one downpour or another
My local coffee shop just started Summer Hours, which means I can walk six blocks from my new front door and eat a lemon bar on a sofa while listening to a band in the company of assorted Portlanders, until midnight. Which is what I am doing right now.
The down side of my new house is that it is very College. It’s exactly the house I would have wanted to live in eight years ago. While not one but three of my friend couples have this very month moved into new and improved abodes (congratulations Lauren & Marc, Kira & Andrew, Beth & Sarah!) I am taking a rather significant leap backwards, into a large but noticeably decrepit domicile with peeling paint and dusty furniture and (ACK) posters taped to the walls. This is officially Not Where I Want To Be At This Point In My Life. Not that I’ve had some white picket fantasy brewing since puberty, but I wouldn’t mind unpacking my grandmother’s dishes with the little orange and yellow flowers. I wouldn’t mind a garage for making stuff. I wouldn’t mind a place for a canoe.
In the mean time I’m living in something of a hippie house, which actually is surprisingly fine. I don’t love the décor but the folks seem so far rather delightful, and it is if nothing else a Portland Experience. Mine are not the only jars of bulk-bought dry goods in the pantry.
And we don’t have a washing machine or wireless or one of the clawfoot tubs I quickly grew used to, but we are within five minutes walking distance of the following things: At least three great, open late, coffee shops. At least six bars I like, half with regular good live music. Pix Patisserie for fancy desserts. Pied Cow for unfancy desserts. Powell’s used books eastside branch. Thai. Brunch. Laughing Planet veggie food. My favorite pizza in town. A permanent tent-style local produce market. Two cut-rate independent movie theaters, both of which serve beer. Gelato.
So tonight I did what I imagine I will do most evenings in the coming months: packed a bag with a book and a bunch of pens and strolled out into summer. Ate a slice and wrote letters. Chatted with the girl behind the coffee counter. Read Nabokov by sunlight at seven. And now I’m tapping on my laptop while a guitar/xylophone duo plays the Beatles and hits from the eighties.
So this change was unwelcome and unwanted and I can’t say I’ve fully unloaded my bitter about it, but I’m willing to accept that it wasn’t necessarily bad. It was challenging and demanding and more than I wanted to handle, but here I am on the other side with a lemon bar and a whole new neighborhood, and it’s not even June. Did I mention the gelato? Did I mention the xylophone?
anthem
All day Friday and Saturday and Sunday while I was packing and moving and unpacking boxes, what I wanted to be doing was camping, because it’s a long weekend and it was clear and beautiful, and because when I’m feeling uncentered it’s good for me to sleep under the stars. But the moving needed to happen, so it did.
Today, however, I left the stacks of boxes unattended and headed to the Columbia River Gorge, which was about as green as green gets. Joshua and I took one of those ambling plant geek hikes that drive other hikers crazy, stopping every ten yards to poke into the trailside: miner’s lettuce, cow parsnip, maidenhair fern, columbine. Plant names are near as magical as place names, and ever since I learned them I feel in on a marvelous secret. Now when I walk through the woods whispering, the woods whisper back. Trillium. Elderberry. Oceanspray.
We accidentally looped back to the car far too soon, so we drove on up the old highway to find a second adventure. A short break at a popular vista turned into two hours of people watching as the holiday crowds pulled their Jeeps and Suburbans and Harleys off the road, speaking (at last count) six different languages, dressed in saris and T-shirts and leather, taking photos with each other in various permutations. I couldn’t think of a more American way to spend Memorial Day.
Eventually we headed west again to Portland, where my new housemates were hosting an invasive plant removal kegger. Another good omen, I think. I untangled morning glory from the raspberries while Kyle expanded the fire pit and armies of one of my housie’s former Americorps colleagues dug up bluebells and ivy. Then we all sat around the burning brush with our vegetarian bratwursts and our nut brown ales until dark.
And here it is practically June, and here I am in a new house, and here we all are getting older and trying not to be bowled over by this new wave of decisions about what’s next – decisions that seem to be hitting half or more of the people I know right now about moving and working and family, decisions we are all trying to make and make well, though few of us remember seeking them out. And this is the motto of 2007, I think – not the motto I chose but the one that made itself known somewhere between noon on Larch Mountain and the smoky summernight sky.
Ready Or Not.
interstitial space
The first load was three bookcases and fourteen boxes of books, and then we took a break for coffee and a smoothie and a cinnamon roll at the coffee shop that now, I think, will be my coffee shop. And that’s how Moving Day started.
Back when I lived in New York City, one load might have done it. But I gained some weight in grad school, books and art supplies mostly, and then when I moved into this big empty house in the fall I found chairs and a chest and a table. So all week I have been shedding pounds. Craigslisters got my cassette tapes and my back issues of The Sun. Buffalo Exchange got a bag of clothes. Powell’s got a shelf of books. I went through my files folder by folder, painstakingly pulling out outdated essays and posters from Nader’s first run. But still I am heavier than I used to be, three loads heavy, plus two tables and two boxes of dishes in the basement of the house where I no longer live.
Melissa and Julie came up from Eugene just to move me, and I don’t know what I would have done otherwise. Cried a lot, mostly. But instead we wore hats and sang on the stairs, and they loaded while I folded, and after the third run we ate cake. They brought me a tomato plant and a pepper and some basil, and a bottle of wine called House Wine. Melissa and Julie are how I got through this day.
And they insisted, between trips, when the truck was already full and we were speeding from old house to new, that we stop at garage sales, where Melissa found glass goblets and Julie found two-dollar patio chairs, and I found an Elijah’s cup for next Passover. And I also found a down comforter, being sold by a girl moving to Syracuse for art school, and this was the best omen of all. Because I went shopping with Disaster for his comforter and I’ve coveted it ever since. Not to mention my new house has no bed. So this is a good start.
Tomorrow I will unpack my new room, and I will take a break to settle in my little plants, and by next week perhaps I will know my new housemates better and it will start to feel like home. Tonight, though, it didn’t, so I came back here to my old house, even though everything is gone and everyone is away. I’m drinking the last of my gin on the couch I helped pick out. It’s quiet and empty here, but it still feels familiar and safe. I still just want to stay.
sowing
I got a text this morning that said: just read blog for first time in a while. Damn. I miss happy / fearless jenn.
As do I. It has not been the best couple weeks, neither happy nor fearless. And what I can say is that I’m ok with that; that ninety-five percent of the time I feel well above average on the happy-fearless scale, so it’s only fair that some weeks go like these. It’s unavoidable, and in any case it’s also sort of exquisite. Residing way up on the other end of the scale thrills me with its fullness, but this, too, overflows. I feel very clean from all the crying. I’ve written some things I like. I’ve spent a lot of time awake, and the middle of the night is beautiful, even when you’re sad.
Did things not work out with the idiot boy? wrote Talley. Alas, they did not. So here I am again at the beginning of a summer that I somehow let myself have specific ideas about – simple ideas about bluegrass and breakfasts. And I am reminded of the long drive last year from Quebec City back to the airport in Portland Maine after the failed Frenchie Adventure, and how I sat in the passenger seat with my foot out the window and the music playing loudly, and how I thought, Really? Really you don’t just want to forget all this silliness about not liking me and instead drive to Montreal and sit at a café and feel filled with luck? Because it always seems to me, at times like these, that the joy is so ready and waiting, and that one has to go out of one’s way to miss it.
And this time around I'm staring at Disaster, thinking Really? Really you don’t just want to revel in the pleasures of a Portland summer with me? What would be difficult about that? How would it be better otherwise? And the answer, I guess, is that I’m just not the person he wants to revel with, and I recognize the conceit of finding that so strange. It’s just that I feel such joy at sharing good things with him when he’s not being Disastrous, and sharing them with him is to me so clearly preferable. But I suppose we do not love people in order for them to love us back. We just love them if we do, and it comes with no other promises, and it is in itself Enough.
And likewise we do not garden just for the eggplants (though if they come it is near as marvelous as being loved in return) so this afternoon I pulled the weeds from the pea trellis and cleared a spot for the cukes. This will not be my harvest but I was happy for the quiet and the smell of the dirt.
Emilee emailed me my horoscope and it said that I should radiate faith in all directions. I think I’m up for that again. I’ll likely still cry a few more times, when I’m packing and when I have the first Sunday paper all to myself and when I have a good bike ride and think that would have been more fun with the boy. But one can hardly write off a summer that’s not even started yet, celestially, and here I am again saying What Would I Have Done Differently? Nothing I can think of. All of it was worth the possibility, all of it was new and grand.
any day now
The guys to my right are talking about Cuba – Sandinistas and Batista and lots of shit they’re getting wrong – and the girls to my left are saying that everyone in Portland is average, and I’m twisted around on my barstool watching the couple play pool: the woman with long curly hair that falls onto the table when she shoots, and the man who looks at her adoringly but is about to win anyway. And I haven’t bought my own beer since the first one, and now I’m scribbling on a napkin, which feels cliché and lame, but it’s too gross to cry in a bar and I can’t go home to my laptop because my housemates are there finding a new housemate right now.
And here I am back home, and the back door was open cause I guess they were showing off the garden, and most of us learn sooner or later that everyone is replaceable, it’s the kind of terrible lesson you wish you’d never learned, but the sooner you learn it the better so that you can get busy forgetting it. It’s a lesson that does no good. I mostly want to puke right now. But I have nothing left in me tonight, not gusto and not goodwill and not the smallest fight.
once more with feeling
The roses are blooming in front of my house, and the daphne and the hydrangea and the irises and the last of the lilac, and I am inside sorting through papers and preparing to pack. I am so fucking sick of moving.
I don’t know how many times I’ve moved in the past ten years but it’s more than a dozen; I lived in four apartments in Brooklyn and three houses in Eugene, interrupted by long stretches out of my backpack. I moved during my six months in Amsterdam. I’m good at moving. My clothes all fit in an army duffle bag and I don’t have a bed and I can position boxes in a truck so that not one cubic foot of space is wasted. And I am sick of moving. I am fucking sick of moving.
Last summer exhausted my rootlessness, and I’ve had no time to recover. I just want to be somewhere. I want to have my glass jars of rice and almonds in the kitchen. I want to grow tomatoes. I want to find it worthwhile to meet my neighbors.
And where I want to be is here. There are grape vines already blooming, and I wanted to learn to make wine. I have a room painted green with three windows and an oddly shaped door. And for two weeks now I have been touring a hundred houses where I don’t want to live – houses with no porches and no gardens, houses where my books will live in boxes. And it sucks. And every time I think of it I feel like crying.
I’m sorry this has become such a bleak blog of late. I keep getting concerned calls and emails, and Kira sent me chocolates. And I know that moving might very well help me snap out of this ridiculous, pointless funk. And I promise that I’m fine. I just had this idea about Portland, that maybe for a change I would not just run away when things were tricky, maybe I could just stay somewhere long enough to spend my time not figuring out the next move but enjoying the space I am in. And I guess that’s a skill as much as any other, and I’m still learning it, and learning is slow and hard. Between all the recent new jobs and new people, I don’t know how much more learning I have in me just now. I’d like a moratorium on personal growth. I’d like to focus for a while on growth that is easy, and peaceful. Growth of my sunflowers. Marjoram. Peas.
may i
I woke up in Carmel, a small touristy town south of San Francisco that I keep calling Carvel, like the ice cream place. Except it has less ice cream and more bed & breakfasts and more boutique malls with obnoxiously patterened capri pants and more bad art. Oh, So Very Much Bad Art, one would hardly think it could all fit in one small town.Tuesday night I was in Portland and I sat on the sunny patio of the Laurelthirst listening to bluegrass and drinking cold Rainiers and playing Christmas Trivia with my friends (because Christmas Trivia was thoughtfully provided by the establishment), and Wednesday night I caught up with some long lost UO folks and ate pizza and went squaredancing. And I was so full of Portland spring, the kind you knew had to be coming, the thoughts of which kept you going through month after month of rain. And there it was, in glorious force, so much spring that I biked with no helmet just to feel the sun on my hair, so much spring that everyone's in flip flops, so much spring that the onion tops have sprung upward at an astounding rate and the grape leaves are unfurling. One waits for Portland spring so long, and so fervently there in the end, and even still after all that fantasy it exceeds expectations.So there is no reason to leave a Portland spring, no good reason I can think of. But my parents were flying out to San Francisco to visit family and I haven't been east in inexcusably long, so here I am, for four days. Here in this beautiful city that never grows on me, a city I always enjoy visiting and never long to return to. San Francisco is neither here nor there for me, not exotic and not familiar, not late like New York and not loose like California. And I don't mean to insult it, because I know many people who belong here or have belonged here for some important period of their lives, and I wouldn't argue with any of the good things you might say about it. But it's not a city for me.The city for me, right now, is Portland, and I can feel it right there one state to the north; I am jittery and longing for it like sitting three rows behind the person I just stayed up all night thinking about. I want to bike out to the edges of the Springwater Trail. I want to walk up Belmont on a warm Saturday night and find a fruity drink. I want to go hiking by a river, hiking until I am hot and tired, and I want to jump into the freezing water and sit on a warm rock to dry. I want to walk through First Friday and Third Thursday and all the other outside summer night festivals, and hear music at the zoo, and play bocce in the park. I want to make limeade and drink it on my porch.But for today I'm in The Bay and its surroundings, driving past vineyards and orchards and dry purple hills, eating cherries at a roadside stand. And it's lovely, really, and I don't mean to take it for granted. But sometimes, every so often, and oftener if you're smart, you know exactly where you want to be - and everywhere else, alluring as it is, isn't there.
hunger
Since Friday afternoon I have eaten a few tablespoons of yogurt, a poached egg, a bowl of popcorn, a bagel (one half with grape jelly), two popsicles, and a cup of oatmeal. This is the sort of menu that I would typically consume during, say, the course of a DVD viewing. But though my stomach bug passed quickly, my stomach itself seems reluctant to let go of the memory. I am not hungry. Eating makes me feel, if anything, uneasy.
I don’t have a scale but I’m pretty sure I’ve lost some weight. My rings are rattling around on my fingers and my skirts are falling even farther down on my hips than usual. This irks me. I don’t like feeling slight. Yoga bodies are beautiful but I do not find them enviable, I do not aspire to one. I prefer a body that would get me up a mountain, and then survive a few days there if I couldn’t get down. I like my body not to break when I drop it. I like it to be warm on May nights in short sleeves.
On the plus side the lack of calories has filled me with increased and unpredictably aimed intensity. Yesterday at work, after recovering from the bike ride in that nearly caused me to pass out, I raced through a long list of tasks. And then, just as suddenly, midday, I left without telling anyone, biked home (wobbly), and painted for three hours. I was so angry. It was fabulous. I love best of all the things I make when I’ve lost it. They always leave me feeling so redeemed.
Unfortunately I miss the casual, un-dizzy mobility of full nutrition, so I’m easing back in. By Thursday I’ll probably be back to sneaking bacon, and I probably won’t be dreaming so vividly or crying in the middle of pop songs or writing long letters full of what I mean but don’t say. It’s such a balance, this life, between wondrous things. I think I know that even when I’m fed.
Sicko de Mayo
While many Portlanders spent Friday night celebrating pseudoMexican heritage with margaritas and mariachi, I caught a stomach bug and spent Friday night puking up all of my internal organs. I think I still have a spine. When I wasn’t puking I was shivering under my covers with feverish nightmares about unpleasant food, accented by the sound of fireworks drifting in my window from the waterfront.
I haven’t been good and sick in quite a while, for which I am tremendously grateful. It is alarming how quickly one can feel betrayed by one’s own body. A body that on any average day is synonymous with oneself, but that then suddenly becomes separate and sinister. I have surprising resolve in the face of many Big Things, and my own illness is not one of them.
Yesterday was a day of waiting it out, because reading and talking and listening and any sort of movement made me hurt, and my fever came and went in waves. At ten in the morning I guessed it was four in the afternoon. On the plus side my housemate juggled for me.
I drank cold gingerale and flat Coke and frozen cubes of green Gatorade like my mom used to make when I stayed home sick from school, and later in the evening when noise was not so jarring I watched many episodes of the Office. It wasn’t the festive weekend I’d hoped for but at least I’m coming out of it in one ninety-eight degree piece. One day soon I may even eat solid food again. Tamales, perhaps. But maybe just rice.
Wednesday Morning, 5 a.m.
At five it’s just the truckers on the road – trash trucks and delivery trucks banging by me, on the sidewalk, headed for the bus stop. Last night at one the rain against my window woke me, and I realized my plan to bike to Celia’s this morning needed a Plan B, so I opened my laptop in the dark and found the bus schedule. Then I woke up every twenty minutes until 4:45, certain that I’d overslept.
The streets are empty but the bus is half-full, and it stops every other block to pick up folks huddled in the shadowy shelters. It’s still dark at five on a Portland morning, even in May.
I get off at Sandy and walk eight blocks east under my umbrella. I used to loathe umbrellas. When I lived in New York umbrellas represented so much of what drove me away: expensive haircuts and dry-clean-only wardrobes and not sharing space. Eight million people frantic with keeping themselves dry, even though it meant shoving metal spikes into the eyes of everyone else. We’re all allowed to be hyperbolic and self-righteous in college, right?
But now I live in Portland, and I love umbrellas. The umbrella lets me take long long walks in the beautiful northwest rain and still arrive fit to serve coffee. It does not make me hot like a raincoat, and it is not some two hundred dollar status symbol of camping credibility. An umbrella is not gear. An umbrellas is simple and effective and poetic.
At Celia’s I unlock the door and turn on the lights and say Good Morning as I always do, and I start the burners under the teapots. I grind three kinds of coffee for French pressing and I fill the cream pitcher and the soy milk pitcher and the water pitcher, the last with ice and three slices of cucumber. On mornings that are stressful or sleepy I plug in the radio. Today I plug it in.
Celia’s is steamy and fragrant and full of good sounds – the whistling kettles and the grinding beans and the beeping of the press timer. Bev arrives at six fifteen and I take out the café tables and bring in the fresh pile of Willamette Weeks and place the stools in front of the counter. I pull open the blinds and spread the Oregonian out on a table and I flip the switch for the neon sign that flashes Open in blue and red.
And then there are customers, fabulous customers ordering three shot Americanos in a twelve ounce cup or nonfat vanilla lattes or Mexican mochas no whip, but I can’t begin to talk about them here. Each of them would take an hour at least to tell you about: she gets Coke with her bagel, he brings coffee back to his wife home with the new babies, she looks happy and peaceful and hopeful, every morning.
And hours later Bev gives me spoiling bananas for banana bread and soup for my housemates and cookies that didn’t sell, and I walk home in a shower that turns into a hailstorm, thunder and wind and ice falling from the sky, so that my jeans are soaked to my knees and my Docs are leaking and car alarms are going off around me. And I am glad for my warm morning. (And my umbrella.)
