folk music is real

So, there we were (Suzanne, Siobhann, Sarah) huddled around our campfire. Maybe “campfire” is a bold word: we had hauled damp driftwood from the beach to pile up and after a few minutes of coaxing (via a tampon: camping tip, tampons are the best fire starters ever), had persuaded a limp flame to kind of just, hang out among the drift wood. Banagrams having proved difficult to play with two layers of gloves on, we just sat and drank tea. It was cold, around 25 degrees, and we were on an island. Our parents were probably worried.

All of  a sudden, a man stepped out from behind a palm tree. He looked like he was from Wisconsin.

“Hi,” he said, uncertainly. “My name is Lucas and I’m from Wisconsin. It’s my 30th birthday so, I mean, you should come over to our campfire. We have whiskey and a banjo and stuff.”

None of us can resist the siren of whiskey and a banjo and stuff, besides which; we could see their admirable campfire blazing from between the palm trees. So we walked over.  As it turned out, all of our neighbors were from Wisconsin, which was thrilling because I’ve never met anyone from Wisconsin but I have watched Lars and the Real Girl an embarrassing number of times and I’m not even sure LATRG is set in Wisconsin but I imagine it is. Anyways, everyone looked out of the movie: thick beards, knitted caps, vests. They welcomed us, vaguely introducing themselves all as politically radical and working at radio stations (which, Sio romanticized, must mean NPR and I agreed) and told stories about gardening and camping on frozen lakes; exactly the kind of things I always imagined people from Wisconsin talk about. And then, the one without a beard pulled out a banjo.

I am not unaccustomed to banjo’s. This is not because I play a banjo or know the difference between  a five-stringed, three-stringed or no-stringed banjo, but because I have been blessed to fall into groups of people who all happen to play folk instruments. This is how I know that folk music is real; because everywhere I go, there is a man with a banjo (wouldn’t that make a great novel? “everywhere edward went, there was a five-stringed banjo” except the rest of the novel would be pretty sub-par). I’m taking a class on the folk music revival of the 1960′s and have a tall stack of Bob Dylan books on my shelf; though I love these classes to death, in my more doubtful moments I wonder what relevance, if any, my Liberal Arts major has in ordinary life. American Studies and Folklore are studies of culture, but to a large degree, they are also studies of myth in every day life. We learn about folk songs from the Civil War, but then you think, so what? I like chasing ghosts, but sometimes the ghosts of the past become confused with what is actually happening in the present.

But sitting around the campfire with the Radical Wisconsin Radio Hosts, I remembered that, folk music is real (and so is my major…maybe…but it might not be). They made the round of folk songs, whooping and hollering into the cold. They sang Big Rock Candy Mountain, and the six-year old, who somehow in the dark had nestled his way underneath my arm, knew every word and sang it loudly. They sang Freight Train by my hero, Libba Cotten, who, as it happens,  lived in Carrboro in the early 20th century and wrote Freight Train about the train track that runs by my house (and she was discovered when she happened to help one of the Seeger children find their mother in a department store! What are the odds!).

As a final birthday present, the non-bearded man sang Lucas a song he made up about Hobo Joe. It was brilliant and warbly and raw and about waterfalls and lost love. If I had been a true folk document-er I would have had a pencil and paper and could have recorded the words, but I didn’t. Instead, they trailed off into the emptiness of the island, and we thanked the Radical Wisconsin Radio Hosts for their campfire hospitality and said goodnight. Except, I had to run back to give Lucas his seashell. I’d felt rude going to someone’s birthday campfire without a present, so on the way over I picked up one of the 50-something shells I’d found up on the beach (with the ambitious idea that I’d get home and make CRAFTS with them-SHELL ART!) and presented it to Lucas, and said

“Umm this shell is for you. It might look like every other conch shell you’ve seen in your life, but it actually has properties to bring you good luck on your 30th year.”

He looked at me with watery blue eyes and accepted it. “I’ll carry this to the end of my life.”

I think he was joking, but you never know with hobos. If I run into him in forty years at a commune or camping, he might just be wearing it on a string around his neck.

recaps

Tonight, I went back to reread old entries and was reminded of the following obscure memories that wouldn’t be preserved if I didn’t have a blog and if you have read this blog for awhile, was inspired to post the following summaries. Call it best-of-life-moments-while-having-a-blog-since-thirteen-life. This, if nothing else, is the reason that having a blog since you were thirteen is valuable. While it may seem somewhat self-congratulatory to re-post these particular memories, if you are reading this, you probably participated in them anyways. The Top 15 Things I Forgot Actually Happened:

1. Having a dog jump out of my window while I was driving. Having the dog live (and we were reunited in December! I am happy to report that Dog #2 is flourishing in her charming country life).

2. Meeting a guy named Tony who gave Sarah and I a tour of D.C (“Unlike most guys named Tony, he wasn’t creepy, just a visionary young guy in orange pants who had an hour to kill”)

3. Asking Dave The Bearded Outdoorsmen “What is the difference between a long-leaf pine and a short-leaf pine?”. Not continuing in the Outdoor Education program. Coincidence? Not a coincidence? Only God knows.

4. The Jane Austen Bedspread: a classic.

5. The Davis Librarians discussing my poor choices of biking clothes (aka, romperbiking, never a good idea). Do I know said Davis librarians? No. Do they know me? Apparently. Having the gossip get back to me. Reforming romperbiking.

6. Having 15 Rwandan Schoolteachers praying for a husband for me (“I love babies.” Peter: “Ah! I see! You are ready to have babies! You want a husband!” “No.”). Come to think of it, though, this is not unlike all the hairdressers I am currently acquainted with who are also praying for a husband for me. Prayers (husbands, babies) pending. Thank goodness. 

7. The inherent awkwardness in showing up for a date with the Belgian UN Ambassador and then running out of the restaurant right as he arrived. Saying hello. Saying goodbye. Feeling awkward.

8. Running: ”Believe it or not, this is actually the second time this week that I’ve been running and been motivated by a yellow beard.”

9. About Goodwill, this also is still very very true: ”The employee that looks like whoopi goldberg is still an employee and still looks like whoopi goldberg. the cranberries still play every ten minutes and the idea of of purchasing bagels from an aisle adjacent to the used-lamp aisle still creeps me out. this is comforting somehow; the idea that nothing ever changes at goodwill.”

10. Forgetting that there is a button that pops the little door on your car so you can get gas, unsuccessfully trying to pry it  open with my credit card, and going inside to ask for help. Commence gas station man patting me on the cheek. Feeling humbled. Moving on.

11. This line from the poem Zoe wrote me: “who on earth would have spent their entire summer/ volunteering when they could have gotten rich and bought a hummer/who in this lifetime would have thought to take care of a dog/that was being hunted like a tasty frog.” That’s right, a dog hunted like a tasty frog! Who jumps out of car windows!

12. My autobiography accidentally being printed in the town paper. (“Bold move, Sarah.” Kelley told me. “Huh? What are you talking about?” I said, as she handed me the town paper).

13. The Feast: “An assortment of elderly people in armor came, I’m not sure where from; and then the artists who were camping by the pond. They all got drunk very quickly and disappeared in pairs into the orchard above, while the rest of us sat by the fire and quietly ate Rhubarb Pie.”

14. Setting Maggie’s microwave on fire on an exam day by heating up a metal cup (here is the six-word short story: Blew Out Flames, Firemen Came Anyway)

15. Having a very wise monk in my ESL class. I miss him.

The End!

happy new year, write lots in books

I’ve met some Billy Collins snobs. That’s cool.  But me, I like poets best who take thoughts and emotions minute enough that you might not be able to put them into the word “thought” or “emotion”, and turn it into a story with unsentimental adjectives, with metaphors that take time. Billy Collins does that so well, and I love this poem because I love books that have the margins written in. Even when it’s a little annoying (think: Cold Mountain with the following annotations “she’s unhappy!”, “nature”, “the civil war”, etc etc) it’s still funny. It gives the book personality. I write in all books even in pencil in…YIKES….library books.

marginalia

sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
if i could just get my hands on you,
kierkegaard, or conor cruise o’brien,
they seem to say,
i would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“nonsense.” “please!” “ha!!” -
that kind of thing.
i remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in the life of emily dickinson.

students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
one scrawls “metaphor” next to a stanza of eliot’s.
another notes the presence of “irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of a modest proposal.

or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
“absolutely,” they shout
to duns scotus and james baldwin.
“yes.” “bull’s-eye.” “my man!”
check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

and if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “man vs. nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

we have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

even irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

and you have not read joshua reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with blake’s furious scribbling.

yet the one i think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of catcher in the rye
i borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
i was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and i cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when i found on one page

a few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, i could tell,
whom i would never meet-
“pardon the egg salad stains, but i’m in love.”

-billy collins

HELLO I AM BACK!

 

Please, you say, rolling your eyes. I have so heard that a time or two.

(Or, maybe you don’t say this, because three months later you have stopped checking this page. Oh well.)

I will probably say it again because I am a slacker. But the thing is, blogging has always been a discipline; a good habit that I have maintained steadily since I was thirteen like flossing or running. I have loved it because it combines my two favorite things: making lists and telling stories. The last kind is especially valuable because there’s no real place for that in ordinary life; a space for telling stories that no one asked you to tell. Not for awhile anyways, until I am an old woman in a rocking chair and can spin unsolicited stories as much as I like (can’t wait). But, unless it isn’t yours, you don’t have to ask permission to tell a story on a blog.

Like: today I came in the back entrance of the bookstore I used to work at; an entrance that makes you come down the stairs looking like you really know what you are doing, like you know everything about books. I wanted to buy thank-you notes and peek at the bestseller clipping that is always posted on the wood post. There was this guy standing in the classics section; handsome, wearing work boots with crusty clay still clinging to them, and a trucker hat. I think he thought I was an employee, because he looked up and “HEY” in a loud, sudden way and I smiled and walked past fast so he would know I didn’t work there. He was holding a Socrates book, turning it over and then over again, in his hands. I have forgotten many things since working there; like how to ring up gift cards or when it will be in stock again; but I still know how to recognize a customer with a question. He walked to the cash register, hesitated, and then put the book back and walked out.

It wasn’t my fault, but I still felt a little guilty. Maybe he would have bought the Socrates book if I had said “HEY” back. Why didn’t he buy it? Was I just surprised because he was wearing construction boots?

The other reason I mostly stopped blogging was because I picked up poetry and that replaced all other forms of writing: not just writing poetry for class, but reading it; actually getting up early for it and losing myself for hours every day, backspacing it. This was a good development, because I really, really like poetry; and if I could pull anything even vaguely academic out of my college experience; I would want it to be learning that. But 2012 will be different, because I will be able to handle more than one writing discipline, or two or more disciplines in any arena, for that matter. Things are looking up. I already went running today and might floss.

Clothespins. This is my favorite poem that I read today, by Robert Bly:

I’d like to have spent my life making
Clothespins. Nothing would be harmed,
Except some pines, probably on land
I owned and would replant. I’d see
My work on clotheslines near some lake,
Up north on a day in October,
Perhaps twelve clothespins, the wood
Still fresh, and a light wind blowing.

Tomorrow, I get to drive to Asheville and see a staggering portion of my favorite women: Eva, Sarah1, Sarah2, Ayla, Jessica, LINDSAY! It is something of a grown-up holiday vacation; where we all get dressed up in tinsel and go out for drinks and host brunches and drink spiked eggnog (maybe); except that it is at our parent’s houses and they are feeding us and giving us beds to sleep in. Nevertheless, I have been having fantasies about velvet all week.

I love the drive to Asheville because it stays exactly the same. There is an old man at a gas station along the way that gives me free coffee; but I never look at the exit number because I have a game that I play with my intuition called ”I bet I can sense the exit coming up and in the mountains you can feel these things” As if. Sometimes I get too zealous with my intuition. Something you should definitely not do when free coffee is on the line.

Today, I was sitting inside a tire shop waiting for my tire to get changed; and let me tell you, it was an amazing place. The tire-changing men–a tribe of honest abe’s, in navy-blue collared-shirts–took my keys politely and gave me the internet pass code. It smelled like grease and coffee; a comforting train of soap operas flashed by on the television and I was addressed as “Miss Edwards”, a title I am rarely privy to, except on the envelopes of bank bills and in first-grade classrooms. I wanted to write a poem to this place to express my feelings. Someone asked me today if my poems ever rhymed and I said no, they sound pretty damn artificial when I try, so I tried to rhyme it and sure enough, it sounded artificial (although, something beginning with the line oh chapel hill tire, chapel hill tire how I love you so! didn’t stand much of a chance to begin with). Instead, I picked up my keys, wrote a hefty check and left.

But it did make me realize this: once I start writing poems to a tire shop, I know I might as well start blogging again. I left this one for awhile. Seven years–that’s right, seven!–was enough time spent typing out my feelings about the world (or, so I thought). Plus, I thought that if I stopped blogging, I would actually start writing independently more and become a real writer, which has always been the goal. To prove this to myself, I started getting up before 7 to write and rearranged my room so that my grandmother’s old desk faced my window. This is something I figure Real Writers do: get up, drink coffee, write and watch the sunrise; live your life, then return, drink wine, write and watch the streetlights blink out. Didn’t Virginia Woolf do that? Right?

But I didn’t actually do that, except for the watching streetlights blink out part. I do watch them, every night: the moth-light of my own porch light and the television square of the Bro’s Across The Street, the dim glow through the woods of my neighbor. The lights are the slow, dependable fireworks at the end of the day, and I seek dependability. Besides which, I started blogging for a health food magazine (decided I have nothing to say about health food, quietly stopped blogging), started blogging for the UNC Admissions office and my internship at the Women’s Center; and so I might as well blog here, too.

In the two months that I didn’t touch this webpage and didn’t really become a Real Writer, either, here are a few things I did do:

+Lacked Socks in cold weather

+Turned 21 and had a pioneer party to celebrate

+Directed my first short play

+Got my first acceptance letter for a poem and, immediately following that, my first rejection letter

+Missed this summer more than I can say

+Still lacked socks, in even colder weather and no heat in my house. Welcome to Russia!!

So here I am, readers that have persisted in the face of an indefinite absence. Thanks for stopping by! I’m going to try and be better. And if you ever need a place to get your tires changed, I have some very strong feelings about a shop down the road.

I resisted watching Mad Men for awhile, because it was one of those things that Hip Lady Bloggers gush about and I thought it was probably one of those things that you don’t enjoy but pretend to enjoy. You know. Like walking through a modern art exhibit and trying to fish out meaning, or watching a cult classic that you’re supposed to like, but just don’t.  Man Men, I assumed, was probably a plot-less show driven by aesthetically pleasing screen shots and curls of smoke. No, my friends: it is not, although it does have both those qualities. I came home from a fiddle festival in Pittsboro late last night and crawled into bed, sleepy from square dancing, with the intention of just watching one episode.

I work with a woman who loves Mad Men. It’s really all her fault that I ended up watching five episodes today. Yesterday, we were in the packaging room mailing mass copies of The Civil War-Era Journal, March 2011 out (yes: actually what we were mailing out) and I started to make assumptions about her taste. “I feel like you and L. have a lot in common, because you both like the South.” She looked up and raised an eyebrow. “Okay…nevermind…because you like cats?” She raised both eyebrows, a tight pencil across her forehead. “You don’t like the South or Cats. Okay, I’ll stop making up things you like. But maybe, Mad Men?” She loves the show, it turned out, and sang its praises out the rest of the hour, while we pressed labels onto packages for people interested in the Civil War (era). So I went home and now have wasted spent a valuable Saturday afternoon living in the 1950′s, entrenched happily in other people’s problems.

I’m home now. It’s always odd, walking into a living room with no windows, because it’s pitch dark at any time of day. After a long school day, when I am riding home and the sun has cast a redemptive yellow color over Chapel Hill; it is odd to walk in and be eclipsed by developing-room darkness and the padded-carpet of a duplex. Still, the new house has charm. It is stone, it has something like a turret attached to the front. We have a decent kitchen and nice neighbors and a black mailbox on the porch wall, like something I imagine from Mad Men, that has a block letter A printed on it. Z. gets The New Yorker every week in said mailbox and when I am feeling classy and sedated, I sit on the front steps, sipping black coffee and not smoking (but feeling like I should) and trying to think up witty captions for the cartoons. Here is the frustrating thing about that, though: you brainstorm captions for a half-hour, fruitlessly, and then the next week you flip to the back and find three astonishingly appropriate and obvious captions. It’s like the game where you lie in bed and think of all the witty retorts you might have made that day, which is to say, it is an exercise in regret.

I dropped a class on Thursday: ethnographic writing. Although this essentially cuts my workload in half, I’m still in lots of writing-intensive class, including a Memoir-writing class, which, for the rest of the semester, is going to make everything I write and say sound very reflective and adjective-heavy. Although I end up writing about my life an exorbitant amount anyways, to have to do that for homework gives me license to look at the world through plot-intensive, metaphor-hungry eyes. So, that’s great. I made a comment in class one of the first weeks which seemed to give my teacher the impression that I feel uncomfortable writing about my life. Whenever she makes a comment about being vulnerable in class, she shifts her glance dramatically toward me and fiddles with her pearls,

“We all have a story and we can all learn to share it.”

I don’t tell her that I have had a journal since age 5 and a blog since age 13. Clearly, writing about myself has never been a problem.

But, I still maintain that being self-reflective allows you to give you eyes to better wonder about the world, and I’ve missed this, I am reminded of this (wonder, curiosity) when reading Annie Dillard. Maggie lent me a copy of  Dillard’s Holy The Firm with faintly penciled margins (along with a shiny new copy of Garden and Gun: what a woman, that Maggie) and I read it before I go to bed every night. I don’t have enough rituals, but Dillard is a necessary one for this time in my life; a reminder to be watchful and wondrous and absorb that of which you wonder, by writing. I need that. I already feel swallowed, slightly, by this sense of being older in college; as if now that I can legally purchase alcohol and write rental checks; the world got less less interest. I forget to drink in the details, all of which should still be brand new. The light that comes in west through my curtains, for instance, at 5:00 when I am home to see it, and highlights every stub of my succulent plant. It’s new.

hunted like a tasty frog

There was a going-away-potluck tonight. I’m not very good at transitions and have been moping around for a few days, but the potluck was lovely and very sweet, etc, etc: Cameron gave me a jar of pickled Okra and Susan recited Manifesto of the Mad Farmer Liberation Front and everything had Peanut Butter in it (I was also secretly hoping to get a baby goat as a present, but not all dreams can come true). I was beginning to feel sentimental until I read Z’s mock poem that she handed me on the back of a “Shock Athletic Yoga Mat Owner’s Guide!” tonight and almost died laughing because the line “who in this lifetime would have thought to take care of a dog” is hilarious. You’re dumb if you don’t think so, too. She’s the coolest 16-year old out there. I’ll spare you any latent sentimentality and instead let you read:

Sarah, WHO ELSE (by Z):

Sarah

who else would have gone on an hour long ride

to a Cherokee play where everyone died.

who on earth would have spent their entire summer

volunteering when they could have gotten rich and bought a hummer.

who in this lifetime would have thought to take care of a dog…

that was being hunted like a tasty frog.

who today would think to go for a run

such as sarah with her piping hot buns!

so here’s to sarah the Super Spunky Woman

to call her anything else would simply be a sin.

BYE Sarah!

When I grow up, I want to be just like Zoe.

This afternoon marked the first in weeks where I have been alone. I am leaving Wednesday, therefore, this meant that I had nothing to do but think about how sad I was to leave. In a way, this was good. Because of the way I function, I am “FUTURE FUTURE FUTURE!” all the time and don’t really stop to think about or relish anything behind the past 5 minutes. I may write or talk about memories, but in my head, I’m just plotting to-do lists for the next day that will somehow magically make me become the person I want to be. I waste a lot of time this way, so it’s good that I have at least found something that I love enough to be super melancholy about leaving, a whole 6 days in advance. Even then, that’s still not enjoying the present. That’s anticipating the sadness I’ll feel when I’m driving down Highway 77 South. Bummer!

The only way I knew how to salve this (prematurely anticipated) wound was to cook and cook and cook and use every sad, leftover vegetable from the garden that the rabbits have snacked on, and listen to Powerful Woman Pandora stations (if Eleanor Roosevelt could sing, this current one would be her Pandora station). My history with cooking is this: I’m less motivated to cook unless there is a 50% risk it won’t turn out. Then, it becomes a challenge; which is why I haven’t near followed any recipes this summer. Right now there is a Quiche in the oven that I made up measurements for, featuring pesto and okra and herbs that really aren’t meant to go together. It’s uncharted territory and it’s looking like I was a litttttle too liberal with the pepper. There’s a solid chance it won’t turn out. But it might.

Cooking helps me feel more present.

I know it’s possible to be a more present person. It’s not a lofty or unattainable goal. There are moments. When I was contra dancing last night, I was being spun too fast and too sweaty to think about the next day, and when we plunged into the cow pond afterwards, contemplating water and space below that we couldn’t quite see, I was too concerned about being nipped by a rogue pond eel to worry about the next day. Today, we swam again and it was the perfect summer water moment, where Crate Myrtle blossoms coated the water like purple jelly and when you dove in, they parted like a curtain around your body. I didn’t waste time thinking about the future, I just floated and kicked my feet at the bright blue sky. But I did think about the future, ten minutes after I got out.

This leads me to a question for you. This summer has been thankfully absent of much time or need for some sorts of distracting technology–television, telephone–but the internet has remained a distraction. It’s always been an addictive time-waster for me and, now that school is beginning in a couple weeks, I know it has the potential to vacuum even more time out. You get on the internet and, voom!, an hour has gone by. I feel guilty and awful when I realize I’ve wasted so much time doing absolute nothing on the internet, while the rest of life has gone moving on by. I’ve read so many books and essays this summer about living off the grid and maintaining an uncluttered lifestyle absent of computers and there is good truth to that. I desire that desire; I want to live that way.

But at the same time, I am a student and I know that technology plays an important role in my generation and isn’t the enemy itself. I’ve thought about deleting my blog, because this is an easy (and obvious) way to get sucked into the internet vortex and I still might delete it one day soon. But I want to be a writer and at least for now, this seems like a good sort of outlet (even though if I was a real-life writer, I wouldn’t actually post things in all caps-lock, drag letters out in a word like thissss or talk about my emotions for paragraphs on end). Also, this fall I’m going to be one of the weekly writers for the online magazine Goodlifer, which is very very exciting, but is a job that also entails more time spent within the blogging/online vortex and mentally absent from what is going on around me.

Earlier this afternoon an acquaintance (by which I mean, friend crush) walked into the kitchen to return a book. He’s sweet, smart and intensely present in the moment to an almost intimidating degree. On the one hand, it was one of the most awkward interactions I’ve ever had. I was cooking and melancholy and listening to my Powerful Woman music and he caught me off guard, so we stood for about ten minutes just kind of staring at each other across the kitchen counter. On the other hand, he said something profoundly basic that has been sticking with me all afternoon: when I mentioned to him how inspired I was by all the things certain people in the community accomplish, he just gave me a funny look and said “You know, they’re just humans. They decide what they value and how they want to spend their time, and they do it.” Huzzah!

It seemed so obvious when he phrased it that way. When I pare down what I value doing, the internet just isn’t up there. But I’ve catered my habits to a point where it certainly appears that way. Susan only allows herself to be on the internet after she’s journaled and eaten breakfast, and before eight at night. I would like to think that I don’t need boundaries, but any vestige of self-discipline seems to go out the window when it comes to The Great Internet Vice. Do you have boundaries with yourself and the internet? How do you balance communication and work and school and…not being bound to an online, sub-reality world? I’m not very good at this kind of balance, but I want to learn. I do.

And you know…didn’t Annie Dillard have something kind of wise to say about that? Isn’t it like, a famous quote or something? The way we spend our days is the way we spend our lives…oh wait, yes. Now I remember.

a list

Today, I decided I want 3×2 raised  beds at my new house (which I am moving into at! count it: 12 days) so I went to a sawmill, bought two long pine boards, measured them, sawed them, and nailed them together. It was the most satisfying experience of my young life (okay, not quite, but still really great). Steve, my Zen Beekeeper friend, helped me. BUT I did build it alone. And going into a sawmill wearing pigtails is a very empowering experience. I highly recommend it.

DIY has inadvertently become a mantra this summer, not because I am incredibly handy, but because everyone around me is. The other day I went and collected sour apples from the tree down the road and slaved over four cans of my first slightly brown, mottled-looking Apple Sauce. They are not the glamorous beacons of pioneer capability that I would have liked to have produced, but I plunged into the task without a pressure cooker or tongs (or anyone wise around to give advice), so it was a miracle that the lids popped at all. Mercifully, at a going-away potluck I received canning tools and my canning adventures can only go uphill. In retrospect, I can say that this summer I have: learned to drive stick-shift, planted and taken care of my own vegetables, rock-climbed, milked various animals, herded pigs, harvested honey and used many mechanisms that go “whirrr!” and can cut off toes. I worked on farms and picked berries until my hands bled blue with juice and sweat…and then went directly to the gas station every week and used that money for gas (which, is a humbling trajectory). Also, I fell deeply in love with a baby goat. I did most of these things very badly (fallen in love with a goat excepted) but did, along the way, discover things I love doing. I’m already over-ambitiously plotting ways I can do more things for myself at school. Raised Lettuce Beds are my first start. Hopefully, Bonnie and Clyde, the doom-named herbs of last year, are not indicative of my independent growing skills.

And yes, I know that sustainability is a trendy word. But being here and watching the way people around me live, I’ve learned that trying to live in a more sustainable way requires sacrifice and isn’t easy, but that it is doable and can create a great deal of joy. Striving to accomplish things by your own hands, or the hands of your neighbor, is a good way to live. Next year, Susan and Franklin want to try to live completely off the land and not buy anything from the grocery store (adios, Ingalls!) and I’m already jealous of next year’s interns.

Miscellaneous:

+ I really like these rescued old photographs (credit: Miss Moss). Favorites: the kissing couple, rad girl on a pony and the couple pretending to fly. Also, the girl with the giant bow that is smirking. Don’t you just want to be friends with all of them?

+I probably should be apprehensive about admitting this, but throwing caution to the wind: I really like Vanessa Carleton’s new album. Like this song. She doesn’t want to anybody’s bride! That’s great! I’m not really sure what she does want, but I’ve still listened to this song…a lot.

+ Ever since I saw this one woman at yoga that had perfect mint-green toenails, I have been a goner for questionably bright toenail polish. I’m never going back, even when I’m an old woman and it is twice as tacky. Up next: this color. 

+ I can’t stop making (and eating) chocolate-zucchini dishes. The kitchen is exploding! No. More.

+As I type, a wren is making a nest above my head. It is the cutest, noisiest wren of them all. But really: how do birds make nests? It looks complicated. I’ve also been really stuck lately on how Dehumidifiers work. How can a machine suck moisture out of the air and turn it into water? How? These things keep me up at night.

+My sister Elisabeth has written a brave post all about our far-away past of the more Amish sensibility (nee, denim dresses). Finally, a good description of our pioneer childhood!! It almost makes our past look hip, which–though it was good–hip it was not. And Elisabeth is so right: who doesn’t love a good BBC Amish drama?

+Snacks of great authors (New York Times). F. Scott Fitzgerald liked canned apples and meat? Gross, but definitely something I needed to know.

+And while we’re at it, great authors and their typewriters (Lost). Hi, Hemingway in front of a dramatic cloud front!

We, the garden team, have striven hard to create Asheville’s very best tomatoes the past 7 weeks, pruning them, tying them, sanitizing ourselves every time we touch them and in general, guarding them like Henry V’s one male heir. And they are here! And they are perfect! Especially with salt and pepper. Zaina is coming in a few days, Jessica is back, Sarah is almost back and, by the swimming pond up the hill, there are new kittens. Could life really be any sweeter?

and here goes a long one

Here’s a bit more about where I live this summer: turn right at the mailboxes, up the long gravel driveway to that one tidy house surrounded by chickens and sunflowers. There are always swimming towels cloaking the porch railing and leftover tubs of potatoes blocking the door and a wooden bowl filled with very specific napkin rings: if you see any of these things, you’re in the right place. I live with four other adults, none of whom I had ever met before I moved in, but nine weeks later they are a family to me. We each have a night to make dinner and a list of chores, a (highly contested) system of dishwasher-loading and streaks of nightly card-playing. Whenever anyone tells a story or piece of information, it goes through the cycle at least 15 times before it dies out of the conversation, and when anyone does anything slightly out of character (“WHAT YOU AREN’T GOING SWIMMING WITH US? WHERE ELSE WOULD YOU GO?”) it is a shock to the house system. We do almost everything together. Last night, for example, Franklin and Susan decided it was time that Lindsay and I learned to drive stick shift, so we took the truck and car down to a farm road. Taylor and Kelley, not to be left out, hopped into the back and laughed at us (and when Chris, a farm intern down the road, got home he just brought a cold beer out and leaned against the mailbox as we drove down the road, the truck jerking violently and the smell of burnt tires wafting out). It’s a small town.

But perhaps a better word besides family is community. These people are not related to me by blood and I have only known them for one season; there is nothing permanent about our arrangement: so for the present, they are my community, and that is a very rare and precious thing to have. There are four main people that I see when I first wake up and before I go to bed, but there is also Lindsay, the Week-Long intern, and Walker the Meat Farmer and Cameron his Homesteading Girlfriend and Blake the Townie, all the neighbors, and everyone else that comes through the house at a given moment. Living together, every flaw and quirk is noticed, and I am constantly humbled by the parts of myself that surface when living in an environment like this (but also when just…living). I talk too much when I get excited and interrupt other people,  I leave dishes under couches and put the granola top on wrong; when I plant seeds I am lazy and plant them crooked. I am needy; I am irritable. Also, it has recently come up for discussion that I apparently steal people’s plates when they aren’t finished and eat off them (note: I have no recollection of this).

But most of all, living within community has made me realize how little faith is a part of my daily life and how limited my definition of grace is.

The past few weeks I’ve been accidentally running into these conversations about faith. It certainly isn’t because I run towards them with my hands up in the air, because faith hasn’t felt like something I’ve openly gravitated toward this summer. It’s a good thing, as Megan says, that when I stop thinking about God, he doesn’t simply disappear. It shows how small my grasp of God is, that I think of him as if his existence depended on the amount of time I spend thinking of him (which is very little, compared to the amount of time I spend thinking about, for instance, what’s for dinner). Luckily, when I stop thinking about my Dad, he doesn’t just stop existing, and God, of course, is no different. He just is, whether or not I am small enough to comprehend Him.

As these conversations about God have happened,  I’ve found myself becoming so envious of my friend’s curiosity about the gospel. Curiosity is such a beautiful place to be in. Born, not just in the Bible Belt, but yee gad, into the Presbyterian Bible Belt; my parent’s bookshelf was never lacking in C.S Lewis, praying before a meal was as common as breathing and I can go into almost any church in North Carolina and play the six-degrees-0f-pastor-knowing and find a common denominator. Of course, this is also community and also beautiful, but it has also made things easy for me. I become not curious, I become not astonished by grace. Sometimes, I think it would be better to not believe in God at all, then to just go through the ordinary motions of my day as if God or faith or the big picture didn’t matter. Because it does; whether or not you believe it or don’t or haven’t connected all the dots. Any elemental belief I have in the universe ultimately affects the way I do, or don’t, choose to live my life. How easily I forget that!

The grace I give to and receive from my immediate community–for eleven more days!–matters. Susan talks a lot about being in community with land as well as people, and being in a garden every day for a summer, I begin to understand this. The Lord’s Acre is the most beautiful garden I have ever been in, but as Lindsay pointed out, the beauty of a community garden is that you have to remove your self-absorption from your efforts. The effort I extend to planting and taking care of things, ultimately comes out in a harvest, which isn’t intended for me. The food is for the food pantry, the moms that come into the garden; the welcome table. But even when I try to not be selfish or lazy in my gardening, any harvest, any really good-looking squash or row of beans, is an act of mercy. Agriculture is not an inherently natural act, and to receive anything from the ground is a gift. Grace does not mean that I will not mess up (and maybe leave my dishes under the couch again tomorrow, or mess up a friendship or do any of sinful things that come naturally to me) and to live under the shadow of that fear and guilt would be wrenching. But what I am learning that it does mean is that what and where and who I am given is an act of grace. And, as with the concept of a community garden, my trying to be better and plant rows of less crooked lettuce cannot be out of fear of punishment, but should be because what I’m doing is ultimately a gift and has some kind of result that affects the good environment around me. There is a certain understanding about grace, here, that had never quite clicked before I came: being here on earth is grace so therefore we should take care of it; being with others is grace so therefore we should take care of them. And that’s a whole new definition of sustainability, and community, to me.