Southbound Train

Two Years

There is a robin sitting on my bird feeder right now, looking in and chirping with a beak full of dried grass. I’m not sure what she wants from me, but she’s obviously in the throes of nesting. Its that time of year.

I’m nesting too, though with less dried grass. We didn’t travel in March and for the first time in memory I wasn’t chomping at the bit to get to the airport, get on an airplane, head somewhere else. In fact, as we did just that, headed westward last Friday to spend the weekend in California, I squawked and complained about it. I didn’t want to leave, I didn’t want to fly, I just wanted to feather my nest and watch spring explode. I’m amazed at my willingness to just be here, to enjoy the simplest of pleasures  - the birds, the flowers, the way the sunlight falls across my bedroom in the morning.

The honeymoon is officially over, today, but I’m clearly still besotted with Tennessee. Like a bride who still sees Prince Charming in the man snoring on the other pillow in the morning, I might even breathlessly tell you that I like it even more here than I did two years ago. I might even be telling the truth. Two years! It amazes me that we have been here that long; it seems in some ways like just a few months ago that we left LA. A year – I could believe a year. But two seems impossible. I think the first months were a blur - I can hardly count them, and who could blame me? Boxes and meals out don’t really make for a sense of permanence. Last year was our first “full” year, but I spent a great deal of it working and being stressed about working and the other significant chunk travelling, the upshot of which being that I wasn’t present here in Tennessee for as much of it as I could have been. And now this, the unceremonious ending of the honeymoon phase, two years gone, just like that.

This spring is familiar, mild and bloomy, roadsides awash with color and the air scented sweetly in the long evenings. We had a thunderstorm two April 8^ths ago, and I think we could hear thunder tonight (we certainly did last night – the cat was afraid and woke us for reassurance). The neighborhood is dotted with cherry trees in full bloom, and thanks to my initial neighbor envy I now have one of my own. The dogwoods are even blooming, spreading their lacy arms out to the redbuds tricked out in shocking purple – the debutante and the bad girl of the tree set. Springtime is Tennessee at her most seductive.

I enjoyed my time in California; no denying that. Being with the people I love was worth leaving my nest, worth the pangs of self-pity that I no longer live in a cosmopolitan place, worth the realization that I am a bad 80’s song and that I do love LA. We were there at the same time last year, and coming back then felt like a 2000 mile wide game of Twister. With a foot in each place and a heart in California, my hands were frantically looking for a place to find balance; I was afraid they might land in Kansas, and then what? I came back to Tennessee last April 8^th and had to ask myself – well, how did I get here? I liked it but it wasn’t mine and I put off the milestone until summer, hoping the dislocation would pass.

Somewhere between last April and this one, mixed in with a soggy summer and a beautiful fall, too much work and house guests galore and making friends and crying over missed ones it did, and Tennessee became home. Not just where I live, a pretty place, a nice house, friendly people – but home. I knew yesterday, as we ran errands and admired spring, that I was where I was meant to be. I’m comfortable. I like it. I miss it when I am gone and still gasp at the beauty of it when I drive to the store for a mundane errand. 

I marvel at my good fortune of landing here, in this neighborhood, this town, this area, this state, even, when there are so many other places I could have ended up.  Leaving LA was painful, harder than I knew at the time and still, sometimes, harder than I want it to be. The nice part of the reflection I am allowing myself today is that I know now that it was worth it, that it was the right choice. We both feel giddy to be home, happy and lighthearted and so pleased with where we are – the dislocation of last year and the anxious knot of two years ago have both gone, melted out of existence with the emergence of the daffodils this spring. Someone else can have those ruby slippers I wished for last year – I’m already where they would take me.

Waiting for the Martins

I’m hoping to become a landlord. There’s a lovely, shiny new birdhouse set up in the garden, positioned with lots of flight path and great potential for flying insects. The white exterior is just what fastidious Purple Martins want, close enough to the house to be sociable but not so close as to be crowded. No overhanging branches or wires that will allow squirrels access. Holes that are Martin sized, perches that are perfect for Martin feet. All the pieces are in place – except for the Martins.

Establishing a new Martin colony is proving more about waiting and hoping than I thought. Somehow, I believed that if I built it they would come, like legendary baseball players sliding through the cornfield. I thought that wanting the Martins and making preparations for them was going to be enough, and that by putting the house up early I’d catch those “early returners” riding north on the first currents of spring. I read the websites and the bird books, opened the required one or two doors on the house and expected to see Martins within a week. I’m still waiting.

We’ve had some false hope – starlings have come to the house twice now, once right away and once just this week. They’re dark, and about the right size, and I get excited that finally, my Martins are here – until I see the yellow beak that no Martin would countenance and I know my hope was wasted. This morning we had starlings inside the house, thrashing about to get in and out because the Martin sized holes really aren’t quite big enough for them. We lowered the pole and tipped the house on its side to encourage them to leave. Leave they did, both of them, in a flurry of feathers and squawking and wrenched wings as they flew off and gave me up close evidence that they were not the birds I was looking for. We closed and locked the doors to keep the marauders out, and still we wait.

I know, logically, that the birds we want, the juveniles who are looking for a new home, won’t be coming until later in the spring – early summer, even. I know that I have to be patient, that good things take time. That we don’t always get what we want right when we want it. That maybe I’ll appreciate my Purple Martins (if when they arrive) that much more. But I’m ready for them! I’m excited at the thought of hosting a colony of birds, counting the eggs and watching the fledglings. I’ll happily make them scrambled eggs and buy freeze dried grubs if the insect buffet is light. I’ll do what I can to make their little birdy hearts sing and give them a good home. Don’t they know that? Can’t they sense that I’m here, with my little bird house and my open field, just waiting for them to nest?

I’m looking for ways to improve my odds now – considering decoys and recorded bird calls. I’m certainly keeping the pesky starlings out of the nest and I’m trying to keep up the hope. I know that as we head into April and then May and then (gulp) June our odds are increasing, just based on numbers. But I worry, a little, when I see that waiting house out there in the middle of the quickly greening garden, worry that it will remain empty, that spring and new life will pass it by and that come fall it will be as it is today, just older and still waiting for a family that never arrived.

Mercurial

Definition of Spring, right? Mercurial? Changeable? Inconstant? Fickle, even? It certainly applies. Most of last week was gloomy and gray and generally down in the dumps. Then Friday was glorious – the daffodils started to bloom and spirits lifted. Saturday was somewhere in the middle – gray, sunny – gray, sunny. Sunday? Wrong term – it was back to rain. No sun in sight. My moods are mirroring the season, and it is driving me nuts – on sunny days I’m balanced, productive, positive. Cloudy ones find me dragging out of bed, plodding through work, sitting dumbly in front of the TV after dinner and generally being a lump. I knew the sun was important to me, but this season is making that terribly obvious.

We got some good work in Saturday, prepping to make hay while the sun shines, or some such Farmer’s Almanac drivel – tilled the entire vegetable garden, treated it with Black Kow fertilizer (call to Bob: hi, we have 500 pounds of shit in the trunk), treated the fruit trees (ambitiously known as the orchard) and I dug up the space for my soon to be cutting garden. I’m so excited to have flowers I can walk out back and cut with abandon. I can’t wait to look out my bedroom window and see waves of color. I sat with a friend last Monday and we poured over flower catalogs, picking out this and that and making sure we had the right balance of color to build bouquets. I tilled under a lot of dirt to make a home for the flowers - because I didn’t have enough garden to weed last summer…

Sometimes I think I’m best at biting off more than I can chew: the vegetable garden was 30x70 last year, and I just added 10 or 15 feet in length so as not to “crowd the corn.”  And then there’s the cutting garden I’ve created -  a whole new space behind the house, wrapping around the tree/bush combo that looms beyond the patio and extending into a sizeable rectangle to the right of it. I’m not going out there with a tape measure – I don’t really want to know how many more square feet of dirt I need to care for this summer. The vegetable garden is already like weeding a 2500 square foot house. My back and legs ache at the thought of bending over to take care of all that dirt, all those plants, all those bloody tenacious weeds. But then I look at the seed catalogs.

Seed catalogs suck me in. They convince me that growing three varieties of squash is perfectly reasonable, that four types of corn will give me the sequential harvest I’m looking for. I love picking the different varieties, looking at last year’s notes on what performed well and what didn’t (and thinking that the longer I garden, the better my histories will be), considering trying new things just because. I have a mental image of myself in a floppy hat collecting beautiful produce from well-manicured rows. This year I’m going to have fewer weeds, because it is the second year for the soil, because I’ve taken better care of it, because I’m going to learn from my mistakes. This year I’m going to manage my drainage and not let the tomatoes and melons drown. This summer I’m going to get the cucumbers trellised early, keep the weeds down early, actually thin my row crops correctly. This is going to be a wonderful gardening summer, unless we have another unusually wet season…

I know March (Spring in general) is the wet time of year here, but this rain, this gray, this damp – I’m afraid it is just a sign of ongoing dampness to come. What if we have another miserably wet summer? What if all my tomatoes drown again, sad twisted black wraiths in a mosquito filled swamp? All the nice garden tools I want, all the special organic fertilizers – what if they are all a waste of money because the summer dumps water rather than sunlight on my garden? And the cutting garden – I have no idea what I’m doing! Just because I managed one scraggly row of zinnias and cosmos last summer doesn’t mean that I’m going to be successful with flowers in bulk. I don’t know if I should plant in rows or scatter the seed randomly or maybe plant in blocks? What if it all dies and looks weedy, or it doesn’t get enough sun, or the cats roll around in it and break the flowers? Then what?

But the sun is shining today. The daffodils are blooming and I read my gardening books and made notes on my seed lists about when to plant what. I’m doing the hard work now, it will pay off in bushels of vegetables and armfuls of flowers later. I’m sure of it – until the clouds come back and the crisp shadows slide into muddy light – and then the garden is sure to fail. C’mon, sun, stay out, because my mood swings are driving ME crazy! I can only imagine how Mike feels.

Five o'clock and Flannel

I can hear rain pinging the gutters and I want to go back to bed. I know there are new soft flannel duvet covers there, warm and fuzzy and far more inviting than my office chair and day packed full of meetings. I feel so smugly seasonal here; even my bed has different clothes for the weather. Summer was a sheet, with a thin blanket folded at the foot of the bed for the odd cool night. Early fall was a switch to individual lightweight duvets and t-shirt sheets. I’ve upgraded to flannel now, and in a month or so we’ll move to the full heavy weight duvet I bought in a fit of shivering last winter, when the one marked “palm tree” in the Company Store catalog clearly wasn’t cutting it anymore. When spring rolls around we’ll step back to individual, lighter weight duvets and then (before I know it, the way our time here is going) we’ll be back to that single sheet. I’m in no rush, though. As much as I want sunlight, I love autumn. I’m a certified broken record on the glories of fall, actually, and I think if I point out one more brilliantly orange tree on the way to the market Mike is going to invest in a muzzle.

I know I’m tedious about it, but I can’t get over how beautiful this season is. I love the golden stubble of cut corn and the burnished gold of a spent field of soybeans. The hillsides (following a brief frosty weekend) have turned all kinds of oranges and yellows, and even if plenty of green remains I couldn’t say that I notice. There are a few stunning trees that seem to emit their own light and I’m obsessed with having a collection on our property; counterpoint to the red buds and dogwoods of spring. I’ve taken to carrying the camera with me, making Mike pull over in awkward spots so I can document the glowing yellows and oranges, and the occasional but so appreciated burst of red.

It was beautiful this weekend, cool air that warmed in the sunny patches, cerulean sky a perfect counterpoint to the fluttering leaves. Sunday was the neighborhood fall festival and chili cook-off, and as a bookend to the spring egg hunt, I dressed as a fortune teller and entertained the kids with promises of good Christmas presents; their parents were more amused, I think, by my three inches of sweeping tinsel eyelash. Mike coordinated an apple biting contest and a costume parade and the chili was tasted and voted upon and the whole event was, I think, a success. We’ve come a long way from last year’s festival, which we mostly skipped, walking up later only to attend the homeowners meeting. This year we knew more people than we didn’t, and I actually felt like part of things rather than a mouse on the edges.  The summer has been full of getting to know the neighbors in more than a wave and it is so nice to have a group of people to talk to who actually talk back. There have been drinks and evenings and casual get-togethers and, honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever been a part of a group so social. I really enjoy it, and Mike now has a potato gun thanks to a July cocktail hour so I think he’s pretty pleased as well.

The downside to the social might be the peer pressure, though, which is taking me away from precious time with the flannel elephant sheets. Throughout the summer a group of us did boot camp workouts here in the neighborhood. Twice a week in the long hot evenings we met at the pool and paid someone to make us tired and sore. I think we enjoyed the complaining as much as the workouts, but I know that I, at least, enjoyed the company, and we all wondered how we could keep it up once the classes were over. I went away for a week and came back to a smaller group who had decided that 5:30 am was the best time for boot camp. Clearly they've gotten to know me well enough to know that was a decision I would have protested... best to make it while I was not present to yelp in horror. I don’t do mornings, especially not mornings that begin before the sun. And yet, here I am, Tuesdays and Thursdays, getting up to an alarm at 5:15 and out the door well before sunrise, meeting my fellow sadists in the dark and working out.

We trade off planning workouts and we all manage to keep getting up, even though I suspect I’m not the only one who finds it hard to leave a warm cocoon of flannel these days.  It makes for a long work day, because even with a shower I’m still in front of the computer by 7 and by the time it gets dark I’m muddling around the kitchen trying to stay awake long enough to cook.  I appreciate the camaraderie, though, the sense of shared suffering as we’re doing planks in the dark – but on a day like today where the rain grows more insistent and the sky isn’t getting any lighter the siren song of the bed is hard to resist.  The flannel is so warm. And soft. And just down the hall….

Time Flies when you’re having Family

That’s the saying, right? It has been a busy sort of spring and now summer is here based on the heat and the thunderstorms and the masses of fireflies hovering above the grass as dusk.  Spring was different this second go ‘round, later and colder and much much wetter than last year. My neighbors assure me that it was “an odd spring” and I’ll take that, because the warmer weather was well overdue in my book when it started showing up in late May. April and May just ran together this year, and we were either away or hosting people more nights than not, the big event being the titular Family Fun that swept into town in honor of my Grandma’s 91^st birthday in late April.

I’ve always yearned for curly hair, a retrousse nose, fine bone structure and a huge family – I imagined I’d marry a man with many siblings and cousins and I would end up with nieces and nephews and a house full of crazy at the holidays. Toss in a perm and a plastic surgeon and I’d be three out of four. Clearly we’ve had epic fail on all counts there, particularly with the nose, but Mike’s small family didn’t really help my case either. When life hands you a paucity of lemons, can you still make lemonade? Our little reunion in April proved that yes, yes you can. It has been a long time since we’ve all been together for more than a few hours, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t more than a few hours nervous about the whole situation. Would we have anything to talk about? Would we argue? Would we be bored? Would they be horrible guests and I a horrid host? Could the house handle sleeping 8? The list of possible pitfalls was tremendous but in the actuality, the worst kerfluffle came simply when Diane tried to hang Grandma’s purse on the back of her chair. That. Simply. Wasn’t. Acceptable.  I’ll challenge any of you to try that little maneuver and keep your hand. A-hem.

Mostly we laughed. A lot. We talked about family history both ancient and recent, set some records straight, recalled Christmases past and considered Christmases future. We drank … well, like fishes. We ate lots of BBQ and lots of Meat & Three and lots of food in general. PK and I reproduced (mostly) the famous Czech Grandmom “buchte” but will live to perfect the recipe. Martha White and her Yeasty Buns featured prominently, as did that most Nashville of events – the Grand Ole Opry.  There was discussion of all living near each other here in this most green of places any of us have ever lived; I think it was our collective European heritage telling us that real people live on fertile farmland, not in the desert.

Maybe the nicest part of the whole weeklong endeavor was that PK and I became friends in a way that was never possible as kids growing up six years and 500 miles apart. We discovered that we share oddities in common that we’ve chalked up entirely to shared genetics, not the least of which being a love of cooking and a sick need to take the scrawniest plant in the nursery home so that it won’t die lonely on the shelf. I’m angling for him to move here and meet some nice Southerner and settle down so that we can look forward to not just a few holidays a year but instead a nice lifetime of Sunday BBQs and bourbon drinking and riotous living, indeed.

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Speaking of riotous living… we celebrated Mother’s Day just a few weeks after the birthday bash by having both our moms here for a road trip to Memphis & Mississippi. We were on the Elvis trail, and we did it up right – a night at the Peabody and front row seats at the Duck Parade, blues on Beale, Lemon Icebox Pie (from Charlie Cavallos Cupboard, natch) and Tupelo to see where the whole Elvis thing began.

In keeping with the wet spring we had plenty of rain that weekend, soaking us thoroughly in Oxford and keeping the car wet all the way to Tupelo. There isn’t much along the side of the road to look at in northern Mississippi but green vines and trees and now at least we know why they are so green. We did stop and look at some great old antebellum homes and learn about the poor Chickasaws who clearly got the short end of the stick. We had a surprisingly good dinner in an extraordinarily funky restaurant, played Hearts, visited a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Alabama and drove home along the Natchez Trace, mile after mile of swooping green parkway and little history and nature stops.  At one point we took the “Old Trace” loop for 3 miles, barely rolling along a barely paved road that took us into a stand of trees so dense that the filtered light was, scouts honor, green. We stopped the car and got out and the silence was amazing, filled with little bits of sound that I’d never notice in a populated place. Rustling leaves and settling gravel, but also tiny breaths of breeze, flowers unfolding, bees pollinating, dust motes settling down on lichen covered rocks and my own inner voice, whispering softly that I was home, home, home.

Somewhere in the last month of visitors and travel and chaos, something about here has become home. I don’t know if it was showing off how pretty it is (Stupidly, like I have something to do with the rolling hills or the cardinals or the dogwoods… geez. All I can take any marginal credit for were the masses of tulips in the front yard) or telling people about it or driving to Memphis twice in the space of one week and feeling how different it is from here. Maybe it was the house guests or the plane rides or the sweet relief of getting off an airplane and being done. Maybe it was surviving, and sleeping, my first two nights alone in the house, but whatever it was, something’s gone to the green side and this feels more like home and less like trying. I’ve got house guests galore in the coming months, so we’ll see how entrenched I feel by then. Maybe some of them will stay. Maybe I’ll manage to recruit the family entirely. One can hope. Home is expansive.

Beginnings, Again

We’re in our last month of firsts, the homestretch before we reach the year marker, 12 months, 52 weeks and 365 days of not being in California anymore, Toto. The time has flown; it is hard for me to believe it has been that long since we were consumed with boxes and uncertainty. I’ll miss the firsts, once they pass into seconds and then march onwards to thirds and fourths and who knows how manys – experiencing something for the first time, be it red leaves or snow or the return of the robins is an electric thrill. I’m sure that thrill is part of why I travel:  the pleasure of the unknown and the unexpected make the flights and the tiredness forgettable. Living in a new place has been a sort of travel for me, the sedentary kind for sure, with the pleasures unfolding slowly rather than exploding, but I’ve enjoyed it no less for its pace. The anticipation of the new has made the longing for the old bearable; I’ve been able to concentrate on where I am in a new way.

Waiting for the seasons to change here has been one long lead up to Christmas, the anticipation of the first signs of a new stage of time, signaled by some natural thing that I’ve generally only read about. Maybe those seasons are why it feels this year of firsts has gone so quickly. Just when I was wondering when I could wear jeans again, I woke up one morning to honking geese and a change in the air. About when I thought the riot of color across the hills couldn’t sustain itself much longer, it was gone, faded into gray and brown and frost on the lawn. Then came the anticipation of snow, and it arrived right on time, heralding the beginning of the Christmas season with a flourish. Now, as I tire of apples and root vegetables and cold hands, I see clumps of daffodils along the side of the road. My own bulbs are starting to make an appearance and the trees look a bit lumpy with buds. We’ve had a flock of robins lately, hundreds of them wheeling in the yard and filling the bare branches with spots of rusty red. I’ve seen a few bluebirds, too, and heard the chirping beginnings of spring from every quarter.

I’m having a hard time conceptualizing the changes that I know must be coming in the next month, though – we had a snow over the weekend, and I can still see patches of white stuff from my office window. It is melting, but slowly. The buds on the trees are just that – buds. The nights are still dipping below freezing, and it wasn’t exactly warm yesterday evening when we walked along the tracks. Spring may be scheduled, but it has a lot of work to do before it arrives. What amazes me is that when we arrived last year, spring had clearly beaten us – the redbud trees were riots of purple along the roads, the grass was tall and wild and the cherry trees were in full bloom, prompting my first ‘keep up with the neighbors’ moment. Now I have my own blooming, weeping Japanese cherry in the front yard, clearly visible from my office window, and I have my eye on her – but she’s still keeping secrets. The grass hasn’t grown, the red buds aren’t budding and the Whistle Pigs are only beginning to poke their noses out. But it is March 4^th! We drove into our driveway for the first time on April 8^th last year – Mother Nature has one month and four days to produce a miracle.

I think this was the season change I was most excited about and now that it is almost here, I can’t wait. I’m ready for spring food, spring weather, spring green. I want to enjoy the season this year, sitting outside rather than unpacking boxes, walking in the evening rather than fretting about the closets – this won’t be my first spring, but it will be the first one I am free to experience and take in. We have family coming in mid- April, and I’m really rooting for the dogwoods to be showing themselves. Having lived through a winter (however mild) I’m feeling particularly justified in wanting spring, another fresh start. Last year was still, in many ways, limbo. I don’t think the last box was emptied until fall, and the house didn’t feel settled until Christmas. This coming year, though not our first technically, feels like it will be our first in the realities of living here, of being settled, of being. I know that the year changes over in the darkness of winter, but I always think of it happening now, with the emergence of the bulbs and the return of the leaves and the warmth, all new growth and explosion of possibility. It was a happy coincidence to have moved at this time of year, because it allows me to mark my time here in the same way – out of the darkness of winter, new life and opportunity arrives, singing.

Post Holiday Blues

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t find the post holiday time more than a little … flat? I can’t get my head around the new year, fresh start, clean slate thing because, honestly, it is still lolling around in the sugarplum dreams of December .(Though I ate a sugarplum this year, and I’m not sure that I want to dream of them any longer. It alternated between stunningly good and tasting like vomit. No joke, pinky swear.) Peppermint dreams, then, maybe, or fudge. Or divinity, that heavenly white concoction of sugar and air and obsessive checking to see if it is ready, not yet, not yet, not yet, oh, now, go go go, time to get it out and top it with a cherry that I made with my moms a couple of days before Christmas. I love the whole Yule season, the rushing and the crowded malls, the odd hours, the baking and wrapping and the decorations, the obsessive replaying of “Santa Baby” on every sound system. I am a certified Christmas junkie, and if I get less sleep in the weeks leading up to the holiday, that’s ok with me because it means I spend more hours lit by tree lights.

The satisfying house-guesty-ness of a Christmas far from family was lovely. I had people other than us for a grand total of ten days, and even the Piggahs thought it was too quiet when finally, we made the last run to the airport. They’ve spent the last eight days wheeking loudly and constantly, making their own shrill dent in the settling silence that has come with departures and the dismantling of decorations. I gave my kitchen its first real workout, cooking to a menu each day – in all that time, we only ate out four meals, two at Waffle House and one at the Cracker Barrel, because it wouldn’t be a visit to the South without a tab at both of those institutions. I loved having my family here when I went to bed and when I woke up, and it stretched the actual holiday into days of subtle pleasure. For the first time in, oh, ever, I didn’t stay up late wrapping gifts alone; our movie room was a blizzard of paper and ribbon and lost scissors and I had my mom, and then later, Mike’s mom, to keep me company. If I missed the social aspects of Christmas this year (the holiday lunch, the dinner with the girls, the holiday concert) and Oh, I did, I at least had the wonderful salve of constant family to rub on the wound. We kept Christmas well this year, and I enjoyed every minute.

Which might be bringing me back to the flat. Because now that it is over, I find the expanse of calendar that stretches ahead to be mightily empty. We’ve been here almost a year, now, and without the rush of unpacking, decorating, preparing for guests and then the lead up to the holiday season, the fact that we don’t really know anyone is looming larger than it has in the past. I think I’ve been in a honeymoon period with moving, and now I’m going to have to face the hard work of a marriage. Finding friends isn’t the easiest endeavor, and with both of us working from home, it is even harder. I suppose we could invite the UPS guy in for coffee, since we see him with more regularity than anyone else, but I don’t think that’s quite going to cut it. I’m sure there are people out there that we would like, but the self pitying part of me thinks that they won’t like us. And the realistic part wonders how we will ever find them anyway. I’ve got this whole house set up and ready for dinner parties, and no one to cook for… when I start sending out photos of my stuffed animals sitting at the table for Ponteuf’s birthday, please come visit and rescue me from myself, mmmkay?

Intervention

I think my cat needs an intervention. I accept that I might be to blame for his problems, that perhaps *I* am the one who got him where he is today, but I really thought we had things under control. I foolishly believed that the serious discussions we’ve had about use and abuse since our journey here in April have made a difference, but mere logic cannot make inroads into chemical dependency. My approach, I realize (too late), has failed him, and now… now I’ve sunk to contributing to his delinquency.

The kitty ‘blue pills’ he came to know and love during the move changed him. Stronger than weed and longer lasting than blow, they’ve left him with wicked flashbacks – occasionally I find him hidden under a tent of fabric somewhere, eyes half closed and surrounded by scraps of poetry. Freedom is Fear, they read. Under bed, gloaming. And my favorite - Dry kibble, dry soul.

The cat has been drug free since April 15th. When four cross country days of opium den solitude did not produce the world class poetry I expected ( see above) and it became clear that he was not going to contribute to the mortgage, I did what any sane and vindictive person would do – I took away his drugs. Once he got over the initial shock, he seemed to be adjusting just fine… but looking back I should have seen signs of what was coming.

He’s become vocal. Very vocal. Every injustice, every hunger pang, every whisper of need is broadcast, full volume. Touching him elicits grumbling. Moving him – the same. Tossing him outside in the morning is a symphony of discontent. In LA he was outside all the time, and he was quiet. Generally friendly, easily pleased, mostly silent and, I’m convinced, a cold blooded murderer. Since we’ve moved he has executed a deft cat about face and now cowers in fear at the back door, vocalizes his almost constant demands and spends evenings and overnights in the house.  We’ve got foxes running through the backyard and who knows what else lurking in the bushes, and I’d hate to lose his furry head to a larger animal. The cat I knew in LA could have defended himself, but this one is useless at hunting bugs and needs help getting out of the trees, so he comes in at dusk. 

Once he’s in, he’s hungry, and he wants us to know it, cute and burbly at the beginning, transitioning to sulky yowls and deep rumbles when he thinks we are not attending to him quickly enough. Once he’s sated he comes and lies under my feet as I make dinner, randomly swatting at my ankles if I invade his space by getting too close. The speed and accuracy that he used to apply to killing backyard game is now applied to our ankles and lower legs when we annoy him. A few nights ago Mike was ignoring him when he wanted a belly rub, so he ran up, leapt through the air and gutted Mike’s calf. No warning was issued. He didn’t like some cat-unauthorized dancing the other night, and I got a claw in my toe for disobeying his yowl to cease and desist. He finds the Rock Band version of Orange Crush intolerable and lets us know by throwing his body against the door and howling. Occasionally I’ll wake from a dream where I’m being poked in the foot with needles only to find the cat curled around my extremity, teeth and claws bared.

He looks sweet and innocent, but many a houseguest has made the mistake of rubbing the white belly he exposes so charmingly. He’ll walk up close, burble and drop to the ground, rolling from his side to his back with his little white booted feet flopping in the air. He’ll close his eyes half way and begin to purr. This is a trick, a crocodile tear. Go ahead, rub his stomach. He’s so cute. He’s so friendly. He’s so ATTACHED TO YOUR HAND AND ARM WITH CLAWS. It happens fast.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I should have seen the vocalization and the aggression for the signs of an addict that they were, I really should have. But I figured we were out of the woods with the drug problem, really, I did, until I walked into the kitchen the other night and saw this:

That cooler is full of the cat’s new drug of choice. Not fish. Not cheese or milk or even chicken. Not chocolate or fruit or bread or pumpkin pie. No, the cat has discovered a deep and abiding love for hazelnut coffee beans. He sniffed from across the room like a hound dog on the scent and was there like a shot. He rubbed his head and climbed inside and purred and burbled and made sweet kitty love to that coffee. The room and all his cares slipped away as he and the coffee shared a deep and meaningful connection that must have brought back the memories and sensations of his cross country opium den. Oblivious to the world, even our hysterical laughter as we caught the whole thing on camera didn’t deter him.

I know that drugs for cats are bad. I know that I should encourage poor little GatoPlex to resist the strength of his urges, that I should help him through this time of temptation. I know that my role should not be that of an enabler, but I just. can’t. help. myself. I’m tired of a crabby attack cat, and I have to wonder if his crusty behavior of late might just be withdrawal? Would steady application of coffee, this new wonder drug, make him into a nicer cat? In for a dime, in for a dollar, we went to Kroger and bought him coffee of his own. Last night we put some beans in a sock and dropped the bundle of love into the cat bed we’re trying to teach him to use.  Kitty ecstasy followed, and I did not wake with needles in my ankle.  Progress? Or spiral into iniquity? Only time will tell.

Fair Summer Afternoon

When I was in grade school, the fair was held in the fall. October, maybe? I remember wearing sweaters, and jeans. Hot steaming bowls of fat white noodles, always from the plainest food stand in the fair (just to the left as you turned into the midway of grease) were the best treat. Valdemar and the other kids with 4-H animals got to take a week off of school to go to the fair. Crisp afternoons lit with slanting light giving way to cold evenings, fog rolling in and smelling of sea.

By the time I raised 4-H pigs, that week off of school to hang around the livestock barns, shoveling shavings and making fun of the girls with lambs was long gone. Most of the fairs I remember, and certainly the ones I participated, in happened in August; shorts and icy lemonades supplanted jeans and fry bread. The Japanese noodles never tasted as good when it was hot, but the dipped ice cream bars were better, and the smells of the fair – grease and dust and hot electrical wires and sugar (glorious sugar) were intensified. It could be cold, even in August, by the Ventura beach, but in my memory days at the fair are always hot, intense, a little sticky.

I’ve never been to a fair I like as much as Ventura’s. Somehow it has managed to stay exactly as I remember it, and I like it all: the Fine Art area where I can always spot watercolors from my art teacher, the tacky commercial barns packed with hucksters and their products. The filtered water guy with the seven foot continuously running faucet and the knife salesman and the jewelry cleaning solutions and over against the wall the mini donut machine, little circles of dough bobbing along in golden grease – I don’t think these things ever change. In the Floriculture building, I see the Kelly family dynasty of displays, always desert themed. I probably know a couple of people selling things. The gem and mineral building by the gate has cool stuff under black lights, and fish, and a photography section. The giant kids hall where my stuff was displayed: art and baking and table settings, thank you very much – kids are still entering the same things I did, except the kids belong to the people I competed against.  I’d blame this wistful recitation on age, but I’ve been nostalgic since I was little, so I suspect it will just get worse with time. I love the fair.

Ventura these days is a bit further than it used to be, though, so we went to the Williamson County fair last Saturday. It had been a scorcher of a week but had cooled down nicely in time for us to wander over to the Ag Center Saturday mid-day, hungry for grease and sugar. This fair has only been going for the past few years – it isn’t big. The commercial exhibits are mostly around the indoor arena – chiropractors and local businesses, and a meet and greet with the police department. The 4-H clubs have project exhibits scattered around, and the midway is small. The livestock is done in stages, but we caught part of a sheep show and some poultry judging, and took in the petting zoo, complete with porcupines and camels. There were rabbits and a draft horse and a longhorn steer, a giant pig with piglets and a few alpacas and that unique, sweet odor of a livestock barn, fur and hair and dust and hay and grain and dirt and spilled sodas, wet animal and old French fries, and wow, I’m selling it, but nothing smells quite so sweet as memory.

The Ventura ladies haven’t got a thing on the Tennessee women in the Home Arts rooms; the quilts and hand work and canning here were nicer than I’ve ever seen. There was a 4-H cake auction happening later in the afternoon and we ate curly fries and frozen treats and a corn dog while we listened to a brass band play Beatles songs. Kids rode the same rides that I rode when I fit into a 3 foot glittered race car and a big military transport plane did a fly by, and I was filled with nostalgia, for this fair, for the fair of my childhood. Fairs are transitory – by now the grounds, here and in Ventura, are vacant again. The wind is pushing an empty cotton candy bag across well trampled grass, a forgotten toy lingers against a post, the PA broadcasts nothing but silence. The fair has packed up and moved down the road, but it will be back next year, the same buzz and smell and sound and cheap glitter in the dust, the same good feelings and nostalgia, the same dreamlike quality. And I’ll be there, three with a painted face, seven in a sweater, eleven with Pippi, sixteen with a pig, thirty-four with a smile.

more fair photos

Leftovers

The worst part of houseguests is that they leave. I know the saying, sure, that fish and houseguests, after three days, stink. And, I suppose, that can be true (for some guests) (and for some hosts) but not for me. I like having people here to make breakfast for, or leave the coffee on the counter for, to entertain and feed and iron pillowcases in advance of. I feel so domestically accomplished having their favorite treats in the cupboard, sharing new iced tea flavors, baking a welcoming cake. I like taking them out to eat and stopping to read historical markers and pretending I’m on vacation in my own town. Nothing has, as yet, made me appreciate where we’ve moved to as much as showing it to the people I care about. I notice how green the fields are, how lush the trees, how charming the main street. I get to do the visitor things and marvel at how much there is to do and how we don’t have time to do it all. I want them to stay, and stay – prolonging the companionship and the hiatus from life’s petty annoyances. Return tickets are at risk in my house. Ooops – was that your boarding pass? The guinea pigs were hungry, you see.

We’ve done pretty well on the visitor front since we moved here – my mom has even been twice – but it is always hard to drop off the people I love at the airport. My eyes leak and I sigh a lot and Mike wonders what he is going to do to amuse me while I feel terribly sorry for myself. If I could, I suppose I would move everyone I care about here (and really, you’d like it, I promise) but the next best thing would be to know when they were coming back. Like a purchased plane ticket, an impending visit is a way to mark time, to count the passing of the days when I work in my messy office and don’t talk to anyone but Mike and wonder why I’m feeling prickly or tired. I don’t, honestly, expect anyone to come all the time, or give up other things to come here just to keep me from drinking alone, but I wouldn’t feel badly if everyone decided to come back sooner rather than later, either. (In case y’all missed it, by the way, that was an open invitation.)

Liking guests fits into my larger desire to take care of people, I suppose. I’m afflicted with a deep need to “fix” things for people in my life; to make things better, solve a problem, right a wrong. I want to supply the magic answer that just makes the trouble go away. Clearly if reincarnation is the way of things, I was a man in my last life. Having people here, in my home, I feel I’m responsible for their happiness – and that I can shield them from the rest of the world. In my bubble, I’m in charge, and everyone will be happy … and if not deeply happy, at least content, well fed and well watered (I do know my limitations.) Breakfast out – with pie. A four person game of rock band. Drinks on the screened porch. Oysters, freshly shucked, at the kitchen counter. An illicit dip in the pool. A road trip, maybe, or dancing barefoot with the fireflies. I can do these things, and while they might not be solving the problems of the world, I like to think that for a fleeting moment, at least, we’re all happy in the doing of them.

For our most recent guests, I made angel food cake. When they left, the remainder of it sat forlornly on the cake stand for a few days. I didn’t really have the heart to throw it out, I didn’t want to eat it alone, and together, the cake and I grew a little stale and rough around the edges. Having looked forward to the D&D visit ever since we moved, I was wallowing in a real post-Christmas-nothing-left-to-look-forward-to funk; the cake (lacking the emotion needed for a self pitying crisis) was drying out. After a couple of days I came to terms with the fact that we are here and they are there and there isn’t anything I can do about that but get on with things. Letting the house get messy and myself grumpy wasn’t bringing anyone back to visit, and the cake needed to be dealt with. Rather than tossing it, though, I cut up some peaches and bought some milk and turned the whole sad mess into bread pudding, a dessert quite improved, I think, by the use of angel food cake and liberal dollops of brown sugar bourbon hard sauce.

I don’t miss you all any less, but I’m learning (slowly) to lessen the ache.

Sweet Home (photos)

We walked into the grocery store two nights ago, and the sound system was playing Sweet Home Alabama, turned up just a little louder than you’d normally expect for a Publix. I heard it last week at Lowes while looking for hose coupling. We heard it, live and loud, in Rum Boogie on Beale last weekend. If I go out right now and turn on the car, there’s a substantial chance it will be on the radio. At only 50-odd miles from the border of the state everyone’s singing about, Sweet Home Alabama is the local anthem.

To be fair, we think the local radio station plays a set list heavy on Tennessee references … I’ve heard Graceland, and Walking in Memphis, and other Nashville/Tennessee/non-country referencing songs plenty, but Skynyrd seems to be king here. I’ve gone and read the history (thanks, Wikipedia) and I seem to have absorbed the lyrics now, and I keep catching myself singing along. Is this my inner southerner coming to the surface?

For illustrative purposes, I’ve loaded all the Alabama photos to Flickr, as well as photos of people’s visits. If you’ve been here since May, well, you can reminisce. D&D, I might specifically be looking at you. ;-)

Happy Birthday to Me

My birthday started out in an odd way. I woke up to see a brilliant sunrise over Chicago, took a photo, and screwed my eyes shut again in defense against the light, the flight attendants and the hideous five am hour. Oh yes, a red eye. No better way to make me feel older than to make me sleep for three hours and change in an airplane seat and call it a night.

I was supposed to get home Monday evening, and as much as I missed everyone in LA, I was ready to sleep in my own bed, use a real sized tube of toothpaste and check in on Mike and Gato-Plex. I left Ojai, drove to LAX, and discovered upon arrival that my flight had gone from 10 to 80 minutes delayed. Delayed enough that I would miss my connection in Denver - my connection which was the last flight to Nashville. According to the 1K desk, my last chance to get to Nashville until 10pm the following day, which just happened to be my birthday, which just happened to make me cry while standing in line and wrestling two suitcases and a large box. Which, because it was LA, didn’t prompt anyone around me to offer condolences, Kleenex or (most annoyingly) help with my box. I’m not sure, really, why I had to be more creative in routing than the United rep, but I suggested she try and get me home via Chicago, which she could… as long as I was willing to sit in LAX for eight and a half hours, before catching a red eye that would deposit me in Chicago at sunrise to catch a 6:30 to Nashville.

There didn’t seem to be anything else to do but take it, so I did, checked my box with much wrangling, made sure I was upgraded and had a really good cry on the phone with my mom while sitting in the lobby. And then I talked on the phone with everyone I could reach to harass, felt really sorry for myself, and watched an “only in LA” vignette of some camera guy harassing a star who just wanted to sit by himself and have a snack before he flew. All this excitement in the lobby of LAX. Hmmm. I used a parking shuttle to get to In n Out and had one last glorious Double Double before leaving town and then waited. And waited. And waited, waited, waited, molasses slow waited, to get on the plane. Which was delayed. A delayed flight after almost nine hours in the airport feels inevitable, really, but gee, cheery fun, they made up time on the way, and we got to Chicago early leaving me plenty of time to trek the marathon between the C gates and the F gates and wait for my flight home.

Do I sound like I’m complaining? Probably because I am, but I’m about to stop, because I did get home on my birthday, and I officially started it with a really nice plate of potato pancakes from the Pancake Pantry in Nashville, a place that we didn’t even recognize without the block and a half line wrapping around the building. Eating out on a Tuesday morning is a lot easier than a Sunday. I worked from the ever faithful kitchen table and had flowers waiting for me and a bunch of nice calls from friends and family, and chalked up the total disorientation to the red eye rather than the three weeks away from home or the new age, which made the oddness of being back here and being that much further from 30 more bearable.

Somewhere in the evening hours I had to pull it together to get to dinner, the only concession to my state being the moving forward of the reservation by thirty minutes. I made it though, showered and dressed, and I was so glad that I did, because this restaurant is a gift. We first went on a whim when Anna was here and closed the place with an impromptu kitchen tour by the chef. I knew then that I wanted to come back for my birthday, and it was worth the wait. Mike ordered an obscure cocktail that the bar staff went to a liquor store to get the ingredients for … and then they comp-ed us the beautifully made drink (an Aviation, for the record). He had emailed them about my birthday, and we had a progression of ‘just for us’ appetizer tidbits that were each better than the last: short rib (with cocoa nibs), scallops, frogs legs… we had a trio of soups (mmm, pea soup with crab) and a trio of salads – really inventive things like pecan pie (with blue cheese ice cream), pigs in a blanket (with fried goat cheese and prosciutto) and muffaletta (yeah, like the sandwich). By the time we got to entrée we were stuffed, but we did manage to share a really nice piece of pork, and the desserts were not neglected in the form of crème brulee and a birthday decorated plate with candle. We drank a good – nay, great – bottle of wine, caught up on the previous three weeks and reveled in the fact that we could be regulars at such an amazing restaurant. Flyte. Reservations now accepted for anyone coming to visit.

I’m not particularly worried about turning 33 – I kind of like the double number – but it seems odd conceptually that I could be this old. I don’t think of myself as having an age, really – it isn’t how I define myself – but if pushed I think I might say I was 27. I’m thinking that’s not so true anymore. I wonder if I’ll always think I’m 27, or if when I’m in my 40s I’ll think I’m 33… either way, I’m intending to make this a stellar year, worthy of the double number. A friend recently suggested that we should make resolutions on our birthday rather than on New Year’s – a more personal fresh start. I like it, and I’m resolving, this year, to slow down, appreciate where I am (wherever that may be) and learn to be a little more content with what’s in front of me, rather than what’s behind or ahead. Oh, and I’m resolving to drink more cocktails on the screened porch. At least that way I can say, next summer, that I did well on at least some of my resolutions. Besides, the second might help the first!

Homesick

This is my third Friday in the office, and I’m homesick – but I don’t really know for where. Driving to work yesterday morning in the fresh California brightness, I looked up towards the mountains and had a physical pang of missing here. I’ve had my share, certainly, of missing people, but sitting in traffic on Fair Oaks (an unlikely place to miss any locale) I suddenly, violently, missed here.

I have a bad habit of being homesick before I leave on a trip. No matter how anticipated the adventure, I spend my pre-departure days moping and missing my home, my guinea pigs, my husband. Simple things like watering the flowers or finishing the peaches before they get mushy become monumentally important. I’m mopey and tired and whiny and for someone who likes to travel so much, I suspect I’m generally just a pain in the ass. Once I leave home, though, it ceases to exist for me and I find that I don’t miss it at all. This also, I’m sure, makes me a pain in the ass.

This trip started true to form: as much as I wanted to see all my California peeps, I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving home. I was just starting to feel settled. I had a garden to deal with, trees to be planted, walls to paint. Although the boxes are all unpacked, the house still isn’t even approaching finished, and I wanted to work on it. There was a home tour in Franklin that I wanted to take. And a horse show I wanted to see. And I was sure that the ONLY good vegetables of the summer would arrive and depart these three weeks that I was suffering in LA. I felt sorry for myself all the way here, through two delayed flights and a lack of dinner and an insufferably long four hour flight from Chicago, and then I got off the plane, saw Dana and was happy. Post-midnight hot dogs at Pinks, LA in the dark, the smell of the night flowers and the dramatic entrance of two fat raccoons – I hadn’t been here but two hours and I was happy. Tennessee was a faint memory. I know. I’m a pain in the ass.

The longer I’ve been here, though, the more I’ve missed my new home. I miss the stillness of the house, the green out the windows and the wild turkey. I miss the pleasantness of the people, the exploration of a new place, the fact that we aren’t the only people who stop to move errant turtles off the road. I miss the slower way of talking and being, and I miss the stillness in myself that I’ve only just begun to discover. I miss the guinea pigs, of course, and the sweet tea, and have I mentioned the green? I miss the green.

At the same time, if that is “newhome” this is still “home.” And I miss home too. I miss the cool overlay of summer mornings, when the birds call and the world seems still and fresh. I miss the rough outlines of the mountains, the abundance of great food of every variety. I miss knowing where I am going without thinking about it. Most of all, I miss people. I’ve started to think of the D-squared house as home, as in “when I get home” and “on my way home” and that comfortable tug of residence I feel when I walk in the door. I miss it already – I miss them already. I miss being a part of people’s daily lives, the easy in and out of conversations that are picked up and put down like magazines. I even walked through the office this week and vaguely (I know!) missed being here. I know, of course, that I’m going “newhome” on Monday, and part of me can’t wait. The other part of me is totally refusing to accept the idea that I’m leaving again, and goes about blithely making mental plans for stopping by so and so’s house, or doing a Disney evening, or eating sushi on Wednesday.

Three weeks seemed impossibly long, and now it feels impossibly short, and I realize now that you can’t, ever, go home again. I’m floating here, part way between what was and what will be, and I find myself a melancholy and not a little bit conflicted. I want, intensely, two different things and I know, inherently, that I can’t have both – my heart aches more than just a little. I can’t figure which place I miss more, the one I’m going back to, or the one I’m in now. All I really know is that a part of me is there, and a part of me is here, and I don’t know how to change that (or even, really, if I want to).

Déjà LA

I’ve been back in LA for a week, and in some ways, it feels like I never left. I walked into the office last Thursday and it was so familiar I wondered if I hadn’t been gone at all. Like a dream, the reality of Tennessee faded to a warm feeling and a faint imprint, and as I stared at the tiles in the bathroom, the patterns of the carpet, the (lack of) light in my cube I wondered where I’d been these two months.

Oddly, I don’t feel any pull to the old house. I haven’t once turned that way or felt a need to drive up the hill. My brain has accepted the idea that I don’t live there anymore -living here it isn’t as sure about. It follows, of course, that everything feels familiar; I lived here for almost six years, and around here for many more. California is a part of who I am, and coming back is slipping into my most comfortable pair of broken in running shoes, blister free. Tennessee, in all its green glory and languid charm, hasn’t yet made it to my bones. These, though, the concrete glare and the gray green of the palms, the brown faces of the mountains and the sun bleached look of the streets, the mix of cars and people and traffic and sound, the low hum of the freeway and the soft morning air scented with the calls of doves – these I claim as mine.

I’m enjoying myself: burning the candle at both ends and cramming as much in as I possibly can. I’m appreciating the multitude of freeways, options galore for going anywhere I want. I’ve seen the beach and the Mouse, eaten from the highest and lowest of tables (and been equally satisfied at both), worked and talked and laughed. I’ve been to the glitter of the west side, the quiet of South Pas, the congestion of the 5 as it winds through the bleak center of LA. I’m not thinking about home – where that might or might not be for me today, tomorrow, and tomorrow’s tomorrow. In the planning this seemed too long, this sojourn with los angeles, but now that it is melting into warm days and bright nights it seems that it could never be long enough. I met friends of a friend this past weekend who wanted to know where I was from – I couldn’t answer. I suspect that I won’t be able to for quite some time.

Know Thy Enemy

I’m pretty sure that anyone who knows me knows how I feel about snakes. Spiders I can live with. Bugs in general are an annoyance, but don’t turn me into a shrieking ninny. Lizards are interesting. But snakes? They simply won’t do. I prefer to refer to them as “snicks” since calling them by their proper name might, like Voldemort, summon them closer to me than I would like.

Tennessee has snakes. Most places have snakes, and unless I plan to move to Ireland or New Zealand (oh, now there’s a consideration!) I’m going to have to live with them. It isn’t as though California didn’t have snakes; Ojai is teeming with rattlesnakes and I’ve personally had to jump over at least one. Altadena was a bit less snake prone, but I saw a few on runs in and around Eaton Canyon, and I know they were there, lurking.

This weekend I got unpleasant confirmation that they are also HERE. Here as in, on the road that turns into our road. Here as in, about two miles from the house. Here as in, <shudder> closer than I am comfortable admitting.

Saturday was the hottest day we’ve had since we’ve moved, and I suppose the lure of the hot asphalt was too great for the curl of snake we saw partially run over on our way home from BBQ. I saw the lights glance over that unmistakable shape and made Mike back up so we could identify that (most importantly) it was dead and also what variety it might be. Never let it be said that I don’t face my fears. After confirming that it was expired and would not slither again, we all got out of the car and inched towards it. I made Mike take a photo with my phone (because while it was missing a head, and all, I wasn’t taking any chances) and then I got back in the car and locked the door because snakes these days have a nasty habit of rising from the dead and opening car doors. I closed and locked the garage door behind me once we were home, too, because you never know.

A quick Google search revealed that while Tennessee has four versions of noxious poisonous snicks, this one was merely a red corn snake (and a smallish one, at that). Of the four nasties, one rattler is rare enough to be endangered (what a pity) and the other isn’t likely to be found here. That leaves two, the Copperhead which, though bitey (accounting for most snake bites in TN) only rarely releases venom when biting humans and the Water Moccasin which makes up for the Copperhead’s relative kindness by being aggressive and snappish. The landscapers I’ve talked to say that seeing either here is rare; that I’d have to be a bit more rural to really have to worry, but I’ll be watching the ground and carrying a big stick anyway. And keeping the lawn mowed down, since low lawn = less rodents = less food source for snicks = less snicks.

I know that moving to the country comes with certain issues, wildlife and bugs and septic systems and snakes being some of the more obvious. I also know that snakes don’t want to see me as much as I don’t want to see them, and they are all part of the great balanced ecosystem and blah blah poppycakes wild creature, blah blah. I’m sorry to say that in the case of snakes, I just.don’t.care. I need someone who speaks parseltongue to broadcast a “stay away” message. Any volunteers?

Knee Deep in Birdseed

So I bought a bird feeder, and I'm turning into a bird person, which is odd. I did this in Africa, too – became obsessed with the birds though I swore I didn’t care about them. I claim the LBR defense, because once you’ve seen a Lilac Breasted Roller, you’d like birds too. Anyway, I've never had anything against birds, really (except for that mockingbird in Altadena a few years back, the one I dreamt up really elaborate schemes to kill until I found out they were protected, and then had to add a couple stealth steps to the already elaborate schemes, just to avoid jail time for killing something that kept me up all night). Wait. Where was I? Oh, right, I've always been neutral to birds, more or less. Except for that one bird that I need to stop thinking about. That mocking... never mind.

Birds. We have lots of them, and they come in all sorts of neat colors and varieties. Cardinals are my favorites, and I have one cheeky fellow who visits the kitchen window a couple times a day and looks at me. He wants birdseed, something I bought more of last night at the grocery, along with the Pringles and the ice cream and some other random thing that we don't need but bought because we've picked up the nasty habit of going to the grocery store hungry. But back to the birds. I started with a “Finch Sack” – essentially a tube of seeds that supposedly attract finches (what, is there a secret code that says, HOT FINCH LOVE HERE, NO BLUEBIRDS ALLOWED?) – and I hung it in one of the trees behind the house. There were a lot of fluttering flashes of yellow wings and a week later the sack was empty. The birds demanded more… so I moved up to a larger fixed feeder closer to the house, thinking that if I was going to feed the birds I at least deserved to see them. Mike hung it last week, but the first hanging didn’t go so well and he spilled birdseed all over the screened porch and the ground below. The birds have had a lovely buffet, and I had to buy more birdseed. I also found it in my hair when I took a shower, and in the cuffs of my jeans.

Messy stuff, birdseed. Granular, gets all over everything, attracts birds, which produce bird poops, which get all over everything. I’m understanding why Mike insisted that the bird feeder NOT be over the deck. Which is getting expanded, this week, to a patio as well. Like the birds I’m feeding, my head this week seems to be full of nothing but birdseed, but I did get the blog here spiffed up. Since Tennessee seems to be all green, I’ve reflected that here. And I added a couple of new bits and pieces: a page of all the food I’ve been cooking on the “cooktop of my dreams” aka the 6 burner Viking, a list of the wine we’ve been drinking, a link to a newly established Flickr site to show off my photos. I’m thinking about a reading list, too. And I FINALLY uploaded all the Route 66 photos to the album just over there to the left (<<- see it, over there?) and I labeled them, too. Poke around. Hit refresh on your browser. You might find yourself some birdseed, too.

Limbo (and not the kind with the stick)

I’m unpacked – but I’m not. I’m working – but not in an office. I’ve socialized here – but I don’t have any friends. I know where I’m going – but nothing is familiar. I live here – but I don’t. It sure is pretty – but I have left the holiday stage and moved into the where am  I and how did I get here stage, and oh! I think this might be culture shock.

It’s been a little more than a month since we pulled into the driveway for the first time, a milestone that passed me by without much notice. My mom came last week, and I was spending my pre-visit waking hours wondering how I could make it look nice in the house before she got here, and my visit hours obsessing about furniture, antiques and curtains as she and I went on “panel hunt 2008,” racking up $2000 of curtain purchases that she left me to return on my own. The living room windows now have panels, though, and yes mom they are even ironed and tabbed correctly. With all that going on, I vaguely noted that we’d been here a month, and moved on. A month! A month of boxes and furniture shopping and eating out and driving around. A month where we’ve seen all the trees turn from sticks to trees, where I’ve seen the dogwoods come and go, seen the lawn need mowing 5 or 6 times. A month where I’ve been in the honeymoon phase of moving: with a complete and obvious lack of routine, everything is fun and vacation-like. I feel no compunction to make my bed. I might as well eat out. Stay up till 1? Why not?

In the past few days, though, I’ve felt a shift towards normalcy. I’m tired of the bed being messy, of stepping over things that don’t yet have a home, of looking in a stocked pantry for something I want to eat and finding only sauces and canned fruit. It’s begun to irritate me that the hammer is never where I left it, or the measuring tape is gone again, or that there are boxes on the floor. I’m craving Mexican food, the one thing I can reliably NOT get here, and have been to Baja Fresh “because it tastes like home” twice in the past week. Mmmmm. A sure sign that I’ve entered the negotiation phase of culture shock. The different sausages at the grocery store are no longer amusing because, HELLO, the fish selection is miserable. I caught myself in the fish aisle the other day thinking “well, when I get back to LA at least I can go to … oh, shit.” Oh shit is right. There is no “back to LA” – not in a permanent sense, at least. And while there are a lot of good things here, I’m at an odd place where I’m taking them for granted and noticing the things I don’t want to.

It has been a little thunderstorm-y this week, and consequently oddly stuffy outside when the temp rises and before the rain falls. I go out there and feel prickly and miserable and wonder how I’ll ever be able to stand it. I don’t like that glasses with ice in them sweat so much, even in the house. I miss talking to people at work, am annoyed when Mike has a schedule that doesn’t mesh with mine – and then annoyed when he does, because I want to talk to someone other than him. The trash man has stopped taking our overdoses of boxes, and I am fretting about where they will go, and I still have more to unpack.

The last ten percent of any project is the hardest, and while I think I’m nowhere near only 10% left to do, I’ve reached a roadblock of hard with the house. I’m sick of unpacking, sick of not knowing where things will go, sick of envisioning furniture that isn’t here. I’m sick of working at the kitchen table, sick of things all over my counters, and really really sick of the boxes in my office, which mock me constantly and are going to get tossed in the trash if they don’t SHUT UP soon. I unpacked something on Wednesday that gave me the most horrid allergy; I woke at four am with a burning, runny nose and my eyes and the nose continued to drizzle all day yesterday. I seem to be on the mend today, but now I’m afraid of what will turn up as I continue to open boxes, and I don’t want to.

There’s the root of it. I don’t want to do any of this. With my office left to unpack, STILL, and most of the “decorative crap” that was in my hall closet now in boxes in my new hall, I have plenty left to do. Never mind that I have walls to paint, art to frame, curtains to order or make… rooms to decorate. Oh and a house to clean, because I keep wondering where the maids are, only to realize they are in LA and not coming. The boxes make me feel that I shouldn’t have to clean, they prevent me from doing what I want to do, which is decorate. I know they must be addressed, I do, but  I. Don’t. Want. To. Unpack. Them. On the other hand, I am itchy with displeasure that they are still there, that the house is a mess, that my friend will arrive tonight and see the house LOOKING LIKE THIS. And yet, I can’t seem to get off my kitchen chair and make it happen. I work during the day, and then, at night when I should be unpacking, I look at curtains online, or hunt for Chinoiserie wallpaper sites, or interesting stencils. None of which I can act on until I unpack. I’m procrastinating, and procrastinating makes me out of sorts. I know it isn’t good but I can’t shake it, and perversely I don’t even want to. I pick fights with poor Mike, because he’s here. I don’t go plant my berries, because I have to unpack boxes. I don’t make a plan, because I feel like everything is in chaos.

I’m prickly and crabby and generally in limbo, and there isn’t much I can do about it but wait it out, grit my teeth and unpack another *&%%$# box. And if that centipede comes back, so help me, I am getting on an anythingbutsouthbound train.

Bubbly

When we moved from the Bay Area to LA, I felt like I’d fallen into the land of friendly. People said hello instead of scowling at me in the grocery store! Sometimes people let me cut into traffic! Clearly, my expectations back then were too low, because Tennessee is all about friendly – Tennessee might even be the promised land of friendly. People talk to me. Everywhere. If, in Japan, I had to count on extra minutes for package wrapping and arigato-ing, here I need to count on extra minutes for general pleasantries. Years of LA have made me reflexively apologetic when I ask a question in stores, but here, I’ve learned that my opening gambit can no longer be “I’m sorry, can I ask you a question” but instead should be, simply, “hi, how are you today?” It takes a few sentences to get to the helping, question and answer part of any exchange, but it is such a pleasure to interact with people in this way that I don’t mind the extra time. Frankly, since I know no one here, I enjoy it – and amazingly enough, people seem to remember me when I go back to a store. I certainly complained about the brusqueness of people in LA (and the flat out rudeness of those in the Bay Area) but it never occurred to me that this gentler way of communicating would make such a material difference in my daily life.

Actually, a lot of this move has been that way. The reasons we listed for moving – slower pace of life, more space around us, friendlier people – all those things were theoretical. I knew I wanted them, but I had no idea that getting them would have an immediate and real impact on my state of mind. Every morning I look out the window here and marvel that this green space is mine. A bright orange beaked finch hangs out on our back porch and pecks at the windows. In the bush at the edge of the yard a cardinal is a daily beacon of red. A pair of blue birds (real! Bluebirds! Not Bluejays!) flits around the kitchen window where I work every day. There is a WILD TURKEY that pokes around the yard, and this morning we saw a pair of hawks in the trees, so big that they looked like feathered pterodactyls. Driving anywhere involves one or both of us marveling that it is just so pretty here. Having lived in California forever, the green is just a shock to my system, and I love the gentle landscape and the soft air. There are dogwood trees blooming on every corner, and while the cherry blossoms that we saw when we got here were beautiful (sakura! In Tennessee!) the dogwoods last longer, and I’ve been enjoying them for a week. I like them so much that I can’t pass one without commenting, and seeing them fills me with an undefined sort of joy that seems silly over a tree.

Our accents mark us as not from around here, and most people are curious as to where we came from and why. Most wonder if we didn’t move “for Nissan” or some other work, and our answer to “why are you here” tends to be “because we really like it.” It is a good answer, both in its truth for us and in its effect on the asker. Interestingly it is usually met with “yeah, isn’t it great/wonderful/beautiful” here. Yes, indeed, it is. I feel lucky to be here, lucky to have been able to make this choice, lucky to have found this little corner of America, lucky that it even exists. Lucky, too, that people are nice to us, more of these Californians who, by all accounts, keep showing up. Regardless of their private opinions, though, people are gracious, and no one has given us anything but positive encouragement about our arrival. Bette yet, they seem to think my exclamatory parenthetical asides (which I’d love to say remain inner dialog but have to admit slip out regularly) are as charming as I find their accents. “Look at the California girl get all excited” read the thought bubbles over their heads. Apparently my enthusiasm is amusing. Even the delivery guys are friendly and chatty, and the mailman (who arrives with our “rural route” mail in a beat up station wagon) waves when he see us. One of the landscape guys eyed me after we had talked for a while said commented that he “thought he saw a country girl in there somewhere.” I get the sense that we’re welcome as long as we keep in mind what makes it great here, and make an effort to not be total city folk. Little things, all of them, but taken together, well, I’m drinking stars.

Last night we went into Franklin for a drinks and starters sort of progressive dinner on Main Street. People were out walking around, having dinner and eating ice cream and talking to all the people they ran into, as everyone seemed to know everyone else. The air was soft and warm and there were couples strolling arm in arm, window shopping and chatting. The local trolley dropped people off, and kids played outside the ice cream store and I thought, good grief, I’ve moved to Ojai of the South. Again, a feeling welled up in that place in my chest where feelings well, though unlike the tight tears of the move process, this one was all bubbles –  I’m standing in a grove of dogwoods and it is Saturday morning and I don’t have to get out of bed, the sun is shining and I have wonderful plans for the afternoon. During all my pre-move agony, those dark days where Mike didn’t know what to do with me and Linda put up with a lot of hand wringing, Anna pointed out that I was scared because I might actually be getting something I wanted, and I wasn’t sure I deserved it. Now that I’m here I know she was right. I didn’t really know what exactly it was that I wanted (and honestly I’m not sure I could delineate it, even now) but I do know that in being here, I’ve gotten it, and for that I am thankful every day.

Adventures in Moving

I’ve learned more about long haul trucking in the past week than I ever considered. My car, our earthly belongings and our freezer full of 4-H meat all came separately. Things we’ve bought (like refridgerators) get delivered to the house. Other things get shoved into Mike’s car, and thank goodness for the split folding rear seat option. Basically, our house is some sort of delivery depot these days. I feel like I should set up a loading dock.

Actually, I shouldn’t take credit for that idea – that came direct from the frozen freight guy, who refused to understand that this was a private shipment, that we were not a company, and that the meat he was hauling needed to come to a residence, not a storage facility. It took three or four phone calls back and forth before Mike was able to convince him that really, we didn’t have a fork lift – and no, we didn’t have a friend we could borrow one from. Because he was convinced he couldn’t get his “rig” into our neighborhood, we met him at the truck stop – where it was no trouble finding his glittery teal semi. A woman and an excitable bouncing animal sat in the cab while I climbed up in the back of the refrigerator trailer. Look, he moaned, this is why I couldn’t move your stuff out. You’re blocked by a pallet of salami. He lifted the heavy curtain and arctic air whooshed out – clearly, our meat was in the same deep freeze state as the tuna at Tsukiji in Tokyo. He passed me the boxes, complaining of their weight, while I passed them down to Mike who stowed them in the amazing expanding sedan. 8 cubic feet later, we were headed home, and our crazy trucker was taking his salami to Atlanta.

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We used Mayflower for our stuff – I kept thinking of those moving van commercials they played on TV when I was a kid, where the family with their two kids and dog move to a beautiful new house with a swing out front and the movers bring the little girl’s teddy bear off the truck first. Yeeeah, notsomuch. They did a good job, really, but the soft focus camera work blocks the reality of dripping with sweat guys packing up your sheets and underwear. Our driver was a really nice guy – he’s a contractor for Mayflower and owns his own truck, which was huge and sparking clean. I was fascinated with the whole process and bugged poor Earl to talk to me about trucking. He’s got to coordinate multiple deliveries, teams at both ends and the physical packing of cramming people’s stuff into the truck. Pretty impressive all around. Have I mentioned we have too much stuff? We do. Picture a big 18-wheeler Mayflower truck whooshing past you on the freeway – now picture that our stuff took up the entire “flower” portion of the truck. Mmm hmmm. When it pulled up last week I asked Mike if maybe they could unload just a couple things I really want and take the rest away. No go. Of course, we almost got the trailer too, since the truck broke, had to be towed away – and the tow truck couldn’t maneuver the cab plus the trailer out our neighborhood entrance. The trailer stayed out front for a day, and I had nightmares that they’d show up the next morning only to discover that we had another load of stuff on it that had to come in the house. I don't think we'd get it in the door:

Having someone else pack for us was a blessing, but during the unpacking it is turning into a curse. The labels on the boxes are proving to be rather … suspect. In more ways than one. We have more boxes than I know what to do with, and even though I’ve unpacked 50 or so, it seems like I haven’t made a dent. Our dining room looks like the back room of an illegal liquor store, and I fear that the Geepers are high from the fumes:

The bedroom, bathroom and closet are basically done (though organizing a new closet that is configured differently than the old one is harder than I thought it would be) so I thought I should start on the kitchen. I looked at all the boxes and carefully chose the one labeled “plates-cups.” It contained this:

This is most of the contents of the box labeled “pots”:

While my perfume traveled in a box with not one bit of padding, the canned food moved cross-country in style, plushly wrapped in 5 sheets of moving paper. Now it rests (again, plushly) in its new, spacious and wow did it take a long time to do this shelf papered pantry:

Every box I open in the kitchen is a surprise. Nothing is labeled to indicate what is really IN the box, and, non-coffee drinkers that we are, we seem to have acquired a large number of coffee makers and grinders – if the boxes are to be believed. I’m realizing that I’m going to have to open all the boxes, put everything on the floor and only THEN start putting it away. I would be lying if I said this pleased me. At this rate, the entire operation is making me want to reach for this box:

That Southbound Passenger Train

We’re hoping the guinea pigs survive the move. Up until this morning, it was me I was worried about, but having two wheeking dependants who suddenly seem heart-attack prone is a good distraction from all the aching my own heart is doing. Mike put them in their travel cage where they promptly began WWIII and pushed their little hearts to the limit – suddenly, with less than 24 hours till departure, we’re going to have to create a better mobile guinea environment.

Less than 24 hours seems so imminent, but it still doesn’t seem real. We don’t own our house anymore and what we DO own is boxed to the nth degree. I’ve had to borrow clothes in order to show up at the office appropriately dressed, and the car is packed to the brim with the items the movers won’t take (the danger of nail polish has been filed for future reference) or that we don’t want them to take (because my scrapbooks just can’t be replaced). We’ve got everything in order, with services in Altadena ending tomorrow and services in Franklin starting sometime before our arrival on Tuesday. And yet. Yet… Franklin? Tennessee? Am I really moving 2000 miles from everything and everyone I know? I can’t picture myself there, not really. It seems like a book I’ve heard someone talk about but haven’t read myself…. I know there is a great passage about watching fireflies at dusk from a screened in porch, but I don’t really know how the words go.

The more people ask me why now, why there, why move? the harder I find it to answer. Like any monumental decision, the real reasons run quiet and deep and I know that people don’t actually want to hear them. Sometimes I can’t hear them either, buried under the emotional clamor and reassuring words. Why are we moving? Why to Tennessee? I suppose the simple answer is that we are ready for a change, not in our friends or our amusement or even our city, really, but in us. A quiet but insistent part of me wants to put down deep roots of my own choosing, to slow down and enjoy the simple act of turning my face towards the sun. Franklin is a small town. We’re getting two acres that back up to a lonely railroad line and a lot of farms. People say ‘hi, how are ya’ in the grocery store and actually wait to hear the answer. We’re buying ourselves (along with a house) the flexibility to try a few things, live a little more simply, take chances – or to simply enjoy the days, drinking sweet tea on the porch. I feel as though I am getting a little hedge against the future, should it turn darker.

I love LA. I love our friends here, and the life that we’ve built, and I like the idea of myself here. I won't pretend that this is not achingly hard, these 2000 miles looming between me and people that I love. But I have a strong feeling that if we don’t do this now, we never will. That’s a hard one to explain, because if I love it – why would I leave it? Again I return that quiet part of me that wants … something. Something different. Just, something. The longer we stay here, the more settled we’ll become, and as many places as we’ve traveled, I don’t want to look back and wish that I had lived elsewhere, built a part of me with a different setting. As for Tennessee, we both looked out the car window in Franklin a couple of years ago and said, hey, I could see us here. Sometimes the real answer is that simple.

And oddly, though I am - very much - a product of Southern California, I feel a pull towards the South. Like my nose and my patience and my sense of humor, I blame Bob. Somewhere in these Jones genes, something is telling me to get on that Southbound train. Buy that ticket, it says. As long as your arm. Put the shovel to the coal. Watch the driver roll.

I’m listening.