Thursday, December 26, 2013

What I know of wearing hats.

What I know: I have three hats and I've never worn them. One is a charming women's hat reminiscent of the thirties. Or perhaps forties. After the flappers, I find history spreads without distinction. The other is a winter hat that if you wear too high on your head, resembles a Russian headpiece. As you can imagine, it's the height of fashion, a category you would see I don't belong to if you looked through my closet. I don't remember the third hat (bowler? fedora? sunhat? I've always wanted a sunhat, but that's another story), so perhaps I only own two. What I also know: I read Nora Ephron and suddenly I am charming, humorous (but not ha-ha funny -- there's a difference between laughter and a gem of dialogue that stays with you until it matures into a joke), and conversational. I talk in short sentences. I manage to fit a stream of thought neatly into a paragraph and somehow it doesn't feel ramble-on and long and I manage to entertain my audience's thoughts the entire process. I am self deprecating minus the deprecation. I poke at myself, gently, and it's more kidding-your-friend than undercutting sarcasm, because what I'm saying is true, it's reality, and it's humorous and delightfully human and it's okay to laugh about that.

At the height of my Ephron stage, I pull out a Kim Edwards novel and I'm thrust into a world dripping with poetry. Thickly layered simplicity piled under metaphors. It's lush and my writing takes on the character of a tropical island in the summer, everything emerald and honeyed and swollen with the descriptions of mangos, fascinating and tragic backstories, plot hooks partially memory, stitched with dreams. My writing becomes nebulous, pure lyricism.  I write lengthy pages of poetry crammed into the constraints of dialogue and narrative and suddenly my characters and friends are sages. They are veritable wise men and women of old. Why, I should take lessons from them! The first being that exclamation marks are a no. This is not a slap-happy comedy. Suddenly, drinking coffee in the morning takes on a dreamy, amber tinted glow, and the line between fact and fantasy blurs until there was no recognizable line at all. It's a buzz in your head, champagne bubbles, silver light on the water. It's addicting. I become convinced I'm a poet and I'm sorry to say I become absolutely maudlin. I know adverbs are the bubonic plague of writing, one case leading to another until soon, they're killing off good, clean prose one by one, but in order to properly describe in effect how terribly melancholic I become, I'll have to let that one slip.

When I'm thoroughly drenched in the violet wine of a recent Edward's novel, I'll start cleaning out my bookshelf, or think, I should read this to the boys, or, I'll look up a quote and get sucked into an old Roald Dahl book. My affair with simplicity and whimsy is rekindled, though I swore (for what seemed like the ninth time) that the dignity of my pieces would remain. I make rendezvous' with words like "fantastic!" "glittery!" and "chummy!" I am animated! And childlike! And exclamation marks pop up like weeds. Excuse me. Like weeds! If Edwards is a grand, matronly lady with a rose garden and a towering mansions, with gallery rooms and an entire wing for a kitchen, then Dahl is the young father of twins, the cheerful nanny who tells deliciously (there goes the adverb again -- they're catching!) chilling tales you can't help but listen to, the best friend in every romcom you feel the heroine should end up with, because sure, the hero has a charming face, but it seems he always falls for the girl after the inevitable makeover. Anyways.

I slip into these writers (and more: I haven't mentioned the simple, kind wisdom of C. S. Lewis or Markus Zusak's brilliant prose, Jane Austen's full-bodied fiction or Nicole Krauss' rapturous words, the charming, humorous writing of Margaret Dilloway, or the shimmering, headying fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and on and on) styles. I try on their hats for awhile but none fit quite as well as my own. Except, when I put all those hats away, I find I lost mine. Except, when I try to look for it, I find I can't quite remember it, whether it was black or gray or yellow, if it had a wide brim or if there was a bird on top. Except, by the time I've found it, it wasn't really a hat, more of a headscarf. Of course! I'm not a hat girl, after all, no matter how I try. And there, I think, lies the secret.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

My great grandmother was a tiny force of a woman. When she died, she was ninety pounds of muscle memory. They say moments live on in your bones, like words layered brick by brick. You’re a skeletal foundation of stories and your knees are muddy with unthawing. She wore thick white tights soft as the pale fuzz of hair wisping around her face. Her apartment walls were red velvet, plush and cloying in your nose. You took off your shoes before you came in, and there was a clatter of pairs by the door. She made chicken noodle soup and served it on china from the Czech Republic. The plates alone were petals. Grace, she said, and in between breaths, don’t let weeds grow between your ribs. I cried at her funeral and the sound of death broke on my skin, falling like snow. The slush soaked through my boots. We had soup for lunch. That day, her glass bowl slipped on the spring earth into shards as small as seeds.

Monday, December 9, 2013

december mix tape.



No rhyme or reason, just sounds of the season.

(cheesy)

Happy December! x

Saturday, December 7, 2013

you and me, we got our own sense of time.















six pies (three gluten free)
a new baby
a snowless evening
two fat turkeys stuffed with cinnamon raisin bread and celery
card games after dusk
rest

our thanksgiving

Wednesday, December 4, 2013


"But if we're really honest with ourselves,
our plans usually don't work out as we had hoped.
So instead of asking our young people
'What are your plans? 
What do you plan to do with your life?'

maybe we should tell them this:
PLAN TO BE
SURPRISED."
- Dan in Real Life