restingmotion

Catching up with June Books

 I read more books in June than I have read in the two months since, not that this is a contest or anything.  But I promised an accounting, and so it seems I should get to it, if for no other reason than I will be annoyed with myself if I don't.  

Actually, the first three books were finished in June, but none of them were completely read that month.  I'd been working my way through
Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Introducing the New Testament since October, as they were primary texts for members of the EFM group I was mentoring and My Neighbor's Faith, was the last text for the the fourth year portion of the group. This was my second reading for each of the books.

 

Working down from the top left corner of the collage, the next layer consists of non-fiction.  I found Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education and Deborah Davis' Strapless fascinating. I don't have to agree with the author to enjoy a book, or to find it edifying, although both authors engaged in some interesting and enlightening analysis.  Crow Country was charming and I would have found it engaging had I not leaned that I really have little to no interest in corvids.  In fact, Crow Country and Kristin Hannah's The Great Alone were my least favorite books of the month; the former because, well, crows, and the latter simply because I found it too predictable for my peripatetic brain.

 

My favorite novel was Warlight.  I wrote about it, along with Little Fires Everywhere and The Immortalists, here,  I thoroughly enjoyed The President is Missing, even though I am not usually James Patterson's target audience and Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry surprised me with its depth. I wish I had written something about it.  This was the first time I had read anything by James Lee Burke, whose prose built a powerful sense of place,  but although I felt the characters had potential, I was not convinced I was interested in continuing to build a rapport beyond that first weekend's read. 

 

So a good month, with books for every mood in which this reader happened to find herself. 

 

Making Soup with Mom

Mom wants to try my carrot-greens soup.  I made a batch at home recently and had it for lunch with some ground pork sautéed with chili powder. Apparently I sloshed the soup carrying it to the table.

I told her that I would make it if we could find good carrot greens, and we did find carrots with nice greens.  I pretty much dismantled the entire carrot display at her local Sprouts finding the best two bunches, those with nice looking carrots and nice looking greens.  But I did put everything back once I had retrieved my prize.  

 

Yesterday we made the soup.

First we sautéed onion and the minced carrot stems.

While the onions softened, mom grated two carrots and minced some garlic.  We let everything soften in a bit of dairy-free butter, although I sometimes use chicken fat, ghee, or olive oil at home, depending on my mood,

Then we added the chicken stock and the chopped carrot leaves.  I've learned from years of experience that it takes a lot of washing and spinning to get all the grit out of carrot leaves.

 

When the soup was done and had cooled, we tried pureeing it, which was an adventure, as mom does not have a blender.  She does have a food processor, but its highest setting is chop, and it does not seal tightly.  It is not meant  for pureeing soup.  My first attempt was a bit of. mess, with green soup leaking out everywhere.  But I figured it out.  The soup was more of finely minced bits of vegetable in broth than a pureed soup, and greens are a bit stringier than I like to crunch on.  Pureed is better. 

 

Mom wasn't sure what she thought.  Frankly neither was I.  She thought we should buy a blender, but I was reluctant to have her buy a blender for a soup she might not even like, a blender she would otherwise never use, so we slept on it.  We were going to my brother's for dinner anyway.

This morning I found mom's magic bullet and pureed a cup of soup in that, which worked very well, and the soup was vastly improved.  Mom thought the magic bullet wasn't working, but really, only something was jammed in it, and it now works fine.  I recognize that the flavor is very much something I think of as "green", a rich savory green, but green nonetheless, and it may not be her thing.  I also recognize that the boxed stock we used does not contribute the mouthfeel of my own collagen-rich homemade chicken broth.  That can be solved by cooking the soup with unflavored gelatin, or pureeing it with a bit of unflavored collagen protein powder I suppose.  But I also admit that although my morning cup of soup was good, I like the soup far better with the added pork as it adds complexity and rich contrast of flavors and texture.  

 

We will reheat the soup for dinner tonight with the added pork and I'll see what mom thinks,

Musings on Sophie Macintosh's novel: The Water Cure

Two more Booker-listed novels have arrived on my pile: one I ordered and the other is from the library so that one will have to jump to the top of my list forthwith.  In the meantime, I have read only one of that first trio of books, Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure and honestly I'm not quite sure what I think.  I hoping some clarity will be revealed as I write but I also realize that is a somewhat tenuous platform on which to begin a book post.

 

I had read about the book before the Booker longest came out, so it was there floating somewhere on the horizons of my mind and I recognized those early reviews when I started reading the book.  The phrase feminist dystopia, and comparisons to Margaret Atwood are bandied about;  and I had read that the novel tells the story of three girls whose parents have fled society after some terrible disease or plague and are raising their girls separately, to protect them.  But in the end I felt all these vague reassurances are more about selling the book than the book itself.  Yes it is the story of three women, and yes their parents have raised them in isolation, but everything else is in question. In that sense the novel is a psychologically suspenseful mystery, but also one that, unfortunately, can come to no good end.  I suppose I see shades of dystopia in the book, since the book is about a community that is slowly revealed to be truly frightening, but this community is a family, perhaps was once a cult, but that aspect seems to be in the past, and I certainly see nothing I want to call feminist in this novel; in fact I am not sure feminism is the author's intention at all. 

 

This is a novel that lured this reader in with gorgeous, often lyrical, and sometimes hypnotic prose.  As it is told from the perspective of the three women, the voices vary, and the perspectives are sometimes confusing.  It is a story that both draws you in and leaves you oddly disquieted, simultaneously entrancing and disturbing.  

 

As I mentioned earlier, the novel is told from the perspective of the three sisters:  Grace, Lia, and Skye, mostly from the perspective of Lia, and very little is heard from Skye until near the end. I suppose in a sense the girls represent the three elements:  Grace, earth, solid but also unyielding.  She is angry, bitter, withdrawn, and at times rock hard, and almost flat in her affect, she has built a steely resolve around herself, a resolve that does not want to be broached.  She is also pregnant. She of all the women in this book frightens me the most, and yet in the end, when she reveals herself far more fully, when her reserve is finally fractured and she explodes, like a volcano rising from what appeared to be an otherwise placid plain, my heart broke.

 

Lia, water, is the most emotional, and her emotional life is often out of control.  She has endured years of abuse, all the girls have, to rid her of her emotions, but it has not taken, and yet she has therefore also never learned to control them, never learned what love is or isn't never really learned how to relate to people as people.  Of course not.  Who has she ever related to but her parents and her sisters?  In some ways Lia makes me incredibly sad, her words are full of longing and one senses that she wants nothing but love, to be held and cuddled.  She is desperate for love, and she would do anything for it.  But love has always been something that is doled out piecemeal to those who obey and submit.  Lia obeys and submits, but she is not broken in the obvious way that Grace is broken, her willingness to submit is a form of defiance, and she never quite finds the love she seeks.  She will go further, do anything, if she thinks it will mean she will get love in return, but she doesn't really know what that means.  Because she is constantly denied the affection she craves, she becomes more daring, more desperate, and therefore far more dangerous. Like water she can be calm and placid, but she can also be a raging storm or a tidal wave. She struggles with why she cannot control her emotions, yet she doesn't understand  anything about them, she is simply an uncontrollable emotional force.  Skye is the youngest, the most ethereal, and yes, you guessed it, the air.  She is referred to the most obliquely, until the end, when much is revealed and things fall in place.

 

But here is the thing that I struggle with.  We are told that the family has fled a great illness, that people waste away, and they have created a healing space where people come to be cured.  But it is slowly revealed that the "cures" are really tortures, and the precautions the girls are taught have nothing to do with reality, with really preventing disease.  They are rituals yes, often brutal rituals.  But wrapping oneself in muslin, scattering salt, forced near drowning and suffocation, slicing the air with a knife, these things will not protect you from actual disease.  Slowly it is revealed that the family is a cult.   Yes they have fled a terrible reality, but one wonders if it is a reality that far removed from our own, or if instead people have internalized fear and anger and rage to a greater idea than we like to admit. The women who are shrinking and dying have not caught some contagious disease, but it is their fear that is eating them alive.  It is as if the author has glommed onto the underbelly of our discontent of the fear and anger in society and wondered what would happen if our fear manifest itself physically as disease and death?  There are hints throughout the book that the outside world is not so much devastated, no so different from our own.

 

Slowly it is revealed that these three girls have been removed from society to grow up in their own patriarchal cult.  The father, called King, is obviously the head, although it seems to be the mother who is the most sadistic, who does most of the dirty work of forcing the girls through rituals that come dangerously close to torture.  The girls, who think they are growing up to be strong, are strangely broken, and really incapable of living with other people.  They are also weak, malnourished, with rotting teeth, the opposite of resilient, completely dependent on an artificial structure, and, unfortunately, on continued self negation and torture.  

 

They are women, not girls. Skye, we learn, is 18, although she seems to behave as one much younger..  One wonders if there would have been hope for her, but the others, Lia and Grace, at  28 and 30, are probably too old to escape their pasts.  In the end, a brutal end, they escape with Skye.  There probably is no real hope for them other than escape; if their parents fled the world in horror to "protect" them, they must now avoid the world, because in the eyes of the world they have become horror themselves even though they had no control in their making, or unmaking. Like much of the book, there have been hints all along, hints the world is not what they think, hints that this place is not what they think, the these girls are not who we think.  Grace remembers coming to the island, which is not an island after all, when she was 2 and Lia a baby.  Grace tells us that Sky is 14 years younger than herself.  We might think Skye, playing childishly is still quite young, but Lia tells us early on that it has been years since Skye has grown.  The hints are there, like a hidden reality, floating beneath the surface.  Secrets waiting to be unmasked.

 

I think the thing that bothers me the most is that there is no  resolution here.  The men come; but they are shadow men.  This is not surprising because the story is told from the perspective of the sisters, and they have no concept of men except as a shadow-thing. The ending is really not surprising if one has been paying attention, but it is profoundly sad.  I did not find it disturbing because it is sad; I found it disturbing because its sadness is so open-ended, as if there is no hope from dependence and destruction. It is disturbing because it reminds us how much we are shaped by our environments, the women who come to the cult hotel to be healed, believe they are damaged by their weakness and fear, and so they are.  The girls who grow up in the cult are damaged even though they may believe themselves to be strong, when their weakness is revealed they have no place to escape. The women who come to be healed are damaged because they internalize their fear, believe themselves to be weak.  Everyone in this novel is shaped by what they believe their world expects them to be.  There is no self-actualization here, And in this world, where one believes because one is told what to believe, without question, without the ability to trust one's own perspectives and experience, without the knowledge that one can be strong in and of oneself, there is nothing but sadness and despair. 

 

I suppose I haven't written a review that would encourage anyone to read this book.  Yet I do not regret reading it.  I do recommend it, but only if one is aware of what one is getting into.  Sophie Macintosh seems to be trying to say something important here, and I applaud the Booker committee for recognizing this.  She doesn't quite pull it off.  But the novel definitely made me think,   I'm not sure we can ever stop crazy people from running off and torturing their children, would that we could, but we we do really need to think about the harm we do to others in our various stereotypes and expectations.  Although in a way the idea of stress causing disease and wasting seems far-fetched, I am not sure it is as far-fetched is it sounds.  Perhaps I am giving Macintosh credit for being more dystopian than I originally realized, and perhaps even being feminist through an anti-feminist sort of metaphor, reminding us of the dangers of blind neglect, of acceptance of the status quo, of complacency.  Perhaps I am thinking that we are really a long way from accepting each other for who and what we are, as individuals and as fellow humans on a shared path.  Perhaps it is time to think about all of that.

 

 

Small Glimpses of Progress

I am becoming settled, but today I am simply weary.  All the weeks of excitement and unpacking, that sense of being somehow unmoored, the frustrations of nesting and organizing --  I suppose all this activity has taken its toll, and I just want to sink into a stupor.  

At least I have some basic, functional spaces to call home. The kitchen is functional.  I have a place to sit and eat.  I have a cozy place to sit and watch tv or knit, although I don't yet have suitable lighting for reading on the sofa at night.  But the progress feels good, and it is perhaps time to take. little break from constantly unpacking and reconfiguring.  With minor adjustments, the place is beginning to work.

The round bookcase in the photo, has been taken to be repaired as it was broken during the move.  That is why the books are on the floor.  I suppose life is never fully settled.

 

Demolition began at the house this week.

The exciting news is that we found a doorway! This is the wall that was hidden behind cabinets in the kitchen sunroom.  It was once the outside wall of the house.  That gap was a doorway into the dining room, exactly where I was hoping to cut out a new doorway.   It is not so much the savings that excites me, although it does, because I am sure the labor and cost of cutting the doorway will be eaten up by some other unanticipated expense, but by the fact that the door was there originally, as if even though I am adding onto and changing the house, I am also rediscovering and restoring something lost.

 

 

A Short Stroll Through The Neighborhood

I thought I'd share a few photos from my walk this morning.

Just a jaunt around my neighborhood, and a shorter route than usual because my right knee is quite uncomfortable.  I don't know if it is a knee issue or a sciatica issue, and it could be a bit of both.  

As usual, I am mostly interested in the small details, and the contrast of texture and color.

For today's walk I took a shorter walk and I took pains to seek out the gentle slopes as opposed to the steeper hills which really were bothering my knee.  I still had ample opportunity to stretch my legs.

But I have also learned to give myself a pass.  I realized at some point, when I was pushing myself too far, when I was sitting in my car in tears, that I push myself in ways that I shouldn't, and that if anyone else were sitting in their car crying, I would tell them to go home, put ice on their knee and have a glass of wine.  And so I did, go home that is, and have a glass of wine.  This morning I treated myself to a short, meandering walk.  Since it appears to be a beautiful day, I will take another stroll later.   There need be no pressure, only balance.  There are times to push, but there are also times to slow, to stop even, and simply find the peace where you are.

 

 

     

 

A First Impression of the Joseph Delaney Exhibit at the KMA

Thursday night I attended a reception for the new Joseph Delaney exhibit at the Knoxville Museum of Art.  Joseph Delaney was a Knoxville native, the younger brother of Beauford Delaney, the better known of the two painters.  He painted in New York at the time of the Harlem Renaissance.

When I walked into the first room of the exhibit, I was immediately struck by this wall of drawings, charcoals, various works on paper, all in blacks and grays.  The works here span the artists lifetime and the sense of presence, characters and vision are strong.   But I didn't really get back to that wall to study anything in greater detail that evening.  There were too many people milling about, too much noise, and although I had a fabulous time, I could really only absorb about two or three pieces.  Oh, who am I kidding?  I can usually only absorb about 3 pieces in any trip to a museum or gallery, no matter the circumstances.

 

I want to write about my initial impressions that night, my first impressions.  the black and white wall (although not really so white) shaped the atmosphere of the room, and most of the works in this gallery were more somber in colors.   There was so much to see, but a couple of pieces really stuck in my head and heart, and those are the pieces I will show here.  I really didn't get beyond them in the exhibit, and I will have to go back.  I also didn't read any of the little plaques describing the pieces, and I know little about the artist himself.  This is typical for me.  I always want to look first, to open my own relationship to the work, then go back, and continue the discussion with whatever curatorial notes I find posted.  I suppose this is my form of disavowal:  these are my impressions, uninformed perhaps, but heartfelt.  Two of these works were discussed at the reception, and I was both gratified that two of my favorite pieces were chosen, but I was also distracted and tuned out part of the talk, possibly to my detriment, as I probably would have learned a lot.

The first work that caught my attention was this piece, and no, I did not take a picture of the plaque and I do not remember what it was called.  What struck me immediately is this powerful sense of combined movement and stasis, as if held in balance.  I liked the way Delaney plays with perspective.  It felt like he was messing with my mind a little; it seemed like there was an obvious sense of distance, but also another layer of perspective that turned it all on its head. What you see, and the perspective of the piece shifts as you move, depending on the angle at which you look at the work.  Near and Far; or is it Far and Near? Or does it even matter?  One gets the sense it is the power of motion itself that matters, as if that combination of motion and place creates its own vitality.  Notice the ship moving out to sea, toward the Statue of Liberty in the harbor.  You can see the island on which she stands, but the colors of the land are echoed in the water, blurring the distinctions.  She is both a statue, and a guiding angel.  The sense of place is palpable, as is the multilayered sense of movement, as if the two cannot be separated, either in space, or, in another sense, in time.

A friend commented on the portraits, and I turned to look.  I admit I am not good at portraits, at describing what I see, for the most part they always seem to subtle, flat even, but not this one.  I was drawn in by this portrait, titled Romaine, struck by the vibrancy of the personality that was captured.  It is full of life, the painting itself seems to shimmer with life, as if the subject could burst through the canvas at any moment.

And then there was this New York scene.  This painting shone like a beacon in the gallery.  It was by far the lightest work in the room, and that sense of bouyancy was palpable.  You get a sense of the grandeur of the city, but also of light and joy. not the almost dark energy of the first painting I posted.  And yet, there is something more than the grand ideas, and the idealized skyline,  The figures in the bottom of the painting seem almost too dark, related more to the other works in the gallery than to the light-filled upper reaches of this painting. It is as if the painting is saying something about ideas and aspirations as contrasted with the realities of life.

Notice these figures in the lower left corner of the painting. There is the lightness of the family pulling their groceries, almost a joyous embrace of the present moment.  Notice how the mother and child are bright, glowing, even, whereas the man is turning away from them and is beginning to fade. There are other people, children and adults of mixed races and backgrounds, some seem fully present, others almost like ghosts and remnants of the cities complex histories.  This seems especially poignant in the image of a jewish man walking toward the viewer, with what appear to me to be ghosts of ghettos past hovering behind him, who seems almost partially faded. Even he seems somewhat tenuous, fully there, and yet linked to some disappearing past.  

Next lets look at the figures in the center, all blurred together in motion, a mix of outline and color as if the present and history are all superimposed upon each other in the sense of a place, in the lives of its residence.  I love Delaney's figures, the way they capture motion and life, and also a sense of historic timelessness.  I also can't let go of the idea that the man directing the traffic, a policeman probably (?) reminds me as much of images of Greek satyrs as he does a man.  

 

I will have to go back to the exhibit and look at all the things I have not absorbed.  I will have to go back and look at these works again, and probably read all the available information, trying to see what I have missed, to further understand what I may or may not have misconstrued.  There is so much I missed that first visit to the galleries, so many fleeting glimpses floating through my thoughts awaiting further exploration.

 

 

Endless Reconfigurations: the kitchen chronicles.

While I am not yet fully settled, everything is unpacked except for the sewing room.  The apartment is functional and livable even, although there is still art to be hung on the wall and a couple of corners where things are piled up, waiting for me to figure out the best storage/use options.  But the kitchen is operational, and increasingly more efficiently so.

 

I was cooking the day after I moved in, jumping right in and filling the space with fragrances that speak to me of comfort and home.  I started with the idea of my grandmother's tomato sauce swirling in my thoughts, but I modified it to fit current circumstances.  Rather than simmering it for hours on the stovetop and adding meatballs, I made it in the slow cooker with a lovely chuck roast that had been kicked out of its previous freezer allotment. This required a slight modification of the fluid ratios, as slow cookers do not concentrate the liquid in the same way as a pan simmer would.  Rather than cooking it for 4 hours, I started with 12, and ended up cooking everything for 18 hours.  I had three quarts of sauce, two of which were frozen, and a wonderful pile of meat which saw me through several meals, including in a wonderful Sunday brunch of pot-roast hash with eggs.  

I've also been to the farmer's market twice, which means I have been cooking, or at least eating in, because there have been a few meals built around salads and simple soups.  Although I mostly ate out during the two weeks I was packing and preparing to move, I did make 20 quarts of beef stock, in 3 quart batches in the slow cooker, simply because I had a batch of bones in the freezer, and it is more efficient to store the stock.  I had ambitiously purchased a bulk package of beef bones in the late winter because I tend to use 3 -4 quarts of stock a week, but I'll probably stick to smaller packages in the future. I don't have space in the freezer while I am in the apartment, so that makes sense.  Even when I return home however, I may forgo the bulk package and buy smaller packs, at least as long as I have a local supplier of grass-fed bones.  It makes sense to save freezer space for things that must be procured seasonally or ordered in, hence making larger quantities feasible.  I will have to think it through as I am definitely the kind of person who would weigh the options: considering any savings from buying in bulk rather than small packages; the cost of an additional freezer; as well as a cost in time and effort for procuring supplies.  But that is months away and not worth fretting over now.

 

The increased time in the kitchen has not been without its frustrations, however, in that it seems that each time I cook I hit some logistical problem. The kitchen has been configured and reconfigured multiple times. I suppose the kitchen is a microcosm of what is going on the the rest of the apartment, but in overdrive, because cooking is so central to my own sense of home and happiness.  I may have finally gotten it right  as I've gone several days now with nary a glitch.  There are still some things that don't have homes, and I am still in the process of sorting out storage, but at this point we are only talking minor refinements.

Part of that process has been adding over-the-door racks, like the one above, and another in the closet I am using for pantry, bar, and miscellaneous storage.  I didn't have enough baskets the first time around, and I was not surprised by that as I needed to see how everything actually worked in the space, so I have ordered more baskets and am now waiting.   I admit that I have more cooking stuff than many, and I use my sous-vide set up and my slow cooker multiple times weekly so they need to be accessible, but I have come to a far greater admiration for people who cook complex meals in truly tiny kitchens.  

 

The complex has a grilling area, so I grilled a steak one day.  Actually I cooked it sous-vide to perfectly halfway between rare and medium because the thing was nearly two inches thick and it is hard to get a steak that thick just right on the grill.  I simply seared it briefly on the grill.  The steak was so big that it lasted me for several meals, including another salad.

Another day I made peanut soup, west-african peanut crusted chicken kabobs and a salad, and that prompted a bit of an organizational melt-down, as I was tripping over myself, my pots, and various other equipment.  However, the food was good and the experience really helped focus my attention on what works and why, another reason I think I am close to finalizing the kitchen arrangement. As I grow happier in the kitchen, I grow happier in general, and it is a contented kind of settling in.

 

A more successful, at least in terms of kitchen functionality was a batch of an anglo-Indian style Beet and Tomato soup.  I got the recipe from Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cookbook, and I've been making it regularly since my 20s.  The cookbook is now falling apart and is kept together with rubber bands, and my version is no longer true to Jaffrey's, but I like to think it maintains the same spirit.

I served it in my grandmother's vaseline glass bowl with some seared shrimp.. I am already thinking of what soup I will make next.  I procured some fabulous carrots complete with a bounty of greens, so perhaps it is time for carrot greens soup. That tends to be another market-season favorite, mostly because it is the only way to find nice carrot greens.  

 

I am getting hungry already.

 

As you can see from this past Saturday's market haul, there have been more salads, but also spaghetti squash and zucchini which I turned into zoodles.  I've come late to summer cooking, as I was mostly preoccupied with other things in the earlier part of the summer, but I am thoroughly enjoying the process now.  The process of cooking connects me to my better self, to family, to youth, to joy, despite the fact that it is often actually work, or is because of that?  Spending time in the kitchen reminds me of the girl I once was, and still am, the girl who baked cookies and cakes for her dorm-mates every exam week.  Cooking, and baking, although I do less of that now, always reminds me of the good things in life.

 

 

 

 

slash and burn

There was a blog post scheduled for yesterday morning, but well, life got in my face in a rather major way and I couldn't finish it. I think I will post it later in the week probably as a slightly different post than originally intended, but hey, I'll just see what happens.  I am pretty sanguine, but I am not quite yet in a place where I am ready to make promises. Yesterday was a bit of an emotional roller coaster of a day.

I remember how just a few days ago, I reviewed preliminary ideas for future landscaping.  A good part of it further in the future than I might like, it turns out, simply because of the way I am staging things.  But I realize that I have made the right decisions for me, and in the conflict between my desire for instant gratification and uncertainty about what I actually want and/or need, time is my ally. Anything good is worth waiting for. I posted this collage of plans, hinting at where I hope we are going, on Instagram.  Apologies if you have seen them.  At the time, I had no intention of blogging about garden plans.

 

I simply planned on coming to my construction site, talking to my house, watering the front plantings, and communing, consoling, comforting and communicating with this place I call home.  I hoped the quiet peaceful bits of sanctuary I find in my gardens, my space, the space I share with this house, and yes I do think that each house has its own unique needs, would sooth my soul even as so much is torn up and I dream about the future.

 

That was before Monday afternoon, when I drove by the house to get mail.  Apparently the landscape crew had been there on Saturday.  As I learned later, when I irately spoke to the head of the landscape company, they had been there with instructions to do light weeding and to remove vines from the roses and hydrangeas.  In the perfectly understated terms of my landscape designer, (not at all related to the landscape maintenance company that perpetrated the crime) speaking from a position of greater detachment than I was able to muster, they "over performed".   My initial reactions were not so kind, and still, although I acknowledge "over performance" is indeed what happened, the wound itself remains raw.

 

Luckily the first thing I saw was the side bed, where some weeds had been cleared out, as had, unfortunately a lovely tree peony, "High Noon" which I had planted this spring and which was settling in beautifully.  Some of the iris crostata "Tennessee white" are also missing, a plant that I had been looking for since I moved to Tennessee and only found this past spring.  I hope the nursery has them again next year, as they are one of my favorite small iris varieties.  Today, with a heavy heart but cooler head, I can see the iris are dying back as it is August after all, and if one was not paying much attention, one might confuse them for crab-grass.  More likely someone was paying no attention at all, and pulled up peony and iris indiscriminately.  

 

But then I looked up.  It looked like someone had just taken a chainsaw across all my shrubs.    Everything was hacked off, all the new growth on the hydrangeas.  The undergrowth was ripped out, including hellebores. It looked like devastation; it felt like violation.  The arching oak leaf hydrangeas by my private little courtyard had been stripped back to twigs, the camellias slashed back by more than half. The ground laid bare, the branches stripped of growth, shrubs and trees hacked away, in ways I would never have eve dreamed of stripping them, denying them their essential nature.  It felt as if everything I believed and loved about this garden had been deemed worthless and destroyed.

Will these little twigs, all that remains of one oak leaf hydrangea, come back?  I don't expect I'll see much in terms of blossoms next year.  At least there are still some leaves.  In a few years, when my garden is full and lush again, I may look back and laugh.  Not so much now. It is not about the plants.  They are gone.  What is left will survive or it will not.  What is done cannot be undone. I am actually calm about that aspect of the situation. Plants may be replaced, or not. What is lost is lost; what survives will be stronger, life and beauty will win in the end.

 

But that is my brain.  My heart remains knotted in outrage, in a sense of having been violated. My space was brutally assaulted.  The words, slash, pillage, maim, keep echoing through my thoughts, although my thoughts are admittedly calmer than they were.  I spoke civilly but angrily. to the owner of the landscape company.  I really see no point in using brutal language, although I felt like doing so.  He saw the problem. He apologized.  We both acknowledged that my anger was justified.   As the day progressed, I slowly relinquish the idea that I should hang whoever slashed my shrubs by the thumbs in the sun.

 

No, I am not normally a fan of torture.  But I also accept that we have to accept our emotions.  Our history, our literature, even our holy liturgies are full fo it, full of violence and outrage.  To deny its existence is to deny part of what it means to be human. Equally so to act out our rage.  No, I will not collect eye for an eye, a chain-saw welding hand for a garden.  There are healthier ways to deal with rage, anger, hurt.

 

It may be only a garden, but I admit that I have not been so angry since a hapless young man broke up with my (step)daughter on the eve of  her move across state-lines, giving up everything she had built to be with him.....the coward chickening out at the last minute.  At the time I was in full mother-bear mode and I shocked myself.  For the first time I fully understood why someone would be so consumed with rage and hate that they would truss a person up, tie them to the bumper of a car, and drag them down the road.  Am I proud of those thoughts?  Not really.  But I acknowledge that I felt them, even though I would never have acted on them.  I felt a similar total outrage Monday, and even yesterday morning.  I am not going to deny that I felt anger, outrage even.  It is healthy neither to deny emotions nor to give in to them.

 

But here is the thing.  As I wandered around my yard, as I gently pulled a vine out of the Illicium that was planted this spring, and which was thankfully missed by the grounds crew, I realized something else.  Whoever cut up my garden did not think they were doing personal harm.  I am sure they knew they were not doing what they were supposed to be doing.  As I stood there, I could imagine it in my mind.  They started with the roses, They are far from the house and were not damaged.  But then, working next to the house one could see in the windows, see that all the furniture was gone.  I can imagine it now.  They wanted to finish, they wanted to do other things, perhaps they even thought they are doing a good thing, preparing the house for a future occupant. Perhaps they simply thought no one cared.  I am not excusing them, but I can attempt to understand.

 

Today, I am not as angry, although I will probably still well up with tears next time I go to the house.  I am sanguine about the future. The garden will recover, and this may even be a small boon to the construction timing. Because the foundation plantings have been butchered, it is actually easy right now for the contractors to get into the beds and dig new drains for the downspouts, to fix a drainage issue that would otherwise have waited until winter.  Does pragmatism negate the horror?  No.  But it is best to move forward, not denying, because that is the path to death, but acknowledging and moving on.

 

Today I will look at the bouquet of flowers I brought home from the farmer's market.  I will continue to settle in to my apartment.  I will walk and listen to music and read a book.  Tomorrow I will go back to the house and move a small camellia that needs to be relocated before excavation begins.  I will place it in the front yard where I can water it, where I can be reminded that hope is always present, even though I don't always feel all that hopeful.  If I give hope a chance, it will worm its way back into my heart.

 

 

 

 

The "Old" Neighborhood

The last couple of mornings I've walked around my neighborhood, my old neighborhood, the place I call home.  In fact, it feels odd to call it my old neighborhood because I feel like I still live there, it is home in a way that the apartment complex really is not, even though I am perfectly comfortably settling in to my temporary location.  Perhaps that is the key, that I know where I reside at the moment is temporary, and my heart is still in my home.

 

In fact, I assumed I would come back and walk around my neighborhood, although I did not really manage it most of the first week.  There were reasons for this of course:  the frustrations of establishing a new routine, the trials of unpacking and not finding things, the general principle that I dislike the idea of driving somewhere just to walk. However it has dawned on me that some principles are just pig-headedness, at least some of the time, and although the apartment complex is large, and is nicely planted with miles of sidewalks, it is a functional but completely uninspiring place to walk.  I can listen to a book on tape, but then I miss the early morning conversation that I have with the world when I walk in my home neighborhood.  Rather than a centering experience, walking around the apartment complex simply feels like exercise, another task to be completed, and although I need exercise, what I am interested in my morning walk is both movement and a spiritual centering, a centering that can occur in my neighborhood, but does not in the concrete world of parking lots and apartment buildings.

 

When I walk around my streets, and it is easy to walk anywhere from a couple of miles to several, I slow down, I listen to the early morning, I greet the plants and watch the birds, the rabbits, the occasional deer or fox.  I am present, fully present  in a way that I am not in the acres of concrete.  I notice tiny things.  They are not necessarily unusual things, but that is not the point.  My soul calms and slows, even if I am puffing up a hill, and my awareness picks up thing that I would miss in the hustle and hurry of modern American life.

 

It is a mile away, as the crow flies, and yet I feel like it is a different world.

There is a large park near me as well, with a walking trail, and I've gone there a couple of times, but it is often more populated even in the early morning.  I am more distracted when I walk there, and it all urban-nature, shaped by man, not at all like wild nature.  The park is neither wild, nor lived in, and to me it seems more detached and impersonal, not wild, and yet not a habited place. Nature-nature and civilized nature feel different, just as I feel different at Lakeshore Park, than I do in my home neighborhood.  The latter is home, a little more intentionally planted, but the difference is really not so great, and the comfort in the space is palpable, at least for me.  We all seek and bring different perspectives to our activities, and there is a place for each, what is best for one does not have to best for all.  Actually, it has been a while since I've gotten outside -- outside the city -- to a different kind of nature, and it is time to do so again, but I count that as different from the immediacy of my morning routine, my morning walk.

 

Tikka also enjoys going home.  We went for a ride, went by the house, and when we pulled onto our street she perked up, started looking eagerly out the window, growing visibly more excited as we reached our driveway.  She was eager to jump out of the car, eager to go inside, dancing around, displaying her inner puppy self, not her often calm 8 or 9 hear old self.  She ran into the house and ran around, checking out the rooms; even empty, they were still hers.  We went out the front door and she could hardly contain herself, eager to go piddle in her own front yard, eager to go for a walk around her block, to sniff the old familiar smells.  It reminded me of the way I used to feel when when George and I returned from a trip and we crossed the Hudson River on the way to our house from the airport, as if the air changes, and you are suddenly home.  It is a feeling I still experience, or I have experienced again since I moved into this house, just as I accept that in a certain way the condo on Maple Branch was never completely home to me, much as I tried to make it so.

 

This is not to say I am at all unhappy here.  I am fairly content, I am becoming more and more settled.  My neighbors are nice.  I will have people over soon. But this remains a temporary landing pad; it is not my home.  Today I will finish unpacking books in the living room, the books I chose to bring with me, the books I decided I would or should read, as if I could anticipate what I would want to read.  But limitations and constraints are also good, and I am determined to read those books, at least some of those books. A few new books have also arrived -- the first of the Booker longlist -- a couple of which are available through my local library system, but most of which I must buy.  I've started The Water Cure, but I am not far into it yet and cannot judge.  The writing is poetic and lyrical, but the book also seems somewhat hallucinogenic, with a distinctly disturbing undercurrent despite its lyricism.  I am drawn in and enjoying it, but so far have trouble connecting what I am reading to the blurbs on the back of the book.

Unpacking.  Walking.  This is farmer's market Saturday and I love wandering around, the joy of the experience.  I've been cooking and have actually cooked, using up last week's haul.  Some time with family.   A swim. Perhaps I will get pictures up on the walls.  Perhaps a stroll along one of the nearby nature trails. It seems like a weekend full of promise, and I hope your weekend plans and hopes are promising indeed.

 

 

 

Book, Book, Book

Time for a book update. I had been thinking that all I wrote about was books, but it isn't quite true. I had been thinking that all I thought about was books, which may have been slightly more correct, but mostly I thought about books I want to read (Booker longlist) and moving books.  When it came to actual reading, July was very light.

 

Three books.  Three very different books, but I enjoyed every one of them. 

 

I've discovered something else as well.  Remember how, in the last post, I stated I would surely discover something that should have been brought to the apartment but got stored instead?  Well I stored all my journals, including my reading journal, up to the most current (new) one, and most of my notes, the passages I copied out, are in storage.  I shall have to rely on memory.

 

Mohsin Hamid:  How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.. I loved Exit West, and thought it would be good to read some of Hamid's earlier work.  When I saw this at McKay's books, I snapped it up.  Obviously the same author, writing about one thing, while pretending to write about another.  The book is very witty, at times sarcastic, and very wise, and I can see how it could be off-putting to some.  It is written under the pretext of being a self-help book, but it never quite achieves that goal, nor is it meant to, it is a parody of a self-help book.  There are no proper nouns in the book, and two parallel narratives. The protagonist, "you" is both the narrator, who rises from poverty to great wealth, and the reader.  The other main character, the "Pretty Girl" runs a parallel but different course. The book appears to be about how to achieve great success, but it is actually about the way achieving success and the path to that achievement corrupts us, and what is lost in the end.  Although the books take place in Asia, in a world that appears quite corrupt, and we in more developed western countries may think it does not apply to us, Hamid's lessons are universal in that the pursuit of power corrupts, and money is also power, but what the heart really wants is to love and be loved. In the end it is a love story, a love story in a time of seismic social change, and this reader found herself in tears.  

 

Deborah Levy: Hot Milk.   Deborah Levy's Hot Milk was short-listed for the Booker a couple of years ago but I just now got to it.  I enjoyed the novel, but I think there is a lot I didn't get, a lot going on beneath the surface.  I can see how it is the kind of novel that people who dislike literary novels would despise.   Half-Greek British girl goes to Spain with her disabled, controlling, hypochondriac confabulist of a mother.  The prose is vivid, and sometimes hallucinatory.  It does not tell the story directly.  But it is still a great novel, about coming of age, about what we gain, but also what we lose, when we unloose chains.  Through beautiful and often intensely metaphoric prose riddled with parallels to Greek Tragedy the author throws in Brexit,  economic disaster, a warm Spanish paradise that is a horror of toxic waste, sexual freedom, dependence and independence.  A lot is made of the themes of those who serve only themselves, vs those who serve others, male and female, and the dangers and traps in both extremes.  I found the novel to be at times cryptically elusive and yet easy reading and entertaining, often even quite funny. I could read it again. Perhaps I should read it again.  But I probably won't.

 

Caitlin Macy: Mrs.  If I picked up this novel in a bookstore I would probably think of it as one of those quick reads about the imperious and overly arrogant one-percenters who are due for a fall, and I am certain there are readers who chose this book for that reason.  They would be disappointed, because there is very little action and no really shocking upset.  I read it slowly and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I think the writing rewards attention, as the author is deft at subtle detail, the kind of thing you would miss if you were skimming through quickly. The beauty of the book would be lost. Yes it is about the one-percenters, parents of children in an exclusive pre-school in Manhattan, and yes there is some cultural upheaval.  But the book is more than that.  It is a satire, but a satire with an undercurrent of humanity.  The story is almost an illusion.  What is important here is the characters, and the stories they tell themselves, both the primary characters, and those in the backdrop, deployed here as a kind of chorus.  Actually, although the story occurs in a specific socio-economic setting, the characters, and aspects of their mores and their behaviors, their assumptions about each other, can be found in any place, in any group.  Perhaps I have a soft spot for the  book because I have known too many women like these women, but I suspect we all have, if we allow ourselves to look beyond the superficialities.  The settings may be different, the level of privilege, but we are not so different.  Macy is a deft observer of humanity, and she tells the story through the voices of her characters, interleaving their stories and their perspectives.  Each character is portrayed tenderly, with understanding, and yet also witheringly.  Each character, in telling the story, reveals themselves inadvertently, showing that weakness or darkness that is meant to remain hidden, often even from themselves, with a subtle turn of phrase.  I found this to be great satire because it slips in so quietly, catches one by surprise, if one is paying attention, and therefore hits directly like a needle to the heart.  It was an enjoyable read, with some really great lines and a few truths.  

 

I don't know what August will bring, reading-wise.  I don't have any of the Booker novels yet, so I can't make predictions about what I will or will not read.  I will however, look back, and come up with a list of the books I read in June.  Leave no rock unturned, after all.