refreshing

The best thing about actually living with your partner is that you don’t have to spend all weekend in the airport thinking about all of the things you’d rather be doing. You don’t have to settle for slimy stir-fry from Panda Express because you can make pesto from the basil on the patio. You don’t have to debate the merits of wheelie bags or fight with TSA about shoving those wheelie bags into the overhead bin. You get to buy shampoo in bottles larger than 3 oz., and you get to stay on the ground.

You also get to wake up on a Saturday morning and decide that the dining room chairs that the former owner kindly left are just too gross to keep using. You can then jump in the car and spend $8.96 a pop for new high density foam. You can also gloat about the fact that you were inspired to buy exactly two yards of heavy weight japanese linen on your summer vacation, even though you never buy more than a yard and a half, and even though you had no idea where you’d use it.

You can then look at your watch and realize that you have all evening to reupholster the chairs, unconcerned about catching a flight or having to go to bed at 8 pm for the cheap 6 am one. You can perfect your process as you go, layering foam and thin batting and fabric, developing a heretofore unseen intimacy with the staple gun. You can even go to sleep with 3 chairs done and wake up on Sunday morning, drink a pot of decaf with the Sunday Times and then leisurely move to finish the last 3. You can finish it all by noon and then clear your desk and get down to schoolwork. Ah, weekends. Ah, short-distance relationships.

first dayz

By now I’ve met them all. There are just 43 of them in three classes. All week I was nervous about the start of the semester and I felt the familiar panic as I walked into each classroom. I couldn’t help but worry. These would surely be, I told myself, very different students. There would be men, for one, and after two years at a women’s college, I wasn’t so sure that I’d know what to make of them. And in one important way, I was sure, they’d seem unfamiliar. After all, the college where I now teach exclusively accepts poor students and primarily those from Appalachia. They’d be coming from some of the worst high schools in the country and I was warned to check my expectations before I walked through the door. I read about “culturally responsible” pedagogy and promised myself that I wouldn’t assume anyone had heard of Walt Whitman or Harriet Beecher Stowe. A colleague warned me to “forget everything you learned at Bryn Mawr.”

After I met them, though, I realized that there was no need to forget. Because students are students, pulled into the classroom by desire, by curiosity, by command, by mistake. But no matter the reason, they’re there. Sitting and eager and ready to give me a chance. So our conversations might sound a little different; they surely were on the first day, but they were conversations nonetheless and I feel privileged to be having them.

settling

The syllabi are coming together. Tonight is the opening faculty convocation. Homer gets a walk in the mornings and a run in the afternoons, just like Arlo, his predecessor (whom he resembles more and more each day) did. We grocery shop in the evenings. I buy vegetables on Tuesday and Fridays at the farmer's market. We started the final season of “Friday Night Lights” last night, curled up together in bed around the laptop, just like we did in graduate school. J met his advisees yesterday, all seventeen of them. We both wore regalia and marched into the students’ dedication ceremony yesterday afternoon. I was jealous of the chemistry teacher who sprung for the Carolina blue robes. J’s colleagues are becoming my colleagues. I’m still cooking through Super Natural Everyday. I finally finished my revision, with lots of smart editing from J. We both do the dishes.

Life is settling into a rhythm that still feels new and unfamiliar but each day also feels a little more ordinary. Each day we love this funny mutt more and more.

end of summer

The weather has turned. At least temporarily. It's cool at night and you can almost smell autumn on the horizon. We're frantically writing assignments and plotting out syllabi. I'm finishing article revisions and day dreaming about hosta and fern plantings.

My Dad came for a visit last week. We barely kept up with him. In two long days, he managed to replace a broken window, fill lots of cracks, glaze the basement windows, hang pictures, fix half a dozen doors, install a range hood (we have light!), fix the electrical problem in the kitchen, give me a closet doorknob, fix the shutters, hang curtain rods, bandage my wounds, and probably several other, life-saving things that I'm somehow forgetting.

We also had a good hike, and even down a lung, he kept us moving. It seems so terribly hollow to say that I feel grateful for visits like this one. But I feel grateful for visits like this one. It's been eight months of worry and sorrow, and so visits like this one feel nothing less than blessed.

We bought summer treats at the farmer's market, like the exclusively grass-fed meat that he can't find in Michigan and lots of tomatoes. Last night I made tomato preserves with our leftovers. I'm sure that I overcooked it, but it was my first foray into canning (another Dad lesson), and now I know what not to do.
I'm thinking about buying a bushel of tomatoes on Friday and canning them whole...Ah summer, ah tomatoes.

sampling life

My calendar says August 14, but surely that’s a misprint. It must still be July. What happened to June? Where has the summer gone? How is it that I’ve found myself in the middle of August with not a single complete syllabus and classes beginning in just ten days?

I suppose that I could blame the puppy. Or I could curse the house that needed so much love. I could blame myself for driving off to Michigan and then back East for quick vacation with J. I could accept responsibility for planting lantana and clover instead of drafting assignment sequences for composition classes. I could reckon the time it took paint the house against the time I spent at my computer. But I won’t.

Instead, I’ll scramble this week and next. I’ll feel unprepared when the term opens and probably still unprepared when I turn in grades in December. Because that’s the way it always feels at a new place during a new year. New students, new problems, new questions, new curiosities. Such, such will be the joys!

Last night I finished up my single needling creation of the entire summer. As I corseted it to the frame, I wondered how it could be that I have not a single knitted gem to share. I guess that’s what happens when a former, hour-long commute turns into a five-minute walk to school, when evenings spent with phone buds in my ears and hands free to knit turns into an actual, live relationship. That might be why I’ve had sheepishly little to share here.

Except this, a late summer foray into crewel, the design by Alicia Paulson. I finished most of it during a long, long car ride East with J behind the wheel. The whole while I felt like I was channeling my 18th century sisters, working our first samplers to practice our stitches and prove our domestic prowess. I’m not sure where it will hang, somewhere, hopefully, where people will appreciate the A, B, Cs.

Remastered

The previous owner of 408 (the seemingly appropriate name for our manse from here on out) had a thing for window coverings. These were the kind of curtains that a poor Maria von Trapp would have made into knickers. For a dozen children. They were so bad that J almost refused to buy the house because they made every room look like it was 1977 in Kentucky. Oh Kentucky. I, on the other hand, saw money signs in my head. Bad decor = lots of opportunity.



But home gyms from 1984 = kinky delights or just pure danger? We were undecided.

Anyway, this was the "master bedroom," an add-on in the 1960s and one that has been settling ever since. The floor is so sloped that you can drop a tennis ball at the doorway and watch it pick up speed all the way to the far wall. The room did have two gloriously large cedar closets (no fights over hogging hangers) though little else to impress.

But after getting a new ceiling and several coats of primer and paint (we're not sure how long we'll stick with the color. It might just be too passive), we ended up with this decidedly more airy bedroom. This was no quick fix and will be a work in progress for the foreseeable future.



It now needs some appropriate curtains. I'm thinking light and gauzy, hung high and extending a bit beyond the window casing to make those skimpy panes look a big bigger. It also needs a funky textile for above the bed, a good, clean rug, some bright art, an ottoman, bedside tables, ceiling lights, this and that.

But for now, it works. And so much better than before. And that glory in the middle? Well, that's our marriage saver, a Tempur-Pedic mattress, our best investment yet.

The good, the bad, the electrical

I had some vague idea that this summer would be relaxing, that I could leisurely undertake some modest home improvements, that I could spend a couple hours each day working on a creative writing project, that I could imagine my courses for the fall as I planted hostas and watched my jalapeños grow. I thought that just maybe J and I would drink cocktails on the patio in the evening, marveling at our good fortune and savoring the fresh summer dinner that I’d just whipped up with delights from the farmer’s market. I’d even open the dreaded dissertation manuscript and start the revisions. Oh, and we’d surely travel to Michigan and then out East, for a meandering road trip in our new car.

All of this seemed possible as I packed my bags in Philadelphia. After all, the blogs I read each day make it seem so easy, so beautiful, so perfectly uncomplicated. So unreal. How did I forget that home improvement doesn’t actually happen in the space of a blog post? How did I forget that my relationship to writing is so vexed that I’d rather make the bed, mow the lawn, and pick up dog shit than sit down and put pen to paper? Why didn’t I remember that having a puppy is like losing an arm and having to work one handed, the other one constantly throwing the ball, removing the bottle cap (or the rock, the sock, the sleeping pill bottle (!), the drano bottle (!!), the shoe, the sandal, the rug) from that damned puppy jaw? And wait, what about this whole marriage thing? Why didn’t occur to me that it would actually take time and energy, patience and fortitude to negotiate all of this with another?

And so now, as we scramble to get out of town for one last breath of coastal air before the grind begins, I feel frantic, made ever more so by the first major house problem. A little bubble on the kitchen ceiling, one that I diagnosed even before I’d mounted the step stool turned into this:



Well, actually, this is the brand new fix. I was too horrified by the problem, I guess, to get a good picture of the old lead pipe (yes, it was actually lead) that was so contorted that it had practically split in two and was spilling toilet “water” into the ceiling. I’m trying to forget the fact that we had just had this ceiling redone a few weeks before. I’m also trying to forget the fact that this drama was playing out on top of our refrigerator. Gross.

The plumber was here all day yesterday, dashing out every hour or so because he was missing yet another part or tool to fix this decided singular set-up. He spent most of the time sawing cast iron and lead pipes, spewing metal filament all over the kitchen. In the fruit bowl, on every plate, glass, and mug. He draped the kitchen in a black snow. And so I spent last night drinking a stiff gin and tonic and mopping up the mess. This all would have been well and good had I not insisted on standing on the counter to wipe the top edge of the window trim. It was then that I noticed that all of his banging had actually dislodged a new light fixture above the sink. I was annoyed and wanted to see if I could sort of jimmy it back into place. I grabbed the metal bar and zap, I felt the shock shimmer up my arm. The light went out and I thought, huh, that was sort of weird, but I didn’t register the problem. So I turned off the switch and grabbed it again. Another zap and then another. I thought maybe I was losing my mind and so I made – forced, really – J to try it also. And of course, electricity knows no favorites and he got zapped also.

This struck me as truly bizarre. How could a fixture be zapping us if the circuit was turned off at the wall? I still don’t know. But a quick google search suggested that we were liable to burn our whole house down. And faced with an unlabeled breaker box (now on “the list”), we decided to be safe and flipped the entire house breaker. Good thing it’s summer and we found the flashlights beforehand. I took down the fixture today, resigned myself to calling an electrician, and I’m forcing myself to just walk away from it for the moment. Argh.



But wait, wasn’t this post going to be about everything evening out? About finding balance in the midst of struggle? Wasn’t I planning to linger on the good, the beautiful, the moment of grace that washed all of this away? Well, I was. Really, I was. But come to think of it, this moment has no beauty and has no grace. It’s just a hot day in Kentucky with a hole in our kitchen and a few singed hairs on our arms.

That last bit, well, that’s just a bit of narrative exaggeration for rhetorical effect. Arm hair remains healthy and growing.

outtakes from a fortnight away

After six weeks of moving, painting, hauling, and settling, I was ready to hop in the car and head north. I came for these sunsets over the bay. Each night I’d sit outside, usually with Homer biting my ears, and try to impress the reds and blues in my mind, storing them for the waterless year ahead in Kentucky. It was hot, though, even in Michigan, and Homer took to wading in until his undercarriage was submerged.



I arrived with great ambition. I was going to get started on a conference paper and write my fall syllabi. Instead, I read a mediocre novel and a couple good memoirs, and I delighted in seeing my family. I drank with my Aunt and hosted a visit from close pals. But mostly, I just slowed down, lay on the hot sand, and tried to quiet my mind before the frantic push of the new school year begins.

marital edibles

It’s funny how marriage makes you eat differently. What’s suffices as a perfectly adequate meal for one tends to flop as a dinner for two. J’s standard issue pile of beans and canned chicken -- yes, I said CANNED CHICKEN! -- doesn’t go over well with me. And my overcooked scrambled eggs on a soulless corn tortilla from a bag hardly passes the muster with him. But we both end up stretching here and there. He’ll eat the whole wheat blueberry waffles when I make them (even if we have no maple syrup), but he’d rather just grab a fistful of almonds and get to work. I’ll try yet another stir-fry, usually persuaded after a bite or two. We haven’t quite found a rhythm though. It’s unclear who is going to cook what and when and how. And all the while, we have a real dining room mocking us. It’s this dedicated space calling out to us, to eat, to put our work away, to throw Homer out the door, to break bread -- err, kale -- together.

And small town Kentucky certainly prompts one to cook. There’s a semi decent Indian place about ten miles up the road, but you can only eat Indian so many days a week. Instead, we troll the farmer’s markets and pick through the “World Foods” aisle at Meijers. I’ve been working my way through Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Everyday. This is the first cookbook that just absolutely works with my ideas of good, simple food. A couple days ago, faced with the slimmest of slim pickings in the fridge, I flipped through its pages looking for lunch. The micro greens that I haphazardly “planted” (i.e. I tossed seeds on the ground) a couple weeks ago were going crazy in the soil, but I needed a vehicle for them. Swanson answered my call with an open-faced egg salad sandwich that uses plain yogurt instead of mayonnaise. I picked some thyme and threw it all on German whole grain bread. The next day, with even slimmer pickings, I tried her chickpea salad recipe, added a couple slices of local tomatoes, and J and I both swooned. Now if I could only find black mustard seeds and rye flour in the land of Hamburger Helper and Mountain Dew.