Snow day

(photo courtesy of A. Z. is on the left, Impish Neighbor Girl on the right.)

Muffled

Outside the store's window, the snow is sedately filling the air above the street, melting the moment it touches anything. There are no customers today. Behind the register, I'm knitting a baby blanket in fine-gauge merino for an old friend's newborn, and letting my own stillness fill me.

My wall calendar, newly changed to February, says "excavate," and shows hands on a shovel flinging up dirt from behind a mound of earth. January was "fix," with strong fingers making a tool usable again. Flipping one page too many, I read "resume," in March, but I tried not to see the picture. Time enough when we get there.

Thaw

There are hellebores about to bloom in my garden, small green pokes of curled tulip leaves. And dog poop, but that's how it goes.

I stopped on my way back home from the co-op, found a pruning saw I had forgotten I owned, and pruned back the branch of the forsythia that I had trained myself to duck around every time I go in and out of the house.

A little more space. A little more hope.

Jo(e), February is a short month. Don't get me wrong, it can still be a fucker, but it's easier, further south, where you can see winter's hold breaking up earlier.

Hey everyone

I just remembered something.

It's February. That means January is over.

Thank god for small mercies.

My mother's gingerbread recipe

For Turtle Wexler and Phantom. This makes a sweet, cakey kind of gingerbread.

1/2 c. butter, softened--and soften up some extra for hard sauce, too
1 c. sugar
2 eggs, beaten

2 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground ginger
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. clove

1 c. molasses

1 c. boiling water

confectioners sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease two 8 x 8 baking pans or one lasagna pan.

Combine all dry ingredients in a medium bowl and set aside.

In a large bowl, cream the sugar in the butter. Add eggs and mix well.

Add the dry ingredients with the molasses and combine thoroughly. (While you're mixing is the time to turn on the kettle.)

Add the boiling water last. I like to use the molasses cup to measure the boiling water and stir it a little, to get all the molasses into the cake. Mix until smooth.

Pour into pan(s). Bake 45 minutes, or until a sharp knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Set out to cool slightly.

While the cake is baking, prepare the hard sauce--this is not really optional, unless you are very silly about your priorities regarding calories and deliciousness. Real, actual hard sauce apparently involves alcohol, but this is how we always made it in our house:

Take some softened butter and a more or less equal amount of confectioners sugar. How much is up to you, but a little goes a long way, though, so I'd start with a couple tablespoons, and you can always make more. Mix with a fork until completely combined. Add more sugar or more butter, to taste.


Eating a bite of hot gingerbread with a dab of hard sauce is pretty much the best antidote to winter I can think of.

Happy Store Birthday to Me, sort of

The store opened on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, 2005. It was a crazy process, and a long one, and it is not ideal for someone with seasonal affective disorder to be starting a major venture at the exact same time of year, to the week, when her biochemistry takes its annual nosedive.*

But that is what I did, not quite intentionally, but the retail season being what it is, the Saturday before Thanksgiving was the absolute last day I could tolerate opening--in the give and take between me and the contractors, therefore, the Saturday before Thanksgiving was the point past which I would not let deadlines be pushed. There were electricians installing track lighting in the morning, but at noon we opened our doors.

The first birthday felt like a huge accomplishment, and for different reasons so did the second. Last year at this time I was astonished that things were obviously improving. I'd gotten myself into a serious hole and it seemed like I was getting out of it. There were setbacks, but that was largely true. This year, there's still more climbing to do to get out of the hole, but we will emerge. Only it's a little harder to see where we're going after that. The economy is hard. Not horrible around here, actually: houses still sell, and most folks around here are relatively recession-insulated. There's no big company that's about to leave town, and in my case, my customers are the kind who see books as a necessity more than a luxury. But we're still feeling it. We were especially feeling it before the election, but even with the election over and people's moods turning around, it's still hard to see the kinds of steep gains in sales that would make me feel better about the store's long-term health.

I just feel mired. I know that a lot of this is about the time of year, as well as the economy. But I am having a hard time getting things done, as always, and a hard time feeling happy about the things I do get done, which is not always true. It's my bad time of year: mid-November to the end of March or early April.

I'm trying to keep it front and center that depression means that things that would give me a sense of accomplishment, a sense of "hey, I got that done!," don't. They just don't. Instead, this time of year each thing I do just seems to clear the way for the next thing to come at me and make me start the getting-things-done process all over again from the beginning. Sometimes I hang onto tasks I could finish easily as a kind of shield, or I leave little pieces of disorganization in place as a way to slow down the production line a little so it's moving at a pace I can handle emotionally, even if practically speaking I could easily be moving a lot faster. I'm capable of being more effective, but I'm not capable of feeling more effective, so I bring down my level of competence to the place where I can handle it.

This morning, I got change from the credit union, and I got the cake for the weekend's celebration. It was two trips when it could have been one, and both of those stops were places I have been on errands in the last two days and I could easily have gotten what I needed then if I'd made a list and been planful, but sloppiness is more where I'm at. I'll go over just to be around some now, and tomorrow, too. But I don't really want to be part of festivities I can't feel.

It's depressing.

*Kind of like what it's doing this week, right on schedule. It's the annual kablooey! of my sense of pleasure and ability to connect to the world. A. and Phantom are both on me to use my lightbox, and I am, and it's helping a lot, but the other major piece of routine that lets me stay on top of my depression instead of going under it is exercise, and there I am not doing well. The bottom has fallen out of my swim schedule because of what I suspect (after prompting from Phantom) is going to turn out to be cough-variant asthma, though I don't have a diagnosis yet. I have a breathing study on Tuesday, in the slot when I would have been swimming, and the name of a pulmonologist to consult. I'll let you know how it goes.

Life and Woods

Back in the middle of December, I took a walk in the woods on a Saturday in the middle of the day, not my usual time and not my usual day. The woods were a very different place from what they usually are for me early on a weekday morning: there was a whole pack of people attached to a five year-old's birthday party, who were searching out snacks and party favors secreted in different corners of the path. There were friends to greet and people I didn't know greeting each other and stopping to talk at length. There was, improbably, a cyclist on a mountain unicycle, who stopped at the end of footbridge as I sat at my place on the bank, and bounced in place three times to hop onto the bridge. There were no birdwatchers and not nearly so many dog walkers, and on the two blocks I walk to and from the woods, there were far more people hurrying to the co-op and milling around the cafe.

One of the people I met that December day, at the beginning of my walk, was the artist who made this installation. She's not someone I know well, but she's a good friend of our neighbors-through-the-wall, and I knew her slightly when I had my first-ever full-time teaching gig, a quarter-long leave replacement I did nine years ago, at the same time I moved to this neighborhood. Neither of us has been at the school for years--it was not a school that was good for the soul--and since I was just a long-term sub with far shorter hair and far less weight on my frame, I'd be surprised if she remembered me from then, but I tend to hang on to details like that.

That day, we stopped and talked for the first time since we were both at that soul-strangling school, me because I hadn't yet said anything to her about the installation even though I had blogged about it, she because, well. She was grieving intensely and freshly, she needed to talk to everyone there was to talk to. She told me her husband had died the very day after the installation went up. He'd had cancer for months, but it was the chemotherapy that killed him, so it was in fact sudden, and the installation took on a meaning she hadn't expected it to have.

After I talked to her I went to those papier mache trees, melting and disintegrating into the loamy earth, and I watched the birthday party making its way through the live, leafless, hibernating trees, and I went home and revised the post I'd written a month earlier, adding a final sentence.


Today, A. and I took Z. to the woods after a naptime that we grownups had used to wear ourselves out with talk. Z. bopped along the path, wearing her Queen Esther crown, making up games, jumping over roots and picking up sticks and futilely commanding us to stop. At the footbridge, Z. ran from one end to the other while I sat and listened to the water in the creek. When A. was too cold to stand around anymore, we ventured down to the creekbed to pluck a dirty plastic bag from the rocks ("We did a mitzvah forw da wateuh!") and made our way home.

On our circuit of the woods, I made a detour to the site of the installation. The papier mache is gone. The ground is exposed, still dark and loamy. Five young oak trees are planted in a circle.

Edited: the artist has a lovely site up about the work, but I don't want to link and show up on such a well-publicized neighborhood site. But if anyone wants to see it, drop me an email, scallen3@aol.com, and I'll send it to you.

The Shortest Day

This is a poem that was part of the Christmas Revels my family went to for years while I was growing up. It's by Susan Cooper, and I offer it on the solstice in the spirit of a pagan fellow-traveler.

So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive,
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - Listen!!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, fest, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!!

Hanukkah Sameach

Hi. I'm back.

It was, all in all, a good Hanukkah, I think. We only forgot to light once, and we wouldn't have had enough candles if we'd lit that night anyway. Actually, any Hanukkah during which we finish the holiday with essentially no candles is a good one in my book. (We ended with 2: we started with over 100, a full box and some leftover from last year and a box from Z.'s daycare.) I'm not going to go into the acquisitions, which were not too excessive but also not entirely free from excess, but the excess was excess I can live with, so, you know, it was okay.

But oh, those dancing lights.

We're in the time of year when it's hardest for me to feel connected to the world around me, especially when it's a week like this one and the clouds are low and the color of dust and show no signs of giving way for days. I start to feel like I'm drowning for lack of light, like the oxygen isn't making it to my lungs because they're slowly filling up with grey.

Those candles, they help. They might not be anything more than pretty lights, but they are cheerful and they are an excuse for people to come together and sing and to Maccabee yoga, even. The simple fact of a holiday that we arrive at each year--in gladness or guilt or hope or sorrow--promises that the earth will keep revolving until it's our turn in the sun again. This year, when the holiday was entirely before the solstice, I imagined that each additional candle made up for the diminishing light in my mid-Atlantic day. And I recalled winters that were harder than this one, and counted myself lucky, really.

The year is turning, the sun is going, the sun will return. At least, it always has.

This is a time of year when I feel like the Christianity I was raised with and the Judaism I embrace now are entirely inadequate to the rhythm of the year. Everything powerful for me about Christmas is pagan. The loss of the sun is profound. All the green, abundant growth of the year that needs the sun for survival--all that is done, it's dead, it's returning to the earth to be used again for new growth. If anything is happening at all, it's happening underground, where it can't be seen and to disturb it would be to destroy it. I can consider the dead leaves, or turn my face from them, it doesn't really matter. Mostly I just need to keep going, trusting that beneath my feet and past my conscious mind there is something that will, in the fullness of Spring, turn into the tiniest of buds and the most translucent of green and grow, day by day, to harvest the energy of the sun.

In the meanwhile, I wish hibernation were an option. I really do.

To everything, there is a season

This November thing selects for quantity over quality, doesn't it? Though it's also pushing me to put up more photographs out of deadline desperation, and maybe that's all to the good. It certainly livens up the place. In real life, I crave sunlight and brightness and I'm not sure why I continue to inflict this dark, melodramatic template on everyone, except that I'm still kind of delighted by the way my late-night fiddling with color turned out. Also, I'm lazy.

I chose it because I was mired in grief and depression when I started blogging, and this is the template you wind up with if you're mired in grief and depression, I think. Well, no one who's been reading for long will deny that those have both had their place here.

I'm heading into the toughest part of my year, Thanksgiving through my birthday (early April). Well, I'm usually doing better a few weeks before my birthday, but I've learned not to count on it, or I wind up depressed about still being depressed, and that's just depressing, if you know what I mean.

This morning was hard. I had a hard night last night, and woke up to grey half-light, feeling bleak and pointless. Like being me was pointless.

Tuesday is the day I'm most committed to swimming, so I swam, but I managed it only through the inertia of driving a route I've memorized. You know the way you drive yourself to work, say, or the supermarket, mostly by telling yourself that's where you want to wind up? After you've set the destination, some not-quite-conscious part of your brain takes care of the navigation for you.

Well, first I drove home from dropping Z. off, even though the only reason I drove those four blocks was to continue on to the pool. But I drove home because I was trying to stay depressed. Luckily, parking is tight on our block, and there wasn't a spot near our house. Instead of circling, I let that not-quite-conscious navigator take me to the Y like it was originally planning to, anyway, but all the while I was lining up excuses to turn back: I just washed my hair yesterday anyway; I didn't want to be wet on such a grey day; it was already nearly 9:00 and I had a meeting at 11:00; I hate the smell of chlorine; etc.

My autopilot is sturdy, though. I tuned back in to my surroundings and found I'd made it to the locker room. There was another moment where I told myself how comfortable my clothes were and how cold my feet would be if I took them out of my shoes and socks, but really, the locker room is plenty warm. I took my time stowing things in the locker. I took my time with the lock. I got in the water because wouldn't I feel ridiculous changing into my bathing suit and not getting wet? I swam the first lap because I might as well, now I was wet.

In the end, I managed my half-mile. It didn't pull me out of the depression of the morning, but maybe it gave me enough of a boost that chatting with a friend at lunch and playing with Z. in the afternoon and a gift of flowers from my sweetie in the evening let me climb out the rest of the way.

Saturated*

I promise I'll make it back when the summer has warmed me awhile

A few weeks ago, on a shabbat morning while A. and Z. were at services, I walked down to the trickling creek that emerges three blocks from my house, in a bit of woodland that is a vague approximation of wild. Wild enough that my dogs once found a deer leg there, anyway, even though if you look you will see that below your feet, the rocks of the main path are actually the tumbled bricks, chunked concrete and asphalt of construction fill, as much as they are the mica-sparkling local schist that provides the stone for so many of my neighbors' houses.

One of the reasons I wanted a house here, in this little corner of my neighborhood, was that I could walk to those woods with ease: one block up and one block over from my door, a broad path bounded by escaped ivy leads into young beech and maple forest. It joins the main path about a block-length in, and at the intersection there is almost a plaza bounded by roots and capped high above by green canopy on these late-summer days.

I usually head through this crossroads to a little oxbow of path that meanders along parallel to the main one before rejoining it where Anonymous has placed a bench honoring an anniversary. I like that: the public gesture, the private identity.

On the oxbow path, the terrain is more uneven, the path slicker with leaves in fall and winter, but I have walked it often enough that my feet know the roots and the dips in the forest floor. In the nine years I've been walking these woods, efforts have been made to close off the most eroded routes downhill, so there are barriers made of branches and logs along the sides of the path from time to time, and beyond them you can see where the forest is beginning the slow work of undoing the damage we've inflicted on it. Who knows how many years yet before all the traces are gone?

That bench that faces me when I return to the main path is where A. and I had one of the toughest conversations of our pre-dating history. While we were sitting there, almost seven years ago now, a couple I know came by, walking dogs who have since died. They made idle chit-chat with us while we pretended not to be screaming with tension. For years, we made it a point to sit on that bench whenever we could, to layer it over with happier associations.

And we have always been friendly with that couple without quite crossing the line into friendship, but now they have a little girl three years older than Z., and we recently joined their babysitting co-op, and they are staunch loyalists of my store. They have invited us to their house for a yet-to-be-confirmed day during the Jewish holidays--about to finally cross that line and find ourselves friends, I hope.

The first time I babysat for them, a young person dropped by their house looking for them, a young person who is the sibling of one of my former staffers, a child who grew up at the same street number where I live but one block north, someone I first knew as a sixteen-year-old frustrated with the limitations of the school where A. now teaches, and who--while we were chatting that evening--conceded to me that it will be impossible to maintain a genderneutral presentation in nursing school. But I am giving it my best shot here in blogland.

Layers upon layers. My staffer, this young person's sister, would have lunch with their mother every week, a butch woman of many talents, and I would chat with her while my staffer got her things together. A few years back the mother was the inspiration behind an all-woman, mostly-lesbian production of Grease in which A. played the part of Kenickie, and the mother took the Frankie Valli part ("Beauty School Drop Out"). When the Israel-Palestine peace group that A. and I were briefly involved with got into a tangle with a local rabbi, the mother, who's a mediator, came and helped us sort it out. That rabbi is the step-parent of my friend who got married at the end of June and moved to Boston, which freed up her apartment for a neighbor who teaches at Z.'s day care to move in.

Living here is living in a web of intersecting lives. The longer I'm here, the deeper and more layered they become. I live only a few dozen yards from the co-op that is the heart of my shtetl. I shop there daily, and I pass the bookstore on my way. It is rare for me to walk that handful of houselengths without seeing someone I know at least to say hello.


But on that Saturday when I returned to the woods and walked down to the creek, I saw no one else. I listened to the intent buzzing chorus of cicadas as it rose and fell, and heard the wind high above me, but no dogs, no people. I found my way down the hill at the end of the main path, to where a lower path rounds the wetlands and cozies up to the creek. It seemed like saplings were crowding in where there used to be more erosion. The woods are healthier than they were nine years ago.

The creek, never very big, was gentle and contained in the center of its course. I walked along looking for a place to settle and write--I made my way down into the creekbed eventually and, figuring my sandals won't make it til next summer anyway, I just walked in the shallow water for awhile. None of the logs that rested across it looked trustworthy, so I found myself at the footbridge that crosses the creek at the edge of the meadow. It had been my plan to settle in there if I couldn't find anywhere better, but when I sat, I found that just a little ways down was a solid tree whose roots grew down and along the bank, reassuringly solid and perchable.

The creek was maybe 2 or 3 inches deep there, moving through the rocks with eddies so small they were just dimples. Where the bottom was smooth, a half-dozen water boatmen jumped and danced on the surface, making delicate circles of ripples that jittered into each other over and over again. The leaves flashed back at me from the surface of the water, grey and green, with blue sky flashing up between them, and their shadows layered onto the rocks of the creekbed, splitting and doubling the patterns there.



That Saturday was my first trip, alone, to the woods, in years. I had gotten out of the habit of going at all, because going was a production. It involved dogs, and kid, and spouse; leashes and stroller and plastic bags and tennis balls and rinsing off the poison ivy oil from the dogs' coats later. All the layers of home coming right along with me. Why bother?

But a friend and I made a pact to walk for morning sunlight this fall. We both suffer when the sun starts coming a little later and a little later every day, and leaving a little earlier, and if that's how you're wired, too, you know the best way to stave off the blues that creep up on you and the weepy days that pile on in December is to soak up as much light as possible as soon as you can manage it after waking. So we walk in the mornings, in our different hometowns, and check in online later.

That's what I've been doing in the two weeks since Z. started school. I drop her off as early as I can manage, and I head to the woods: all on my lonesome but fulfilling a promise to a friend. It's not as much sun as if I stayed on the sidewalk, but the green all around me eases my jangles and the earth and rocks and roots under my soles keep me focused on the living world that we try to cage with our grids and our masonry and our asphalt, and my online world is layering onto my physically present one. And that little creek at the bottom? Well, I know where it goes. I know the way the storms make it swell and the drought thins it to a trickle and I know the path it follows to the ocean as the water keeps cycling round and round in our saturated world.


*Isn't that the opposite of wrung out?

Summer Days

My life has been spent on the academic calendar. It's only the past two years that I've had a year-round job, and since I'm my own boss, even that feels like a bit of fiction. Because I'm married to a teacher and used to be one, the summer is still the time of year I think of as dedicated to recuperation from the ravages of the school year.

I am also a seasonal affective disorder sufferer, so my year cycles through low and high. I am likely to be depressed by December and January, even in a good year, and I haven't had a good year in quite some time. This makes me a much better early-season gardener than a mid-season one. By the time the bulbs start to bloom, I am desperate to see the ground returning to life and beauty, so I watch for the crowns of my perennials with the eye of a scavenger.

I feel no similar desperation about keeping the jungle at bay in July. If it grows, it grows, and around here July is much too humid to do anything outside but swim. And August! Forget it. August is for doing as little as humanly possible, preferably in New England.



But as long as there is air conditioning (and in a bookstore in a humid town, there must be air conditioning!), I get things done in summer, usually in bursts of phone calls and fits of organizing energy. Actually, that's how I get things done no matter what time of the year it is, but during the summer I have bursts of bursts, and need less time to flop and catch my breath in between.

This summer has been something of an exception. I have had one notable accomplishment: I hired a bookkeeper. I have yet to give her any of the stuff she needs from me, but I did hire her.

The other high points of my working summer were, for me, occasions for congratulating myself on having hired and promoted well. I had relatively little to actually do in pulling off the fabulously successful HP7 launch party, and the "Best of" honor that we were given is down to my event coordinator more than to me. She's the one who envisioned and organized the festival that got us noticed in April.

Having hired and promoted well, having been freed from most of my child-care duties while A. was home, I have more or less let things go along without me for a couple-few months while I spent most of my energy on getting my emotional life together in various ways.

That work was long overdue, but it's far from done and there is one week left in summer. I'm worried about the fall. I'm worried that I haven't made enough progress, and I'm worried that what progress I've made was only possible because of the conditions of this summer. I know I'm in far, far better shape than I was this time last year. But I haven't tested that much.

It's almost time to go back to school, and I don't know if I'm ready yet.

(Illustration by Z. [detail])
(The orange spirals are Z. and Mama, but I don't know which is which.)