm not trying to be one of you so much as to feel and understand you-- to savor your BBQ ribs beneath a steel-plant infused sunset. Maybe even tell a true story. 

Which brings me to the post-tornado story. A true story that's jam-packed with traffic and development. When Tuscaloosa Runs This was published in 2012, the development hadn't quite begun. But a Camus-loving prophet by the name of Erik Wennermark nailed it. Probably not because he loved Camus but let's face it, Camus called it over Sartre every time and he had the grist of a good prophet. Three years ago, Erik wrote:

"When they rebuild, they'll rebuild ugly. More cookie-cutter student condos. New look strip malls, Panera and Starbucks and Best Buy. Yes, when they finally opened the Barnes & Noble in town I went too, but with great reservation. Tuscaloosa may have been dull at times and prone to exacerbate my alcoholism, but at least it wasn't like everywhere else in this country-- when I first arrived it could have just as well been El Salvador, so different and unique it felt to me. I fear when they rebuild-- if they rebuild-- it will be just another strip mall suburb along the highway. The same shitty stores in the same shitty architecture. Clean and modern and lifeless boxes dropped to earth."

Did he say the word "life"? Because I feel like that's what we were talking about. I feel like maybe I was saying a pretty life isn't the only one worth saving. A lifeless box is not an upgrade. A massive four-lane bypass is nothing but an opportunity to expand the craven, pathetic strip mall style deeper and deeper into the woods. Then over the creek. Forget grandmother's house because that place was 1,000 square feet and we need bigger houses. Faster cars. Blah blah blah you know where I'm going. 

The fact is simply this: I don't want to go there. I don't want to imagine my hometown covered in highways and byways and neighborhoods abandoned for the latest prefab "community". I don't want to smile and pray to Progress. I don't want to call rampant, ridiculous consumerism a "blessing". I don't want to lie to you and pretend I'm a satisfied citizen of this.

Because...... there are meadows. And because there are people who care about life. And because there are children who might care about life if they grew up in a town saturated with life. Not just roll tide life and tailgating parties but trees and creeks and slippery rocks. Simple, uncomplicated, naturally-existing life. Unpretentious, unpretty, un-manicured life. Yes... WILDlife.

There. I said it. 

Before I go wash out my mouth with soap, you should know there is a beloved meadow in Northport, Alabama currently under siege. You can sign a petition to preserve it here. And I can thank Amy LeePard for caring about life. And I can thank Roxanna Bennett for her sailor's mouth and the wide-open heart beneath. Thank you to all who work to save meadows-- and to all who publish poems about meadows to conserve or preserve the unpretty-perfects of the world. 

At the UA Arboretum with Suebee and Pops.

Suebee flips through The Tuscaloosa News which, of course, is not exactly the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She and Pops were thrilled to pose for this morning photograph in the front yard. Thrilled, I tell you.

Suebee and Pops came for the weekend last month, their trunk filled with toys and the backseat bearing a surprise visit from cousin Jael. The girls caught up on gab and bikes and pinecone tossings. 

We spent one afternoon traipsing around the Arboretum.

Okay, that's a lie. They traipsed while I hid behind a tree and worked on a fiction collection. When I say worked, I mean a strange combination of scribbling, editing, and trying not blur the ink by crying. 

The King took photos of what I missed. As Suebee started off on the trail, Pops ushered stragglers forward. 

Suebee tells Pat very clearly NOT to take photos of her hiking up the trail from behind. Having viewed the entire roll of film, I know for a fact that he refrained from taking rear pictures.

A beautiful golden flower filled with yellow stars. A face that could launch a thousand stories.

Among the missings was a dance performance at the open-air amphitheater.

Jael bops. Prophet looks cinematic. Gnome explores head-banging.

Clearly, there was booty-shaking which took place.

Let it be noted that there is nothing I appreciate like a good, mid-forest booty shake.

Gnome, Prophet, Sueebee, and Jael pose for a photo along the trails. Poor Prophet refused to apply chapstick around her mouth-- "it doesn't make sense, mom... my chin is not the same as my lips". So I had to formulate a term called chapped upper chin to describe the way the space around the lips gets chapped if you lick it during cold weather.  

They sauntered to the top of the treehouse.

A serious version of something in the treehouse.

My favorite version of anything. Because it happens to include Him.

And then this.

10 must-read articles about education.

A good education gives you something to stand for.

"The Democratic Education of Unschoolers" by Astra Taylor
n+1, November/December 2013

"The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland" by Tim Walker
The Atlantic, October 2015

"Educating Ourselves To Oblivion" by William Astore
Mother Jones, May 2009

"The Junior Meritocracy" by Jennifer Senior
New York Magazine, January 2010

"Why It's Not All Bad To Be Bored" by Alina Tugend
New York Times, November 2012

"What Danish Parents Know About Teaching Empathy" by Katie Hinz-Zombrano
Mother Magazine, October 2015

"Undercover Universities" by Emily Mulder
Yes! Magazine, November 2014

In the name of love: The Eldest at the Tuscaloosa PRIDE parade.

"Saving Kids From Nature-Deficit Disorder", an interview with Richard Louv
NPR, May 2005

"Leave No Child Inside" by Richard Louv
Orion Magazine, 2013

"Unleashing Empathy: How Teachers Transform Classrooms" by Lennon Flowers
Yes! Magazine, April 2014

"Charlotte's Webpage: Why Children Shouldn't Have the World At Their Fingertips" by Lowell Monke
Orion Magazine, September/October 2005

"Male and female ability differences down to socialisation, not genetics" by Robin McKie
The Observer, August 2010

And, of course, there are personal reasons for the choices we make. Here is what I've learned- and what I continue to learn- about our lives and education/s:

"Why I Homeschool" 

"Thoughts on Mr. Lookadoo's Approach to 'Self-Empowerment'"

"The Liberating Habits of Compassionate Men"

"Homeschooling and Socialization: The Heart of the Matter"

"Mining A Fallow Field For Stories"

"Visitation", a prose poem by David Shumate.

Fall is hammocks by the fire.

I'm slightly in love with David Shumate's book of prose poems, High Water Mark. Apart from admiring his craft, my affections tend towards the particular.

I am grateful for his "Prescription For Insomniacs". Because a poem is the best prescription of all once you accept the words which keep you awake. The price of a good night's sleep being so many unrendered stories.

Riveted by "What Hemingway Learned From Cezanne", which reads like a gallery visit, the conversations we create between artists and writers who inspire us. It's a sharp poem. Clear and edgeless.

Astonished by "The Blue Period". Muddling slowly through the thick muds of "Lifesaving"- the question at which point two people wish to lose the cares of loving another, return to the place where "she could just drive by".

Curious about "The Psychic Geography of Atlantis", and the Romanian reference.

Pacing the room with "The American Dream" in hand. Thrilled by his insight into immigration and assimilation. The phantom limbs that keep me up at night.

He tends the fire in the pit he
created for the Eldest's birthday.

And then there is "Visitation", the poem that hits me in all the right places. The poem that speaks outside spoken sense. Straight into smoke and fire.

 

Visitation

 

This morning I sit down with the spirit of my father. At first he is reluctant to join me. Perhaps he fears what we might say. Or something in the code of the dead warns to leave the living alone. I pour him some coffee. Offer him his favorite pipe. We start with small talk. How the others are. The time when we did this or that. He has lost that nervous edge. That tremor in his voice. As if we grow younger with each year of death. He senses something unsettled in me. That gnawing the dead know so well. He blows a smoke ring in the air and points his pipe in my direction. Take up gardening, he says. Become a shepherd. Or follow your way with words. He reaches over and places his hand on my shoulder. Like the foot of a bird, it weighs nothing. But it is more than enough.

 

Oh if I could only tell you about the bird, that stubborn phoebe that keeps returning to sit on my notebooks as I write. She is not enough, though. Not yet.

More poems from High Water Mark

"Passing Through A Small Town" (The Writer's Almanac)
"High Water Mark" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Teaching A Child the Art of Confession" (Reader's Connection)
"Mornings With Freud" (Indianapolis Public Library)
"Afternoon Nap" (Arabesques Review)
"Reading to the Blind Man" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Shooting the Horse" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Custer" (The Writer's Almanac)

"I set out into a poem imagining I am Kafka let loose in this modern world just to see how that feels, and I end up with the image of a lover straightening his tie, giving him a renewed sense of purpose."

Paul Holler talks to David about prose poetry craft (Eclectica)

Other poems by David Shumate

"Plum" (Agni)
"Amish" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Trains" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Chinese Restaurant" (The Writer's Almanac)
"The Department of Love" (Karen Kovacik)
"An American In Paris" (Karen Kovacik)
"Lincoln" (The Writer's Almanac)
"The Long Road" (AGNI)
"Mangos" (Plume)
"Bringing Things Back From the Woods" (Plume)
"Talking Animals" (Plume)
"If You Hire A Poet To Draw A Map" (Verse Daily)
"A Hundred Years From Now" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Welcome Home Children" (The Writer's Almanac)
"The Bible Belt" (The Writer's Almanac)
"Mannequins" (NEA)

The summer I want to forget without forgetting, somehow, these moments.

My life divides on the date June 18, 2015. The date mom died. All the details fall into categories of before and after. The photo above is a before. A photo from mom's iphone which she took on our last outing before she flew away.

See, when your mother flies to Amsterdam to see her niece's art exhibit- the niece she loved and wanted to support- and then dies overseas, it is as if she flew away. Boarded a plane and never flew back.

When the coffin arrives on a plane one week later, it's not a return flight. The body does not return smelling of apples and fresh-washed linen. The body does not return to smother you with smoochy kisses.

What comes back is a box you will never open. A story you don't want to read. A story whose text tells you nothing about the protagonist. Not one ounce of her life embalmed in that body that people want to see.

The life is divided. There is before. 

And there is after. And after. And after.

And the after never ends.

There is a hike somewhere above Dillon, Colorado where all you can see is her bright blonde bob just over the next hill. Because she hiked faster. And you can't keep up. 

There is a thunderstorm on the horizon and it is not a source of awe or beauty. You can't see it that way anymore. It is simply this: the promise of a downpour. A weather in which you can cry without being noticed.

There is Gnome's first tennis lessons. Because Bunica wanted them to play tennis. Because she loved tennis and you love her and them but it doesn't make sense to keep on loving if she has left. The other mothers crack jokes about bikini waxes and you try to make cheering sounds but the sun is too bright. And she is not here. To make you behave better. 

There is a game that the girls teach Isla. A game which involves jumping over a rope held by others. You are sure the game has a name but all you hear is Isla's laugh when you look at the photos. All you hear is how they taught her to jump.

All you see are the sunglasses she insisted on wearing through every leapy attempt. All you know is that she felt a connection between sunglasses and jumping. There could be no other option. And you know mom would be proud. But your heart breaks anyway.

There is a note in her trail book about a hike you took together last year. But she wrote the date down wrong. The date she recorded is tomorrow. A day that has not happened. Your son says it is a sign that Bunica wants us to hike it tomorrow. You hug him tighter than a cobra and he wonders when you will stop crying. You cry together. You don't think it will ever stop. But you will lace your boots and bite your lip and make what folks call "the best of it". Are they joking? What's happening right now is the worst of shit. Not the best of it.

There is, indeed, the hike you took to Lily Pad Lake with her last year. There is the hike you take again. This time, you call it a pilgrimage. This time you fold a boat to set loose in the lake where she smiled 1,000 times brighter than Colorado sun. You don't want to leave. You tell the kids descent is more difficult than ascent. You don't tell them why. You don't tell them that you can never go back to a place where she is with you. 

There are structures you climb just to move away from the chatter. You are scared of heights but you keep climbing things that put you out of reach. If you get high enough, then maybe no one will need you to tie a shoe or resolve a conflict over lollipops. The people you love are below. They won't climb this high. And so you cry because no one asks if a woman who climbs is crying. They only say, wow, that looks high.

There are books you read- Russian Nights by Vladimir F. Odoevsky- which make awkward promises about time. You feel yourself flushing. There are new forms of anger you have never encountered. Sudden comets of anger that blaze across your face. There are no unpoetic moments in the life of a poet. You'll take his statement and clarify: There is nothing poetic in the death of a poet. There is no poetry in a heart that stops. There is no beauty in this endless silence.

There is only the impossible, insoluble longing. And the destruction of present tense. This after and after and after. Nothing blessed.

A stunning secret garden in Holt.

It begins with flowers out front.

Earlier this summer, the King snuck the kids to visit the home of a lovely Holt couple with brilliant green thumbs. 

The knockout roses demanded attention. None of the half-hearted blooms you find in my untended yard. 

"Flower faces", we call them.
Because-- what else?

Gnome wanders among snapdragons.

I remember the childhood feeling of being dwarfed by plants. Wandering through paths which grew like whorls in the bark of an old oak tree. Nature's natural lines are curvy, as, perhaps, ours should be.

Lettuce and maples and wonder.

The pond.

Lilypads... and koi hiding underneath.

Roses hold the dew like cheeks hold childhood's tears.

A testament to what can be done in a tiny yard.

I admire this couple so much for what they made after the tornado's wreckage. What they cultivated and tended despite the damage. So many days when I wish I had a green thumb- or, at least, the persistence and dedication to put a garden higher on the list of things to honor in life. 

The Eldest came home with a tiny stalk of a crown of thorns plant which has developed into a happy, boisterous, multi-stalk crown of thorns sitting beside our front door. Every time he waters it, I think of how our lives have been enriched with blossoms handed along by others. I will always be grateful for these small gifts that grow into something bigger.

A few recent things.

Just because you call this home doesn’t mean home is not a form of self-defense. A band-aid heals but remains a barricade. The flag waves but has no hands. Mexican-Americans pour over lower borders like beetles from a moist log but they still die parched.

[from "The Ring in the Rain" published in Lingerpost]

 

Things I’ll never say again.
Settle, instead, for dictators and awful.
Treasures are stored inside
stories passed on as pickled
cauliflower recipes or mountains
rising mid-nose or a taste for sun
with teeth. Emotions are held back,
stockpiled into traditional forms.
Agony: a folk song old as wind.

[from "Holy Bread" published at Eunoia Review] 

 

It was Mabel’s idea. Everything from the temple to the mattress was Mabel’s idea. She read about the mattresses in a book about woodland Indians and the way she told it I was sure she could teach a class on the subject. So we sat in the temple and tore out hundreds of pages and wadded them up in our fists then unwadded only to wad them again until the paper was soft and smooth enough to feel the cotton inside. Soon only the covers were left. 

[from "Doppelganger" published in *82Review]

 

Whatever footprints persist
none of this is separate as it seems.

It was, after all, the Frank O’Hara poem,
that went through several hands

before it left me warmer
within your arms’ parentheses

the punctuation marked a girl
and how she lied to a perfectly

good poem. Whatever she quoted
you or him, the poem is the part

she can’t recover with our regret.

[from "Incident Concerning A Poem By Frank O'Hara" published at Logophile]

 

You call it unknown but what of me have you known and what more supple mystery than the nights of a creature who bleeds by the magnetic force of the moon.

[from "53/New Forms", a series of letters to Arthur Rimbaud
published in Lockjaw]

The nature cure: Why the only cure for now is nature.

The Eldest shows Amy a discovery at Tannehill.

In the latest issue of The Atlantic, James Hamblin explores the emerging profession of "ecotherapy". My heart skips and cartwheels to see Richard Louv's name quoted in a mainstream media outlet.

Children with ADHD who regularly play in parks have been found to have milder symptoms than those who spend more time indoors, for example, and therapeutic-camping programs have been found to decrease relapse rates in substance addicts. Such findings generally have more to do with mood and behavior than basic biology—but mood and behavior are intimately tied to physical well-being. Social connection, for instance, is one of the most important factors in human health. And communal green spaces foster that.

These are things we know. Things which explain why the Boy Scouts continues to survive as an organization. Because, let's face it, once the Boy Scouts start "camping" online, the Boy Scouts are finished. 

But in this day and age, we don't do what we know as much anymore. Instead, we do what the people down the street are doing. If keeping up with the Jones was hard before, it's almost impossible now that everyone can keep tabs on Facebook.

 

And then there's the dilemma of expert-worship. I was surprised and excited to learn of medical doctors, like Robert Zarr, who write prescriptions for nature time. 

In his office in Washington, D.C., Robert Zarr, a pediatrician, writes prescriptions for parks. He pulls out a prescription pad and scribbles instructions—which park his obese or diabetic or anxious or depressed patient should visit, on which days, and for how long—just as though he were prescribing medication.

Zarr says it’s important to give concrete advice instead of repeating the vague admonitions (Exercise more! Get outside!) that people are used to hearing. “If you came in to me with bacterial pneumonia,” he told me, “I wouldn’t say, ‘You just go to any pharmacy, pick up any antibiotic you’d like, take it for as many days as you’d like, with or without food, and I’ll see you in a month, buddy.’ ” He doesn’t necessarily tell patients what to do at the park, however—just to go.

Zarr is part of a small but growing group of health-care professionals who are essentially medicalizing nature. He relies on a compendium of 382 local parks—the product of meticulous mapping and rating of green spaces, based on accessibility, safety, and amenities—that he helped create for DC Park Rx, a community-health initiative. The Washington program was one of the first in the United States; there are now at least 150 others.

That's awesome. It needs to happen. I hope other doctors learn from it. I am very, very grateful for physicians who take a holistic approach to the care, treatment, and diagnosis of patients. 

We climbed up the hill and then picked up rocks to use as chalk. 
Karst or slate make excellent hand-drawn trail markings on trees.

But when I think of long-time organizations like Sierra Club or small local garden clubs and naturalist groups or nonprofits like the Druid City Garden Project, I can't help thinking the only new thing about ecotherapy is the word. People have been involved in careers devoted to increasing our exposure and interaction with nature for many, many years. What stands out in the present is the medicalization of what was once natural. The prescription for what is patently obvious. 

As a culture, we've outsourced care for decades. Now we are outsourcing common sense as well. Before long, we'll outsource our political conscience to men on TV who bully one another. By long, I mean maybe a few months.

The truth is that kids are more likely to have visited a theme park or Disneyland by their 8th birthday than they are to have camped with their family. The memories we make involve purchases and fancy accoutrements rather than stories and campfires. Maybe what we need most is to heal from exorbitant, expensive, and over-stimulated vacations.

Prophet wants me to look, mama, look!

Hamblin concludes:

What makes ecotherapy different from an attempt to “mine nature for its beneficial effects,” Chalquist explained—perhaps sensing that I was eager to begin mining nature for its beneficial effects—“is that we have to give something back.” He tells students that if they want to experience the full value of ecotherapy, they can’t just go touch a tree; they need to come to care about that tree and help preserve it for future generations.

Actually, I found this to be one of the more persuasive arguments for ecotherapy. If the practice leads people to volunteer in an urban garden (as Smith did) or to start a bird-watching club or to fall in love while chained to a redwood, it could legitimately improve their health by giving them a sense of purpose and fostering social connections. The same could be said of so many unconventional therapies (equine, acroyoga, glassblowing) that seem to be beneficial despite the lack of a clear biological mechanism. And even if you don’t “give back,” it’s tough to argue against doctors’ prescribing time in a park, crazy as it may seem that they need to do so. Soil-holding remains optional.

The nature cure is not a cure-all. Think of it more like a foundation- a brick upon which one builds the walls of a sturdy, resilient, awe-inspired self. We don't go to nature to build muscles we can admire in the mirror. Even if we do, what we get is different.

What we get from nature is a sense of awe and reverence. That's why running with headphones through a city street is not likely to be a nature-cure alternative to your treadmill. At which point in the run did you stop and listen to the wind? At which point did you admire a snail slurping across a log? At which point did you leave the clamor and drama of daily life behind?

 

Maybe it doesn't matter. But one of the reasons that I'm homeschooling my kids is because an unpopular, hidden, and secret part of me believes that it matters. And it matters even more given the way the world is changing. The relationships they build with nature right now will sustain them through the challenges of college and early adulthood. When they can't afford a therapist or a fancy counselor, if they don't make enough money for those options, there will always be some woods into which they may run. A forest into which they can retreat. A haven where the busy bodies of squirrels scamper over branches with acorns and hopefully my kids will look up for one second and discover- as so many have discovered before them- that life is much bigger than this moment's heartbreak. The world is much grander than our bewildering ache. 

I had a favorite magnolia who knew everything from my first kiss to the wonder of my first period. My back nested into that hole in her bark perfectly. The shade of a familiar tree offers not only succor by also counsel: the hope that one's strength grows alongside the burls and bruises of time. A place where things continue to change and yet remain mysterious and eternal. A place where you can both lose yourself and find yourself in the space of a single moment. 

"Goodbye Tuscaloosa", a poem by Bruce Smith.

I read the poem in a 2014 issue of Five Points and I spent all morning being struck-- and restruck-- by it. It's a beautiful paean to the time from 1998 to 2002 which Bruce spent in Tuscaloosa, "equidistant from William Faulkner, Otis Redding, and W.E.B. DuBois.... the axis of bourgeois ante-bellumism among the legacies of blood and blues."

Italics are mine, things that spoke to me, people I've known or imagined, places I've tasted, plants I've touched. The familiar re-envisioned in the wave goodbye.

Lee Bains playing at Druid City Brewery last month.

GOODBYE TUSCALOOSA 

Goodbye Rufus and Ditzy, Goodbye Don Dove, Goodbye Tim Early,
     Goodbye Bebe Barefoot.
Goodbye to the Brooklyn Jew-boos and the boys from Des Moines
     who wandered in their trail of tears to Tuscaloosa.
Goodbye to the Ur ovens of Woodrow's. I loved the slaughtered hog,
     the gloried grease, the human nature standing around,
     standing around the fire.
Goodbye to the state flower, the shredded layer of rubber
     the truckers call alligators.
Goodbye to my face in the window at night.
Goodbye to the songs I sang to you beginning in bright vocals
     continuing through licking to the dark lies
     ending in parlando where our burdens are put down.
Goodbye to those I could not understand and could not understand me.
     When you said, "Troy" I heard, "Charlie."
Goodbye All-American Storage and my birthright exchanged for a mess of
     postage.
Goodbye rained-on cardboard box. Goodbye corrugation--chart of my          heart.
Goodbye roach, you were my ontology.
Goodbye wind twisted in the Gulf and bitch slapped
     and spun through Tupelo
     and sent like the Po-lice to the homes of the poor.
Goodbye Druid City Car Wash whose spray was scrupulous to me at two
     ayem,
     whose mist was an exercise by St. Ignatius.
Goodbye to my face in the window at night.
Goodbye Blondel. Goodbye Aquanetta.
Goodbye, too, to the West Alabama Veterinary Clinic where I waited
     with the sick furred thing with the owners of Wabbles,
     L'l G'l, Dollbaby, Mrs. Pinkerton and Honey Bun
     for yours is the pure devotion.
Goodbye to the Crimson Tide fans who worshipped the hypermasculine
      for yours is the pure devotion.
Goodbye Mr. Vaughn of the 103rd bomber squadron, blind, kind, for no
      white reason.
Goodbye to the machinery of the horizon and the fried foods of Ezel's
     Catfish Shack,
     where I could taste my mud and slumber.
Goodbye crepe myrtle and the vertigo of the last hundred years
     when I lived here (there) George Wallace died
     the coach was fired and you were my alibi.
Goodbye three hours drive to M'fs. Goodbye elsewhere.
Goodbye red Camaro in a black bra. Goodbye hairdo as the Kabuki
     of the South. Goodbye blues.
          If there's a labial among y'all, let it be heard now.
Goodbye Alfonso. Goodbye Tyrone. Goodbye Stella. Goodbye student
     who prayed for me in my sin and affliction.
Goodbye freight train for yours was the pure devotion.
Goodbye nights of the fragrance I never named and days of noon,            tongue,
     and handgun.
Goodbye manners as tongue and handgun.
Goodbye unknown woman with a drink in her hand who burst through the        tea olive
         without spilling, walking in the back and out the front door.
     I kiss your Jack and coke goodbye.
Goodbye to the bird saying Preacher, Preacher.
Goodbye to the three legged-dog who suckled the twins, Tusk and Lou,
     who founded the town on snarl and hunger.
Goodbye to the dirty silence clarified. Here's my reparation.
     Here's my face in the window at night.
Goodbye to the 4X4's on lawns and the Pain Care Center.
     I became an orphan like you here (there).
     There was no shade for me under pin oak or magnolia.
Goodbye to the Black Orchid and your transvestites. Goodbye Miss
Mystery.
     I kiss your post-op lips goodbye.
Goodbye and thanks for the Jesus.
Goodbye Time as a pure form of sensuous intuition. Goodbye Immanuel Kant
     of Queen City Boulevard.
Goodbye Bible verse on the cash register receipt.
Goodbye pool hall, cabstand, pawnshop, and storm door company.
Goodbye He's as Rude as a Yankee.
Goodbye red velvet cake and ersatz rue.
Goodbye Little Zion Tabernacle Church with your brush arbor
          built from wood milled in the hollow
      and your darker than blue.
Goodbye bathtub covered with a mattress during the tornado.
     You took my form.
Goodbye tetchy, goodbye triflin', goodbye mama love and moonpie.
Goodbye my little scuppernong.
Goodbye interlocutor with the lost. I kiss you reluctantly
     as one kisses the forehead of the child
     whose fever will kill.
Goodbye to the Enola Gay of race, and to Mr. Vaughan, who flew in you,
     blind, kind for no white reason.
          Thank you for the two-dollar bill.
Let me lie down between Rama Lama's and Vinyl Solutions one last time.
Let me lie down between the porch and the battle reenactment,
     the bombers and the lambs,
     the bonfires and the birthplace of Sun Ra.

Wisteria growing through the tin shed cannot find me.
From now on the law against kudzu is lifted.
From now on I will be translated into this.
You were my Dollywood. I was your Judas.
     Maybe some Tara will save me.
I will look back.
I will become cold and salted.
I will go up into the morning, sometimes.
I will be measured. I will be shattered.

A conversation with Gnome about fairy names.

 

What is your fairy’s name?

 

I don’t know. Yet. Cause Micah named it but I don’t like long hard-to-member name cause I wanted her to be Violet but Micah named her fairy Violet. First.

 

What are you looking for? In a fairy name, I mean? 

 

Something like Flutterwings. A Nice name.

 

How about Esmeralda?

 

No. Too hard to say. If I can’t say it right I won’t member it either. 

 

Maybe Dana? 

 

Oh. Dana. No. I just wanna get home. I want a pretty name.

 

Elise? Alise? Alice?

 

No. Micah thinks Rosie and Rose is not a good name. One of the dogs is named Rosie.

 

So what? Rosie is a great name. I know dogs named Max.

My Partner's Matchbook Collection.

My favorite untranslatable words.

Full moon off The Transylvania.

The kids frequently ask me to translate a Romanian word for which I can find no simple English match. Over the years, they have learned to expect definitions which extend like kudzu in multiple directions and layers. 

One of my favorite Romanian words- also the root of my father's name- is impossible to translate. I cannot convey the way in which this tiny word tangles with the scent of moist mountain soil, the sonorous vocalizations of shepherd songs, the face of a woman caught laughing.

I've written poems up and down this word without coming any closer. 

"Doina de Jale" (Poet's International)
"Holy Bread" (Eunoia Review)
"Doina de Haiduc" (The Freeman)

The word is "dor". The word is immense as a landscape. Here is the meaning, alongside a few other fascinating untranslatables.

WAIT! THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH "HOMESCHOOLING"

Everything in the world is "homeschooling". Everything and anything. Example: one fun way to play with these words is by asking your child to write a short story about how the word came about in the given language. To provide interesting details, encourage your child to research the country of origin, including its legends and religious stories. Perform the story. Or read it aloud with gestures. There are so many ways to play with magnificent words.

Dor (Romanian)
Begins with the longing for absent things or places or people but stretches beyond longing into an element of pleasure, a fondle which inhabits the pain.The feeling is elusive but it is not vague or passive, and it is always ‘directed at an object’, as the entry says. 

Iktsuarpok (Inuit)
the frustration of waiting for someone to arrive or turn up.

Mamihlapinatapai (Yagan)
the wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start. (Yagan is the native tongue of Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago off the coast of South America, the last stop before Antarctica)

Saudade (Portugese)
the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love, and which is lost. 

Ya’aburnee (Arabic)
literally, “You bury me,” a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person, because of how difficult it would be to live without them. 

Litost (Czech)
a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery. Milan Kundera believes it is impossible to understand the human soul without this word.

Waldeinsamkeit (German)
the feeling of being alone in the woods.

Drugoj (Russian)
the other people or neighbors whom we are supposed to love as ourselves.

Esprit d'escalier (French)
literally, "the spirit of the staircase". Refers to that witty comeback that you think of moments after leaving the situation in which you might have been able to use it. The staircase is a reference to your departure from the scene. 

Hygge (Danish)
a complete absence of anything annoying, irritating or emotionally overwhelming, and the presence of and pleasure from comforting, gentle and soothing things.

Schilderwald (German)
a street covered with so many road sides that you become lost.

Uitwaaien (Dutch)
literally, "to walk in the wind". Refers to the act of taking a brief break in the country side to clear one’s head.

Bakku-shan (Japanese)
the word for a girl who looks pretty from behind but ugly in front.

There should be a word for the way
moonlight swallows engulfs a girl
on a sailboat.

Culaccino (Italian)
the mark left on a table by a wet glass.

Zalatwic (Polish)
the use of friends, bribes, personal charm or connections to get something done.

Jayus (Indonesian)
a joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh.

Dépaysement (French)
the feeling that comes from not being in one's home country.

Fernweh (German)
a feeling of homesickness for a place you have never visited.

Komorebi (Japaense)
the dappled effect which results from light shining between trees.

Pochemuchka (Russian)
a person who asks too many questions.

Won (Korean)
the reluctance to let go of an illusion or delusion.

Gökotta (Swedish)
to rise early in the morning for the purpose of going outside to hear the birds sing.

Backpfeifengesicht (German)
a face badly in need of a fist.

Shlimazl (Yiddish)
a person who is chronically unlucky.

Evighed (Danish)
literally, "eternity". What makes it untranslatable, or at least worth thinking of in translation, is Kierkegaard’s use of the term to cover at least three different possibilities: the felt eternity of the present moment; a future eternity that corresponds to St Paul’s concept ‘the fullness of time’; and the sheer continuity of consciousness, which eludes time.

Faith without works and the people of Syria.

A fascinated Gnome.

Today I made it through communion without crying. It's the first time I've done so since Mom's death. Granted, I cried in during the final hymn as we sang the word "perish" because perish is such a heavy, impossible word from which there can be no relief or reprieve.

So I hold quantum theory against human words like "perish"- words that lack the humility of what we cannot see. I hold science and faith and poetry and beauty against words which end what we can neither control nor explain. I realize this is a personal preference. I understand there are others who need to believe Christ's love is something they have earned by saying His name.

Church is always a comfort, a place when the words in my head stop bustling for privilege and paper. I listened without worrying about what I should take away. Listened without holding an ear open for the teachable moment.

The Eldest bumbled through an extended rotation of hiccups while Gnome copied words from The Book of Common Prayer on the back of a blue prayer card. She wanted me to see- and the sight was a succor of soothing verses. 

My mind kept coming back to the reading from James 2:1-26. This is an uncomfortable passage for many who believe once-saved-always-saved doctrines but much less threatening to those (like myself) who believe Christ's love and mercy includes every single human being without regard for class, style, dogma, creed, or religious belief. 

Syrian refugee children (via Peacechild.org).

14 What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? 17 Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

How many ways can we read these verses in light of the desperate political and economic refugees at our doorsteps? 

How many ways can we throw money at a problem without opening the doors of our spacious homeland to those in need?

How many times can we smile, sign a check, and then say, "Um, I did my part and see you later"?

How many excuses can we formulate for our selfishness? How can we say people envy our freedom when the only freedoms we exercise include the right to carry guns and go nuts over football? Surely there are some who envy our foolishness and hubris but this is not the same thing. To give someone a Bible and then refuse them entry into your home is a defamation of what we've been taught.

Surely at some point we must choose between two opposing principles- the preservation of our vapid consumerist lifestyles and love for all the world's human beings. We must choose between this world and the world of Christ's love. We must choose between materialist Mammon and spiritual brotherhood.

There's no middle ground, I'm afraid. We MUST choose, knowing deep inside that the decision to keep refugees out is a choice we make out of fear, mistrust, and selfishness. It is a choice that reflects our lack of faith in love. It is a choice that reflects our love is limited by the heat we pack to protect it. And it breaks my heart to know Christ's love is used to sanction self-defense against innocent victims of war in this world we have created.

Watching from a distance, the weather.

Calls for bikes and being outside while my mother's estate calls for phone calls and phone calls and phone calls (most of which must be repeated to another person because someone mistyped a word and the world is nothing if not a series of misshapen words and oblong vowel sounds including oooooohhhh nooooo).

But on the happy front, the Eldest now pumps air into his own tires without assistance, not to mention he can find the air pump on his own. I watch him bike from the front window and try not to think of all the life I'm missing while digesting the legacies of death.

Admiring "The Female Man."

Getting the air ducts cleaned out.

Oh there's nothing quite so titillating and gut-wrenching as a weekend spent re-reading Joanna Russ' The Female Man. It should be required reading for any college freshman literature course. It should be the invisible shield within a backpack to protect young people from the sexual insolvencies of current gender norms. It should be required reading for all parties considering heterosexual marriage.

Let's see... what do I love about it? Well, for one, the familiar parts of the female protagonists' scripted life:

Now in the opera scene that governs our lives, Janet would have gone to a party and at that party she would have met a man and there would have been something about that man; he would not have seemed to her like any other man she had ever met. Later he would have complimented her on her eyes and she would have blushed with pleasure; she would have felt that compliment was somehow unlike any other compliment she had ever received because it had come from that man; she would have wanted to please that man, and at the same time she would have felt the compliment enter the marrow of her bones; she would have gone out and bought mascara for the eyes that had been complimented by that man. And later still they would have gone for walks, and later still for dinners; and little dinners tete-a-tete with that man would have been like no other dinners Janet had ever had; and over the coffee and brandy he would have taken her hand; and later still Janet would have melted back against the black leather couch in his apartment and thrown her arm across the cocktail table (which would have been made of elegant teak-wood) and put down her drink of expensive Scotch and swooned; she would have simply swooned. She would have said: I Am In Love With That Man. That Is The Meaning Of My Life. And then, of course, you know what would have happened.

Janet's story intersects with that of other females. One of my favorite scenes is a luncheon for which I've excerpted the particularly delicious parts:

    I knew most of the women there: Sposissa, three times divorced; Eglantissa, who thinks only of clothes; Aphrodissa, who cannot keep her eyes open because of her false eyelashes; Clarissa, who will commit suicide; Lucrissa, whose strained forehead shows that she's making more money than her husband; Wailissa, engaged in a game of ain't-it-awful with Lamentissa; Travailissa, who usually only works, but who is now sitting very still on the couch so that her smile will not spoil; and naughty Saccharissa, who is playing a round of His Little Girl across the bar with the host. Saccharissa is forty-five. So is Amicissa, the Good Sport. I looked for Ludicrissa, but she is too plain to be invited to a party like this, and of course we never invite Amphibissa, for obvious reasons.
    In we walked, Janet and I, the right and left hands of a bomb. Actually you might have said everyone was enjoying themselves. I introduced her to everyone......
    I shadowed Janet.
    I played with my ring.
    I waited for the remark that begins "Women-" or "Women can't-" or "Why do women-" and kept up an insubstantial conversation on my right. On my left hand Janet stood: very erect, her eyes shining, turning her head swiftly every now and again to follow the current of events at the party. At times like this, when I'm low, when I'm anxious, Janet's attention seems a parody of attention and her energy unbearably high. I was afraid she'd burst out chuckling. Somebody (male) got me a drink.

A ROUND OF "HIS LITTLE GIRL"

SACCHARISSA: I'm Your Little Girl.
HOST (wheedling): Are you really?
SACCHARISSA: (complacent): Yes I am.
HOST: Then you have to be stupid, too.

A SIMULTANEOUS ROUND OF "AIN'T IT AWFUL"

LAMENTISSA: When I do the floor, he doesn't come home and say it's wonderful.
WAILISSA: Well, darling, we can't live without him, can we? You'll just have to do better.
LAMENTISSA (wistfully): I bet you do better.
WAILISSA: I do the floor better than anybody I know.
LAMENTISSA (excited): Does he ever say it's wonderful?
WAILISSA (dissolving): He never says anything!

What starts out as a pristine pink filter...
[Yes, work with me on the metaphor here]

A handful of pages later, Janet and/or/plus Joanna enjoy an interaction with your average male. I like Joanna's use of italics to switch between the self she narrates- the public performance of a female self and the human within. Italics are so frequently overused or mottled in fiction. But not here:

    "But American women are so unusual," said the man from Leeds. "Your conquering energy, dear lady, all this world-wide American efficiency! What do you dear ladies use it for?"
    "Why, to conquer the men!" cried Saccharissa, braying.
   "In mah baby brain," said Janet, imitating quite accurately, "a suhtin conviction is beginnin' to fo'm."
    "The conviction that somebody is being insulted?" said Sharp Glasses. He didn't say that, actually.
    "Let's go," said Janet. I know it's the wrong party, but where are you going to find the right party?
    "Oh, you don't want to go!" said Sharp Glasses energetically. Jerky, too, they're always so jerky.
    "But I do," said Janet.
    "Of course you don't," he said; "You're just beginning to enjoy yourself. The party's warming up. Here," (pushing us down on the couch) "let me get you another."
 You're in a strange place, Janet. Be civil.
    He came back with another and she drank it. Uh-oh. We made trivial conversation until she recovered. He leaned forward confidentially. "What do you think of the new feminism, eh?"
    "What is-" (she tried again) 'What is-my English is not so good. Could you explain?"
    "Well, what do you think of women? Do you think women can compete with men?"
    "I don't know any men." She's beginning to get mad.
    "Ha ha!" said Sharp Glasses. "Ha ha ha! Ha ha!" (He laughed just like that, in sharp little bursts.) "My name's Ewing. What's yours?"
    "Janet."
    "Well, Janet, I'll tell you what I think of the new feminism. I think it's a mistake. A very bad mistake."
    "Oh," said Janet flatly. I kicked her, I kicked her, I kicked her.
    "I haven't got anything against women's intelligence," said Ewing. "Some of my colleagues are women. It's not women's intelligence. It's women's psychology.
    Eh?"
He's being good-humored the only way he knows how. Don't hit him.
    "What you've got to remember," said Ewing, energetically shredding a small napkin, "is that most women are liberated right now. They like what they're doing. They do it because they like it."
 Don't, Janet.
    "Not only that, you gals are going about it the wrong way."
You're in someone else's house. Be polite.
   "You can't challenge men in their own fields," he said. "Now nobody can be more in favor of women getting their rights than I am. Do you want to sit down? Let's. As I said, I'm all in favor of it. Adds a decorative touch to the office, eh? Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Unequal pay is a disgrace. But you've got to remember, Janet, that women have certain physical limitations."
    (here he took off his glasses, wiped them with a little serrated square of blue cotton, and put them back on) "and you have to work within your physical limitations.
    "For example," he went on, mistaking her silence for wisdom while Ludicrissa muttered, "How true! How true!" somewhere in the background about something or other, "you have to take into account that there are more than two thousand rapes in New York City alone in every particular year. I'm not saying of course that that's a good thing, but you have to take it into account. Men are physically stronger than women, you know."
    (Picture me on the back of the couch, clinging to her hair like a homuncula, battering her on the top of the head until she doesn't dare to open her mouth.)
    "Of course, Janet," he went on, "you're not one of those-uh-extremists. Those extremists don't take these things into account, do they? Of course not! Mind you, I'm not defending unequal pay but we have to take these things into account. Don't we? By the way, I make twenty thousand a year. Ha! Ha ha ha!" And off he went into another fit.

Winds up looking pretty nasty.

The man from Leeds discerns a connection between conversing with Janet and possibly mating with Janet. He strikes out to explore this situation while we read what Janet's thinking through italics. 

    "You're a good conversationalist," he said. He began to perspire gently. He shifted the pieces of his napkin from hand to hand. He dropped them and dusted his hands off. Now he's going to do it "Janet-uh-Janet, I wonder if you-" fumbling blindly for his drink-"that is if-uh-you-"
    But we are far away, throwing coats out of the coat closet like a geyser.
    Is that your method of courtship!
    "Not exactly," I said. "You see-"
    Baby, baby, baby. It's the host, drunk enough not to care.
    Uh-oh. Be ladylike.
    She showed him all her teeth. He saw a smile.
    "You're beautiful, honey."
    "Thank you. I go now." (good for her)
    "Nah!" and he took us by the wrist "Nah, you're not going."
    "Let me go," said Janet.
    Say it loud. Somebody will come to rescue you.
    Can't I rescue myself?
    No.
    Why not?
   All this time he was nuzzling her ear and I was showing my distaste by shrinking terrified into a corner, one eye on the party. Everyone seemed amused.
   "Give us a good-bye kiss," said the host, who might have been attractive under other circumstances, a giant marine, so to speak. I pushed him away.
    "What'sa matter, you some kinda prude?" he said and enfolding us in his powerful arms, et cetera-well, not so very powerful as all that, but I want to give you the feeling of the scene. If you scream, people say you're melodramatic; if you submit, you're masochistic; if you call names, you're a bitch. Hit him and he'll kill you. The best thing is to suffer mutely and yearn for a rescuer, but suppose the rescuer doesn't come?
    "Let go,____________________," said Janet (some Russian word I didn't catch).
    "Ha ha, make me," said the host, squeezing her wrist and puckering up his lips; "Make me, make me," and he swung his hips from side to side suggestively.
    No, no, keep on being ladylike!
   "Is this human courting?" shouted Janet. "Is this friendship? Is this politeness?" She had an extraordinarily loud voice. He laughed and shook her wrist.
    "Savages!" she shouted. A hush had fallen on the party. The host leafed dexterously through his little book of rejoinders but did not come up with anything. Then he looked up "savage" only to find it marked with an affirmative: "Masculine, brute, virile, powerful, good." So he smiled broadly. He put the book away.
    "Right on, sister," he said.
    So she dumped him. It happened in a blur of speed and there he was on the carpet. He was flipping furiously through the pages of the book; what else is there to do in such circumstances? (It was a little limp-leather-excuse me-volume bound in blue, which I think they give out in high schools. On the cover was written in gold WHAT TO DO IN EVERY SITUATION.)
    "Bitch!" (flip flip flip) "Prude!" (flip flip) "Ball-breaker!" (flip flip flip flip) "Goddamn cancerous castrator!" (flip) "Thinks hers is gold!" (flip flip) "You didn't have to do that!"
    Was ist? said Janet in German.
   He gave her to understand that she was going to die of cancer of the womb.
    She laughed.
  He gave her to understand further that she was taking unfair advantage of his good manners.
   She roared.
   He pursued the subject and told her that if he were not a gentleman he would ram her stinking, shitty teeth up her stinking shitty ass.
   She shrugged.
  He told her she was so ball-breaking, shitty, stone, scum-bag, mother-fucking, plug-ugly that no normal male could keep up an erection within half a mile of her.
   She looked puzzled. ("Joanna, these are insults, yes?")
  He got up. I think he was recovering his cool. He did not seem nearly so drunk as he had been. He shrugged his sports jacket back into position and brushed himself off. He said she had acted like a virgin, not knowing what to do when a guy made a pass, just like a Goddamned scared little baby virgin.
   Most of us would have been content to leave it at that, eh, ladies.
   Janet slapped him.
  It was not meant to hurt, I think; it was a great big stinging theatrical performance, a cue for insults and further fighting, a come-on-get-your-guard contemptuous slap meant to enrage, which it jolly well did.
    THE MARINE SAID, "YOU STUPID BROAD, I'M GONNA CREAM YOU!"
    That poor man.
   I didn't see things very well, as first off I got behind the closet door, but I saw him rush her and I saw her flip him; he got up again and again she deflected him, this time into the wall-I think she was worried because she didn't have time to glance behind her and the place was full of people-then he got up again and this time he swung instead and then something very complicated happened-he let out a yell and she was behind him, doing something cool and technical, frowning in concentration.
    "Don't pull like that," she said. "You'll break your arm."
    So he pulled. The little limp-leather notebook fluttered out on to the floor, from whence I picked it up. Everything was awfully quiet. The pain had stunned him, I guess.
    She said in astonished good-humor: "But why do you want to fight when you do not know how?"
    I got my coat and I got Janet's coat and I got us out of there and into the elevator. I put my head in my hands.
    "Why'd you do it?"
    "He called me a baby."
    The little blue book was rattling around in my purse. I took it out and turned to the last thing he had said ("You stupid broad" et cetera). Underneath was written Girl backs down-cries-manhood vindicated. Under "Real Fight With Girl" was written Don't hurt (except whores). I took out my own pink book, for we all carry them, and turning to the instructions under "Brutality" found:
    Man's bad temper is the woman's fault. It is also the woman's responsibility to patch things up afterwards.

Mark your calendars for the First Annual East Alabama Book Festival.

 

On Sunday, October 18th from 1:00 to 6:00 pm, The Gnu's Room is hosting the First Annual East Alabama Book Festival at Town Creek Park in Auburn, Alabama.

The Festival will feature authors, publishers, local original music, vendors and more! Co-hosts for the event are the Southern Humanities Review and The Republic of East Alabama Artists + Makers. The event is FREE and open to the public.

They are issuing an invitation to authors who wish to have booth space to promote their work and take part in a short reading, as well as to publishers and literary arts related non-profits and others. Booth space is somewhat limited and is first come−first served. Reading slots will be available in a like manner.

The deadline for participation is October 1, 2015. They need your registration form and donation of $20 by that date to hold your spot. Non-profit booth space requires no donation, but they will still need a registration form to save your spot. Bring your own booth- or, as is the case with most of us, bring your own table and chairs.

Town Creek Park is located at 1150 S Gay Street, Auburn, Alabama 36830. Parking and restrooms are available at the Park. A covered pavilion will be utilized for author readings, announcements and musical performances. Bring your own lawn chairs, umbrellas, and blankets. There will be food trucks, local coffee vendors, and various other goodies.

gumdrops

Registration forms and additional info 
More about how The Gnu's Room serves the community
How you can help a nonprofit/bookstore
The Republic of East Alabama (formerly the Revelator)
"It's A Sin to Mock A Mockingbird" by William Cotter
Cole Bryant's graphics 
Auburn Witness Poetry Prize 
Marjorie Rommel, Auburn's Poet Laureate
aaaand...
the superduper philosophy-prof-turned-poet, Kelley Jolley, who marked my papers in bright red ink and thereby earned my eternal favor

The Gnu's Room is located at 108 S 8th St, Opelika. You can speak with a fellow mammal most days at 334-705-048.

Reading an essay by Wendell Berry with flowers in my head.

Prophet and Gnome cozy up to what they call a dandelion gigantosaurus.

I came across an old essay by Wendell Berry in which he dissects the challenges of poetry and language in the present. His regard for history and tradition has much to admire in it- much I wish I could emulate (if it weren't for the unrepentant revolutionist within). 

Our past is not merely something to depart from; it is to commune with, to speak with…. The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

Wendell's respect for the past is ecological. He respects the past as we respect heirloom seeds over Monsanto-generated GMO versions. We cannot improve the present unless we acknowledge the past and build upon it. We cannot end slavery until we acknowledge the social and cognitive mechanisms by which persons were made to internalize the possibility of a human as personal property. 

….our malaise, both in our art and in our lives, is that we have lost sight of the possibility of right or responsible action. Publicly, we have delegated our capacity to act to men who are incapable of action only because they cannot think.

Wendell mourns the extent to which politics has evolved into an act of professional strategizing- responding and reacting to polls and events rather than reflecting upon them. 

Putting exclusive emphasis on a world of words has the same result as putting exclusive emphasis on heaven— it leads to, and allows, and abets, the degradation of the world. And it leads ultimately to the degradation of art and religion.

What I take from this is not where Berry leads in the essay but another place altogether- a place which has been returned to my life over the past three years. A place where my soul rests easy in mystery and awe having forsaken the practice of piecing apart the Bible, word for word, pronoun for pronoun.

As Protestants, we have been accused of worshipping the word, the Scripture, while losing sight of the Spirit.  The result is that one line about same-sex love or masturbation (i.e. onaism) can undercut the entire vision with which Christ animates the Bible— a spirit of love, empathy, tolerance, compassion, mercy, and complete disregard for social or conventional hierarchy. In worshipping the word, we become prey to literalism, our eyes abandoning the mysteries of art for the brisk verbiage of advertisments. 

Yellow Goat's Beard seed head
(Tragopogon pratensis)

I remember the scent of the moist, cool cathedrals in France. I remember how the silence and beauty made me hungry for prayer. I remember wishing the tourist groups would pick up a pamphlet and walk the stations of the cross on their own rather than guffawing and blabbing with their habitual irreverence. I say habitual because reverence is a habit we pick up as children. Reverence is a way of observation which a child either learns or learns to disregard.

I say habitual because we attend a church where the service is liturgical and habit-forming, the habit of silence and rapt attention hatched early in young hearts. My husband and I value this together. We admire not what we see in shopping malls and amusement parks but what covets our attention in sombre wooden icons, stained glass windows, the red vein of late summer leaf.

The decision to attend a more traditionally-liturgical church (an Episcopal church) was rooted in our desire for self-discipline as well as the belief that faith is only a costume without a deep sense of reverence. Both of us have worn the costume. We taught Sunday school together and hosted small-groups at our home. We pitched verses like footballs on sterilized stadium grass, stadiums being America’s version of cathedrals, places we go to wave holy symbols and fabrics and worship some vast and nameless corporate franchise together. 

Musk thistle
(Carduuas nutans)

I remember the rise of the megachurch in the early 2000s. I remember wondering at which point at which altars became stages for self-promotion. Certainly this is a modern development, a far cry from the creekside baptisms of the previous century. The church of Northpoint in Atlanta comes to mind— church of rock concerts and cafe latte counters, daycare dressed to resemble an entertainment park, endless cycles and promises of nonstop fun. An extravagant warehouse geared towards consumers of current Christianity where the walls are covered with hashtags and trends, a place where everyone can be entertained with the enjoyment of modern convenience, and nothing permanently exquisite is built because who knows when you need to expand and who knows what people want next, maybe even a bowling alley.

Musk thistle is a member of the sunflower family.

There is an aesthetic dimension to reverence— it is simple as the soft velvet underside of a magnolia leaf, complex as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It is a line which connects us to the past, the soil beneath our feet and the challenges of human history.

The reason we need to have our certainties shaken is so that we may see the possibility of better orders than we have.

 

I do not believe we can become better people without an awareness and engagement of this past. I do not believe the incessant amnesia of Christian pop or strobe lights enables us to make a habit of forgiveness though it certainly leaves us with memory and salience issues, certainly leaves us prone to forgetfulness. We must un-know as often as we know, but we must do this with wisdom rather than the need for fun, immediate gratification, or convenience. Perhaps a revolution can be wise after all? Perhaps the revolution is poetry.

"Stagger", a poem by Maureen Sherbondy.

I first read this poem in The Broad River Review but then found an online copy at Connotation Press. The simplicity struck me- as well as the rootless texture of life since mom's death.

Stagger

Leaves stagger into the grass, drunk

on freedom and the breeze.

 

We have all fallen

from branches before.

 

We graze on grass

and fat, lazy raindrops.

 

Nothing is left

but the white rind of time.

 

Home is wherever we land.

The view from Keystone mountain in summer, and then that book by Elissa.

Yes, there is snow atop the Colorado mountains in the month of August.

I finished Elissa Schappell's Use Me last night. 

Truth: I started reading it early this summer and then lost it in the pile of books beside my bed. When I picked it up to finish this month, mom was suddenly dead.

Truth: I laughed and cried while I read it. Mostly, I cried and bit my pillow.

Truth: There is no such thing anymore.

Truth: I seek ghosts for succor and look for omens in the woods. Then I curse all the ghosts for their disdain and avoidance. Curse them for visiting people who hate ghosts-- for talking to folks who fear ghosts-- while this ghost-hungry girl goes famished. 

Truth: I am famished for her. I cannot eat enough of my mother. 

Stop. Turn around. Tell me your story.

"On the first anniversary of my father's death, I realized that it was possible that because I'd been building him up in my mind for so long, preparing for the day when I'd lose him, I'd missed the man altogether, and now he was irretrievable."

I left Elissa's book in our Funky Little Free Library (for locals who'd like to read it). It's a great book. A book I didn't expect to need in the way I've need it this month. A book I didn't expect to use as a scaffold for the fucked-uppedness of grief but use it I did. Use each other we must. Use the love we find. And just keep on using it until we use it up.

Nodding while reading Nikky Finney's interview.

Water riffling off Montezuma Road.

Nikky Finney grew up in the South, and graduated from Talladega College in Alabama. She was "always trying to say the really hard thing in as beautiful a way" as she could.

As a child, Nikky thought art should consist of "the hard to say things and the beautiful things." In a seamless recent interview with AWP's magazine, she describes the influence of a 7th-grade teacher who required students to memorize poems, and the intimacy she developed with language after learning "poems by heart":

....Because then I had the ability to do something no one could really take away from me. The library could take the book back. My mom could say 'Go to bed' at night. But I could keep the poem so close? Something changed when I was able to do that.

I think of the phrase "to learn by heart", and how, over time, it becomes becomes "to know by heart." The words become a form of deep, inner knowledge, their significance imprinted on our hearts and minds.

The words a form of power or currency with the spirit. Words we can use as rhythms while walking. Words we can imagine while folding laundry. Words we can sing in the Birmingham city jail. Words we can use to encourage and resuscitate broken spirits (the verses of We Shall Overcome, for example). Words we can revive as lullabies to chase distant sleep. Words no one can take from us or discredit. Words that become treasures.

Watching the anglers upstream at Montezuma.

Nikky uses poetry as a vehicle for historical reconsolidation and self-discovery. Why, for example, she cannot reconcile polite manners and convention with integrity, and how she learned this. She refuses to dance with Strom Thurmond, in her words:

I have to remember this moment because in the remembering of this moment is what I'm saying about memory: we must save what we know so that we don't repeat mistakes from the past.

An excerpt from the poem, "Dancing With Strom,":

History does not keep books on the

handiwork of slaves. But the enslaved

who built this Big House, long before

I arrived for this big wedding, knew

the power of a porch.

 

This native necessity of nailing down

a place, for the cooling off of air,

in order to lift the friendly, the kindly,

the so politely, the in-love-ly, jubilant,

into the arms of the grand peculiar,

for the greater good of

the public spectacular:

 

us

giving us

away.

What we see is limpid motion.

She cites Toni Cade Bambara as a seminal influence on her writing life. Toni's house was a wreck of stacked dishes and clutter- no counter space, books piled into towers along the wall and floor- but her desk was absolutely bare- "meticulous"- apart from what she was writing at the moment.

This example of how a female rearranged her life to invite writing, living to write rather than to clean or decorate, encouraged Nikky. Toni warned, "You'll never have time to write...So therefore you must make time." 

Nikky is/was child who does not resent her view from the margins because she doesn't believe (or much care) what others make of her. The limits other people impose on her as a black female are limits Nikky does not accept or take seriously. She always felt like an "outlier"- and preferred it:

....being in the margins for me does not mean I feel marginalized. It gives me an edge. It gives me a precipice. A vantage point.

In a sense, it also gives her a place from which to fall. Leaving the South after college was terrifying, Nikky says, until she began to grow out of her "terror" and into her "curiosity". 

I have to drop the seed in the ground so it grows from wherever I've been.

Unlike other American poets, Nikky believes history cannot be silenced. She is a witness to the voices of the present- and this emerges as a thread between lines and pieces. She engages inexplicably tragic characters- those stunted by history from moving forward- including a suite inspired by the ontological quandary that is Condoleezza Rice. (Steve Earle's "Condi, Condi" comes to mind.)

For Nikky, history is the story some people get to tell about what happened. Her poems challenge the received wisdom and "historical truth" by enlarging the lens through we envision what happened. In a Zinnian fashion, she adds the overlooked voices to enrich the history we tell and sell to one another. I love her for that.

As the child of political defectors raised on white-bread southern patriotism, I find my political and poetic commitments do not reside in separate spheres, and though I admire writers fortunate enough to compartmentalize, we must acknowledge the ability to write outside politics is a specious sort of privilege. Perhaps, even, a fashionable muzzle.

 

NIKKY FINNEY, THE PERSON

The Beauty and Difficulty of Nikky Finney (NPR)
Excerpts and readings from Head Off and Split (National Poetry Foundation)
"Questions of Faith", an interview (Poetry Society of America)
"So I Became A Witness" interview (Sampsonia Way)

"Heart, Truth, and Justice" interview (Lambda Literary)
National Book Award Acceptance Speech (YouTube)

 

HER POETRY 

"He Never Had It Made" (US Library of Congress)
"The Girlfriend's Train" (Soul Incites)

"The Blackened Alphabet" (The Bottom of Heaven)

"Making Foots" (The Poetry Center at Smith College)

"The Aureole" (Feministing)

"Red Velvet" (Except In Dreams)

"The Greatest Show On Earth" (Punch-In-The-Face Poetry)

"Sign Language" (The Poetry Center at Smith College)

"A New Day Dawns" (Moving Poems)

"Sam I Am" (Huffington Post)

"Hate" (Project Muse)

"The Clitoris" (Structure and Style)

"Heirloom" (Academy of American Poets)

"Sex" (The Poetry Center at Smith College)

Friday Farmer's Market in Dillon.

[Photo borrowed from Summit Daily.]

Last Friday, we woke up hungry for local honey and decided to drop by the Friday morning Farmer's Market in Dillon. There were more vendors than we imagined- and a plethora of snacks and sips and scents to sample.

The Wandering Madman provided more than music- he emceed the entire event while simultaneously producing his own web shows. If you don't believe me, you can see for yourself right here.

"Hmmmm... this is really tasty. Reminds me of a mimosa. The first time I got tipsy it was also 9 am and a mimosa was the solitary culprit....."

"Can I try the other sangria as well? Is there a limit to how many samples I can try because it tastes different by the time you get to the third cup, you know, the taste really pops..."

Meanwhile, the girls sampled tiny cups of bike-blended smoothies, courtesy of Smooth Riders.

"Wow! That's more energy efficient and faster than using a blender!" the Eldest exclaimed. The bikers nodded warily and continued biking.

And so we wandered, picking up candles, homemade pierogies, and a book about local trees. 

Lounging in the car, Prophet and Gnome battled a case of the giggles.

I thought of the "giggly moods" that assailed Carla and myself when we were youngsters. And how my parents rolled their eyes and prayed for rain when the giggles began.

The common current of laughing, mischievous sisters gives us a space in which we can look forward. My mother had a sister. I have a sister. Now Isla will have a little sister.

The tradition of sisterly bondage continues through the generations. I am grateful these days for small, unexpected things which remain the same. For recognizable threads in life's thick blanket.

Bill Withers and the Blue River Trail in Silverthorne, Colorado.

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Gnome pouts with tree.

My sister passed over a few magazines last month and one had a neat interview with Bill Withers that set me to thinking. 

When asked about regrets, Bill said everybody has regrets but the key to life is not thinking too much about them. Common sense. Obvious. But isn't that what we do? Spend time wondering how much easier or better or happier life would be if only we had done that other thing? Mated with that other person? Purchased that other car or house or condo or apartment or life?

The kids watch the water wander past on the
Blue River Trail in Silverthorne, Colorado.

The Eldest and Gnome launch rocks and pebbles.

When asked how he dealt with the insecurity of beginning a music career- the fear of not being talented enough, or original enough, or strong enough- Bill said he decided to test his gut intuition. The only way to know if he could make music was to begin making music and wait for a judgement. In his words:

"I had ninety days to reenlist or not. And I thought about it. Do I want to try to take on this world? I hadn’t been a civilian since I was a kid. Am I ready to take this chance? And I said yes to overcome the fear of finding out. There was something dormant in me. I knew it was there whether anybody else did or not."

My notes on Bill Withers along the Blue River trail.

The interviewer congratulates Bill for his upcoming induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It's a tremendous honor, especially for a man who removed himself from the music scene for many years in order to be with his family. Bill acknowledges this honor, which he takes as a "compliment", an event he anticipates, but his caveat is thoughtful and inspiring: 

"But I’m not a jump-up-and-down kind of guy. If I go to a football game, I sit there and watch it. I’m not waving my arms and carrying on. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel something, you know. I feel it’s healthier to look out at the world through a window rather than through a mirror. With a mirror, all you see is yourself and whatever is behind you."

And then my favorite quote- the litmus test for artists, writers, philosophers, and musicians. The sheer guts of it. The part we prove to ourselves, though the act of proving is entwined with the act of promising in such moments.

"...everything in life boils down to this riddle: Are you what you think you are?"

All I need is a good gauntlet and I am ready to try again. And again.

10 beautiful sights in Summit County, Colorado.

1.... our dear friend, yarrow.
[Peaks Trail]

 

2.... clouds reflected back from the waters of Lake Dillon.
[Dickey Trail on Frisco Peninsula]

 

3...... monks in their purple hoods.
[Rainbow Lake]

 

4.... the eldest lounging between tree roots, his cheeks obscured by a Stetson.
[Peaks Trail]

 

5...... aspen leaf gall, our first sighting ever.
[Peaks Trail]

 

6..... Buffalo Mountain locally known as Baldy, the weatherman.
[Ryan's Gulch in Wildernest area]

 

7.... the king taking photos midstream.
[Montezuma Trailhead]

 

8.... worried thistle hanging her head.
[Dickey Trailhead on Frisco Peninsula]

 

9..... love in a grassy meadow.
[Marina Park in Frisco]

 

10..... the Colorado state flower, blue columbine.
[Ryan's Gulch near Salt Lick]

Things to do in Summit County, Colorado right now.

Prophet ogles an aspen stand on our ascent.

Today we hiked to Rainbow Lake in Frisco. We thought it would be an easy and straightforward hike but we took a wrong turn and wound up following Peak's Trail for a while before discovering we'd gone off the "easy" trail.

The kids loved our mistake because we crossed at least seven creeks before arriving at Rainbow Lake, gleeful to avoid the bikers and large groups we'd experienced on the "correct" Rainbow Lake trail.

Hey, it all works out. We ate a few granola bars and purple tomatoes and Gnome sent a few fairy leaves down the pint-sized waterfalls spilling out from Rainbow Lake.

As usual, I'm making the hit list for myself on the blog. It's an old habit. 

GPS Scavenger Hunt
Keystone's River Run
Weekdays between 8:00 am - 6:00 pm

Guests can check out GPS units and receive instructions from the Activities and Dining office in River Run. Choose from the River Run Scavenger Hunt or the Mountain Top Scavenger Hunt. Each course has waypoints throughout to provide directions, followed by hints, clues or riddles that lead you toward the spot you are looking for. Collect the items at each spot and return them to our office to receive fun prizes, with a chance to earn the top prize if you get the highest score! The cost is $12 per GPS unit.

Tennis Clinics for Kids
Keystone Tennis Center
Tuesdays & Thursdays 
10:00-11:00 am (for 5-10 years)
11:00-12:00 am (for 11-15 years)

Each child receives an-hour clinic/lesson for $15. It's a great deal. Competitive tennis parents might appreciate the semi-private lessons. 

Wild West Night
Keystone Stables
TUESDAY 5:00-8:00 pm

The fun starts at 5pm with a bike-in movie, horseshoes, lasso, and s’mores around the campfire. Food and alcoholic beverages available for purchase. Everyone is invited to hang out around the camp fire and enjoy the sunsets form the Stables vantage point. No charge just to tour the Stables and hang out by the fire. Movie starts at 6 pm. This Tuesday, the movie will be "How to Train Your Dragon." More online.

FREE CONCERT IN THE PARK
Historic Park & Gazebo Lawn, 120 Main Street, Frisco
THURSDAY, 5:30-7:30 pm

Bring your own blankets, chairs, drinks, and hackey-sacks to hear the New Orleans Suspects playing this Thursday evening. More online.

FRIDAY FARMER'S MARKET
Buffalo Street & Main Street in Downtown Dillon
FRIDAY 9:00 am to 2 pm 

A delicious farmer's market but no pets allowed.

FRIDAY FREE CONCERT SERIES
Dillon Outdoor Amphitheater
FRIDAY sunset

With four distinct voices clustered around a single microphone, Darlingside effortlessly draw audiences into their lush musical world. The band’s sound, characterized by classical strings, tight vocal arrangements, bluegrass and rock instrumentation, and smart lyricism, is the product of complete collaboration among the four close friends. The group has no front man; instead, lead vocals are traded from moment to moment, and each song features a new combination of instruments and textures, pulling heavily from folk, retro-pop, barbershop, and chamber music.  

Other great places to drop by anytime the urge strikes, the gas mullah permits, and the kids are ready to combust:

PARKS
Frisco Skate Park 
Marina Park (Frisco)
Point Dillon Park & Lawn (Dillon)
Town Park (Dillon)*
Rainbow Park (Silverthorne)*
Meadow Creek Park (828 Meadow Drive, Frisco)
Walter Byron Park (306 Creekside Drive, Frisco)*
Marina Park and Dillon Amphitheatre (Dillon)*
Dillon Nature Preserve (Dillon)

HIKING TRAILS
Frisco Peninsula Trail System (Frisco)
Windy Point Area Trails (Keystone, Swan Mountain Area)
Saint Johns Road (Montezuma)
Keystone Gulch Road (Keystone)
Lily Pad Lake (Silverthorne)*
Gore's Range Trails (Eagle's Nest Wilderness Area)
Rainbow Lake (Frisco)*
Gold Hill (between Frisco and Breck)
Hunkidori Mine (Montezuma)
Georgia Pass Road (Parkville)
Frey Gulch Trail System (Keystone)
Chihuahua Lake (Montezuma)*
Deer Creek Road (Montezuma)
Horseshoe Gulch Trails (Silverthorne)
Lost Lake (Green Mountain/Heeney)
Old Dillon Reservoir Trailhead (Dillon)*
Buffalo Mountain (Silverthorne)
Sapphire Point (Dillon)*
Lower Boulder Lake (Eagle's Nest Wilderness Area)
Lower and Upper Slate Lakes (Eagle's Nest Wilderness Area)
Rock Creek Road and Trail (Silverthorne)
Ptarmigan Pass (Silverthorne)
Ute Peak/Ute Pass (Silverthorne)
Cataract Lake Lower Loop (Green Mountain/Heeney)
Mayflower Gulch (Leadville)
Laughing Jay Trail (Dillon)*
Tenderfoot Mountain (Dillon)
Loveland Pass (Arapahoe Basin)*

ALINA'S WISHLIST
Peak's Trail from Frisco to Breckenridge
Oro Grande Trail near Lake Dillon and along peaks
Red Rocks Amphitheater 15 miles outside Denver
Dillon Cemetery
Masontown from Frisco
Officer's Gulch from Copper Mountain