the wanted one

Spring is hanging like a fine spider web, fragile and translucent out the winter window. Sickness showered days of belly aches and fatigue throughout our house. Time slides by ten times faster than it did before our daughter gifted us with her presence.

She walks.
She laughs.
She moos and woof woofs.



She is a delight.
She is delightful.

She is most of our waking moments at least those moments when we are not consumed with our other work.

The journey to willa was so long and at times arduous. When i read back through some of this blog, I am often left with my mouth slagging a little. Months and months and months which turned into years of trying to get to her. She is one of the most wanted children living on this planet (i know, there are hundreds of thousands additional very wanted children). But I think about the hoops and planning and persistence and iron chested will it took to continue to pursue this being into existence, and I am driven to anger and sadness for those people who still espouse the rhetoric of hate about my family.

You know the sant..orum said a few months back that a child was better off having his father in prison than having two lesbian parents. Usually, i brush off his hate for ignorance, religious intolerance and drivel, but the fact that he has had the spotlight of the american media and is taken at all seriously as a potential leader for this country adds a layer of fury to my disdain for people who would try to take my child from me or who refuse to give me full legal rights of my child. I know I've blathered on about it here before, but I cannot adopt willa here in this ass-backwards and repressive state of michigan and comments from someone who sucks up minute upon minute of television, and radio, and interwebs, and newspaper airtime like the one mentioned above are serious.

Oh, and by the way, I work with people in prison and encourage the good fathers and the once deadbeat dads, alike, to parent their children from behind bars. So, santo..rum's insult was not that insulting on its face value. I think people can parent from prison, but not as well as I can parent day in and day out, face to face with my willa. See, the insult rests in the attempt to make me and kk invisible/non-existent. It is reprehensible that we isolate and ostracise whole groups of people in cages throughout america. It is also reprehensible that this other otherised group, queer folks, are threatened with extermination of full civil and human rights (or do not yet have full civil and human rights). there are intersections here. In many ways I am not so different from the man in prison, both in my position politically and socially.

The man in prison (or the woman) is very vulnerable to having his or her parental rights stripped by the state. I have no (legal) parental rights from the state. People in prison are either made to be invisible by the media or portrayed as scary, evil folks who we must lock up in order to be safe in our beds. Queer people are often feared and/or otherised to the point of being draped in a cloak of invisibility or to the point of becoming the demonized, evil deviant who we should shield our children from ( i know this is changing, but not in enough spheres. example: i cannot be out in the work i do in the state capitol. whole pieces of me are invisible there. though, i out myself through appearance:)).

Similarities? yes.

Willa paints. She hugs. She blows kisses and showers our cheeks with love.
She was wanted beyond wanting.
We work to clothe her and feed her and bathe her and catch her vomit and soothe her tears.

Spring seems early. But winter never came this year, not really. The wind is howling and trying to carry the current of growing season on her back.

Life is wanted and we are working toward delight.

yep

i wrote this long thing. spent two days on it. all of the words disappeared. a fluke of of technology. a reminder that it all WILL fall apart. it was a nice piece--significantly balanced with sentimentality and the daily stuff of being alive.

in the meantime while those words float in some kind of cyberworld purgatory, i will simply load a fairly recent picture of my daughter to this page. please understand i have been reading jonathan franzen's the corrections, which is cynical, realistic, and hopeful all at once. it is the worst kind of reading for someone engaged in the heavy stuff of suffering that i witness day in and day out. but nevertheless, my life is more than full right now.

with goodness and sadness and angst and heartache and love.

i have not too many words to put up here.

i love my kid a lot.

so what.

and in the interim we hurt one another and make one another laugh.

sorry to be heavy handed and hearted--but fuck.

to her scent i will go...

Today I had this semi-sacred experience regarding the new soul who inhabits my waking and sleeping hours.

I was at work and work has been hard. The grief and stress and violence of other people's lives constantly surrounds me. In our work we are witnesses to suffering and salvaging and sometimes small victories. On top of that, I also have to deal with piles of administrative bullshit, truly wonderful volunteers (something like 12 this semester), planning for meetings, and working in coalitions...

That, there shit above, is the backdrop. I sat at my desk almost paralyzed by the amount of stuff I had to do, when this scent came barreling into my nose. The smell of my darling daughter's skin fell over my face. She, of course, was at her home day care, not there with me in my garage of an office.

The gentle scent of her little head--the place where infant sweat, the scatterings of sweet food and breast milk leftovers, soft, downy hair oils, and her baby bath soap mingle--came over me as if she were sitting on my lap. I paused what I was doing. My eyes glassed over with tears; tears bordering on the edge of the divine and sentimentality, and I inhaled with devout attention for a breath.

Then it all became a divine moment.

It was some kind of miracle. A reminder of this sacred bond I have with another human being. A reminder that legal rights (while I will fight for them until the day I die or until I get them) mean nothing in the face of the daily miracles and sufferings kk and I go through as we engage and love this small child.

If only I could bottle this scent and experience and sell it to the conservative right. The people who think I have no business raising a kid. The people who do everything in their power to disconnect me via intrusive laws (or non-existent ones) from willa's existence...oh ya, folks, if I have not mentioned it here before, I cannot adopt willa in MI--there is no second parent adoption. So, I feed her, bathe her, dance with her, love her with all of me, but, in the end, someone who does not love her as I do or who does not love kk as i do could essentially do legal battle to get her from me and essentially kk's next-of-kin have more rights to her than me. Blah de blah blah fucking blah dee da.

But that ghost-like tendril of traveling smell, it reminded me of the oppressive nature of "man"-made laws. It reminded me of the lasting longing of the deepest sacred parts of humanity. It carried me to a new and better place. The connection embodied in this real, yet profoundly strange, moment surpasses that which the political sphere, the sphere of marginalization and bigotry, and the sphere of civil and human rights can never tap into. I have both animal and spiritual connection to my child beyond the imaginings of the human mind.

So, to her scent I will go. To the smell of her hands that now feed her own self--peaches and dirt, summer and minerals. To the smell of her cheeks when we enter the house from a walk in the sun. To the smell of her shit that invades the whole house with intestines discovering the nuances of various human foods for the first time. To the smell of her tears, like water on dry stones. To the smell of her breath, like an indescribable sweetness doused in the gentle sour of buttermilk. To this small being who I love with the deepest parts of me. To her scent I will go.

inside out

KK and her mama
It’s raw. All of me. My innards are exposed, layers of skin and fat and bone have folded inside out and there on the surface rests all of my organs.

Maybe she cut me open with her arrival? Maybe her brightness—the shiny remnant of stardust lingering on her soft humanness—is razor sharp?

All I do know, is that for the last many months I have been experiencing a kind of vulnerability that I have never known. I feel exposed; I feel heavy; I feel love like I never have before, but it is a thicker love. It is both burdensome and rich.

It weighs on me—literally, my whole body feels heavier. My head might as well be a cannon ball; my chest a freighter; my feet rocks from Lake Superior.

And then those pesky dead ones, they are hovering. Their presences are hanging over us like the thick fog on a cool spring morning that desires to be hot. All of them, our grandmothers, k’s mother, our grandfathers, our uncles. All of them. They are so close.

The bridal’s veil is in full bloom. The lilacs are erupting in sickly sweet aroma and my grandmother’s hands write languid visions of her skin on my eyelids.

KK’s mama is sending messages from the netherworld. Her beautiful smile cascades teeth and gums over our bed in the morning when the three of us wake from deep sleep held together by the certainty of one another’s bodies.

This vulnerability, this exposure, this hovering of the dead. It is all okay. It’s different and hard and beautiful. I think it is some new kind of falling in love with the living we are doing day in and out; the weaving together of our lives in tight strands of illuminated rope. Indeed, I loved my daughter from the moment I knew she was alive inside of k. But, always reservedly—just in case she splashed out of her mother’s womb before term without life, just in case the blood that trickled between k’s legs for the whole first trimester ended up being the beginning of the end.

Since Willa met us on this side of living, away from the dark and marvelous world of k’s womb, I have been falling in love with her day in and day out. And it is this loving of Willa that makes me more susceptible to the dead ones who are pestering me with memories (my lived ones and the ones I have been told) and pounding even louder on the rickety cage of ribs that is stacked in a dull pink white glow below my chin and neck.

In the shower in the morning my tears run with the hot water as I think of k’s mama and how she will never know Willa or see k as a mother. Her life was too short and my heart aches for kk. I think of my gram and I feel her soft, wrinkled hands on my face, my shoulder—I miss her, really miss her.

This loving is powerful stuff. It is sharp. Everyday my heart sinks a little deeper into the air outside my chest; my bones clatter in a kind of agony at the turned-inside-out-cold on nighttime and morning, my insides tremble in their new home, unprotected by epidermis, muscle, and fat. Exposed, opened, unfolded—more alive than I have ever been in this new and persistent loving.

when they were young

i have so many reflections buzzing through my mind and so little time to capture them with letters.

work, play with the new love of our lives and taking care of the new love of our lives, and sleep seem all to be the center of the universe to us.

Some days, I look at pictures of my parents when they are young, and I am amazed at their tenacity in the face of the newness of being parents. After all, my mama was 19 and my dad was 22. K is 36 and I am 34 and we are so green, but easing into this with clarity and open hearts.

me and daddio


me and willa


our elders next to our bed


my sweetheart, again...

she is like spring in winter

Sorry to have dropped off the face of the planet, but I've had a head full of everything but the desire to write.

We have been through so many life changing, life affirming, life-as-we-knew-it disturbances over the last many weeks--I should have plenty to ruminate about. But my mind has simply sunk into a hibernation mode when it comes to the ability to fruitfully process the change and mystery unfolding all around us.

I have this gorgeous little being all tied to my chest right now and my heart is more breakable than it has ever been before.

She is like spring in winter. She is wide-eye captivating, fragile, wiry strong and dainty: Her heart like thunder in a small, ribs-like-swift-to-crack-sticks cavity ricocheting aliveness all around us. She reminds me of the green to come and the wakening of trees and garlic shoots. She tells stories in her silence and expresses stillness in her wakefulness. She is reiterating the song of learning how to just be. She is grounding. Her presence fastens the animal in me closer to my skin. sleeping, eating, peeing, shitting, sleeping, eating again. Her scent and her softness plenty to swallow amidst the coming return to the chaos of our working lives. She is pure wild. She has us by our hearts--clenching my alive parts with her scaly fingernails, scratching my vital organs and lifting many veils from around my eyes.
She will now be my best teacher. She is thawing the frozen ground beneath our feet. She is like spring in winter.

She is here - our Willa Sea

There is so much to tell, but tiredness abounds.

Our daughter, Willa Sea, was born on November 30 at 7:09 am at home after 27 hours of labor (24 of which were active). I'll tell all about it soon.

According to me, she is beautiful beyond beautiful.

Her first name is for Willa Cather (one of my favorite novelists) and her middle name is for the first initial of K's last name and her mama's first name, Cheryl, but we made it into SEA for three of our grandmothers who have passed on in the last year: Grandma Sterling; Grandma Esta; Grandma Anna = SEA.

A few pics:

8000 miles into the many folds of my imagination

I made this deal with myself that our baby could get born once I hit 8,000 miles on my bicycle. Well yesterday that happened, so k's vaginal gate is now allowed to loosen up and let it fly.

In all actuality, we have no idea when this will happen, but the aforementioned deal with myself is an example indicative of my strange thinking habits. I tend to have a grandiose imagination and the absurd ability to develop worst case scenarios in my mind.

For instance, part of our conversation with our midwife on Wednesday morning, Me: "So...S what is your back up plan in case you are experiencing violent vomiting and diarrhea when k hits active/active labor?"

Of course she has a solid back up plan so I have no worries, but I will envision all the crazy ass things that could go wrong (or right) about 1000 times before our bundle of joy comes rolling out of kk's nether region. It is just how I am.

some new age folks might think that this is negative thinking that will impact the way things turn out for us, and I sometimes end up thinking that the negative thinking will indeed make things roll out negatively, but then I think that that is simply part of my neurotic imaginative tendencies, and I get over myself and the self-implied power present in all of the power of thinking BS that circulates the new age airwaves like an overactive muscle spasm.

This is not to say that I think that what we think does not impact our overall demeanor and state of comfort or lack there of. I know how to work myself up over the things I imagine in my head and then I know how to talk myself out of the panic i drive myself to.

But I do not believe that if I imagine horrific things (which I do all of the time) then I will bring those things upon myself or my loved ones. If I did believe all that super-human nonsense, then I would have to be placed in a very cushy room to stop the tragedies that cross my mind from befalling the universe. I am not a supernatural superhero or antihero; I am simply a getting closer to middle age over-imaginator.

And please understand that the shit that flutters through my mind is not all death and destruction or vile images of fluids exploding out of both human ends; I also think lovely thoughts. There are even times when I think nothing at all and simply ride in a state of marvel through the changing colors with a dark liquid snake of a river rushing next to me. While eight species of birds dart and swoop and flutter all around the fecund, layered decay beneath sumac and dried mullein and evening primrose and touch-me-not that has fallen to brown remnants for winter. And I laugh at the lone blue jay standing amidst the Canada geese calling out screeches of derision to the ever-growing colder autumn morning and my mind settles softly to the place where there is no thing but the calls of earth catching me breathless in anticipation for the most amazing coming experience of our lives...

a bath and her lovely belly with a bounty that is beyond, beyond

Trying times are met with brilliant moments.

We have been through death and sorrow (my gram went on, my too young uncle, also) in the last month. Work is full and good. Preparation for our dear one is in full swing as K is 35 weeks into this mystery. We are gathering supplies, writing down notes for our desires, and moving toward giving birth at home.

These walls have held the years of others' living like dark stories caught in sunlight. These walls are thick with horse hair plaster and layers of paint and old wall paper glue. These walls are witness to the stretched vocal chord sound of song, fury, love, heartache, winter frost, summer dew, the scent of sex, the idleness of waiting, the quiet of stillness, the hectic murmur of insomnia, the bewildered moments before knowing, the aches, the pitter patter of small animals and children (animals too), the last breaths of loved ones. So much has happened in these rooms in the last 107 years; so much we do not know; so much we do know.

And soon we will be adding to the memories of these walls and the ceilings and the floors. Soon, K will be wailing the cries of child birth; notes that have long vowels and crazy consonants carrying out the ends of her mouth. Soon, she will walk over worn wood in rhythms we are yet to understand. Soon, this thing we know so little about and have tried to learn too much about, will devour us with its mystery and we will make invisible etchings of experience all around us.

On Saturday, we took ourselves out for a fancy date (the last one till our world is turned upside down by the introduction of this new being into our lives). Beforehand, K bathed in our old, deep clawfoot tub. Dusk was on the fringe; gray cascaded through the windows in autumn clad slices, and I took pictures of this graceful beauty unfolding within and throughout this woman i love with every ounce of all of me. Below are a few:

belly ball in bath

angel

amazing

shimmer in the tub

gorgeous beyond, beyond

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.

My grandmother's kitchen--a sedative

The last five months I have been battling chronic insomnia. I've said it before; I'll say it again: I've suffered from insomnia since I was in the fifth grade, but it usually comes in waves and does not hang on week after week for five months at a time.

A few weeks back when I was wide awake at 2 something in the morning, I started going over the contents and layout of my grandma h's kitchen in my head and then after awhile I found it worked in putting me to sleep.

From the fourth grade on, I grew up three doors down from my gram. We were tight. I saw her almost everyday of my life. I would walk in her backdoor (which she always kept unlocked during the day whether she was home or not) and pour myself a glass of her sweet tea and guzzle it and then set about on the rest of my afternoon. If she was home, we would sit and talk in her kitchen or hang on her porch and talk and people watch.

My grandmother is from southeastern Kentucky and she is (was) ultra hilarious. She has been afflicted with Alzheimer's for the last 9-10 years and if there is one thing I regret in my life it is my personal inability to deal with her mind's demise. I can deal with a lot. I can deal with dying loved ones; I can deal with conflict and upheaval and hurt, but I cannot handle the shutting down of a person's, who I knew so well, reasoning and personality capacities. When I do see her now, I spend time with her and stroke her head and every once in a while I witness a scant glimmer of the person who she was, but I rarely see her. I do not visit much. I actually mostly avoid her because of my own inability to cope (please understand if she was my mother or did not have proper caretakers I would be there all the time).

But that is not what this post is about. This post is about my grandma's kitchen and how remembering it--the smells, the organization, the late afternoon light slanting in the back screen door and window, the coolness of tea and lemonade and mountain berry kool-aid (which my mother never ever let us drink at home), the canning jars cascading over her small kitchen table and dining room table, the blow of the fan in the heat of the summer whipping around heavy humid air thick with the smells of cooking (always cooking)--help rock my adult insomniac-self to sleep.

I wish I could count the hours I spent in her tiny kitchen. Let me be clear her entire house is miniature. She raised 7 kids (she had 9 in total, but one died at age 4 and the oldest was out of the house by the time they all moved downriver) in an 800 square foot home with one bathroom and an unfinished Michigan basement. Her kitchen can sort-of-comfortably fit three people around the table. Usually two of us would sit at the table and then we would pull chairs around the doorway to the dining room and block the fridgadaire (that's what she called it) in.

My grandmother canned and cooked constantly. She instilled in me a love for cooking from scratch. My family ate at her house often; she was widowed before I was born and lived, alone, so we were her constant company in close proximity. She would fry potatoes in a cast iron skillet, whip up some skillet corn bread, cook down soup beans with lard and bacon all day, and fry salmon patties. Our clothes would stink of fish and grease long after we left gram's, but the food was to die for. Another favorite meal was biscuits and tomato gravy for supper. The gravy was thick and peppery spicy and her biscuits flaked off in our mouths. It was made with lard and homemade canned tomatoes.

As I got older, my Uncle Junior, my grandmother's bachelor brother, moved in with my grandma and I would often sit at the kitchen table with the two of them and talk about the mundane which in reality was really the sacred and today to me means more than I can say with words. It means a peace that passeth understanding when I remember and reflect on those times in the warmth of my gram's kitchen.

These reflections of the mundane hours spent with my grandmother cast a lullaby shadow over my restless mind in the night hours when I toss and turn. My gram scrubbing dishes so fast I thought she was a superhero dish washer, my gram chatting about tomatoes and beans with Uncle Junior, my gram's deeply wrinkled, agile hands wiping down her always table clothed kitchen table, my gram slicing watermelon and gently salting it (I can see her fingertips wrapping around her well-worn white plastic salt shaker), my gram commenting on how she, "wouldn't have another man if he had a golden asshole; if he had a golden dick." My gram always being on her porch; the reliability of seeing her there in the evenings and knowing there was more home to all my home.

These memories are like a sedative: sleeping over at grams and watching her get ready for bed then cozying up next to her night-gowned self and falling deeply to sleep in her steady bosom. Gram rising much earlier than me or my sisters and brewing herself coffee. Then us rising and finding her in the early dawn drinking her cup of coffee and eating a piece of toast with butter and jelly. Gram finishing up her food and making us a fancy breakfast of palachikas or pancakes or eggs (whatever we wanted). Sitting next to gram in her tiny living room and watching the grand ol' opry and the ralph stanley show. These snippets of memories--common and everyday, but sacred and substantial all the more--the beginnings of who I am today are forever (unless I inherit her brain-mush disease) fortified up in me.

But again her kitchen, the first feeling of fry grease splattering about that I ever did feel happened there. I watched her pressure cook beans, and chop pears, peaches, strawberries for canning. I mowed her lawn and hung up clothes on the line with her.

I husked corn with her on her front porch and snapped bean after bean. I helped her water her yearly garden. I listened to her stories of her childhood on the farm with her single mother. Her father died when she was eleven and her mother continued to farm without him. She told of hog killings, chicken neck wringing, dressmaking, and canning.

In her back yard I gutted my first fish with my Uncle Junior and brought it in the house and fired it in her cast iron skillet and ate it right there in that kitchen that has become my night salve--that healing comfrey balm for my mind.

The gifts that continue to bring me a calm and a smile are the minutes, hours, and years of time spent with my gram. Those regular everyday moments. Those foundational pieces of time that make me so in love with the earth and growing my family's food and building clothes lines and fishing and cooking and food preservation.

Last night, as I struggled wide awake from 2:00am on, my sweetheart said, "think of your grandma's kitchen; remember count on her kitchen."

So, the scent of her kitchen in summer came breezing across my nose and my eyes shut tight. The worn brown-stained sharp edges of her handleless cupboards drifted over my eyelids and fingertips; the rag rugs by her stove and sink wove their way under my small bare feet; my ears perked up to her twangy, southern voice, "Nat, I love that short hair of your's, Nat. Sis, you want some mustard on that ham sandwich; how about some potato salad?"

And, I drifted into other dreams.

nothing left to say

since saturday, my dear k has been consistently bleeding.

it blows.

how many times have i said it here on this blog? those words, that is? or something like them? it blows. it sucks. fuck it. damn. hard times. suck. etc. etc. etc.

i am trying to be all in the present about it and all that lovely bullshit, but guess what, at this point in time, i'm over it. plain and simple over scavenging for remnants of dreams that are yet to manifest into concrete flesh and blood before my eyes. the day when i feel the little being's scrawny paws upon the tender, yet sharp, curve of my collar bone--when the soft little animal unfolds in ringlets of new skin before me--until then, i will curse the wind and the rain and yell out profanities to the stars and then reel myself back into the present, this moment and take it for what it is.

and what it is is this:

people, we are so fragile and fleeting. at anytime it all could stop for you. at anytime we could be the 25 year old pga pro golf player found dead in her home on a sunday. or we could be the one to be sideswiped by an 83 year old woman who should have had her license taken away 8 years back. (and hell no I am not an ageist; i am a fucking realist).

often, i want to really be okay with all of this passing on that happens before our eyes. i want to know that we leave some kind of imprint--for good; for bad; for always. we do, and still, we do not. we are flashing. we are leaves. we are strong and green and flapping in the strongest of winds and then we fall heavily to the ground and dry up and break down into something else. hopefully, always something life-giving.

but, how do i capture that moment of waiting to know if what is (or was living inside of kk) is still alive? how can patience fortify itself in a heart that desires more than anything to know. to know what is real. to know what is next, and still to understand that we can never know what is next.

i can remember being in the 5th or 6th grade. my parents were gone out for the night and, of all things, I sat on the toilet and started to cry uncontrollably cause i realized my mama could die and not come home. i realized one day the person i cared about the most in the world could and would be gone. i cried and cried and my chest heaved with sadness.

today, that person has shifted to my kk. and now it has shifted to the two lives before my eyes. the life of my lover--the upper quadrant of my heart and this other life trying to forge a path to our world through her womb. and so when the blood is made visible and this threat of new death dangles on the edge of her being, i am paralyzed and devastated.

and now, i have nothing left to say...

my bleeding lover

This morning kk had another ultra sound at the repro clinic. The wee little embryo is still alive.

The heart was thumping--strong.

The doctor was just fantastic and I wish she could be my regular obgyn. Anyhow, we saw what's been causing the bleeding; it's a Subchorionic Hemorrhage. The doc explained that the gestational sack is like a cancer and it is burrowing deep into the womb and it disrupted a vessel which then pulled up blood and came out kk's vagina.

So, now she may bleed a bit more here and there. It will take some time to heal. Anyhow, it is toward the front of the sack and not very much of it is touching the thick wall surrounding the embryo.

Hopefully, there will be no more disruption and the wee thing will keep growing and a healthy pregnancy will ensue.

It is still a waiting game. A worry game. As the doctor said today, when the baby gets born and is out of the womb it is still all about wearing your heart inside out.

Very right.

In the meantime, I am trying to relax in the middle of a whirlwind of emotion...

My meditation

Taking care of our chickens is my daily (or every other day) meditation time.

The meditation goes like this:
While still inside in the semi-warmth of our kitchen, fill three or two containers with warmish water.
Set outside on back porch.
Dress in large winter jacket and warm hat (usually forget to wear gloves, because I like my hands to be nimble not clumsy)
Make sure my feet have socks on them.
If I am missing socks, go put a pair of socks on cold feet. (kk constantly gets on me about going barefoot in the middle of winter. I’ve lost count of how many times she has placed a pair of slippers in front of me and given me the finger wag and look).

Slip into boots (usually k’s green mucks are perfectly placed on the back porch).

Walk down treacherous steps and through backyard to coop/run.
Greet our ladies with a, “hi lovely girls. How are you this morning?”

Pull snow tarp back and open door.
If we will be home, keep door ajar
If we will be gone, shut myself into the run with the hens

Monitor feed bucket
If feed refill is needed, unclip feed bucket
If no feed is needed, leave feed bucket in place
unclip rubber, water bucket from chain

exit run
with bucket/s in hand

Beat on rubber bucket until ice water releases
Depending on the temperature, sometimes must run hot water over bucket then kick it/ throw it until ice releases

Take bucket/s on back porch.
Fill emptied water bucket with warmish water
Fill feed bucket with feed and oyster shell mix

Walk back down treacherous steps and through backyard to coop
Re-enter run
Hang up the water and feed

exit run

If we have special scraps, retrieve them from porch or kitchen

Back to run.
Feed the ladies the scraps.

Check hen house for extra amounts of chicken shit.
Remove with small rake and throw into compost heap.
On some days, refill pine and straw in hen house.

Check for eggs in nesting box.
Lately, only 1 or 2 are there.

Collect eggs.

Walk back to house.
Slip out of boots.
Go inside the house.
Put away eggs.
Wash hands with warm water and soap.

Meditation ends.
20-30 minutes of good chicken work and quiet, cold emptying of mind and preparing for another day

the Ebenezer season

winter tiredness has hit me hard. it is dragging my eyelids through slushy pot holes--liquid ice and mud and street salt pools that burn real bad.

my heart is heavier than the gravestone in my back yard and the frozen dead chicken still resting soundly in the garage. it is heavy cause blood family can be so complicated. and when 39 year old relationships can no longer withstand the daily test of love and being together, it can roughen the heart of even the most optimistic of people. not that i am an optimist--far from it.

and so let me start over. let me tell you that i can be sentimental. i like to hold onto objects that have passed over the hands, mouths, faces, teeth, breasts, butts, and other fleshy parts of long dead humans. i like old agricultural and woodworking tools--the kinds with worn handles--smooth and slippery from sweaty, oily palms of men who have died due to various diseases and accidents. a slip on an icy patch of concrete and a divot to the temple--dead like that. a long agonizing death treated only with drips of liquid morphine as the jaw bone fell apart from the ravages of mouth cancer in the year 1940. a quick unexpected death from a heart attack--a grasp of the chest a turning up of the blue lips in a quick flash of pain only to last as long as it takes to stop the beating of the human heart.

i think about these things. these made up deaths in my head. haunting me. keeping me company. a story to go along with the handle of a 100 year old ax.

but, i am having difficulty appreciating the many words left by humans about what all this living is supposed to mean or about how we are supposed to do this living or about how we are supposed to love while living or about how we are supposed to die well or about simply being.

some of these words come in the form of inspirational, contemplative bullshit that circulates in a whirling deluge through the interwebs and books and "news" sources and audio recordings and dvds and etc; all that inspirational gunk floating throughout space; all that shit is driving me mad. up a wall.

who cares? really? do the words make it easier here on this planet? maybe for a brief moment. but really? and i am reflecting on all of this after giving my uncle who is battling the unbeatable pan.creatic cancer a bo.ok of blessings to try to help him get through a few minutes of the day.

yes, maybe a few minutes.

in the end though, we will succumb and no longer draw air into our bodies and we will do it either lightly or heavily or quickly or lingeringly or maybe all of those together. we will end up burned into dust or placed in the ground wrapped in gauze or bomb proof caskets with silky linings for our dead skin to feel not or a pine box or some other simple contraption or maybe we will be left out for carnivorous birds to tear at the sinewy strings of our muscles or maybe we will be thrown--flesh and bones and blood and hair--into the midst of a hot compost and break down into a perfect kind of soil additive. we will come to death and hopefully some of us will have myths and meanings wrapped up around this event that is bound to happen to all of us. and hopefully these myths and meanings will be deeper than the wordiness of this post or of the hundreds of thousands of rants of words that fill the human airwaves.

all in all, i sometimes think that all the inspirational bullshit hovering around is some kind of balm to keep us in denial about the impending end and the crusty parts of living that are like a big, snotty nose that has been sick with a sinus infection for days on end. you know the kind when your skin is rubbed raw down to the layer right before bloody. touch that raw place. touch it and press it and plant a seat upon it for a few hours. maybe the meaningful words written by too smart for their own good people or too spiritual to be drawn back down to the rocky soil we are treading on esoteric type of folks would get lost among the pus and pain. maybe every once in a while we just have to stare the suffering in the face and say you suck suffering--you suck real bad. and you suck hate--you suck worse than suffering today. irreconcilable differences you suck.

not eloquent or soft and fluffy, but at least this thinking keeps me rooted; at least it keeps me grounded. the sentiment above is what keeps me from ever becoming an addict (drugs, alcohol, etc); i like to feel what is happening before my eyes or what is unfolding somewhere beyond me, but has been conveyed to me by letters or phone calls. i do not want to be numb. i do not want to smile or think that was oh so very deep and profound and now it all makes sense because of something i read. i want the real to unfold around me and to grab hold of it, even if it is a razor blade and squeeze it until my hand is gutted and my heart aches. okay maybe not that dramatic...

oh and maybe the inspirational fodder adds some drama to the day. to this day. and writing is a god thing after all. it makes for fun times.

and now this crotchety soul will move on to another glass of beer and try with all of her might to ignore the trembling, shaky leg syndrome person in the booth behind her. but that might be the festering raw sore i was talking about sitting in...it is for me tonight.

to a longer day--to not knowing what tomorrow has in store

time ticks away. the days fall flat or robust or somewhere in between like a deflating sausage casing. night is long. and now it is getting brighter. or at least the seasons teach us and promise us that after today the days will get longer and light will be our helpmate, our sustenance, our teacher, our guide.

This time has been heavy for k and me. Always it is. Always the months of October, November, and December hold the traces of people who have passed on from us. k's mom was born in october she faded through november; she became vapor like in december; she vanished in January. all of this happened years ago, but still her fingerprints leave smudges over the lead glass windows of our house and the liquid surfaces of our eyeballs.

I could go on and on about the dead ones and the dead almost ones (like what happened last year at this time to my body and then came out all bloody and lifeless in the toilet) but i'll spare us all the memory traveling and reexamining of emotions and emptiness left on the concave ridge of kk's collarbone and i will tune in to where we are now.

we are waiting for the days to get longer. we are learning that chickens do not appreciate the wet piles of snow accumulating all over the yard. we are thankful to still have this deep love, like a tunnel to the other side of the world that seems to go on and on forever, between us. we are happy with one another's softness--the soft parts of our skins, the pillow world of cheek and the bone hard security of shoulder.

we spend time together as though time might soon slip away from us and fall out of line with the tale that seasons have told for so many winters and summers and springs and autumns. like it might just end, be gone, flit away in the particles of dust shining in the sun shards coming through the window of a dark, deep basement.

we wonder what it will be like to be old and childless. we wonder what it will be like to be old and parents. we wonder if we will even make it to old, or if cement or bumper or disease will have its way with us before the silver and white coat our skulls. we wonder a lot about the future and work. and we think about where we want to be in this world and how we want to be in it. we think too much.

on this solstice--this night that is long in the veil of dark, navy sky creased by the shy light of a sliver of moon--we tried again to make something of a life in kk. who knows what tomorrow holds, but for now we will cheer the promise of a longer day and taste the star shaped snowflakes of december on our tongues.

wee critters killed

Often while riding my bike I run across the dead remains of animals--once living things smeared to the road in horrific positions. I call them unnatural conditions because their death encounters with automobiles seem so very far from what their deaths would have been had humans not infringed on their habitats with roads and fast, zooming vehicles.

On Wednesday while riding, I saw the jaw of an opossum cracked in wet shards to the pavement. Her face was pasted to the ground in a long stretch of flesh, fur, blood, bones. That small twinge of sadness that bubbles up under my diaphragm came visiting, and I rode on thinking about how I disdain cars. And, thinking about how death is supposed to be a natural and everyday occurrence; the thing that all living beings will one day greet and sit down for tea with and how our human drive for power and shimmering energy beyond our control has set us on a path of destruction that creates gruesome deaths.

The smeared bodies of animals all over roads should help us to pause and think about our own coming demise. How do you want to die? Not that we can determine how it will happen, but I would rather move on from this world untouched by the violent scythe of modern technology and human ignorance (the misuse of uranium, the death trigger of a handgun, the crashing impact of a high speed multi ton vehicle into the fine, thin line of my exposed spinal column while riding my bicycle).

And maybe all of this road carnage is natural. But really I see it more as being bound to happen cause there are so many more of us in our sprawling suburban homes and steel, framed motorized coffin bubbles driving through the once more densely treed landscapes and winding river expanses that held the homes of squirrels, foxes, turtles, frogs, mice, opossums, woodpeckers, blue herons, swans, green herons, bluebirds, red wing blackbirds, minks, moles, muskrats, otters, beavers, raccoons, fox and garter snakes, and so on.

The look on the face of a wee critter who has been struck by a car is often one of terror and distortion. I see these lifeless shells up close and personal every damn day that I ride my bicycle. And maybe I am, through my own human definitions, applying those words terrified to the emotional landscape of my fellow dead being? But, maybe, I am not.

good bye sabbatical

I've been back to work for one week.
It was hard diving in. I cried. Well, I wept hard.

I was scared that all my compassion had dried up and that stumbling back into the madness of direct connection to a justice system so full of injustice and ache and madness (not insightful madness, but the angry, heart wrenching madness of a system rusty at the root and too heavy with the bones of too many souls to turn in any degree of right direction) would be too difficult to stomach.

When the days were long and the flowers were blooming and life was pulsating in the perfect patterns of aliveness all around me this summer and early fall, I felt contentment. I also felt that deep satisfying exhaustion due to all of the hard physical labor I did around the yard (our little urban farm on the edge of some woods; the kind of wooded area in cities where dead, human bodies turn up--eerie woods I would not walk alone in at night).

Anyhow, I was so fortunate to have these many months off and explore the pieces of myself that have often been pushed asunder because so much of my time is spent working away from my homestead. When I list what I accomplished over the last 3.5 months it is quite amazing:
Scraped and painted front porch and railings
Got chickens
got bees
learned about beekeeping from my beekeeper mentor and some books
harvested over 2 gallons of honey two weeks ago by myself--well kk was my helper--but I did it without my mentor
rendered beeswax
made lip balm
built from scratch with no plans mobile chicken run for chickens
put together pre made coop and permanent chicken run
took a permaculture course and got a certificate
dug a four by four by four root cellar in the back yard
filled it with a shit load of michigan squash, onions, and soon some sweet potatoes
planted and tended gardens at home/gardens at community garden
made a lot of pies
went raspberry picking
went blueberry picking
made blueberry freezer jam
dehydrated a hell of a lot of roma tomatoes
taught myself to cook lamb shank
cooked a lot of good food from local farms and my own backyard
read some books
tended to kk's dying grandma
ushered in her death in our living room
eulogized grandma s at memorial service
spent a vacation up north with my sister,eo, her husband, the 3 wee ones, my ma and dad, k's dad, and grandma c and got along swimmingly
threw a great dinner party for my baby sister's,ea, pre-wedding celebration
stood up in aforementioned sister's wedding with kk and other sister
road my bicycle a lot
planted three american black currants, two precocious hazelnuts, one american hybrid chestnut, two beach plums, four regent serviceberries.
pulled out bushes in front yard including stumps, by hand, in order to plant the serviceberries
ran a chicken wire fence behind where the tall bushes once lived
went to reskilling festival and milked a goat
wrote
drew a little
loved a lot
enjoyed my friends
enjoyed sleeping
drank good beer
rested
got my hands dirty
hit 5,000 miles on my portland
loved some more
realized how much i love animal husbandry and how one day i want to keep goats too and homestead as full time as possible

so, I am back to work and I still have an ever-flowing chest of available compassion which I am thankful for. And I have the understanding hearts of people around me, at work, who are insisting that I not jump full force into the nitty gritty and that I be good to myself.

Good bye dear sabbatical; you were so good to me and my heart is better for having known you.

their small fingers dipped into the dripping honeycomb

the confused longing pounced on my heart like a stealth cat on the prowl for a helpless rodent. it came fast and furious--the ache. not quite empty; not quite loss--just a sadness fused with a smile for the memory of the moment that brought the longing.

their small hands--hands that are learning everyday more and more to draw and write and maneuver hockey sticks with grace and finesse--dipped excitedly into the oozing honeycomb. they scooped up wax and dripping, sticky amber liquid and chomped down on it with fierce laughter at the newness of the experience. and i smiled.

cause only at our house--this home k and i are creating everyday--could these young boys have this experience. the experience of tasting honeycomb in their aunts' kitchen. honey that was harvested only days before by me, a novice beekeeper, and my beloved, my kk.

and the longing hit, because the excitement of sharing this gift from the beautiful bees that live behind my garage and forage the neighborhood's gardens and sparsely wooded areas with our nephews brought up all kinds of dreamed desire for building our lives together with the honest yearning of our own children.

and then the longing retreated to a silent place in the long cavities behind my blood filled organs. and i remembered my thankfulness for all this life that has surrounded me these last many months. the lives of these bees and the chickens and walnuts, zinnias, turnips, beets, black raspberries,autumn-orange-brown oak leaves, and all that shines deep red orange in the morning sun and even deeper purple orange in the setting sun makes my heart full and lessens the ache to a dull thud that only surfaces in tiny moments.

tiny moments when small fingers fall into the sticky life of a honeycomb and small mouths turn up in amused smiles of wonderment and astonishment. smiles that adults do not know how to conjure up to our faces. smiles that we may be missing out on for ourselves...

soil

I've been digging a hole in my backyard. It is an experiment. A root cellar experiment. I will be sinking a rubbermaid tub full up of sand and apples, carrots, and squashes down in my deep, deep hole. I will seal it up tight and add rocks to the top to keep out unwanted critters. It may work. The hole will end up being approximately 4 X 4 X 4.

Grave like.

I love the soil. I love digging in it and pulling my hands through it. I've found quite a few bones in this area of the yard. I've also had to lacerate tree roots, and I marvel at the water that pours from their sad underground limbs--so much like blood, so full of life.

The theme of this week; maybe the theme of my whole sabbatical is soil--earth--that living body of death, decay, life and energy below us. I am reading the Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan right now and re-reading the Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry and simultaneously digging a hole in my backyard and watching my chickens shit and scratch and cultivate and create beautiful, fertile compost.

It is all too amazing for words. And still my eyes well up with tears as I read and dig and watch because, dammit, I desire something different for my life. I desire this closeness to the earth that I have been able to foster over the last few months away from my paid work.

The Worst Hard Time is about the dust bowl--the killing off of the buffalo; the massacre of the soil the destruction of the earth in the name of profit and the constructed american dream that trampled down the Comanche and other indigenous people in the name of profit for the "civilized" and the mad vengeance that befell the people who were still there when the dust came ripping. I'm not done with the text yet, but the first 90 pages are a fantastic historical account of the tragedy that human beings can create by fucking up the planet.

In the Unsettlng of America there is a great chapter called The Use of Energy. It is all about soil and agriculture and the destruction that we have waged on the planet through the god of big agribusiness and our disconnection from the land, animals, and plants.

Soil.
on my mind.

I'll end with this great passage by Mr. Berry, "The Soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life."