As of tomorrow, May 20, LWON will have been alive for five years. LWON is a little surprised at this and entirely pleased with itself. In celebration, two of our brilliant alumni have agreed to write guest posts listing the Top Five Things They Want to List the Top Five Of. We are, and always have been, grateful to them.
When top LWONian Ann Finkbeiner asked if I would contribute a top-five list of something in honor of LWON’s fifth anniversary, I immediately said yes. Not just because I love and am a little afraid of Ann, but also because of a writerly phenomenon that she may already have coined a clever name for. It’s the mind’s tendency to go blank when deadlines loom and then start generating story ideas once no outlet exists. To wit, the following list of the top five posts I think Ann would have liked, if only they had occurred to me when I was still an active person of LWON:
1. Abundance without perfection. I have a lemon tree in my backyard. Even in the California drought it produces bushels of fruit, sustained by the pee and spent bathwater of my children. I grew up long ago and far enough north to remember times of the year when fresh lemons couldn’t even be found in the grocery stores, let alone dangling in their abundance just outside my back door. Having a lemon tree is perfect, even though the lemons themselves are decidedly not.
Some are shrunken, as small and hard as golf balls. Some grow with thin skin and are quick to turn brownish and musty: others are bigger than softballs, swollen with inch-thick layers of pith beneath the rind. And some, their developmental pathways hijacked by a citrus mite from the genus Aceria, twist and extend their segments into wild forms. At most, two out of five of our backyard beauties conform to traditional supermarket standards of acceptability. Many of the rest are simply odd, while a few are truly, gorgeously, grotesque.
Developmentally speaking, they are failures. And yet I’ve come to love the lemons all the more for their departures from the expected form. Like the people who populate our lives, they don’t have to be perfect to be full of value. They just have to be. Continue reading
One night this spring I left all the doors open to the van. It was stinkier than usual, and I figured anyone who thought they might peer inside would have found little of value before being frightened off by the smell.
An anonymous guest poster is sure that fairygodmotherhood is