A friend's house in Vermont

One of my favorite places to visit in Southwest part of Vermont. 

Books, love and our 25th wedding anniversary

I have a book garden. It’s located behind my desk and it takes up an entire wall of my office, floor to ceiling, front to back.   My husband built this for me twelve years ago, constructing it a la Shaker style, forming a grid on the floor, nailing pine boards together then raising the entire unit until it stood flush and vertical against the wall.  He even added some molding to the top and sides.  A designer’s flourish.

We’d stored our books in cardboard boxes for years while we traveled overseas to Hungary and then back to New England and several states before settling in Boston, where we live now.  At some point in my wanderlust, in my need to leave everything behind, I dared to leave another lifetime of books in a basement of a rental apartment.  It felt wrong but I did it anyway—I was choosing to change the course of my life and books were heavy.  I had to lighten my load.  

But now I was done with traveling for a while. We had a five year-old and we were anchoring ourselves for the upcoming school years.  Unloading those boxes of books was a joyous, frantic affair. Boxes and boxes finally unbound, we stripped off packing tape like new lovers ripping off clothes, hurling ourselves into happiness, reuniting after months.   I was so relieved.  Finally, my books were back in my life.
  

Over time, the shelves took on their own order, a sort of “his side, her side” way of things (reminding me of Carver’s description of a couple’s bed in one of his stories).   History and business books dominated “his” side, with some law textbooks and biology books intermixed.  On my side, novels and plays and poetry from undergraduate and graduate school days.  More recently, shelves full of books written by friends.

That was thirteen years ago. My son is 18, and today my husband and I are celebrating 25 years of marriage. My collection of books has become a moveable time keeper, a shuffling abacus—with each book demarking some important passage of events, people, memories.  

Feeling the push of decades behind me, I recently spent a weekend culling my book shelves. It was tedious yet satisfying.  A book garden overgrown and tangled, I dusted and vacuumed crusty spines, pulled out textbooks I knew I wouldn’t reread, and paired lost volumes with each other.  Finally, War And Peace Vol. 1 and 2 are side by side again. My Pushcart Prize anthologies, helter skelter on separate shelves, are lined up together in numerical order.   I came across a Jean Rhys novel that I adored so long ago: Voyage in the Dark.  Rereading the opening line, I fell in love once more:

“It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I’d ever known.”

There’s my book of Montaigne Essays (not the new one published recently); the one that my English professor gave me in college, a teacher who confessed to me that Montaigne’s essays had saved his life.  There’s my book of Flannery O’Connor letters (Habit of Being) that I read the summer after my bone marrow transplant in 1981. O’Connor and I both had blood diseases.  Her daily discipline of writing and faith ushered me through that year I reclaimed my health.

As I weeded my books, I also came across a book I didn’t know I owned.  Intrigued by the title and picture: Ishi—a biography of the last Wild Indian in North America, I began reading and couldn’t stop.  Sad, beautiful, aching, Ishi is the story of a man who witnessed his culture’s extinction by the White Man.  It’s about ancient time colliding with modern time. It’s about how we cling but can’t hold on—like our hearts, like Ishi’s. It’s about reaching out to find new centers of order and connection after loss.  Like Ishi’s loss of his entire people, like my loss of my father this past December. Time floods on.

The year before I met my husband, I was living in a studio apartment in Boston. 1985. Most of my furnishings consisted of books I’d bought from a place called The Bookcase in Cambridge.  The Bookcase was a warehouse-sized building so crammed full of books, it spilled into a 3-story annex across the street.  Art books, literature, science textbooks, obscure books.  Any book.  Every book.  The Bookcase was a library, a place to wander down paperback aisles, a place to eavesdrop, to fall asleep. The Bookcase even functioned as a bank, at least for me.  Anytime I needed fast cash, I knew I could haul a few books down to The Bookcase and sell them back to the owner. It was a perfect arrangement.  A perfect balance for my cash-strapped life steeped in books.

So when my future husband and I decided to move to Florida together, I sold my furniture and headed back over to The Bookcase to sell more books. 

 “I’m in love,” I told the owner of The Bookcase.  “We’re planning to get married!” I put several grocery bags of books on the sidewalk outside the store where he was kneeling, restacking some sale books.   (I must have borrowed a friend’s car to deliver that load.) “That’s why I’m getting rid of everything. We’re moving to Florida.”  I shrugged.  “I don’t really want to sell them, but I need the money to buy a car. I mean, these books have been my life—So many memories--“

The owner nodded with the seriousness of an undertaker, then something sparked in his head.

 “Let me tell you a story about a young couple who fell in love and wanted to marry,” he said, turning to me.  It was a warm summer day in Cambridge, the kind of day that encourages musing.

“The girl was beautiful but her family was poor. So poor, her father had no money for her dowry.  In those days:  no dowry. No marriage,” the bookcase owner said.  “Naturally, the father fretted over this. What to do?  He had nothing of value that he could sell except his books. His books were very dear to him--like yours are to you--but he realized he had to sell them for his daughter’s dowry.   Over the years, the father had built quite a collection. So he stacked his books on the street outside his house and put them up for sale.  One by one, as people walked by, he began to have second thoughts.  That book is very special, he would think, and take it back into the house.  As the day wore on, he took book after book back into the house until there were no more books on the sidewalk, no sale and no dowry for his daughter.  She never married.

“That’s terrible!” I said, pushing my books closer to him.

 “So you see,” the owner said to me. “You’re making the right choice.”

A few days later, I got on a plane and flew south to be with the man I love.  Today, a quarter of a century later, I honor this story of books,  this story of time, this story of our marriage, and try to balance it all on this tiny nexus of today, this tipping point between yesterday and tomorrow. Today, 2011, my 25^th wedding anniversary day.  1986. June 08. Boston. Gone. Here. Forever.

Bird of Grief, feature short story this month

I love the folks at Connotation Press.  A few months ago they published a piece from my search for home memoir (A Not-So-Ordinary Girl's Search for Home), and this month my short story: Bird of Grief.

Click the link (Bird of Grief) above and it will take you there.

Look around. You'll discover other wonderful pieces published there: poetry, drama, visual arts.  It's a great online site.

Thanks.
Jessica

Pets and a Poem by Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel Prize winner

A dear friend of mine lost her pet recently, a cat who lived to be 24 or so years old.   Anyone who has a pet, and anyone who has experienced this loss knows it can hurt more than losing a person--sounds crazy I suppose--but it's true.  Our pets know the most intimate details about us. Just think about it--they know who we sleep with, and they know our routines from waking to bedtime. They know our smells and sounds. They know who we allow in our home, and what we eat.  They travel around our rooms seeking sunny spots during the day, warm spots near radiators in the winter, and they are experts at taking on our most comfortable chairs.

This friend sent me a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel Prize winning poet. She didn't tell me this, but I'm guessing the loss of her dear pet led her to find this poem.

Why do our cats and dogs leave us so soon? Maybe to remind us that the present is where we should reside. Our pets remind us that every day matters, but beyond every day, they also bring something else into our homes--a sense of something other than our egotistic selves. This gorgeous poem calls up that something else.

A Few Words on the Soul
By Wislawa Szymborska (Polish Poet ~ winner of Nobel Prize for Literature 1996)
We have a soul at times.
No one's got it non-stop,
for keeps.  Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.
Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood's fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.
It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.
It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.
For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.
Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.
It's picky:
it doesn't like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.
Joy and sorrow
aren't two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.
We can count on it
when we're sure of nothing
and curious about everything.
Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.
It won't say where it comes from
or when it's taking off again,
though it's clearly expecting such questions.
We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too. 

Hello, Spring

Billie Hinton's wonderful post about writing space spurred me to report on my recent silence here. Since my father's passing in December 2010, I've been working on fiction and my memoir about my search for home.

I'll be back with more posts related to home (and writing, too) but am focused on finishing a collection of stories: Women In Bed.  I've published eight of the possibly nine stories that will complete the collection. The eighth story: "Bird of Grief" will be published in June by Connotation Press and will be their Feature Story of the Month. What an honor.


Now to what's really on my mind.

We have a plant in our house. (A total of two plants because I have a red thumb or whatever color thumb is the opposite of green.) This plant was a gift from my father when we moved into an apartment 15 years ago.  Gardening was my father's passion.


When my father gave us this plant, it was robust.  For two years it bloomed pink flowers that looked like fluted champagne glasses with feathers.  We moved to the city and the blooming stopped. But the plant kept on.  It grew leggy and sometimes looked wrinkled.  I tried placing it closer to the light, then further away.  No blooms.  I watered it more or less.  I transferred it to a larger container.  Nothing. More years passed.  This plant kept on but remained flower-less.

As I mentioned, my dad died this past December.

In February, after 13 years,  this plant started to bud then pop pink flowers!  It's still blooming. The flowers, slowly opening these past few weeks, are making their way around the circumference of the plant.

It's possible that there's a logical reason for why these flowers suddenly decided to appear after such a long dormancy, but I don't have one.


My father died at age 88.  He was a complicated, damaged soul, who found peace in the garden.

I plan to write a whole lot more about him.

Not For Sale

I hope you'll take a look at a this excerpt from my memoir about my search for home. It's called Not for Sale and you can read it online at Connotation Press.

As always, I welcome your thoughts and comments.


Thanks.

Jessica

On my Knees (before Thanksgiving)

For three days I’ve been on my knees in the house of the Lord--my house that is—scrubbing, cleaning, waxing, sucking up dust that’s claimed whole rooms while my mind’s been far away, my heart in a trap.  I’ll get to where I’ve been in a moment.

An appraiser was coming to assess the value of my house.  I was refinancing my mortgage, determined to achieve the ever-elusive balance of financial stability. “Don’t worry about your appliances,” the appraiser said over the phone.  “I’ll be looking at the condition of the house—walls, floors—“

Walls and floors? Oh my.  

I stood in the kitchen and took a long view at what I had done.  This wood surface that I crossed daily to make coffee in the morning and tea at night was spotted and scratched with grit, its yellow pine worn out in patches. Individual floor boards were losing cartilage near the room’s most active points-- in front of the stove, sink and refrigerator.  For months, I’d ignored its diminishing condition, fading in the shadow of my neglect.

Dear kitchen floor, will you forgive me? I’m sorry that it took an outside force –a strange appraiser—to activate tending to your needs. 

I tied back my hair, put on holey jeans, and cleared the counter tops in preparation for cleansing. I filled a basin with soapy water and submerged a cloth—a piece of myself—into this bowl. I came up dripping, wrung out, ready for the task.

When I emerged, I found myself crouched in a corner where the kitchen floor and wall met at the far end of the room.  Where had I been, I asked myself?   --Wandering  in tunnels of family troubles?  Yes.  Squeezed between an ailing father, an exhausted mother, a teenage son struggling to find his path?  That’s right. Work worries, too.

As I scrubbed and rinsed, scrubbed and rinsed, muscles in my right shoulder and back awakened and hurt.   When my right side started to cramp, I switched to my left side, dunking and twisting the cloth to free old dirt, then applying it anew to the next section of floor, my wrist and finger joints pivoting, de-rusting from emotional paralysis.  

Some people run. Some people attack when life overwhelms.  I shut down.  Turn off.  Become numb.

Alone, with the November sky lighting the room, I bowed forward and pulled up, bending into malformed versions of Child’s Pose, then Downward Dog, then Child’s Pose again.  My right arm traversed narrow sections between walls.  At times,  my cloth-covered palm became a fist as I punched out emotional grime, reclaiming my base.  Life is hard, goddamn it.  Face it. Accept it. Move on.  

   

     

I crawled backwards, sliding on my shins toward the other end of the room.  When my knees began to throb, I folded a towel beneath me to soften the blow of bone, muscle, tendon, skin, blood against wood until my whole body succumbed to washing, and release.  

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What person, event, thing, launched you out of a funk?