Homer!

Meet Homer. The Homebot. Nugget. Sir Puppo II. He showed up right after I did. We were out for drinks with friends when one of them mentioned the puppy who was living on her porch. She had found him a couple weeks earlier lying in the middle of a country road in Jackson County. He was all alone, a few weeks old, nearly bald with mange, and eager to hop in the car with them. I'm not sure I would have been so generous with my backseat. When I first met him, he looked a little like an old and wrinkly man. I should post a photo, but I wouldn't want to embarrass him. At first I volunteered just to take him to the vet and pay for the medicine that he needed to combat the mange. And I really did maintain some kind of healthy distance from him for a few days,or at least until I fell hopelessly in love with his high pitch yawns and his baby suckling noises.

We wanted an old-timey, straightforward name for a pup with such modest beginnings. But J wasn't having any of my suggestions. Then I remembered a friend's doggie nephew, another Homer, and we decided that it was okay to plagiarize a dog's name from Connecticut. We tell ourselves that they were channeling the poet; we're channeling the country. Neither, let's hope, were going for the Simpson.

going analog

Three years ago, J and I were at a wedding in Florida. It was June and hot and I insisted on floating in the bath water of the Atlantic until just before the ceremony, my hair a salty tangle as I slipped on my azure silk dress. The minister, a middle-aged-pleated-pant-wearing-kind-of-guy, took his place at the arbor and clutched his e-Reader to his chest. He greeted us all extemporaneously and then dove into his electronic bible. All was well and good until it froze, in the middle of a psalm. He cleared his throat, paused, looked up sheepishly, and confided that he’d need to “reboot his bible.” If there’s ever an analog-only event, I thought, it’s gotta be a wedding.

But, it seems, there are other analog-only events:
moving to kentucky
buying a house
finding a puppy
buying a car
settling into real married life with someone you hardly remember

For the last six weeks or so, I’ve kept the computer off. I mean really off. Sure, I check email three times a week on my phone, but I’ve had little desire to record this crazy transition here. I haven’t even been reading other blogs nor have I written a word. I’m not sure I can explain my desire to turn it all off. I suspect it has something to do with leaving a job in which I sat in front of my laptop in a cubicle for nine hours a day. Now I spend nine hours a day unpacking, painting, shopping for new toilets, sanding kitchen cabinets, and trying to teach little Homer to stop -- just stop for god’s sake -- biting my toes.

And then there’s the matter of what this space will become, now that 550 square feet have multiplied into 2000 and my quiet life of one has become the negotiated life of two. I find myself looking for the familiarity of my studio in Philadelphia as I hang artifacts of that life in Kentucky. There are traces, of course, but so many unrecognizable differences. Perhaps that’s what this will become: a record of difference, of change, of the new.

compression

For most of my life, I’ve looked young for my age. I don’t hear that so much anymore, but that may just be because I married a man who looks a decade younger than his peers. When I was very small – and much of my childhood was spent that way – I sensed a kind of eerie dissonance between my form and my interior, between the way I looked to others and the way I felt myself. This wasn’t a kind of teenage angsty discontent, but rather a simmering sense that it did me no good. I got carded at an R-rated movie when I was 25. I had to sit out from the roller coaster rides on a youth group theme park trip when I was 10 because I wasn’t the requisite 45” (which, to be honest, wasn’t all that disappointing). When I was 19, I had a fake i.d. that claimed I was 26, and it still shocks me that it actually kept me in beers and bars throughout college.

People always said that I’d be thankful one day. That seemed like a shitty consolation, perhaps because I knew, even then, that it wouldn’t pay off. It couldn’t.

After work yesterday, I redeemed a lovely spa gift certificate to get a massage. I warned the guy that my back was, as always, a mess. Bad backs seem to be a genetic gift that I share with my dad and sister and aunt. They extend through the branches of our family tree like that sinewy wild grape vine that withers a perfectly healthy oak. The masseuse tried to untangle the mess of my shoulders, the Gordian knots in my neck, stretching and pulling my muscles back into place. Once I emerged from the foggy warmth of the session, he said, “Man, you got a really intense back.” He might as well have said, “Little sister, that back of yours, it might look like 29 and a half, but it feels like 60.”

In other words, the dissonance, instead of gradually harmonizing, seems to be getting louder. Now my body has surpassed my age and I still have yet to glean the wonders of being mistaken for 33 instead of 35, for buying a gin and tonic without flashing my gummy grim.

Maybe I should drink more gin and tonics and my back would feel better. But would that take away my crow’s feet?

belatedly

I’ve been thinking a lot about knitting lately, trying to figure out what it would mean to create meaty prose about purling and dragging yarn over and over and over again. My sister-in-law Lisa has escorted me to the yarn harlot and knitting daily, and as much as I appreciate the former, the writing on neither really piques my interest.

And then there’s those blog readers -- those modest few -- who tell me that they skip my posts whenever I write about knitting.

In any case, I realized this morning, on a bumpy train to work (only 10 days left!), that the reason I’m interested in writing about knitting is because -- and perhaps for me alone -- it’s the stuff of muscle memory. Or rather, it’s somehow and quite literally often the fabric of my emotional landscape.

Like yesterday. On a perfectly balmy mother’s day afternoon, I meditatively continued on with a teal summer cardigan in Philadelphia’s under-appreciated Fitler Square. This sweater features the kind of lace knitting that I actually have to pay attention to or I’m apt to misinterpret a knit-two-together as a slip-slip knit. Yesterday, though, my mind was drifting off and I could -- for the first time in more than twenty five years -- recall my very first piece of knitting: a mustard yellow acrylic patch, one of those misshapen numbers that my mom told me was most definitely a doll’s blanket. Too bad I didn’t like dolls.

I recall neither the yarn passing through my fingers nor what became of this scrap, but I do remember showing it to my mom and sheepishly pointing out the mistakes. And this is where it gets at something I want to remember. My words are missing, but in some resonant way I recall blaming that acrylic for the skipped stitches, the little holes that surely meant a doll’s toes would catch cold. What I remember even more clearly was my mom telling me that it wasn’t the yarn that had erred. It was me.

I’m convinced that I remember this moment amidst all of the other fogginess of my life because of it was such an anomaly, a moment in which my mom actually called bullshit on my bullshit. I like this moment, then, because it’s one rare bit of critique amidst an otherwise hazy morass of adulation and encouragement. I want to believe that this moment made me a more careful knitter, that it implanted some shed of self-reflection, and for it I’m thankful.

a fine prospect

I’ve begun to write four posts in as many days. Each time, as I’m ready to finish one up, I get distracted or my plane lands or I decide sleep is better than blogger. I’m hoping to find the time and space to work on these hibernating posts more this week and, in turn, get this little blog hopping again. That may be wishful thinking. I have a feeling that chaos will ensue until I land permanently in Kentucky at the end of the month.

For now, though, I’m determined to post. J and I finally -- and hopefully conclusively -- decided on a house this past weekend. I made an unexpected trip back to Kentucky on Saturday to check out one lingering possibility, a lovely and rambling old place that in the end needed more work (and thus more money) than we thought we could muster over the next couple of years. So we decided on the little brick abode that we first turned up a few weeks ago.

It’s not without its problems, but this morning I woke up more convinced that we were making the right choice given the options that we have. I also woke up thinking about how polarizing this experience has been. Since I’ve known J, he’s extolled the virtues of renting. In fact, my first doubts about our relationship arose during one of his particularly vituperative monologues about the idiocy of home improvement. I was crestfallen. How could this otherwise brilliant, generous, caring, and creative man have such a blind spot?

He was, after all, calling foul on one of my core commitments. (Oh god, I can’t believe I just self-referentially used the expression “core commitments.”) He was, unknowingly, throwing stones at my imaginary glass house. I couldn’t take it.

I have, I’ve had, I’ll always have domestic desire.

You see, I was reared by a mother who was always crafting and recrafting her interiors, who was thinking about ways to make kitchen traffic flow or finding the perfect shade of butter for the living room walls. We always had stacks of interior design magazines and architectural books about small houses as our bedside table companions. I particularly remember a book from the 1980s about tree houses -- one of those old Sunset publications, I think -- that singlehandedly constructed arboreal retreats in my young mind.

Sadly, our recent house hunting was massively compressed. We had, essentially, one weekend to find a place in a land of generally abysmal architecture, in a state that’s given over -- hook, line, and sinker -- to the excesses of new construction. I had dreamed of a big bungalow on a rolling hillside with cultivated gardens, but not surprisingly, that wasn’t exactly available during the 48 hours we had. And so we’ve compromised.

We’ve taken the pretty good instead of waiting for the perfect. I like that we’ve made this compromise, mostly because I think it will help me to not over identify with my house. The yard is small, but carefully tended. The kitchen hasn’t been touched since the year of my birth, but is pleading for a facelift. The light doesn’t flood in, but there are these lovely, delicate wooden shutters on the inside of the windows that are ready to drink up a coat of brightening white paint. There’s enough to do, but not so much as to scare me from even starting.

Still, I've only half convinced my other half that this is a good decision. I see the worry in his eyes when we talk about replacing the furnace. I hear the tightness in his voice when he bemoans the lack of a disposal. But in the end, I think he'll come around to home ownership.

And it seems, in fact, like this little brick number might just be the perfect place to start.

peeping out of the woodwork

Oh man, it’s been awhile.

I’ve officially transitioned into the inured-to-the-present-living-in-the-future mode. This is neither good for the blog nor good for my soul. My teaching (finally finished today) has become stale. My projects at work need thoughtful conclusions. My mind is already in Kentucky.

The last couple weeks have been full of house hunting and offer making. J and I chose a sweet little brick number, but then in the last few days, we’ve been racked with indecision and may well end up in a more rambling tri-level from the 30s. We can’t decide. Either way, though, we’ll have a home soon, a place to nestle in and try out cohabitation for the first time in our relationship. It seems extraordinary that this two years of distance is finally -- finally! -- over. J gets to Philadelphia on the 17th and then we’ll pack up and drive west into the hills.

The real reason that I felt compelled to inch out of my silent shell was the arrival of this fantastic wedding treat:


It's a lovely tiled silhouette of me and Josh (mind you, it's a much more flattering silhouette of me than actually exists) with the Whitmanian "Camerado" from our vows underneath. I'm totally smitten with it. It comes from the wildly talented hands of my high-school-roommate-turned-art-teacher Maggie. I'm loving the fact that soon we'll have an actual real house in which to hang it. I think that she should start up a little side business...

Okay, I'm headed back into the shell now. Perhaps I'll come out again soon, especially if we survive an actual home purchase. No matter where we end up, we have lots of home improvement in our future.

{This Moment}

headed to Kentucky this morning with the newly-blocked, quickly-finished Ishbel in tow. Balm for airline travel = lacy madelinetosh shawl. Bring on delays, the pat-downs, the misery. Happy weekending.

still looking

Finding bits of beauty on my way out of this city. Kentucky-bound this weekend to find a place that feels like home.

tick tock

It can’t possibly be true. There’s no way that I’m really 35 today. It must be some kind of mix up, some cruel calendrical confusion.

Last night I was talking to a novelist who, reflecting on his career, offhandedly noted, “life is long.” It instantly reminded me an ex-boyfriend who, reflecting on our years of mutual torment, used to coax me back into romantic revery by saying the same thing. At 25 it seemed true enough. At 35 it feels patently false. Those ten years, for instance, well, they’re gone. And save for a dozen new wrinkles, I have little account of them.

A dissertation? A PhD? Somehow they don't add up to a decade.

When I told the novelist that life felt anything but long, he said that having his two-year daughter changed his account of time. It reminded me that when you’re a child, each day and each year feels a like a century. Having a baby, he said, was like resetting your own internal clock back to a child’s time. I hope that’s true.

My celebrations today are modest. I bought a cheese danish that I’ve been thinking about since January. Each morning when I buy a desiccated, painfully healthy, whole grain roll, I longingly admire the cheese danish. In early February, I decided that I’d splurge on my birthday. And so it began: 3 months of cheese danish imaginings.



I think it might be perverse to dream about a danish for three months. It might be the sign of instability. Or it might just be a way to pass the days. Because that's what it feels like I'm doing here, at the end of this post-doc, passing the days, waiting to move on, to leave behind, to start again.

Mid-life is just time to do that.