Alina's Adventures

Watching the blackberry shrub: A lesson in patience.

Our first blackberries are popping up near the fence. Last year, when we planted the shrub, the kids were disappointed:

"No blackberries! Not even flowers."

Then then question:

"Why should we water something that isn't making berries?"

Finally, Prophet's accusation:

"I think blackberry bushes are lazy."

Patience, I urged. Patience. To myself as well as them.

This year, the kids were delighted when the blackberry shrub came to life in April. Her fringed leaves emerged a vivid green.

The Eldest used twine to situate her along the fence. I'm not sure how he knew to do it, only that one morning I wandered outside to find the string scaffolding gently supporting our bush.

In the first blush of May, ten delicate white flowers blossomed.

Prophet couldn't believe the lazy blackberry was finally "doing something".

We spent one morning sketching the leaves and blossoms. Before long, the white petals fell into the grass leaving behind stiff, light brown tendrils. 

"But mommy, those aren't blackberries," Gnome asserted confidently. "Those are greenberries."

I told her we needed to watch a little longer- to observe and make notes. The blackberries were not finished changing. 

She paused and nodded. It made sense to expect the waiting wasn't finished. It made sense to expect more marvels from our little blackberry shrub given the marvels that we'd already witnessed in the span of five weeks.

We wait and watch, our desire for immediate gratification up-ended by the simple marvel of ten blackberries fruiting in the yard. Nature study teaches us how to tend plants and understand ecosystems, but also how to wait for a fruit to ripen. How to silence the buzz of schedules and demands in the face of slower fruitings.

The annual Cahaba Lily blooms- and Albert Goldbarth.

The annual Cahaba Lily Festival is going on, but we caught the first blooms last week. According to locals, the Cahaba Lily blooms between Mother's Day and Father's day every year. We visited the stands with Heather and Mike on Mother's Day- the earliest moment.

And then again, the next day, with Sanda.

As Sanda and the girls collected shells, I allowed myself to wonder about the rocks- how many years of water flowing in one particular motion left a soft curve in a rock? How many years does it take to fashion a hip from stone?

Pinka watched and yipped. Notice the beautiful shape of the rock to her right.

The remains of some human's feast dried on a rock. I love the heaviness of crustacean coverings. How they resemble bones.

Prophet found several pieces of coal which she used to write her name on the rocks.

Our impulse to leave something behind. A name. A skeleton. The beginnings of a history.

Meanwhile, the fungi grow un-occluded. As with all forms of life, a fungus sprouts under very specific conditions. The context must be ripe.

Gnome used an old plastic egg to collect her shells. She noted the shells were the same kind they gave you in the Indian village at CHOM. And the rocks were the same sort of rocks you rubbed the shells against to make a hole for your necklace.

Prophet's turtle shell.

A bird fishes near a lily stand.

The latest issue of december has a small, short, unnamed poem by Albert Goldbarth on page 89. The poem stuck in my head like a talisman.

The grasses bend
and, cutting them, the man
bends too.

Be careful.

We become what we do.

It's certainly not Goldbarth's usual taste and feel. More Vonnegut or Gary Snyder. But compelling in its brevity and the warning. But sticky. Like sand on the soles of driving barefoot.

We cannot escape the soil which makes us.

Mary Tylosaur concert at Kentuck Art Night plus Druid City Brewing Company this Saturday.

I think the French word for Mary Tylosaur is super.

The band played live at the most recent Kentuck Art Night in downtown Northport. For those unfamiliar with Mary Tylosaur, here's the skeleton as offered in an interview with The Tusk.

D.C. Moon: guitar and vocals, composer and music director
Sandra J. Hunt: lead and backing vocals, percussion and sass 
Celesta Riner: bass guitar and attitude 
Katie Grayson: keyboards, composer and sex appeal 
Robby Roberts: drums, percussion and general wizardry

When asked to describe the band's sound, D.C. Moon said: 

Noted author John Shirley had this to say: " ‘My Boyfriend is a Zombie' opens the fun rockin' first album by Mary Tylosaur, kind of B-52s meets The Ramones meets Southern rock, with some Cramps happening, too. And fans of my old friend D.C. Moon will recognize his distinct touch here, too, in guitar, vocals and ... ‘The Communists, The Martians and the CIA' (which is a damned funny song). Some vocals by Moon, most of the lead vocals are by the sexily deep-voiced Sandra Hunt. Check it out."

I think the French word for a hot pink guitar is incroyable.

I think the French word for what my husband kept wanting to do is dance.

I think the French expression for what they did is playing down the sun.

I think I'm not speaking French anymore when I say they rocked the spring night.

Free pinot, free oven-baked pizza, and good live music. A few French subtitles. Husbands who want to dance like robot puppets. Pink. Black. Whatever color comes up.

You can catch your own Mary Tylosaur this Saturday night, 8:00 pm, at Tuscaloosa's favorite place to show up beardy (or post-beardy, or pre-beardy, or recently-seen-with-beardy)- the treasure known as Druid City Brewing Company.

If you haven't spent five hours at the Taproom yet, the weekly schedule includes Live Trivia on Fridays at 8 pm and Open Mic on Sundays at 6 pm. Bo and Bob are the best- good people who brew delicious beer. Oh, and one more thing about Druid City Taproom: the saison never stops.

The unspeakable part of our bodies, and why it must be spoken.

Visualizations of Adrienne's words.

Trying to educate my children to think critically about what they consume in our overwhelmingly consumerist culture is like howling at the moon and waiting for a response. 

We see the billboards slathered in pencil-thin women with massive breasts and buxom, rubber-ball bottoms. Those of us with curves wish we were skinnier. Those of us who are skinny wish we had curves. The pictures we see show us nothing real or natural. The pictures show us how much money we need to spend to fit the current trends being sold to our children, peers, and lovers. The pictures show us what we will NEVER be without ponying up.

During the second world war and the early ad era, curves were evidence of prosperity. Women rued their skinny bodies and forked out money to purchase Marilyn Monroe curves. My friends tell me how "lucky" I am to be "skinny" but being skinny means I will never have those breasts I see jiggling back from every billboard and mall kiosk. Being skinny means I can only have those breasts with surgical help. 

"So if you want them, why not just buy them?" one friend asked.

There are many things I want that are for sale. But sometimes the act of purchasing these things robs me of who I am to myself- this little "me", this self I call mine, the integrity that is the only thing I've worked to leave to my kids.

I cannot buy those breasts because my desire for them is a betrayal of myself. I am not a busty female. I am not well-endowed. My curves are not as steep as mountain roads. I am learning to appreciate my hills. In a sense, I cannot buy those breasts because somewhere in that transaction exists the seed of human slavery. Dissatisfaction with self threatens to make a slave of me.

Notice how this ad sets up envy between females? Creates it as backdrop?

I am tired of seeing sister placed against sister in this competition to be prettiest. Or coolest. Or most powerful. Or most gifted. Or most successful. 

My menstrual cycle is not a sickness that I feel the need to hide from men. It is not a contamination that makes me disgusting. Patriarchy begins with such myths.

I will not perpetuate the need to wear super-short shorts during my period in order to entertain a man while hiking (of all things, hiking!). 

I won't pretend to like whiskey or football or hunting to play the cool girl. If I liked football, I would not be ashamed to like it, but I don't care who wins the Iron Bowl. I don't care who plays quarterback.

I DO care when a football star assaults a female and the public gets mad that this is reported because "oh my gosh this will ruin his career." A person who assaults others should not be surprised if his/her career is ruined. That's how we learn and grow up. 

Or stop cruelty to women in the name of animals.

PETA's ads are annoying. Is there no other way to argue for decent treatment of animals than by dehumanizing females? Do her legs have to glow like butter? Does have Celina have to appeal to a personal fetish in order to make the world a better place? Does supporting PETA implicate us in much more insidious consumerist memes?

Do we have to imagine a blow job in conjunction with a burger? Do my kids have to imagine it as well? Do males have to compensate for penis size with sandwich size? Do males need to be told the lie that size matters?

I don't want my husband or son to ever think such things.

Size only matters in porn.

Size only matters when the goal is to punish.

No, no- I'm not done. Does innocence have to be peddled as sex product? Is the all-hallowed aura of virginity what we're peddling here? Who cares if someone is a virgin or not? Nevermind, misogynists and religious fundamentalists care. Does Christ care? I think the Bible is pretty darn clear on that one.

I want Lifeway Stories to stop selling virginity to my kids and then calling it "Christian." I'm tired of the disgusting cruelties and misogynies perpetuated in the name of a God who came to this world to overturn law and tradition and convention as we know it.

This female looks scared. That is scary.

And I'm soooooo tired of ads that paint sex as something "done to" a female. I'm tired of ads that show fear on a woman's face while suggesting sex. I'm tired of those ads because I'm tired of rape.

I'm also tired of bad sex. Why can't sex feel good? Why can't it be awesome, beautiful, intense, sublime, a loss of self, a discovery of another- the closest thing we come to magic in this life?

I love sex. I have always loved sex but never so much as now when it is mine- and my body is something I share with my partner- two bodies joining to create a landscape that exists only for us when we seek it- and differently every time.

In our house, I am as vocal about loving sex as I am about despising nonconsensual sex. I will never tell my kids to wait until they are married. I will never glorify abstinence. Instead, I will tell them to wait for someone who deserves to explore that world with them- wait for someone who is willing to get lost.

The last thought is our responsibility to be honest and truthful. Where sex is concerned, this means I'm going to be honest. I tell my kids:

Although the sex I've had while married has been the best and most intensely mind-blowing, the sex I had before marriage was also pleasurable. It's not about a wedding ring so much as the other party.... and your relationship.

And there is nothing wrong with pleasure as long as your pleasure does not hurt or damage another life. Perhaps you will discover pleasure is too easy and therefore unsatisfying. Perhaps you will discover you want more than pleasure. Perhaps you will develop an appetite for communion. If so, godspeed. 

If all the other voices in your culture- all the ads and billboards and peer groups and maskulinities- speak only for consumption, may you find words to hold in opposition. May you find words for the sacred unspeakably beautiful things. And may the truth of these words keep you free.

I had a nightmare about Mother's Day last night.

Atop the piano, a pastel by Prophet.

I woke up this morning with a Mother's Day nightmare fresh in my head. The nightmare was simple: it was Mother's Day and nothing the kids could do was fancy, expensive, or complicated enough to gain my approval. For a female who says (and thinks she believes) Mother's Day is not important to her, this was a nightmare from hell, replete with excessive consumerism and passive-aggressive poses.

Apart from being a commercial holiday for which our local Bojangles has a sign reading "Your Mother Would Love Our Heart-Shaped Biscuits", I think Mother's Day is a celebration of the way our world expands by mothering.

In my head, in that perfect land of parenting and partnering, Mother's Day would be any day of the year when you bust into a dance party on the beach with a beloved fellow mother and her saplings.

It would be the instant when I witness all three kids together on the piano bench and Prophet turning pages for the Eldest as he works on a difficult piece. It would three pairs of toes in varying degrees of motion. It would be the beautiful mysterious ways they've devised to cooperate without any suggestions or nagging from the voice that sounds like me.

It would be a poem about little feet padding down the hall at night, each step a succor-seeking syllable. It would be life, and the special part wouldn't cost a card or a penny. Only the kiss just after your eyes careen around the same curve and settle into seeing one another as treasure.

Papanasi, a Romanian recipe for dumplings, and Norman Manea.

Gnome samples papanasi, a traditional Romanian food.

Whenever my Aunt Sanda visits, she and Bunica collaborate in the kitchen to create all sorts of Romanian foods that Bunica doesn't cook so much anymore. It's exciting because it reminds me of my childhood, when Romanian recipes were all my mother knew (she hadn't quite learned to cook American yet) and so tripe soup or tongue soup (the dreaded dishes) might pop up any night of the week.

Papanasi can also be eaten as entree without sugar.

A paper bird gifted to us by Bunicu hangs above the dining table.

I sit at the table and write beneath a strange bird. 

It's hard for me to get away from the Romanian evocations in my writing- partly because the mist of childhood makes them feel like legends, fairy tales, impossible things once believed as backdrop for everything else around me. Sanda has been teaching the kids Romanian phrases and it's a reminder I should be doing the same- that I shouldn't abandon my first language. Or leave it to history.

I've been inspired so much by Romanian writers, currently including but not limited to Dimitri Tsepeneag, Mircea Cartarescu, and Norman Manea. I love how Manea describes writing in this excellent interview with Norman Manea in American Reader:

“You write in order to redeem yourself partially from the chaos which is around you, you’re trying to find something, meaning, somewhere. Or to invent one, if you don’t find it—and this is what produces art generally: this need of the individual to search for something which is beyond their reality, even if it is sometimes hidden within that reality.”

Portrait of Manea sourced from an interview with The Daily Beast.

He admits to writing for readers in a closed society:

"My language tried to be faithful to a closed society, rather than an open one. The language was coded, sometimes quite obscurely, and differed greatly from the language of newspapers or party slogans. The characters were usually marginalized—people who were foreigners in their own land."

In the same interview, Manea describes America as “the best hotel”. He shies away from claiming a favorite country:

“A hotel is where you come in, you have a place for which you pay, everything functions, nobody asks who you are or what you want. You have an ID, you give the ID, you come, you go, and that’s it. It’s a domicile and it’s a temporary one because we are temporary here on this Earth.”

There is so much to learn from Manea, who survived both the Nazis and the communists as a Jew and a human being. So much to learn from those who refuse to accept the unacceptable and write their way through the lies society asks them to tell. 

And there is papanasi- the complicated substance and texture of a minority immigrant childhood- that one girl must describe to placate the dead. 

PAPANASI RECIPES TO TRY AT HOME 

Papanasi dessert recipe from Artsy Bites
Papanasi recipe from Cooking Without Limits
Papanasi recipe from Bettina's Traditional Romanian Foods blog

Pieces that stuck in my head from the recent issue of Cloudbanks.

A lady frog pauses: a princess in
disguise. She hears, she hears, she hears.

He is music to whatever she has for ears.

[Russell Rowland, "Sounds Like...."]

there exists a kind of gravity that's sometimes called love.

[Aimee Penna, "At the Museum of Natural Sciences"]

....The footprints
of your last woman still fresh
on the ground around you. 

[Francine Witte, "When we meet up at the Parker Avenue Grille"

Two fun May dates for Tuscaloosa residents who love gardens and shrooms.

Can you see the frog hiding?

Our Isla is taking a voracious two hour nap while Gnome and Prophet chomp at the bit for her to wake up and play. I'm just happy she's sleeping so well and so peacefully. The girls and I discuss gardens and read a book about frogs. 

On that note, garden-lovers should mark their calendars....

MAY 16: Organic Gardening 102 (Druid City Garden Project)

They are also hosting an Organic Gardening class on May 16th. Register online- it is open to the public. Druid City Garden Project is looking for summer volunteers. Great opportunity for teens and college students.

 

MAY 17: Oh Shitake! (Sassafras Center for Arts and Environment)
On May 17th, locals can benefit from Jeremy "Wild Man" Crosby's incredible knowledge of plants, fungi, and natural life by registering for an afternoon workshop on how to grow your own gourmet mushrooms. Tickets sold by the Sassafras Center. Register online today. Incentive? First 25 registrants get to take home an inoculated log from the workshop - up to five years worth of mushrooms!

 

 

Thoughts on broken porcelain and prayer ropes.

The porcelain holding the prayer rope.

As we prepared for church this morning, I heard the sound of breaking glass- a terror in any house with small people. The Eldest sheepishly confessed:

"I was trying to see what was in that porcelain bowl by the chair and it fell off the wall and broke. I'm sorry mom. It was an accident."

But I wasn't in the mood for an accident. Because the thing he wanted to touch was a prayer rope I'd woven from 13 strands of my hair and twine and wooden beads as a gift for my husband in lieu of holy water. In lieu of so many things I want to give but lack.

And so I got upset. Told him sorry wasn't enough. Told him fixing it was needed. Told him this in an unforgiving voice I wish I could erase. 

He asked me for forgiveness. What goes around came back to me asking his forgiveness. 

We forgive one another in a circle that tastes nothing like poetry. A circle that tastes closer to tawdry plastic trees. But this circle is love, a prayer rope, a mistake I won't stop making. The only freedom comes when I show him what he already sees-- son, I am nothing bigger or better than Thee.

In clover.

The music.

The things that touched us on our nature excursions this week.

Wood sorrel.

Another gorgeous roadside creature with which we communed.

Baby wild bunnies born at a friend's house down the street.

The Eldest took a 10-minute video of the bunny with his camera.

Because what could be cooler than bunnies?

 Except maybe the secret inside the potting station...

..discovered by the potter himself.

He'd been jotting down notes for the past week or so about bird comings and goings to this oven bird nest and imagine his excitement when he bustled in the house yesterday hooting and hollering about a fledgling in the grass.

This was no ordinary fledging, mind you. By the look on his face, I'd say this was a kindred fledging who resented a world unfolding prior to coffee intake.

But also a precious fledging whom I feared disturbing- a first day out of the nest sort of fledging.

So we journaled about how it might feel to be a fledging on our first day out of the nest. Wove in threads of fact as well as fiction. Added his name to our Knowing Nature notebooks. And then realized how many tiny creatures are experiencing first-day-out in this mindblowingly beautiful season known as spring.

Fancy fungi.

The best things are found in clover right now. Clover and good percussion. Enjoy.

I'll be in clover
I'll be in clover soon
I'll be in clover
I'll be in clover with you

Innovation Fair at the Alabama Museum of Natural History.

Last weekend, we motored over to the Alabama Museum of Natural History to sample the sweet conceptual bones of the Innovation Fair. This hovercraft, built by UA students, was among them.

We started at the catapult-making table. The girls were eager to make their own catapults, though Gnome struggled a little to get her launchpad oriented just right.

Prophet crafted a fantastic monster bookmark torn straight from fabulist fiction.

The Eldest and Erin send their rockets for a first flight.

Meanwhile, pet snails Cheddar and Velvet look on from the sidelines. This glass jar is their traveling vehicle. If you have experienced spring rains with homeschooled kids, then you know it is impossible to keep them from collecting snails. In our house, jubilation follows rain- "flowers and snail hunts" the battle cry.

Upstairs, the exhibits included explosions and buzzes and beeps and all sorts of effects but none was quite so intriguing to the kids as the river table.

Gnome and I sat on the stairs and talked about the mososaurus who roamed this land-sea prior to us. What does it say about me if an extinct species is my totem animal?

Small people watch the hovercraft demo rev up its fans and engines outside.

Small people get distracted by presence of an ROTC rope climbing which crazy mom swings upon in her rope-unfriendly skirt and thus inadvertently legitimizes miscreant activity.

Dinosaur teeth are not really primed for popsicles.

Small (brilliant) people suggest that, in fact, ice cream is an innovation on ice crystals and therefore shouldn't we find some to admire with our mouths.