Accidental intimacy

By: | November 27, 2020

Found a little mystery.

I am alone as I write this, as I have been most days the last eight months. There are many things I know I miss: french fries fresh out of a restaurant kitchen, killing time in a bookstore. Other deficits have been more subtle, things I know aren’t available to me right now but that I haven’t consciously desired, like eating at an airport Chili’s. (Don’t get me wrong — I love a good Chili’s, but the airport ones are always disappointing.)

Also on that list: the little observations about my friends that make me feel a part of their lives, like having a bourbon at a friend’s house and noticing their new plant, or going to a wedding and noticing how much the bride’s mom resembles her aunts. Lately, the cumulative lack has finally made itself known, like how anemia can take hold after years of iron deficiency — and as a result, I’m looking for tender details everywhere.

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From Last March, Happy Thanksgiving

By: | November 26, 2020

This is a conversation the People of LWON had late last March when, along with the rest of civilization, we were going bug-nuts with covid stress.  We had decided we couldn’t keep up a five-day-a-week posting schedule, we’d have to cut back to three days a week.  We didn’t like this, but we talked through our various lives — new food supply protocols, kids at home, kids needing help with remote learning, parents who wouldn’t socially distance, working from home, finding masks, learning what’s safe, normal life now being harder, more uncertain, and taking ten times longer — and didn’t see any other way out.  Emily volunteered to write the post that explained our new and unhappy covid posting schedule and unusually, before publishing it, she asked the rest of us to read what she wrote.  The responsibility of writing it, she said, felt like a Thanksgiving dinner. And that got us thinking, in March, about what life might be like in eight months, at Thanksgiving. The conversation took on a life of its own. 

Emily: So, this may sound strange, but the feeling I had writing this post was similar to the feeling I think I would have if we were all getting together for Thanksgiving dinner and somehow I got entrusted with an important dish, like pie or stuffing. I had that thought and then thought how wonderful it would be to get to have a big meal all together. That thought evoked such an intense mix of gratitude and longing, I teared up. Anyway, you all matter to me a whole hell of a lot, and I think LWON matters to a lot of people, and I also think some time to rest is going to be good.

Ann: And now I’m tearing up too, Emily.  Wouldn’t we be happy, everybody bringing a dish and setting the table so beautifully, and watching all the people we’ve written to but rarely or never seen and heard, and with amazement because they’re so interesting.  Oh my, what a dinner we’re having! 

Craig: I’ll bring the weird Jell-O dish.  

 Ann:  You’ll put olives in it, won’t you, Craig.

Craig: Gobs of em.

Sally: Can I bring 70s fish mousse in a mold? 

Ann: Parsley sprinkled over the top in an artful manner. 

Cameron: Pie pie pie 

Helen: Aw, yay. I’d bring duchess potatoes. 

Jenny:  more pie really tart cranberries

 Ann: Cornbread sausage stuffing.

Christie: apricot pie here.

Becky: Green beans in butter and garlic sauce. And apple pie.

Becky: OMG, Thanksgiving this year. Will we be able to gather? Will that be covid season? I can’t bear to think of that yet.

Sally: And about that asshole that brings fish mousse to an otherwise lovely dinner party.

Emily: I love this so much. It reminds me of my favorite thing on long backpacking trips, which is to imagine all the food I’ll get to eat when I get back to civilization. I usually start craving waffle fries and ice cream at around day 6. 

Jenny: My mother-in-law really goes to town with the marshmallows on the sweet potato casserole. Maybe she even uses TOO many. Then again, when has anyone ever said, this sweet potato casserole tastes too sweet? No one. Ever. She also does the (naturally) sweetest sweet corn you can imagine. She uses summer corn that she cuts off the cobs and freezes months before. I am getting happily fat just thinking about this.

Jane: My in-laws have a Thanksgiving tradition of cooking chestnuts in cream and after my father-in-law died, it was even more important to prepare them. They’re awful to shell; we’ve tried a million different methods, and we’ve mostly settled on one where we microwave them in hot water, then singe our fingers peeling them open. Inevitably, everyone curses a lot and we’re always glad to be done with it, but I miss that now.

Emily: That’s so lovely, Jane. My Nana’s tradition was to buy pureed sweet potatoes at her favorite grocery store and pretend that she’d made them herself. So now we make sure to always tell a few harmless lies at Thanksgiving, to honor her memory.

Emily: Also, since this is an imaginary feast, I don’t see why it can’t also include Easter brunch. I’ll bring eggs benedict.

Richard: Well, if we’re adding Easter dishes to our Thanksgiving feast, then I’ll bring my mother’s potato borscht, complete with kielbasa, hard-boiled eggs, and horseradish. It won’t be as good as hers, but I’ll do my best.

Richard: You realize we’re all writing a new post, right? About hope, and the power of looking to the future, and comfort food, and companionship? 

Really, everyone, really, from our hearts, with comforting food and a clearer future and dear people, everyone, happy Thanksgiving. We can do this.

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

By: | November 25, 2020

I’ve always been fascinated by tales of postal heroism. Not the manufactured goodwill of a reply program for letters to Santa Claus, but the everyday challenge of figuring out what a sender intended and getting the letter into the right hands. It’s become a bit of a sport for snail-mail loving citizens, and the postal workers have stepped up to the plate.

Like the Irish postman who in 2015 managed to deliver his charge to “Your man Henderson, that boy with the glasses who is doing the PhD up there in Queen’s Belfast.” Or this one, which could be mistaken for a postcard, but is really a descriptive address. I like to think the fact the recipient had a hamster was the detail that solved the case.

Others are just a vague map with a dot on it and something like “Henry”.

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Good Bones and Weltschmerz

By: | November 23, 2020

This post originally ran August 16, 2018. But as COVID19 cases surge, hospitals reach capacity, and the long, dark winter descends, you can bet I’m again feeling the weltschmerz.

Two years ago, a poet named Maggie Smith wrote a poem called ‘Good Bones.’ I printed it out, and I find myself reading it over and over again. “The world is at least fifty percent terrible/and that’s a conservative estimate,” Smith writes.

Really conservative. Right now, I’d put the number closer to ninety percent. Nearly everything feels awful. I have a bad case of weltschmerz, a term I just learned that smashes together the German words for ‘world’ and ‘pain.’ According to Joachim Whaley, a German historian and linguist at the University of Cambridge, weltschmerz “is the sense both that one is personally inadequate and that one’s personal inadequacy reflects the inadequacy of the world generally.” He adds, “it is pain suffered simultaneously both in the world and at the state of the world, with the sense that the two are linked.”

Yes, that’s exactly how I feel. My personal failings represent the failings of humanity. And lordy are we failing hard.

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The Death of a Star As Told to the Trees

By: | November 20, 2020

Space is this abstract concept to lots of you. I know so many people, including so many writers, who could not care less about the subject. They are bored, at best, by everything that exists beyond the eggshell-thin layer of this planet’s atmosphere. The wild, kaleidoscopic kingdom of life on this world is enough for them. As much as I love living things, I will never understand this perspective.

Antipathy about space vs. SPACE!!1! is an old argument and it’s one I have held with friends for years, and so I don’t feel like re-litigating it. But allow me to enter into evidence, if you will, a new finding that should remind you of how space is not far at all, but near, and part of us all, and a force in all our lives.

Trees can absorb the shockwaves of supernovas, and record them for posterity. 

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Hungry Birds

By: | November 18, 2020
Anna’s Hummingbird in Pacifica, California. Photo by Rhododendrites/Wikimedia Commons

As the days get colder and darker, and the escalating pandemic keeps me homebound, I’m trying to make the most of what I can see through my windows. Last week I bought a beautiful vintage hummingbird feeder made from a blood-red glass bottle with fluted sides. I filled it with sugar water and hung it on my back porch, where I can see it from my desk. Within minutes, a hungry Anna’s hummingbird arrived, flashing emerald wings and a ruby gorget.  

The hummingbird is now my main entertainment during the workday, and a source of tortured fascination for Calliope, our strictly indoor cat. Calliope’s jaws chatter and her striped tail twitches as she watches the bird whizz to and fro, dipping its long bill into the feeder’s flower-shaped divots.

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Looking Up

By: | November 16, 2020

Cameron said the other day that she’s feeling a little bit low on perspective right now.

First of all: Me, too, Cameron. Me, too.

Secondly: For perspective, I recommend the sky. It’s always there, there’s often something happening in it, and the thing that is happening almost never relates to an election.

Here are some things I have seen in the sky in the last week.

  • Mars. It’s bright enough these days for me to find it without my glasses in city light pollution. Is that an official measure of brightness? It should be.
  • Vultures. Dozens of them, circling overhead. Also, I was in the backyard of a friend who is a serious birder and could teach me (masked, from a distance) how to tell the difference between black and turkey vultures when they’re far overhead. It has to do with where on the underside of their wings they have lighter-colored patches.
  • Two bald eagles. The same friend picked out the birds that weren’t vultures and also figured out what they were. Bald eagles look very different from vultures, even when they’re hundreds of feet up, silhouetted against the sky, but you have to take the time to look.
  • The absence of a helicopter. I keep hearing helicopters over my apartment and then, despite having windows on two sides of the building, not being able to find the actual helicopter in the sky. I assume the helicopters exist, and that they aren’t some kind of imaginary brain helicopter I’m inventing.
  • Cassiopeia. A high school teacher made us learn the circumpolar constellations and I’ve never stopped noticing that W in the sky.
  • A bunch of crows chasing a raven. This looked like a bunch of crow-shaped silhouettes, but one of them was huge and croaky, and the other crow-shaped silhouettes clearly hated it. (Ravens don’t often come to D.C. – this was about 100 miles from here, in West Virginia.)
  • A shooting star. Zip! Across a little stretch of sky, just to the left of Mars. I watched for a while, but it was the only one.

When you look back at Earth, everything is still more or less the same, but now you can remember that there’s a bird soaring, or dust burning up in the atmosphere, or that stars still exist.

Photo: Helen Fields

Redux: Whatever Trees

By: | November 13, 2020

I’m a little bit low on perspective right now, so I’m checking back in with the trees for some resilience inspiration. This post first appeared in 2018.

There’s a quote I’ve seen attributed to Ram Dass about why we should turn people into trees. When we look at people (or ourselves), we judge. We compare. We criticize. But for trees, Ram Dass says, it’s different. “Some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You appreciate it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way.”

That’s what I look for, the whatever in trees. The more whatever the better. The wind-swept bristlecone pine that thrives in its gnarliness at the highest elevations. The rainbow eucalyptus, with colors you can see once the bark starts peeling off. The Moreton Bay Fig Tree next to the playground, which has huge roots and crannies that are equal to any climbing structure.

Last weekend it was Joshua trees. These spiky plants have few clusters of branches—some have none at all—leaving the ones they have to take on the burden of arms. They reach out, they point the way, they perform sun salutations. They shrug. The Mormons noticed: the story goes that 19th century pioneers gave the tree its name because of its resemblance to the biblical Joshua, extending his arms in prayer.

These evergreens look even more unusual against the backdrop of the Mojave Desert. Blue sky, sand-colored boulders, the craggy trees standing around, giving each other enough personal space to take in the view, for us to take them in. They have no tree rings; we guess at their ages based on their height.

Making more Joshua trees is a finely tuned affair. They must bloom—it doesn’t happen all the time, and may involve the precise combination of precipitation and a winter freeze. Then there is the yucca moth, essential to pollination. As a person, the Joshua tree would need to chart her basal temperature, calculate the ovulation window. Perhaps she would require scented candles. When she lit the candles, they might smell like rain.

Or maybe she wouldn’t need any of this when it came down to it. They can re-sprout after the main tree has been wiped out by fire or flood. They weather extreme heat and cold, months of drought and then a five-inch downpour. They can live for more than 150 years. Some may live far longer.

And so much about them is still unknown. Researchers writing in PLOS ONE thought that warmer climate may have caused a peak bloom of Joshua trees across its range in 2013, and found that increased temperatures did boost reproduction at the sites they studied. But the bloom was so widespread, with trees flowering in urban settings well outside their normal range, that the scientists think climate wasn’t the only thing that triggered the floral explosion.

It’s certainly easier to see both the forest and the trees here. Each one with its pincushion personality, the group of them united in their daily, yearly, decadal survival—maybe even communicating in a way we don’t yet see. It’s so much harder with people. I rarely notice the poor soil, the past deluges, the invisible messages in a language I don’t recognize. But there are the arms, doing what arms do, with so many fewer spikes. There is the whatever, making its daily attempt at survival. I’ll imagine the desert behind this mobile, two-legged tree so I can see it better.

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Image by Christopher Michel, Flickr/Creative Commons license