Driving

Hello, lovies.

I've a peeling nose from overblowing, a full heart, and a swollen gland. I just finished my morning goal of writing two more chapters on my Maple Mullihan sequel (never mind the first book hasn't yet been accepted--a mere detail!) and I'm rather happy with the sunshine filling the whole of my window pane. I'm rather less happy with the rotten fish smell outside, but that's different mining-town Pennsylvania story altogether. I did want to share an account of my mystical drive to church yesterday while my gratitude for it is still fresh in my innards:

I left the children with Martin yesterday morning. With my travel cup of coffee and my materials for Sunday, a sandwich and pumpkin cookies in a crumpled paper bag, I left a screaming Elspeth and headed down the front steps. I'd been complaining a bit about making the drive by myself, especially as Martin seemed fabulously comfortable in his slippers, but as soon as I sat behind the wheel of our Subaru, I knew I was in for a happy time. I banished NPR, my usual background noise to the cacophony of children, for the silence that sat beside me companionably as I pulled out of town and onto the highway toward Morgantown, West Virginia.

The highway cuts in between rolling hills, which were once mountains of the western america magnitude, but are now comfortable and more like an old grandmama who is a bit saggy and droopy but all the more beautiful for the marks of her children, who have eroded all her sharp edges. Occasionally you spot a house on a ridge line or in a valley, and occasionally there's a blight, like a box store or a car dealer, but mostly there are just endless trees, curving upward and out until you find the horizon. The morning of my solitary drive, the sky was clear blue, the sort of blue that makes you wait for contrails and swooping birds.

The deep green and thrumming reds of our autumn seem to have burned away to give way to a golden blaze. As I drove down toward the edge of Pennsylvania, the maples burned on all sides. The trees seemed to have drunk up all the summer sunlight and were alive with gold. The maples were like a blast of music, ringing in my head, bringing tears to my eyes, when suddenly the road curved upward into a cloud.

All the singing hushed, and everything was white and soft and far away, echoing out on all corners of the road. I thought the mist would last only a few seconds and then I'd plunge back out into the color again, but it went on and on. I turned on my headlights. The cars around me slowed a bit. The mist moved through the hills and as I moved more deeply into it.

It wasn't until I was in West Virginia that I realized the fog was gone. I don't know when I drove out of it, but suddenly I noticed I could see the striated browns of the rock walls to the left of the highway. Shafts of water darkened the rock in solid waterfalls. Then it was out of the mountains back to the rolling color, the spheres of yellow and red, the flickering of leaves, the dipping of the road. I increased speed to that good old West Virginia pace--78 and curving through autumn, descending finally to my exit and to the university traffic and to the responsibilities of people and noise.

A Full Tea Kettle

Here is my short Friday wish list:

A full tea kettle always ready to whistle but not screaming. Perhaps I should like the heft of the kettle under my palm and fingers, enjoy the filling. Still I wish it were always full.

Also a silent person who puts the tea cup, with perfectly blended milk and no sugar, at my elbow, whom I do not thank but who knows I am thankful.

Beds that change their own sheets.

More tunnels.

I think maybe I would miss the snap of the sheets and the way I feel my mother is with me, at my elbow, watching every time I tuck a hospital corner. I would perhaps miss bobbing the tea bag by its string in the hot water, watching the swirls drift into the corner of the cup.

So I'll whittle my list down to one:

More tunnels to beautiful places.

And add one:

A yard full of mature maples and pines. I awaken one morning and there they are, standing in my yard like old uncles, hands shoved in corduroy pockets. They have always been in the room.

Autumn, Continued

Bea's face looks like mine when we take drives these days.
New England may be fine, but our autumn is pretty glorious, too. I wish you all could be here to see it. Today I cooked up an acorn squash and my o my but there isn't anything better, especially with a little cinnamon, brown sugar, and apples.



Lest you be tiring of the odes to autumn, I do have a luscious piece of news: my man Martin just got a poem accepted at Beloit Poetry Journal! Pretty proud of that guy. So proud, in fact, that I whipped him up an acorn squash tonight. That's the kind of wild way we celebrate around here.

Autumn Now

For my parents in Bangkok and Martin's parents in Houston, here's a little of what you're missing:





Our first hoary frost lay over everything--the stroller, railings, car, trees--zapped the zinnias, but melted quickly to give way to a perfect autumn day. Beatrix's favorite new thing: chasing squirrels in the park. One threw down nuts at us today as we waited for Martin. My mother has always had a particular knack with squirrels--one at the Episcopal Church in Maryland chatted regularly with her.

Are there squirrels in Thailand? I won't list what I'm missing by NOT being in Bangkok. Martin cooked Thai noodles tonight, so it's almost as if we're there. Hmm.

Zippitydodah! Hoorah for yellow and red! And for Thai noodles!

The World According to Elspeth, Age 3 1/2, in Photos

I just downloaded some pictures with the intention of creating yet another ode to autumn. . .and then I found that Elspeth had been quite busy with the camera. I actually found myself loving her photo journal, though of course she's not technically supposed to be running around with our only digital camera. Technicalities like these have never stopped her before. I wish I could include all her takings, but I've chosen just a few. Without further ado, then:





You'll note that focus is also a silly detail she doesn't pay too much attention to, which tells you much about her: she is ALWAYS on the move. Most of our pictures of her are out of focus for that very reason.




The first set of photos are from one evening and the next set are from a following afternoon.




We end with a self-portrait.

Writer's Bird

This is Elspeth's photo of me, when my head was taken in glory. It was a great trip. I missed my body. Someday I will write of it.

So here I am. I don't have writer's block, exactly, which is a dumb name and makes me think of laxatives. We don't want writer's diarrhea, either, just. . .well, I'll stop there. I have these lovely shards to a story and I'm not brave enough to throw them all into the fire.

Maybe it's not cowardice, either, that stops me--maybe just laziness, or weariness, or the water is too cold to jump in all at once. What I need to do is just plunge in like those fools I've known who whoop like gorillas and beat their chests and whip around their wet cold heads like buffaloes in heat. They are not fools at all. They are brave.

I wet a little bit of my body at a time, afraid of the full hit of coldness. . .and then the story is gone. This is not how I usually operate. Usually I write like mad for four hours and then sit back with my scissors and begin snipping. Martin comes in with his chainsaw and takes off all the appendages, leaving maybe just the head. Or maybe just an ear. "There's your story!" he says, holding up that one ear with a grin. A small silver loop dangles. I hold the ear, despair for a minute, and begin mixing up the plaster to construct a body around it again. If I am brave.

I think all the reading of Sylvia Plath's journals has taken it out of me. I looked at a mushroom today in the grass on the way to class and I wondered, "How would Sylvia have described this mushroom?" And low and behold if I didn't open my book at random in class and read, "A mushroom's black underpleats."

What is that high buzzing in my office? I hate high, constant sounds. They get behind my eyes and stick themselves down in my throat.

Maybe, just maybe, I will start that story. As soon as I finish this exceptional cup of tea. Then. And maybe when that buzzing goes away. A black bird just flew past the blinding, sunlit clouds, like the blur of a waving hand in an overexposed photograph. . . .Actually, not like that at all.

Vegetables Make You Feel Lovely

Whether it was the perfect autumn day, a measure of my surrender to weariness, or the simple meal of vegetables I ate for dinner, I feel so content. Green beans and local purple potatoes and peppers that a farmer and retired professor showered into my lap (with a gruff, 'don't want to take these home') and I carried around in my capacious purse all afternoon. . .onions, a little tomato, and a long simmer.

I never feel this happy when I eat meat, except perhaps turkey, and that's the sleepy drug kicking in, I suppose, and the fact that I always eat it with family on holidays. I feel vegetarianism at my heels again. I've become picky and paranoid about meat lately, even local, all-natural, no-hormone meat. And then, the other day, this happened: We were driving along, almost off the interstate, almost into the bosom of our little town, when a big semi passed by. It was one of those with slits in the walls, and through the slits we could see great big soft, dirty black cows.

"Where are they going?" the girls wanted to know, delighted that, Richard Scarry fashion, they'd seen a truck full of cows.

"I'm not sure exactly," I said, not untruthfully, since I didn't know WHICH slaughterhouse they were bound for.

"I think they're going to the fair," one daughter suggested, and then another said they might be going to a great big cow park, and then Elspeth concluded they were headed for a field of flowers.

That would be nice. Ug. It was like a knife had plunged itself into my liver. All I could see was the death-agony eyeroll that accompanies a cow being slaughtered.

The sticker on the back of the semi said I [heart] LOVE BEEF. I did not read it aloud.

I think I'm a vegetarian, I said to Martin. That clinches it.

In other happier news, for the first time I saw a semi with its bed full of apples--not crates of apples or bags of apples. Just the naked spheres tossed in. There must have been thousands and thousands, piled to the top. It brought to mind another Richard Scarry fantasy: the overturned truck with apples strewn everywhere and the truck driver, in happy resignation, setting up a stand with "Apple Cider" advertised on a jolly sign.

Here's a cup of tea and some dahlias for you, be they a bit out of focus:

Enjoy!