What I’ve been doing, what I haven’t been doing, what I wished would happen.
Continue readingABOUT FLOODING
meeting goals
BALANCE CONTROL
I can stand on one leg long enough to put each sock on the other foot. I cannot stand on one leg for long with my eyes closed so I stopped trying to do that. I keep reading that my ability to balance on one foot is an indication of longevity.
This morning I read about the 30-second test, balanced on one foot, and with one eye closed. I can sort-of do that with my right foot and right eye closed. (I am left-eye dominant—cross dominance is more common among women than men—right handed and left eye dominant. It’s why I had to aim off-center when I had archery in high school, though I did not understand this at the time.)
The goals I set and the accomplishments I am proud of… a little planning and some realism.
HALFWAY
Gary standing in the path he built (and has had to rebuild several times) through the rocks. We hope we will be able to turn the loungers around and safely enjoy a 4th of July fire on the sand. (We half hope someone takes these lounge chairs—one of which we found.) That’s a bit of beach trash in Gary’s hand, a length of plastic pipe he carries to poke at the sand.
Today is halfway through 2020 and it’s a good place to pause and take stock. For many human beings this has already been a tragic year on so many levels, so I feel I need to access my situation.
We are both retired so we’re doing fine as far as finances go. That is, unlike so many who are without income such as one son and both daughters-in-law, we still have Social Security. Everyone in our immediate family is healthy but several have continued working in essential services. We have been isolating since 10 March with one exception: our younger son and his two children visited for a weekend sixteen days ago. We are still healthy because they are still healthy, masking and taking other precautions. Other than that, we have the habit of weekly grocery shopping with the occasional extra trip out to pick up mail or deliver mail to the nearest mailbox.
At the beginning of 2020, I set a couple of goals that are still valid. We gave up seafood from our diet. In six months, no seafood, again with one exception: there is fish sauce in my pantry and I made an umami-rich sauce that I’ve used in bowls with fresh veggies and pasta or rice.
The other goal was to purchase no more than eight items of clothing the entire year. I have bought three garments from Eileen Fisher on steep discount (more than 60% off). EF is a highly responsible company and I am glad to support them. Do the two hair clips from eBay count as clothing? Does the replacement headband for the one I’d worn since the 90s but lost on the beach count as clothing? Either three or six purchases, either I am doing fine or this is not looking promising for the second half of the year.
In the past four months I have cooked angelhair pasta at least a couple dozen times (a simple one-pan meal cooked with vegetable stock and with greens, onions, and/or cheese), baked a couple dozen loaves of bread, made gibassier and waffles and spring onion pancakes. I have made curries and vegetable stews and spiced grains. I discovered that a rich soup can be made with leeks and water and salt and pepper—simple as that. Yum. We have eaten pounds of broccoli and uncounted bags of various greens.
Last month I killed my sourdough starter, but I have grown a new one. It tastes fine once it’s baked, but the smell is rather alcoholic than sour. That’s because the “All-Purpose Unbleached Flour” from Costco has barley mixed with the hard red wheat—I didn’t even notice until a local friend and I were comparing notes on our sourdoughs and she said her sourdough had gone rather alcoholic too. A step shy of beer, but . . .
One of my best discoveries is organic miso available at one of the stores we shop once a month. I now have both white and red miso in the fridge! Also, salad greens sauté well with pasta.
My root canal is still sore. I gained back the four pounds I lost. I am not running. sigh
Three packages that we ordered in May have not arrived and we assume now all three are lost. Gary’s CD of Estonian music and my handmade doll from Russia both vanished somewhere in the Baltic. They left their country of origin and never arrived anywhere at all. And the painting—Oh, that painting I love so much—UPS lost track of it at their hub outside Chicago and has issued a refund to the shipper. The refund has been forwarded to me, and I will do the responsible thing and set it aside toward our property taxes.
This year, I have ordered eleven skeins of yarn. I use fourteen for each warp and that much again in weft. This means that the four seven warps I have put on the loom since January have yielded nineteen and a half shawls so far. I am generally still weaving past 7pm. After six months work and subtracting expenses, selling them all might yield a couple weeks or even a month of minimum wage pay, but who’s counting?
I pieced the top and back of a quilt that is waiting its turn to be quilted.
Butterfly Fontanelle has gone through revision three times and I am halfway through reading it aloud again. Tiny changes this time, little corrections but since I am still finding things to repair, change, and move, I will need another edit when I finish this one. I am always in too much of a hurry to send out work. Did it this time too, but I have sent it to a slow responder that does not allow simultaneous submissions, which will ensure I do not send it out again until winter.
This morning I caramelized my last two onions to top macaroni and cheese made with the last of the Stilton, mozzarella, Parm, and with a scattering of dried cranberries because our taste has shifted to sweet and savory and salty all at once. I had only two cups of milk until our next shopping trip so cooked twelve ounces of pasta. It’s in the oven.
At our next shopping trip everyone in the state is required to be masked. Yeah, July 1st! (And about time.) But neither the local sheriff and nor the parks department plan to do a thing about what happens on our beach on the 4th. The one time we tried calling the fire department about a beach fire that was over twenty feet high (absolutely not exaggerating—it flew up another ten feet), the volunteer fire department dismissed our concern. The local millionaires are allowed. “With the rich and mighty, always a little patience,” according to Jimmy Stewart’s character in Philadelphia Story.
I read the news every day—NYT, WaPost, NPR, Guardian—even on the days I swear I will take a break. I study covid-19 statistics. Gary reads different news’ sources. Between the two of us we cover the world. Apparently we are much better informed than the President of the United States. That’s because we read. I have read 34 books so far this year, including nonfiction, memoir, poetry, and novels. Streaming (no cable) we are currently particularly fond of watching Midnight Diner (again) and we finished Somebody Feed Phil on Netflix, even though Phil eats so much meat! Detectorists remains Gary’s all time favorite. On recommendation of a friend, we tried again to watch it and decided we liked Shitz Creek after all. We look forward to Monty Don and Gardeners World on Friday nights. We paid to stream two current release movies and they each had their good points, but we’ve found better distraction and information and drama via our subscriptions.
The hall where I meant to paint is not finished, but Gary and I are scouring the house for set of essays written by a former student. Gary is not optimistic, but our search will be thorough. I was fond of those essays and kept them and still trust they must be here someplace . . . I hope. In the mean time, searching has forced us both to sort and clean. It wasn’t how we planned to spend the week, but it needs to happen.
There has been a lot of cleaning house going on throughout our nation. Statues of treasonous and racist men are coming down. Men who did nothing for our country other than attack it. Comment on national websites point out that even Benedict Arnold fought for our nation in several important battles, long before turning against our country, and no one celebrates him in a public statue or named a military base after him. Laws are changing. White people are taking long, difficult, honest looks at their own privilege and insisting to themselves and the world that we can do better. As hard as these days are for so many and for so many reasons, this is reason to think we might actually accomplish some good in our nation.
My husband and I still get along fine with one another. We are sad sometimes. We nap too much. We worry about our children and the world. Too much. Half of a year and too much has happened to claim anything except hope. There is hope.
We have rewatched the first seven and a half minutes of the pilot of The Mentalist a dozen times in recent months. “Seriously, it’s not as bad as it looks.” And every time, we laugh.
How could I forget making chutney and two kinds of jam?
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CAN YOU HAVE TOO MANY BOOKS?
I saw a meme on Facebook the other day. The wording was something like: “I decided I needed to lose 10 pounds last year, and after six months I am doing great—12 pounds to go!”
That is the irony when our best intentions go backwards. I have some personal experience with that. I have been watching my eating, drinking, and walking for the past 7 weeks and have lost the 8 pounds I gained since last December after deciding I needed to lose 14 pounds. I sleep better and my feet feel better when I weigh less.
During that same time, I taught two college writing classes, read 38 books, completed weaving three 82″ lengths and seamed them into a 75″ x 82″ blanket + fringe, planned a quilt, submitted stories and poems and essays, several published pieces and a story due out next month plus an essay out in September. (I will inflict links to these publications upon you once they are live.)
We walk the beach most days for at least two hours. I have picked up a few hundred pounds of trash since January, and 98 bits of sea glass so far just in July. People ask Gary and I all the time what we are finding. “Do you find agates?” they invariably want to know. We always find agates. We don’t even gather most of the agates we find, not even a quarter of the agates we find. What we carry away is mostly plastic trash. You knew that.
I watched the second season of the Netflix series, Anne with an E, which I loved from the first episode and this second season more than ever with challenging issues of sexual orientation and race. The novels are pretty “safe”, but the series takes chances and flashes back to the early years not only in Anne’s life but in Marilla’s and Matthew’s lives. The characters are thus more well rounded and meaningful, more real and less white-washed cardboard characters. The Irish actor playing Anne really is not “pretty” by the standards of those days, but bursting with energy and imagination as she should be. Green Gables is depicted here in the same way that Wicked seems to portray a genuine Oz. All the magic, but a grown-up and serious version—charm without flinching.
My own flinching is mostly about too much stuff.
My goals for the year, my husband’s and my goals for the year, include gutting the house. Going leaner, you might say. We are emptying out closets and shelves, the dozens of pretty pictures that have no walls to hang upon. Gary took everything out of the attic which still had things from my mother’s house, unexamined items from her sister’s home, boxes of ceramics I made in college decades ago now. Nothing goes back in the attic. I am about to empty four bookcases of nonfiction and poetry. A lot of the books and at least one bookcase will go out the door. We are preparing for a garage sale and major gifts to Good Will in the near future. I keep going through books and moving stacks out of the house.
Despite all that, I ordered a book the other day. I ordered three towels on sale and I ordered two skeins of yarn, even though I have SO MUCH YARN! Too much. Too many books. Too many Christmas ornaments. Too many family pictures in frames. Too much stuff. The greatest appeal about moving into a smaller house—something we fantasize about from time to time—is the need to divest.
More important than divesting is the imperative to stop accumulating. It is possible to stop. I believe it is possible, but I have to skill in that direction.
The Green Gables house in the new series is sparse and clear. The table is set for dinner in a dining room that has no other purpose but dining. The meal is eaten, the table cleared, the ceiling is the primary decoration. Beautiful unpainted boards.
No cell phones, no music but what people made for themselves. I am not so foolish and as wish myself back in that era. Dentistry. Vaccinations. Voting rights. I know what I would lose.
But Anne’s daily walk through the woods. Writing with pen and paper. A fox in the forest. People who make immediate use of nearly everything, or they do not keep it at all. Anne has little, but holds so very much. She is creative and imaginative and loving and kind. Her ambition is generous and heartfelt. She asks for little, but the best of everything. Her best is not about gilded rooms or extravagant praise. She might enjoy those things, but there is something precious and few about her longings. More does not mean better, as I was warned in childhood.
May I at least have more of Anne? And maybe a few pounds less of me.
BRAIN POWER
The brain is a greedy organ*. I heard once that Einstein used the same energy when he was thinking hard that a marathon runner would be using about mile 25.
I am thinking a lot these days. I am revising curriculum on the fly because my tiny writing class needs to become a more muscular group, and I am grading their essays and trying to give them specific writing advice—actually all sorts of advice.
At the same time I am writing a story. It is not ready to be submitted, but it has undergone enormous revision. When I butcher four or five thousand words out of this long story, write a thousand new words, and then butcher out another thousand to make room for them; when I rethink how the story should end and what, perhaps it means; and when I allow myself to become distracted enough that I risk killing that darling at the beginning of my novel (a very different project), which I am trying to find representation for . . . I need to take a nap.
My exhaustion is not physical, but it is real. I have been thinking. And all my thoughts are about what to put on the page.
This year I set an unusual writing goal for myself. I would like to plan on publications, but acceptance for publication is primarily the choice of editors. I have no control about what is published, other that to submit work for consideration. All I can do is send work out. So a more reasonable goal is to set a number of submissions. A friend of mine, in her effort to gain tenure as a college writing professor, set a goal of having 100 submissions out at all times for a year. That sounds admirable but insane to me. One hundred? I have been paying attention for a long time and have read many, many—in fact, an astounding number of—journals, and I have found 104 to put on my list. There are close to 4,000 I might consider, but even of those on my list, there are perhaps a couple dozen that really interest me. In the past, I have tried to keep at least 8 submissions out at a time. Sometimes I go for double digits.
The entire process of submitting work is work, and mass submissions also require that I have a lot of work “ready for publication” (see above). And there is that word “submit.”
At some point toward the end of 2017, I read about a writer whose goal was to have 100 rejections. That is pretty smart, I thought. Sneaky too, since in order to have 100 rejections, I would need at least 100 submissions over the course of the year. In 2017, I had 78 submissions—close—so I thought about this and decided it was totally doable.
Counting rejections also has the advantage of giving my some tiny advance in my record-keeping each time an editor sends me a note that says, “I liked the quality of the prose, but overall the narrative didn’t quite win me over and I’m going to pass on this story for [our magazine]. I wish you best of luck finding the right market for it and hope that you’ll continue to keep us in mind in the future.”
Well, that story really does needs more work. I sent it out too early, and I should have asked a friend reread it. I should have read it aloud to my husband. But . . .
But good news, halfway through May, I already have 45 rejections! Whoopee me! I am going to meet my rejection goal!
The bad news? My brain is completely worn out. Wiped out. Soggy noodle. Maybe I should go take a nap? Or two. Or a good night’s sleep?
Tomorrow I will read that story aloud and do the needful.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 