Wednesday 18 November 2009: Out of our misery

They comfort you all year long. Comfort them this holiday season.

Friday 1 January 2009

Growing up, my dad used to floss in our car while driving home from dinner. Over time, our windshield would become peppered with bits of steak and broccoli that looked like tiny neon bugs splattered across the glass.

I would watch him floss in the rear view mirror. He’d be at the wheel and I’d be in the backseat. Once, I remember his fingers being wrapped so tightly around the floss that they turned bright pink, plumping out around the string. I stared at his hands, then eyes in the mirror, and for a second our faces looked the very same.

That’s how I feel about the new year. There’s this strange mix of familiarity and tension, especially now–with the whole world flipping, flopping, and boiling down.

But more than that, I feel resolved about the tough and sweet year that’s passed. Went for coffee today with D and month by month we wrote out everything notable that happened in 2008. Things like friends losing parents and gaining children, where we were on election night, travels to Prague and Vashon, playing pool on my birthday.

Thinking about all the weather that will travel from west to east this year, starting close to Capitol Hill and hitting the places I’ve lived and the people I love across the plains, over the Smokies and to the Atlantic makes everything that’s to come, scary and tenuous as it may be, seem beautiful, messy, and really really close.

Thursday 31 December 2009

The Space Needle, hiding out before midnight fireworks.

Happy New Year.

Wednesday 24 December 2008

Tonight we’re making peppermint bark in anticipation for Christmas Day. Molly from Orangette is crazy about Bon Appetit’s version, and I’m taking a break from smashing up candy canes to post. It will be dark in an hour, and later we’ll sit down to cider-braised pork and cumin sweet potatoes and persimmon pudding.

Something about the holidays makes me want to write about food instead of weather, which has been so exciting lately it’s surprisingly hard to choose where to begin. Cross your fingers for a white Christmas.

Thursday 18 December 2008

Thundersnow hit the city around 5:30 this morning, which was about the same time I realized this thing about being family.

D has a chest cold. He’s all coughs and sighs, and I was up and down with him all night. At one point in the early morning, I thought about how as a kid my mom would sit with me all night when I was sick. I’d always felt a mix of love and chagrin back then, when I was the taker.

And now I’m understanding, being in that role of caregiver to D, that sitting up through the night is such a simple, even good, practice. I know someone well enough to tell you when he’s asleep and breathing clouds or kicking through water. It’s a pleasure.

While I was thinking about this, I jumped. A huge clash of thunder shook the bed. I went to the window to look out and all at once I was a wounder, a wanderer, and a healer.

Wednesday 17 December 2008

We live on the tip of Denny, one of the biggest hills in one of the hilliest cities on the planet. In my worrying head, a forecast of flurries overnight means that, while on his way to work, my husband will surely loose control of the wheel and chute-and-ladder from the top of Capitol Hill into Elliott Bay a mile down the road.

D drives to work very early, so before bed last night, I pulled out my pink stationary pad shaped like a hot dog and left him a note on our car: “DRIVE SAFELY & SLOWLY! I love you. See you tonight for grilled cheese.”

I fell asleep quickly and dreamt that D was losing control driving down an icy Denny like I feared. But right before the turn where the road ends and water begins, my hot dog note morphed into a giant safety net at the bottom of the hill. A hot dog-shaped barrier popped up from the road and became a meaty pillow, maneuvering our car safely away from the water.

Monday 15 December 2008

Saturday night, after teeth were brushed and faces were washed, after we got water and put the chain on the door, we turned out all the lights and opened up the curtains in our living room. We watched a million flurries blot out the sidewalk, then laid down under an extra comforter and fell asleep with the back light of the building next door shining into the room.

With the glow from the building still on my face, I woke up when it was still dark and for a second thought that I was in some great incubator. Further west than West, water and trees arched toward a ceremony away from the snow, moving closer to flip-flopped cakes of lemony light.

Friday 12 December 2008

Evergreen Crown

Thursday 11 December 2008

Darkest Night of the Year Mix
for December 21, Winter Solstice

Devendra Banhart: Hey Momma Wolf
Leonard Cohen: Famous Blue Raincoat
Fire on Fire: Three or More
Vince Guaraldi: Christmastime is Here (Instrumental)
PJ Harvey: Missed
Innocence Mission: Lakes of Canada
Low vs. Diamond: Stay Awake
My Brightest Diamond: Ice and Storm
Red House Painters: Katy Song
R.E.M.: Hairshirt
Elliott Smith: Condor Ave.
Under Byen: Palads
Tom Waits: Alice
Yeasayer: 2080

Wednesday 10 December 2008

Moving closer

Tuesday 9 December 2008

Northwest weather is a real shape-shifter. Sometimes she’s green-tumbed and vital. Other times, she’s like a rubber band around a water balloon. A prickly pear.

I heard weather writer Cliff Mass interviewed by Steve Scher on KUOW recently and now I can’t stop reading his blog. I keep scribbling down notes about particular causes and effects of weather in Washington State. He talks about storm watching, predicting the waves and swell. And also about a rare but true green flash that is sometimes visible for a few seconds when cooler air travels over warmer water.

With everything being so unstable across the planet, it’s easy to see why it’s hard to stop reading Mr. Mass. Just last week he said we’re in store for a wetter, cooler pattern in the weeks ahead. And he was spot on.

Monday 8 December 2008

I listen to local radio when I can’t sleep because I know somebody is in the booth at any hour. It’s a good sad, that the “on air” light blinks in a dark hall for nobody’s benefit. There’s a comfort in the very idea third shift, the sound of cars on the state highway I can hear from bed, and all of the trains huffing past the bay.

One summer in New York, D and I were on our roof in the Village at 4 a.m., arms flopped off the side, just watching people walk around. A skateboarder, a firefighter, and a woman in heels walking her dog eating an ice cream cone passed by. Watching people so awake when everyone in the building under us must have been asleep made the city a good enough place to stay put.

At night, to communicate without communicating may be a half-comfort but it’s a comfort all the same. Watching and listening can get you through a heavy winter, re-placing a need to be accounted for with a need to co-exist. It’s an insomniac’s bread and butter.

Friday 5 December 2008

Madrona and the empty trees

Thursday 4 December 2008

I keep telling myself that by December 17th, the sunset will begin a minute later than on the 16th. We’ve almost rock bottomed, and everyone’s still putting on pants, eating soup, and riding the bus. Even if it’s mostly in the dark.

Wednesday 3 December 2008

On the radio today, I heard someone explain how the atmosphere is a chaotic system meant to produce abnormalities. Which seemed heartbreakingly perfect somehow, because the atmosphere is so basic, necessary for existence, and it gets forever permission to do its thing.

There’s this tendency towards disorder when you share a space. One person leaves a sock on the floor, another hangs a bra between two chairs to dry, and each spare object becomes a whole galaxy. All 550 square feet of your place turns towards some strange, corkscrewed constellation. And it’s almost too beautiful to straighten up, because all of a sudden you figure out it was supposed to be that way in the first place.

Tuesday 2 December 2008

Monday 1 December 2008

If you live in Seattle, I best be seeing you at the Triple Door tonight for what’s sure to be an excellent evening of music from Trace Bundy and dear friend Josh Garrels. It’s chilly and almost dark at 4 p.m., but in a few hours the lower lights will be burning.

Friday 28 November 2008

It’s Buy Nothing Day, which this year feels farther away and just plain sadder than ever. The day after Thanksgiving—when all we want to hear is save your health, save your house, save your leftovers—and all we get is a gaggle of Kohls employees, sleepy from opening for a line of three people at 4 a.m., half-assed mouthing spend spend spend.

Oh Christ, pop in and I’ll fix us all a giant fruit salad with berries we picked and apples we plucked.

And you can turn us around, from the mall towards the water in a fleet of white hot air balloons.

Tuesday 25 November 2008

Last night, I had a nightmare about this grizzly old duplex that sits on our street in Capitol Hill that the city finally knocked down yesterday. I dreamt that its remains stretched into a track of wood and stone, thickening towards my building and rising into an arc to just under my open window. Suddenly an old landlord crawled up the pile and through the screen, looking venomous.

I was so used to walking past the duplex when it was still in tact, held together with a million band-aids, that it got to the point where I stopped noticing that it existed.

I’m realizing that this is the exact opposite of the kind of people we should like to become—ones who get so used to what’s wrong that we forget how to start over. Like a slap on the wrist or a tiny pinch, we need something to tell us that being healthy is better than being sleepy.

Rooting out old fear kept inside of even older parts of our heads, in spite of the fact that nobody’s buying Baby ballet shoes this year.

Monday 24 Novmber 2008

On my best behavior, I read from the Book of Hours. I’ve marked the page where a Benedictine writes:

“Pour into us now, O most loving one, the gift of eternal grace, so that, by the misfortunes of new deception, old error may not destroy us.”

Friday 21 November 2008

November.

Thursday 20 November 2008

Tuesday 18 November 2008

It was this time of year when a house I rented with friends really came alive. With rats. It was a big 1920’s Craftsman near Greenlake with a drafty crawl space in the basement. Having always lived in old houses I should have known that there was a real risk of the place having rodents. It sat close to a string of restaurants and a grocery store and was blocks from the water. But before this house I hadn’t dealt with anything larger than mice–cute as they are creepy–and never dreamed of living with their big brothers.

I should have been pleading with Saint Gertrude for help the whole time. She’s the patron saint of suriphobia—the fear of rodents.

By the time I was packing up the kitchen and moving out the next summer, a long list of rat stories had unfolded. The rats had been quiet for some time, likely traipsing across the yard in the warm summer weather. Exterminators and dozens of traps later, it had gotten to the point where I knew I was cohabitating with the rodents instead of getting close to actually beating them. And as a result, the rats were gracious, for the most part keeping out of food and sight. But when I left I knew that really, the rats had won.

I opened a cupboard and grabbed a stack of plates to wrap in newspaper. And there it was, this perfect pellet dropped on the center of the top plate. Sort of like the rat was giving me the finger as a farewell.

Friday 7 November 2008

It gets worse before it gets better.