The search for thirsty blue

By: | March 2, 2017

There’s a particular shade of blue that I’ve tried to replicate with pigment for much of my life. I think it’s blue, anyway. There’s gray in there, too. Indigo. Violet. Black. Flickers of gold. This blue is luminous, despite its darkness. This blue is heavy and satisfying as a thirst, slaked.

I can’t point to any objects that are this color. It belongs to something more ephemeral: The bruised underside of a storm when the sun is at a 4-o’clock slant on the opposite horizon, burning the prairie grass white in the space between. It’s a waiting color, one that heralds a sky shattered with lightning, boom-cracking thunder that ricochets inside your ribcage, and the transformation of hardpan to ankle-grabbing mud. The things that come when the spreading anvil cloud drags the hard shield of its belly over your head—tightening the blue now to opaque gray, then obliterating it in sheets of rain.

On roadtrips with my family to the High Plains when I was a teenager, I’d turn in a circle to click photos of that storm-and-sun dance with a little 35-millimeter film camera. Later, copying the artist David Hockney, I’d tape the images together into panoramic composites, and sit down in high school art class with an oblong sheet of thick paper to try to paint that sky, that blue, with my watercolors. The results were forever disappointing. Continue reading →

The Problem with Good People

By: | March 1, 2017

Writing about people who are a normal mixture of good and bad is already hard.  Writing about good people is close to impossible.

I wrote a profile once about a doctor who was just plain good.  He wasn’t a do-gooder – “I’m not a missionary,” he’d say; he was just a man who needed to make sick people well so he needed to get to the bottom of what made them sick and what would make them well.  He listened, he watched, his manners were exquisite, he said what was on his mind, he was kind, he was absolutely relentless, he didn’t attract or like attention.

By “good,” I don’t mean faultless.  He’d have said his biggest fault was his competitiveness, but I spent a lot of time watching him deal with people and the only thing he was hell-bent on competing with and beating the daylights out of was disease.  We were collaborators – he was the doctor, I was the writer – and I’d have said his biggest fault was not getting his chapters to me within four years of the deadline.  Other people got mad at him for similar reasons but nobody stayed mad.  He’s a good man, period.  He is good and he does good.  And when I wrote the perfectly truthful and representative profile of him, the editor sent it back saying it was a valentine, I needed to make him more human.

Why is that?  This doctor I was profiling is famous not only for his work but also for his goodness; everybody says so.  Why couldn’t I report that? Continue reading →

Jewish TMI

By: | February 28, 2017

In my family, we talk an awful lot about bowel movements. If. When. Consistency. Pain level.

I call my Aunt Judy. “How are you?” I ask. “Terrible,” she says. “All I do is schlep back and forth to the bathroom. Sometimes I sit on the toilet and cry.”

I call my Dad and his lady friend, Ann. “How are things?” I ask. “Terrible,” Dad says. “Ann has a miserable stomach, terrible constipation. She’s been moaning and groaning all day.”

My mom used to tell me why she rarely called her sister. “All she wants to talk about is her diarrhea,” she said.

I’m not kidding. This is how it goes. Poop (or lack of) dominates every conversation. Continue reading →

Dial M for Medicine

By: | February 27, 2017

One evening last week, after digesting about three times the recommended daily allowance of political news and making myself nauseous with anxiety about the state of the world, I resorted to a familiar remedy. My husband found me in the half-lit bedroom, staring at a flickering iPad. I looked up and shrugged.

“Icelandic crime drama,” I said.

He nodded understandingly, and shut the door.

I’ve been like this for decades, I’m afraid. Thanks to a family friend, I heard or read all but the creepiest Sherlock Holmes adventures in elementary school. I spent a fiendishly lovely middle-school summer following Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple from one bloodstained British drawing-room to the next. In high school, I indiscriminately absorbed Alfred Hitchcock and Tony Hillerman, Edgar Allen Poe and Murder, She Wrote.

Whether they’re dark and violent or corny and cozy, whodunits or procedurals or a little of both, I still love mysteries. On glum, rainy evenings when everything seems out of joint, I’ll open a Ruth Rendell or a P.D. James or a Dorothy Sayers like some people open a bottle of wine.

There are certain moods, certain species of confusion and hopelessness, that only Harriet Vane can fix. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | February 25, 2017

The big theme of the week at LWON: Nature. Probably because many of us who should be in puffy coats and moon boots (remember moon boots?) have been sunbathing and strutting around in flip flops.

But Rose kicked off the week with a look inside, at our digital limbs (cell phones) and computer-network-wired brains (think Facebook). She’s like to know, as would the rest of us, who has legal access to these electronic bits of ourselves?

Helen then reminded us what this season is supposed to be like—in a redux from an actual winter. She really likes winter.

Then came Jessa’s redux considering words and pictures and click-bait facts in what we read. She reminds us why digging deeper matters, even if you end up with just factoids on the brain.

Emma Marris brought us back to nature with another in her series about making beautiful things with Earthly ingredients like sticks and berries. Check out her ice ornaments and make your own.

And finally, Cameron expressed her love for a potted plant. The first step is admitting it, Cameron. We’re proud of you.

Potted

By: | February 24, 2017

I’m in love with a houseplant. It’s a maidenhair fern, its frilly little leaves dangling from willowy stems. There’s something about it that just makes me incredibly happy. It’s true, my heart even flutters a bit when I see it.

This is my first adult relationship with a houseplant. As a kid, we had plants all over our house, but I thought they were weird. The plants got aphids, my dad would squirt them with a soapy spray bottle. They smelled like soggy dirt—soggy inside dirt, which is totally different than soggy outside dirt. We also had an annual infestation of carpenter ants, which I associated with the plants.

I may not have been wrong—the ants feed on other insects and sugary things, including the honeydew that aphids and other houseplant-dwelling insects produce. Honeydew is sweet, sweet bug poop. Continue reading →

Creating With Nature: Ice Ornaments

By: | February 23, 2017

transparent circles of ice with berries and sticks embedded in them, along with loops. Four are shown.If it is still freezing hard during the night where you live, you can try this easy and fun art project. Find some paper plates, cups, tupperware containers, anything with an interesting shape that you can get ice out of in one piece pretty easily. I like the paper plates because you can kind of peel them off. Fill your containers with water. Now add pretty things from the yard or neighborhood. Berries, ferns, petals, rose hips, bits of evergreen foliage, anything you like. Finally, cut a length of twine and make sure the two ends are completely submerged. This will be your hanger. Leave them outside. In the morning the decoration will be ready to hang on a tree, a fence, or your front door.

Continue reading →

Redux: Reading Beyond the Shallows

By: | February 22, 2017

A wave of books in the last couple of years has warned of the mentally-unhealthy click bait diet and what it means for our attention spans. We are enjoined to unplug, descend from the shallows and engage in “deep work.” After all, the creator of every great work of culture has been able–at minimum–to pay attention, and that ability is under threat.

I believe that we in the media can be part of the solution by resisting certain common devices that make our work “digestible”. It’s never wrong to be readable or clear, and there are ways in which we can write to scaffold the reader’s attention, helping them to hold more ideas in mind than they could without the text. But there are some techniques that buoy a reader’s mind at the surface and make it very difficult to immerse themselves in long-form pieces. I wrote about them here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons