seasoning
Things really got interesting the morning my toilet froze.
It had started with a thin sheet of ice on the surface of the water in the bowl. But by morning it was solid. Not just the water in the bowl but also the water in the tank – frozen into one big block with the black plastic buoy suspended in the center.
We are having a cold snap in Portland. I didn’t worry much about this kind of cold when I got my woodstove. We don’t usually have this kind of cold. When I say that, I don’t mean that we have it only once or twice a winter. What I mean is that years and years go by, decades even, without Portland seeing a temperature in the teens. We are in a valley between mountains. We are wet, but we are temperate.
Once in a while it will snow. It will snow weakly and unconvincingly and the flakes will melt on contact, leaving the same wet pavement we all expect from November to May. Snow on the ground is something Portlanders drive east for.
This year, though, it started falling fast the week before Christmas, and then it just kept falling. A dusting and then an inch and then more than we knew how to count, and it didn’t disappear. It covered our cars and our porch steps and our crosswalks and we stood around and stared. Because surely it couldn’t last.
Then the temperatures dipped to the twenties, and stayed there. Everyone was at a loss. We do not have plows in Portland. We don’t have salt trucks, because of the salmon. We don’t have snow tires. We wrapped ourselves up in puffy layers of outerwear, the likes of which I’ve never seen on the west coast. Where did all these coats and boots possibly come from? And we set out on foot, haltingly navigating to the store, smiling stupidly.
Portland Public Schools were closed for days. The mayor sent us home from work. Stores sold out of chains and windshield scrapers. Buses skidded out across intersections. The citywide transportation information hotline went dead.
And then my toilet froze. Oddly – luckily, perplexingly – my pipes did not burst. They did not burst even though some of them run uninsulated outside the house, and uninsulated in the crawl space, and uninsulated through my bathroom – which, when I am not home stoking a fire, is more or less the same temperature as my yard.
Did I mention yet that I ran out of wood? I was waiting on a load that fell through, and by the time I called around to order a new cord, the storm had hit. Increased demand and impassable roads made waitlists two weeks long. I fished out my space heater, and my wool socks. It’s not so bad, I think. People lived here for a long time without furnaces. My only concern came the morning I woke up to find my boots, abandoned the night before in the hall, still caked in snow.
Today, though, it seems to officially be coming to an end. Current precipitation is wholly liquid, and the ten-day sits squarely in the forties. Soon I will have a new load of oak and fir, and I will not make that particular procrastination mistake again. In the mean time I have a renewed appreciation for my hot water heater, and for fleece, and for flushing.
let there be
My dining room – the center of my house, and a place where I pay bills, and wrap gifts, and occasionally even dine – has a single light fixture, a small old chandelier with five candle-shaped bulbs. Two of these bulbs have been out since I moved in. When a third popped off last week the room became rather undeniably dark.
When I say “last week” I mean, of course, early November.
Yesterday I finally arrived at the store with a tiny sketch of the needed bulb. An easy enough assignment. But I’ve been diligently switching to compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and so I tried first to find some of those. CFLs use less electricity and last longer. Switching to CFLs is the single easiest thing that everyone can do to get greener.
But if your fixture has a dim feature (which mine does) you need special dimmable CFLs. And some CFLs have terrible light quality, so it’s important to find bulbs with the EnergyStar logo so you don’t get crappy light. Frustratingly the candle-shaped bulbs at this particular store came in either (a) non-dimmable EnergyStar or (b) non-EnergyStar dimmable, and neither was what I wanted.
Furthermore the CFL candle bulbs were $8 each. At $3 for a four-pack of conventional bulbs, spending $40 to light a single fixture felt absurd, even if it would pay for itself within my natural life. Plus the non-candle-shaped CFL bulbs were $4, which felt unfair.
But the conventional bulbs looked all fragile and Made In China, like they were engineered to be thrown away and replaced. They felt wasteful and short-sighted. They felt like the cheap package you were supposed to pick up without further thought, which itself felt like a problem.
So I stood there paralyzed, staring at an assortment of equally inappropriate bulbs and unsure of what to do. I think I stood there a long time.
And I tell you this now not to illustrate the thoughtfulness I put into my purchasing or to educate you about new lightbulb technology, but to remind you that we are all, every one of us, Occasionally Crazy. I stood there with my hands full of lightbulbs as if this decision might Change the Course of History.
I have friends with filthy kitchens because they are driven to clean their kitchens so thoroughly that any cleaning short of a complete cleaning is futile. I have friends who write down their odometer reading in a tiny little glovebox notebook each time they get gasoline. I have friends who mow their lawns in specific patterns, so that the grass doesn’t get smushed down unevenly.
And once in a while, when I witness these ordinary insanities, I find myself rolling my eyes. Wouldn’t a slightly clean kitchen be better than this abomination? I silently wonder. Or, Have you ever even looked in that notebook for any purposeful reason? Or Patterns in your lawn? Seriously?
And then the universe sends me to the electrical aisle at ten thirty on a Thursday night and fills my hands with lightbulbs, that I might become fraught with indecision. That I might face my own Inner Crazy, and remember why it is there.
It is there, for me, right now, because apparently I am craving a feeling of control. Much of my life feels out of my hands but This, this I can do – I can choose the proper lightbulb. I can weigh my options carefully and make the choice that is Right, and it will go just as I plan.
Sometimes it’s there for other reasons. Sometimes we clean or record or mow to feel competent or wise or of consequence. Crazy can be all kinds of useful. And what am I hoping for, anyway, when I wish it away? A world where we all make optimized reasonable decisions based on efficiency? A world where we only think about important things, all the time? Which things are those?
I bought the $3 four-pack. I didn’t feel great about it but I came home and got up on a chair and put them in. I figured out that two of the three dark bulbs weren’t actually burned out at all – just improperly adjusted. I’m sure there’s a lesson there too but mostly it just started me laughing, long and loud in my empty, bright room.
you came along just then
I could date a boy named Malachi, I thought, when the guitarist introduced the drummer of that name at the Friday night show being held in honor of the end of Prohibition. A Repeal Party, it was called, which I’d never heard of.
We had been on our way to 80s night, actually, but then Allie had heard that this guitarist she adored was playing at the Bagdad. So there I was drinking three dollar whiskey, surrounded by flappers and fedoras in my leg warmers and off-the-shoulder tee.
I wasn’t interested in that specific Malachi. The thought just entered my head unbidden that I could date a Malachi. And I remembered a few years ago in an Anchorage kitchen telling my friend about my plans to fly to Quebec for a boy I hardly knew, whom I’d met years before while backpacking and who invited me to visit via instant messenger. And the friend, happily married, told me that this was the one thing she missed: random and unexpected romance. Possibility.
Malachi, I thought. I rolled the name around in my mouth like a foreign airport.
I have spent the past year in an unfamiliar world of wanting. It might have to do with all of the babies I have witnessed – warm, sweet babies in the lives of people my age. Or it might have to do with this house I now own, the way it is too big for one person, and how scary it is to use the ladder alone. It might have to do with the entrance into my life of a man who seemed as intriguing as keeping my options open.
In any case there I was wanting, and not getting at all what I wanted. There was a lot of sadness.
Since things ended I have been remembering what it was I did before all that wanting. Namely, just doing. Doing things in the world around me as they presented themselves. Projects. Painting. Repeal Parties. And I have been narrating it like so. I feel like a gift he doesn’t want to open.
And up to and including this week, as I have been growing back into myself, as I have been staring in mortified awe at the person I became (who tried to need nothing at all and then less) I was still phrasing it like so. Why can’t I just be myself with him? Why can’t I be frank about what I hope for? His doubt feeds my smallness and my smallness feeds his doubt.
And this week especially, as I have taken stock of myself – as I have seen plainly that actually I am not lonely at all, that actually I have quite a lot of friends with whom I do fun and interesting things (when I’m not trying to keep my whole schedule clear) and that furthermore I often enjoy doing things alone – I was still phrasing it this way. Is he really going to let me leave?
But then somewhere on the dance floor, maybe when the adored guitarist was singing that corny pretty song about Colette, I thought about Operaman, for the first time, in the past tense.
And what has been hard for me, these past few weeks (though things seem decidedly to be swinging my way) has been accepting that Operaman will not be the story of my life. He will be – is already – just a story. Even though he felt so much bigger than that.
Once I loved an opera singer. He broke my heart.
Other things happened next that weren’t about him at all.
