How to Clean Your Sink

9:00 AM

Tell yourself that you will write for one hour straight, no interruptions.  It is your Writing Day after all.

Make a cup of tea.  There may be grease and grime and some weird food-stuff stuck on the tea kettle.  Clean it.

As you wash the tea kettle you will see that the sink is gross.  Gross as in you need to get out an old toothbrush and the bleach gross.

Since you clearly cannot write while your sink sits in the kitchen all dirty and gross you must postpone the beginning of your Writing Day. This will only take a minute anyway.

To make sink cleaning more “literary” you should find a lecture by Lynda Barry on You Tube to listen to while scrubbing. 

While Barry talks about “creative concentration” and how to transform images and memory into stories run your paper towel covered finger nail around the metal edge of your old 1950s sink.  It’s really the only way to get out the grime.

Your buddy Lynda will mention “imaginary friends" and "imaginary enemies” and you will cry thinking of an old friend who has dumped you unceremoniously and unkindly.  Not to worry, tears bring up the shine on the porcelain.

Use the toothbrush on the faucet and handles.  Wipe off the soap pump.

Your tea is now cold. Stick it in the microwave to revive it.

Do you know what goes well with tepid tea?  Pickles.  And cheese.

After the pickle-tea-cheese snack return to the sink.  Buff it dry with a clean rag.

While you have the rag and toothbrush out you might as well clean the counters, too.  And the stove.

Have another piece of cheese.

Scratch off the words “Writing Day” on your calendar. There is always next week. 

10:00 AM

Winter Chill

December is just two days away, and I'm not prepared.  Oh, I have gifts purchased and Christmas cards ready to send.  I have the calendar full of parties and events.  But, still, I feel a dread that quickens my pulse and tightens my throat.

I have lovely memories of golden roasted turkeys, holiday carols, and frosted cookies. Yet, scattered between these are darker memories that still chill my bones:

1. Nana: She becomes ill and enters the hospital right after Christmas. I wait to hear how she is, but I'm scared.

2. Daddy: He dies, suddenly, one December day as I prepare for college finals.  Everything changes.

3. Momma: She gets terribly sick and is admitted to the hospital. I am too far away to get to her.  I am helpless.

4. Grandma: She dies, after years of suffering, in a nursing home in St. Louis. I hadn't seen her in over a year.

5. Sister: She is admitted to the hospital in San Francisco after her water breaks six weeks before her due date.  She gets an infection and my niece is born pre-mature. She is forced to spend Thanksgiving day in the hospital.

My mother and sister are fine now.  They are healthy and well as is my sweet little niece,  but every year as the holidays approach I begin to panic.  I find myself grinding my teeth and my neck tightens with anxiety.  I have trouble sleeping, and I become nervous and twitchy.  I jump when the phone rings, and I find myself thinking, "What will happen this year?  Who will it be? What will we have to deal with now?"

I dream of my father and grandmothers and wake with tears in my eyes and my head aching.

I know this type of thinking is irrational especially considering that the majority of the holiday seasons I have lived through have been pleasant and uneventful. But I cannot help it.  My heart has scars that itch when the weather turns and the days get darker.  There is no salve that will calm the irritation or soothe the pricking of fear I live with this time of year.

All I can do is watch the snow fall and hope, hope, hope, that this year will be a good one.

Scraps

Today I found a fragment of the wallpaper that hung in our living room when we first moved into our house nine years ago.

The day we closed on our house our friends came over with a bottle of champagne and a gift card to the hardware store.  We drank and laughed and toasted, "to our new home!" as we all peeled at corners of the wallpaper that I said had to go.  The paper in the living room, to our surprise, came off in long, thin, easy-to-peel pieces. Soon everyone had a glass of bubbly in one hand and a strip of wallpaper in the other.  Our two-year old toddlers raced around ripping paper and weaving between our legs, and I felt so happy to be here in this place with those I loved so dearly.  I felt so secure in that love, those friendships.

To my surprise I found a working phone in the dark, dirty basement.  I snuck down and dialed my mother in California.

"Oh honey, your first home! Daddy would be so proud!"

I cried with her, a little drunk now, and wished my father was there, so I could have told  him about how I had saved and scrimped in order to buy this house.  I'd have told him how we ate lots of cheap macaroni and cheese and didn't buy new clothes for months and only had one car.  He would have applauded my thriftiness and, like my mom said, would have been so proud.

I look at the wallpaper shred now, and it makes me sad and nostalgic.  Why didn't I take pictures that day?  Why aren't there snapshots of us with our friends, arms around each other in goofy poses? Where are the pictures of us all standing in the empty kitchen or waving on the front porch?  Why didn't we have a camera to take shots of the kids  being crazy and enjoying themselves in the wide open rooms that smelled of cleanser and dust and other families?

I don't have those photos, but I do have this wallpaper scrap.  It's something.

Abundance

With spring beginnings come promise, hope, renewal and a thousand other cliches about what might be right around the bend.  We shake off the crust of winter snow and toss the boots in the attic and march forward into the sun wanting more.

Ever and always wanting more.

But now, in late summer, the basil plants are hanging weak and thirsty, and the tomatoes drag their vines so low you want to yell, "get up you lazy things!" The early September light is white and glaring and almost garish, and the squirrels are as fat as piglets.   The pepper plants are bursting, and you sigh deeply because what am I going to do with all those peppers?  The jam is made and the canning done.  The school supplies are purchased. The new clothes are laid out carefully for the first day of classes.  

Before you know it the harvest will be over and the fresh fruit gone.  The pumpkins will turn orange, and the new clothes will be stained.  All the tomatoes will be mealy and imported and utterly disappointing. Everyone will have to buy their basil in depressing little plastic clam shells that hide the brown leaves in the center.

All of these things--the riches of late summer and the barrenness of the coming fall and winter-- make me feel heart-achy in way that makes me grateful and honest and raw and tearful and ready all at once. I'm ready to say good-bye to summer. 

I'm ready to say good-bye to so many things.

summer cairn

Tiny Poem

Words leak from my ears at night.

In the morning,

I shake out the pillowcase to see if

Sentences

Fall out.

Fiction: Name Contest

 I had several people suggest names for a hard boiled Brockport detective.  I can't decide on just one winner, so I'm going to put it to a vote. Vote in a comment here or on the link on facebook or twitter by Monday August 20th.  The winner gets a little Brockport, NY memorabilia.

Here's the list:

Daniel John Walker
Captain
Nick Stone
Mitch Denson
Jud Harrison
Chet Marony
Dirk Wolcott
Silas James
Rodney (Rod) Beach
James Styles
Silas Dupree
Clarkson Manning

Fiction

I don't write fiction.

But if I did I would write a story about a hard boiled detective  living in my little Western New York town.

He would drink lukewarm coffee at the the diner and throw back Gennys with the local color at Barber's Tap Room. He would know, though, that if he needed info for a case that he could usually find it at C&S Saloon.

 He'd walk the banks of the Erie canal late at night thinking about a woman who hurt him in ways that words couldn't describe.  She would have left a sweater that smelled of Chantilly Lace in his coat closet.  He would refuse to get rid of it even when other women asked why he kept it.

He'd have a beat up old clunker of boat that he would take out on Lake Ontario to get away from it all.  The boat would be named Doll.

 He'd rent a loft apartment over a downtown gift shop and run his small time detective business out of his tiny kitchen.  He would be independently wealthy because of a family inheritance, but he wouldn't want anyone to know.  He would be proud, and since he always worked hard he would continue to work hard, money or not.

 Most people around the village would think of him as a decent but quiet sort of man.  He would chew on the end of a match when he talked on the phone because of his constant struggle to give up smoking. Most of his work would come from cuckolded spouses, but every now and then he'd get a case just a little bit more interesting, a little bit more mysterious.

He would stay out of village politics but find that politicians and police needed his services more often than they would care to admit.

He would know almost everyone but like almost no one.

He would have scars, lots of them, but he would rarely if ever talk about how he got them.  Even a few extra Gennys wouldn't squeeze it out of him.

But, alas, I don't write fiction.

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Care to give my detective a cool-as-a-cucumber-but-tough-as-nails-name?  Best entry wins a Brockport-themed prize.