a singlet--with hair

Thanks to a very informative dialogue on swim wear with a focus on butches over at Effing Dykes, I went and ordered myself the sweet singlet seen above in an aggressive stance picture of me.

There was a time I had a swimsuit, actual full on old school swimsuit, with tight legs and a binding kind of restrictive top, etc. I wore it so much it got all thin and useless. So, I'd been searching to no avail for something like it. Then the aforementioned discussion took place in the comments section of offing dykes (every time I write effing dykes on this ipad it auto corrects it to offing dykes, hee hee) and someone suggested wrestling singlets. Then I found this great black with royal gold trim and I ordered it. The damn thing took an eternity to come in the mail. One of Will's caretakers actually said, "you sounded like a little kid every day asking--'did my singlet come in the mail yet.'"

Then it arrived. It fits great, but my tits kind of slide out the sides, so I will have to wear an additional garment underneath if I plan on not offending the public with glimpses of too much flesh.

This is all a very long introduction to the the real question of this post. How many of you gender benders out there-- you passers for dudes, you mostly masculine types--shave your legs even though you are as butch as can be? Tell the truth.

I've played sports with plenty of super butch ladies and every single fucking one of them but me, shaved their legs. I know sporty dykes are a different breed, but many of these ladies were full on passers for dudes, gender benders, etc. When it came to their legs, well, they were silky smooth.

This all has been resurfacing for me, because I think my kk wants me to shave my legs. I think she is embarrassed of my extra hairy shins.
We went to a pool party the other day (it was a very strange crowd; friends of and the children of friends of kk's deceased mama--all pretty damn gender normative to say the least). I did not sport my singlet that day. It was warm and beautiful, but I stayed in my rolled pants and let my hairy sandaled feet and ankles make their presence known without letting the big sisters on my shins and calves be seen.

K had been hesitant about me getting into my swim gear, so I take this to mean she wants them smooth. Though, the one time I shaved, in the past, when we had been together maybe a year point five, she ended up thinking the smoothness was fucked up in relation to the rest of me.

My armpits will always remain hairy.

But, kk says one day, "maybe you should shave." and the next, "no don't; it will look too strange."

I'm mostly of the mind to always keep them hairy and let all of the onlookers with their frowns and befuddled looks keep their twisted, distorted and more painful to carry faces for themselves. Sure, every once in a while, I become very uncomfortable when I think that people are judging me because I have lady breasts and booty and also a thick weave of hair on my legs. It confounds the dumb. It enrages the already mean spirited homophobes. But, shaving is a pure pain in the ass. It does not reflect who I am.

While it may sometimes feel like I have a thousand boogers hanging from my nose (I mean legs), from the stares I get at the public pool, I say fuck em. Next time, I am at a high falootin pool party, my hairy legs might just end up clogging the filter.

inhale/exhale

Have you ever read Walt Whitman's Specimen Days? I've been visiting those words lately and feel compelled to share about this experience that coalesced with the reading (of a particular part of Specimen Days), the doing (a particular thing was done), and the dying (a particular person has died).

A few weeks back Waddles, my once favorite chicken, had to be killed. She was heavy with vent gleet which is an incredibly nasty chicken yeast infection. She had flies laying eggs in her behind and I tried to cure her but with no success. We were getting ready to leave for our mini vacay and kk was gone to pick up our friend M from the airport. I was home tidying up the "farm" with our friend R. I went to change the bedding in Waddle's isolation pen-I had separated her out from the rest of the flock cause she was so ill-and she fell over when I pulled her out. Her comb was turning purple; her eyes were not opening all the way; she was simply suffering and I could not leave her with my intern and her girlfriend for the weekend cause that would have been mean for all involved.

I dug a hole under the great oak in our yard. R said she would hold Waddles for me and I could hatchet her neck, but I said no I cannot put you through it when you don't even believe in eating animals, really. So, we waited for kk and M to arrive. K was going to hold Waddles and I was going to hatchet her, but M said she wanted to do it and so she had jumped off a plane from Brooklyn made her way to Ypsi by car and now stood in our backyard ready to help in this mercy killing.

M held Waddles, R burned sage, K readied the newspaper lined bucket, I readied my sharp hatchet. In the end I could not cut her neck. I tried and tried, but M graciously offered to switch spots with me and our vegetarian friend walloped Waddles on her main vein and ended her suffering. I placed her in the bucket and dumped her in the deep hole I had dug. And then I covered her and this peace filled my whole, physical body. It was this almost other-worldly experience; I felt a calm that I can only dream of replicating.

And what does this have to do with Specimen Days. Well, I was reading a section shortly thereafter where Whitman describes the deaths of three young men he had witnessed some years before his writing of them (and actually one of the deaths was witnessed by a dear friend of Whitman and then the friend relayed the dying to Whitman cause the friend thought Whitman would appreciate the death of the man who had died). The piece is called Three Young Men's Deaths--surprise, surprise. And these deaths were immortalized in Whitman's text. The details of each man's gentle parting are simple yet plentiful. They had left and in their leaving also left behind a significant hunk of life due to the remembering of this wise poet transcribed onto the page. Whitman's comfortableness with the transitioning from this world to something different is so full of value and lessons. His words ring true for this present moment and they ring true for tomorrow and the day after that. He witnessed the deaths and sufferings of many young men and some women in the civil war hospitals and the dying/battle fields. He captured the inhumanity of war and also the peace that came too early to so many who had been blown apart by the violence. Specimen Days is spattered with the tattered lives of people long gone. People most likely turned all the way into dust and earth, maybe some chunks of bones here and there.

Anyhow, it seemed timely for me to read about these three particular deaths represented in Specimen Days. I had this sort of great affinity for the simple emotion that he captured through the very act of writing a small snippet about each man's character and likes and then a small snippet about his demise--that one man thought enough of each to capture the essence of the last breath; the fact of it--the inhale where there seems to be no exhale or maybe the exhale looks remarkably like an eternal inhale, the struggle, the no-struggle, the eyes forever open to nothing or closed forever to all.

"He was one of these persons that while his associates never thought of attributing any particular talent or grace to him, yet all insensibly, really, liked Billy Alcott. I, too, loved him. At last, after being with him for quite a food deal--after hours and days of panting for breath, much of the time unconscious, (for the consumption that had been lurking in his system, once thoroughly started, made rapid progress, there was still vitality in him, and indeed for four or five days he lay dying, before the close,) late on Wednesday night, Nov. 4th, where we surrounded his bed in silence, there came a lull--a longer drawn breath, a pause, a faint sigh--another--a weaker breath, another sigh--a pause again and just a tremble--and the face of the poor wasted young man (he was just 26), fell gently over, in death, on my hand, on the pillow" (Whitman, Specimen Days 836).

And then I cried for these long dead men and then I cried for the peace that surrounded me when I put Waddles in the ground and then I cried for the knowledge of kk's grandma c on her own deathbed awaiting that final inhale/exhale. And grandma c did die. She passed on Thursday. KK was able to make it up north on her own intuition she dropped everything and drove up on Wednesday morning. Her father and hospice had been saying she was ready to die at any moment for 6 days. But, like the young man above, her vitality was immense and she kept on keeping on for days and days. And then she drew her last breath a little more than half way through her 89th year after kk came once more to say goodbye.

So, it has been a dying time here in this August month. Last year in this same but very different month and season, kk's grandma s took her last breath and unfolded her limbs and skin toward becoming dust. We are now down to two grandmas between the two of us--both of mine are still inhaling and exhaling fully.

Back to Specimen Days and what any of this means. K and I have been gifted to be in the presence of midwifing some of our loved ones out of this world or perhaps deeper into this very world. Though it may be the most difficult of all human emotions, there is something deeply peaceful about witnessing the end of suffering. And while it is impossible to compare a chicken's death to a human's death, the peace that seeped through my ribs after laying Waddles to rest in the tangle of roots and worms and fungi and leaves and decay was profound enough to translate to the following observation about myself and my own coming demise: Through all of this I came to the grim and lovely conclusion that being buried in a box or gauze/ or basket makes perfectly good sense for me.

A strange place to leave it all, but I am working on my exhale.

lakes, legs, and love

lake michigan after a day of rain

k and i just returned from a lovely mini-vacay. i went on her "girls weekend" this year, because only two of the "girls" could go on it, and we had to cancel our regular vacation due to k saving up all her vacation days in order to take a 3 month maternity leave. she gets paid leave only in using up her vacay and sick days and then it becomes unpaid.

K's legs my fingers

it was really good to go up north and be near so many of michigan's wonderful lakes and all of the rivers that flow out from them. of course, we have lakes and rivers downstate too, but up north the inland lakes are large and deep and then lake michigan or lake huron are always near-by (or nearer by). we stayed up the hill from crystal lake in a cottage. we could not see the lake cause a huge condo-complex got built sometime in the late 80s/early 90s and now blocks the view, but we were not far from the lake and we could smell it on the air and know it under our feet.

whipping and skipping rocks on lake michigan

whipping and skipping rocks on crystal lake at sunset

there is this thing in the longevity of loving another person like i love k that is so subtle and simultaneously deeply spread, like the roots of a black walnut. as the days go by, our love seems to sink longer into the folds of this planet. And with that love comes this greater understanding of one another. obviously, our rhythms are sometimes different, our views diverge, our moods cross and rough one another up, but, all in all, we get along splendidly and enjoy each other, day after day after day.

On our little vacay, our friend M spotted this big-ass tree and she decided that K was going to get up i t with her semi-big pregnant belly and M was going to do a photo shoot of my kk up in this tree. Now the crook of the tree where M wanted to shoot K was a good 12-15 feet up off the ground. Mhm, you heard me right. My stomach was a little queasy as K climbed the ladder that M and R had set up in the tree. And then she was on this lovely limb with her solid, rock hard sexy legs hanging out from under her skirt. And, my stomach was still a little queasy, cause I am one overly cautious person, but K up in that tree, well, she was (and is) just gorgeous.

M shooting K in tree from top of the car

and another shot of the shoot

Time to come down!

Down she comes; hot legs

she's hot

yep, literally and figuratively.



and she's mine.

she's wearing the fun outfit in these pictures right now, next to me, on the couch. she's got it on to keep her cool, cause damn it has been hot. and since she came down stairs sporting her belly and her bountiful bosoms, I just had to take a picture and share with all of you her tube top and yellow shorts.

kk is going for the big ultrasound tomorrow afternoon. we will check the sex and make sure he/she is alive and all that. We will also check on the hemorrhage to see what she's been up to. hopefully, she dug a hole out and has permanently left my beloved's body.

we will be checking to see what hangs or does not hang between the little thing's legs. these queers--that's us--are checking the sex cause we have two very gendered names picked for the kid and so one of those names will indeed be assigned to the kid based on the sex. we still live in a very gendered world and still happen to prefer two very gendered names...lifted, of course, from two dead people who left remarkable bits of stardust and wisdom all over the pages of books and in the halls of libraries and the bedside reading tables of many, many people.

back to sweating by my sizzling mama to be.

flying time

Up north sunset--lake michigan

I know people say it all the time--you know those words about time--about time flying so fast. well, it is a common (overly common) expression for a reason; it is true. really, very hard-hitting, actually ever so true.

My sabbatical is wizzing by me. I've been doing lots. I went away for a week to a permaculture course. It was a blast. I camped at Tibbits Nature Sanctuary Tibbits Nature Sanctuary and lived through an intense night of rolling, strobe lightning thunderstorms. My tent rained in on me, and I tossed and turned even though earplugs were in my ears cause earplugs do not keep out the deep booms of thunder nor do they act as an eye patch for the lightning that beams pulses of blue and white through the thin sheen of tent fabric. You can read more about the LSC at : Qani's (the summer caretaker's) blog

I met great people at the course and really got a general overview of so much connected to permaculture--observation of the land, observation of patterns and plants and wind and sun, becoming more self sufficient and community sufficient while living in our own houses and on our own land (however big or small it may be), and on and on.

I also had the privilege to poop in a humanure all week. A humanure (well this one) was a bucket. We, 25 strangers or so, pooped on top of one another's poop and each time a person expelled feces into the bucket the person covered it with sawdust. As the bucket got full, it was dumped in a compost pit a bit beyond the lovely little house where the bucket lives and it was all covered with thick brush. It will have to compost for two years and then it will be used around trees not vegetables.


humanure outhouse

After the permaculture training, I came home and did homesteady and community things for a week. I made blueberry freezer jam from the 14 pounds of blueberries we picked a while back. I dried a bunch of romas from my garden, i made butter and then i made ghee with that butter; i made some corn chowder with the buttermilk from the butter-making run off. And one afternoon rode around with A from growing hope to plan out the GH Tour De Fresh coming up in september.


blueberry jam


golden ghee


romas

I extracted some honey from one of my frames I harvested a while back; this turned out to be quite a fiasco. I harvested the frames a few weeks ago and, little did I know, I should have frozen them for 48 hours to kill all the wax moth larvae. I did not; so when I opened the tub--yes wax moths and eggs and worms galore. My friend, R, was there with me when I took off the lid and I am so thankful she was. While I love bugs, worms that are not earthworms can make me squirm.

R shaved the sides of my hair out in the driveway cause my hair is growing bushy,bushy, bushy. The top is still all huge but the sides are down a bit now.

And then we packed for vacation and now I sit here typing from the great up north. We are here at all seasons resort-k's dad's place with my mom and dad and sister and brother-in-law and 2 nephews and niece, plus K's dad lives here and her grandma too. And family friends from way back are vacationing here right now also. So, it is a big group and we are having fun together. The kids make me laugh a hell of a lot. and time is flying by too fast but i am not holding my breath and taking it all in.


winning ayla a stuffed patriotic donkey on the claw machine at leggs inn

life is so full

life is so full.

goodness, green, stress, sweat, muscle pain, fatigue, happiness, heartache, sore hands, hard dreams, escape dreams, chewing and swallowing, speaking to one another, crying, smiles forming everlasting creases on the surfaces of human skin, not knowing, knowing too much, wishing for more, yearning for less, wondering, being mean, being kind, patterns, persistence, the calm before the wind comes blowing hard and fast, the calm after the rain leaves dents in the soil, burning in the gut, watching the birds, learning to love always, listening to the sadness, vegetables, animals, bees flying dances of fertility all around the yard, berries, drying the clothes that keep us sheltered from the elements of wind, rain, and fire, calf muscles pulsing as pedals push, enjoying friendship and family, food and drink, dancing on the porch, laughter.

knowing our ever empty wombs are right and that in spite of no children our lives are full and good and sad and lovely and all of it.

below are pictures from the last many weeks.
life is so full.


blackberries--many bushes live and give in our yard


my new beehive in the back of our perennial garden


pie made by A from the blackberries and mulberries in our yard



K hanging clothes on the new clothesline that A and me (and my pops did help with drilling the eye screws) built and put in while k was in scandanavia


a beautiful turnip from one of my vegetable gardens


the turnips cooked in butter in salad with feta and walnuts


garden flowers


trey and me after the ypsilanti fourth of july parade that we rode our bikes in

I AM THUNDER. I AM SIRENS.

If only I could bellow like the thunder roaring and the the sirens shrieking outside my old cat scratched screens.

If only I could shout to the heavens and ask them for relief from the dark cloud hanging on the rusty hinges of my heart.

If only...

So, really things have not been all that bad. Zoloft has given me a lift and I have become chatty cathy queen. Oh, yes, dear readers, I have been popping a pharmaceutical. I take it daily and I think it makes my tits hurt and it makes me pee a lot and I was hazy for the first three weeks and I wanted to scream that I had caved to what I had called the lies of western medicine.

But after losing the pregnancy--oh yes I was fucking pregnant which sometimes sounds so weird as it rolls off my tongue or saunters over the soft gray matter of my thoughts--all the chemistry in my brain went back to the high-anxiety state of precoming out of the closet. All late winter and spring I had panic attacks and sleeplessness and even night sweats.

Finally, more than six weeks ago, my therapist was like, "you need something to break the chemical cycle that you cannot control." And so I started the drug. Well, I got the script and then it took me two weeks to start it but I did it. And now I am kind of "normal" again. Kind of.

But work is slowly giving me the kind of anxiety that feels like 3000 bricks piled high on my chest, and I just want to say-SHUT UP WORK. I AM THUNDER. I AM SIRENS. I AM SCREAMING AT ALL THE BULLSHIT.

I love my work--the actual work--the working with people in prison and their loved ones and trying with all of our might, together, to make us all look at crime and suffering and victimization and mental illness and hurt differently. And exposing through the direct stories and testimonies of the people living behind the caged walls what prison really is like--guess what folks it hurts people and communities more than any of us will ever realize.

But, without going into too much detail--my organization is having financial trouble right now and I am tired, tired, tired of the fall out of years of dysfunction--the dysfunction before the financial dysfunction that is exacerbated by the financial woes--cascading mountains of ash all around me.

So, lovely, nearly mid June Michigan thunderstorm, I am bellowing with your voice; I am calling out to the winds to bring more rain to cover the ash of the dysfunction and the wounds within our own hearts and histories.

Stopping the melodramatic writing: I really am just screaming and hollering like crazy, loud in my head and waiting with more and more anticipation for my sabbatical which will arrive soon and very soon (more on all that later).

roll with it

the view from the top of the resort!

our time up north is winding down. we will come home for our staycation tomorrow, and i will not go back to work until september 2--YES!

the vacation has been beautiful. it also all flew by way too quickly.

we've taken in so much sunshine and water and green living things and human beings.

it has also been a strange and bewildering time.

the first sunday we were here k's ex-girlfriend, A, arrived at the cabins with her 60 something aunt. they stayed in our cabin with us for four nights and then moved on over to cabin 11 after k's aunt A left-- aunt A was here for four days of our vacation and k's ex was here for 6 days.

(now, you all might be asking what was k's ex girlfriend doing hanging with you on your vaction? well, her mama died just a few weeks ago and she had come home from new orleans to michigan to be with her ma as she passed on and then she needed to get away from the mayhem of the aftermath of her passing, so she came up north and we happened to be up here when she was coming up.)

we were a motley crew of people wandering around the very northern tip of the lower peninsula and the southern end of the upper peninsula. two very butch dykes=ex and me. one super hot femme dyke=kk. one 87 year old woman with a walker and chemo running through her veins and chronically out her ass. one nearly 60 year old woman with her wits entirely about her and one 62 year old woman with her wits on the fritz.

The six of us hung out in st. ignace at the casino one afternoon. then the five of us, this is minus grandma c who needs to sleep a lot due to aforementioned chemo and diarrhea, hung out in one way, shape, or form the other evenings.

we drank beer together; we drank whiskey together; we played pool together; we talked late into the night together; we swam and hung in the sun together; we hung with the family p who was all up north at the same time as us together. what an elixir we all made.

we smeared northern michigan with quite a bit of queerness. it was all a bit tiring, but also fun. we even ended up at clyde's, the only business in carp lake, mi besides a mini-post office and a general store, one evening with k's dad and this fellow that lives in the trailer that k's other grandma used to live in. i know, entirely too much information, and why would you even care about any of this cause it has absolutely nothing to do with k trying to get pregnant or me bending down near her private parts and slinging jizz up on in, but it all does have to do with our incredibly complicated and yet so simple lives.



inside clyde's.

I mean the setting and props for our vacation were perfect--blue skies, luscious, deep bodies of water everywhere, plenty of fresh fish to nibble on, sunshine, blue skies, warm weather, water on skin, tiny bedroom with soft bed for sexual activity, forests--and then the characters for the vacation just kept growing in number and complexity.

i cannot do justice in writing about the weirdness that seemed almost totally normal to me over the last ten days, but i guess it is indicative of the ways in which our lives are hammered out in order to build us into these constantly changing beings. we suck up the circumstances of everyday and churn out as much beauty, meaning, and love as we can. sometimes we get cranky and fight and yell and behave badly. other times we just sit and take it all in--by all i mean whatever gets slung at us be it injuries, good times, old loves, old friends, family, moral dilemmas, justice, injustice, and all of the stuff of living and dying.

my learning this vacation has been all about gaining a better understanding of how to roll with it; whatever the it might be.

a perfectly beautiful uterus and other stuff...

me in four square costume
another crazy ass week is biting the dust. we've been busy little reproducers. a visit to the re happened last friday and k got her female organs prodded and picture snapped.

the doctor said all her soft, fleshy baby-making stuff (uterus, tubes, cervix, etc) are just perfectly beautiful.

we breathed a heavy sigh of relief with an anguished question of really? oh damn? connected to the relief sigh. mostly, we wanted to know why the fuck she has not gotten knocked up yet if everything is so perfectly beautiful.

this doctor was different than the other doctor cause other doctor was on vacay, but we think that k may need to go on clomid just to get her hormones in a perfectly succinct dance.

we've still been trying this time around. for what it is worth...?

My left knee ballooned up last thursday and is still swollen and it has me very pissed cause i've refrained from riding my bicycle for a few days and that makes me antsy and angry. see, i was on a roll--up until balloon knee--I had been putting 100 or more miles a week on the new bicycle. at 12 weeks old she had 1205 miles on her and now it is all at a stand still. my knees do this shit about twice a year and i am tired of it cause i am only 32...what will happen when i am 60?

last friday evening i participated in a four square tournament. i played on team rocket. we did not win, but we had the best costumes and did win a trophy named jan for our attire.
team rocket

Our good friend KG was in town all week and we had plenty of fun and good times.

and saturday we leave for vacation. carp lake here we come. we will be staying at k's dad's all seasons resort. This is my eighth summer going up there for vacay--it is kind of crazy how time flies.

sample platter of my summer

This summer has been beautiful. Work has been hard. trying to get pregnant has been tiring and interesting. friends have been abundant. the garden and yard have filled up many of my hours with joy. eating good, locally grown food has been delicious. Below is a taste of some of it.


today we took off work with a and r and went to the lake. this is the lake where we swam and floated and ate good food for hours and hours. there are no houses only woods and green herons and blue herons and fish and hawks and trees and cat tails.


t makes beautiful, delicious salads. r and t shared this one with us last week.


a cone flower from our garden.


more flowers from our garden.


delicious beets from t and r's garden and the farmers' market.



me after a long day's work in the yard.


beans and fennel growing in my garden.