It's only been an age since I last posted. Ah well.
Our city is wearing snow well this year, and just in time for Christmas, for everything resembles a Christmas card. The trees are coated in frost, the lawns are thick with white, and the moon shines brightly enough to illuminate a bedroom at night.
In between laundry and wrapping birthday presents and all the other things 'to do' this morning, I found a pocket sized notebook from my post-college days, when I was teaching in Galway. There are a few pages where I wrote about seeing Seamus Heaney do a reading on Salthill beach in 2006. It goes a little something like this:
Sun beating down, casting short shadows on the pavement. Jackets off, sweaters around the waist. A gathered crowd at Ladies' Beach. Schoolchildren form a sea of green uniforms.
A gentle breeze shifts the sands. An elderly man kicks a red football toward the brown seaweed scattered shore - his grandchild runs barefoot after it.
And Seamus Heaney, standing on the daisy studded verge between the strand and the street, began to speak of a poem written on the Salthill Prom: "the golden moment of 1965 when I saw them come out of the water, gleaming." Girls Bathing, Galway, 1965.
Wind blows strands of hair, strollers pause, hypnotized; dog leashes lay in the sand. Bicycles park along the wooden benches that run the length of the beach. Dogs lay on the sun-warmed pavement while some go on interrupted by poetry - by the poet. Schoolkids turn cartwheels in the grass, and photographers snap pictures.
Afterward, crowds gathered to get him to sign books, pages struggling in the Atlantic breeze. People wait patiently for his attention - a handshake, a scribble, a nod.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Saturday, November 3, 2012
On being Pro-Life, all the way, in an election year.
Halloween has come and gone. Two trick or treaters, the only ones who came to our house, were given generous portions of candy. The rest... is mine.
Meanwhile, we are counting down the days to the election. Some people are sick to the teeth of political ads, others can't get enough out of a good debate with friends and family, even more moan about the undecided voters, while some 'undecided' voters declare themselves independents who have long since decided, thank you very much.
Ah, polarity. It is usually strong, but right around now the strength that people feel their convictions is staggering, sometimes. It always comes as a surprise when friends open their mouths to chastise one another based on differing political opinion.
This week the New York Times published an editorial called Why I'm Pro-Life, and it has been on my mind since I read it a few days ago. You may have seen it, it's made the rounds on Facebook, often posted by people who would not normally call themselves pro-life.
Reading it was like a light turning on inside my head, a sunbeam splitting the clouds, a choir opening up into song. Thomas Friedman put into words what I have felt and thought since reaching the age where I could vote, but have been unable to articulate. He pinpointed the frustrations I feel as a voter, and a citizen.
I suspect that I'm not alone in this.
In his article, Mr Friedman says:
This is why I have such a hard time in election years - the fact that neither party espouses these values fully - and friends have expressed the same dismay. Many are pro-life in the thorough way that Mr Friedman demands in his editorial. Personally speaking, my trouble comes from my conscience, which has me in turmoil until a week after I step out of
the polling booth.
See, I have yet to find a candidate who is, like me, pro-life, Friedman style. That is, I'm a strongly anti-abortion, pro-gun control, anti-war, anti-death penalty, pro-social justice, pro-insurance reform, environmentalist, pro-gay equality, Catholic feminist voter.
Now I ask, where is my candidate?
Where is my party?
Who can I vote for that will stand up for everything I hold to be important? For human rights from conception until death, for quality of life, for respect for our land? Who can I vote for without making an enormous moral compromise?
*crickets*
But I'll still vote. Always do.
Meanwhile, we are counting down the days to the election. Some people are sick to the teeth of political ads, others can't get enough out of a good debate with friends and family, even more moan about the undecided voters, while some 'undecided' voters declare themselves independents who have long since decided, thank you very much.
Ah, polarity. It is usually strong, but right around now the strength that people feel their convictions is staggering, sometimes. It always comes as a surprise when friends open their mouths to chastise one another based on differing political opinion.
This week the New York Times published an editorial called Why I'm Pro-Life, and it has been on my mind since I read it a few days ago. You may have seen it, it's made the rounds on Facebook, often posted by people who would not normally call themselves pro-life.
Reading it was like a light turning on inside my head, a sunbeam splitting the clouds, a choir opening up into song. Thomas Friedman put into words what I have felt and thought since reaching the age where I could vote, but have been unable to articulate. He pinpointed the frustrations I feel as a voter, and a citizen.
I suspect that I'm not alone in this.
In his article, Mr Friedman says:
"The term “pro-life” should be a shorthand for respect for the sanctity of life. But I will not let that label apply to people for whom sanctity for life begins at conception and ends at birth. What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth. That radical narrowing of our concern for the sanctity of life is leading to terrible distortions in our society."
He also says:
"You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and want to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, which ensures clean air and clean water, prevents childhood asthma, preserves biodiversity and combats climate change that could disrupt every life on the planet. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and oppose programs like Head Start that provide basic education, health and nutrition for the most disadvantaged children. You can call yourself a “pro-conception-to-birth, indifferent-to-life conservative.” I will never refer to someone who pickets Planned Parenthood but lobbies against common-sense gun laws as “pro-life.”"
Here, here, Mr Friedman.
See, I have yet to find a candidate who is, like me, pro-life, Friedman style. That is, I'm a strongly anti-abortion, pro-gun control, anti-war, anti-death penalty, pro-social justice, pro-insurance reform, environmentalist, pro-gay equality, Catholic feminist voter.
Now I ask, where is my candidate?
Where is my party?
Who can I vote for that will stand up for everything I hold to be important? For human rights from conception until death, for quality of life, for respect for our land? Who can I vote for without making an enormous moral compromise?
*crickets*
But I'll still vote. Always do.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
The book sale
Thursday morning:
Library sale, all weekend, starting today. Books $1 per pound.
Oh, yes.
Rang up the mammy, agreed on a meeting time, and hurried into my clothes in the icy morning air that filled the upstairs rooms of our house. The earlier post from this week was about right - yesterday, sleety rain came, covering the sidewalks, handrails, picnic tables, leaf piles left too late, all in an glassy layer. The trees looked heavy by mid-afternoon The sky has been a low, slate gray since early this morning, and if not for the wide roads, you might think you were on the shores of the north Atlantic.
So heavy socks it was, a sweater and wool coat bundled round me, scarf up to my nose, and I fairly ran out the door, down the street, hopping over the streams of wet leaves laying in the gutters. Nobody else raked, evidently.
Just a few streets over is the library, where many adult bookworms of today spent their precious summer hours as children, curled up in a beanbag chair with The Boxcar Children or Laura Ingalls Wilder. In the meeting rooms, downstairs, a line of middle aged women was coming out the door. I spotted a friend's mother and said a quick hello before heading in. It was after 11, which is the lunch hour, officially, in North Dakota, and is the time when many people 'get stuff done.' The bibliophilic crowds were there, all right, nosing through the boxes of books laid out on long banquet tables. I headed into the fiction and non-fiction room, buoyed by the thought of new books and a winter filled with long stories by the window.
Immediately, treasures surfaced. A book of American short stories. David Sedaris. Rebecca. Folk songs as played by Pete Seeger. Chocolat. A Passage to India. Julia Child's My Life in France. A volunteer walking through the crowded room spotted the growing stack in my arms and offered me a blue cloth bag with a tree printed on it. As I walked about the room, the bag grew fuller and fuller. Jodie Picoult and Jacob Have I Loved joined the others in the blue bag, and I had to put it down from time to time to keep the handles from cutting into my arms.
The mammy wandered by, and we shared our finds, plotted a coffee for after we finished.
I found Germaine Greer's 'The Female Eunuch' and Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' in the fiction section. Might be an indication of the politics of whoever was in charge? Let's assume it was a second-thoughts buyer who left them there.
One book stood out, with gilded page edges and gold lettering on the front. Magpie bait. I cracked open the cover, thumbed through the pages to see what it was, exactly. 1906, gorgeous illustrations, and pages framed in flowering vines.
It had to be bought, if just for the beauty of it.
We laid our purchases on the scale, and paid sweet little for them. $7.50 for ten books. That's a frobisch.
In the line, a dark haired woman heard my mother's accent and snagged her into a conversation. This lady had just come back from her father's foreign birthplace, and wanted to talk with another north islander. She was very pleasant until a moment before we said goodbye, when she launched into a critique of immigrants today... reminded me of an older person's 'kids today' speech. The current wave of immigrants into the United States made her heart hurt, she said, with their insistence on clinging to their language and traditions, those people who don't become citizens immediately, those people who come here on work visas and then go back home because they can. Yes folks, you read right - she was complaining about legal immigrants.
My mind went to the Nepalese and Bhutanese refugees I taught in Grand Forks, who are trying so hard to eke out a living in the northern Red River Valley, illiterate refugees in their later years who spent seventeen long winters in mountain refugee camps, ghosts in their own parents' country; who take buses back and forth across the towns each day in the bitter cold so that they can take basic English classes, so that they can improve their job prospects, so that they can feed their children and move their lives into modern America. Why shouldn't they hold fast to their language and traditions? It's all they have left of their old life. I thought of my mother, who waited twenty years before becoming an American citizen, because that - waiting - was her choice. I could scarcely stop the glower from creeping into my eyes. What can you say to a person who says things like that, publicly and proudly?
At the same time, across town at the park, my husband was in conversation with a woman from the Czech Republic, who was there exercising her dog. Some of the other Americans who came into the park ignored his hello. She was glad to talk.
It makes me angry when people speak of immigrants disparagingly. I came to immigrate in a place of privilege. I am Irish American, which means that I'm a white, English speaking, educated, dual passport holder with an easily pronounced name. Those are the reasons that I'm accepted effortlessly when I go to Ireland, or when I'm in the United States. I know that I've had it very, very easy.
But it's so easy to throw less convenient immigrants under the bus, it's easy to imagine that your own foremothers adapted to the American way of life immediately, that they learned English quickly, and didn't bemoan anything whatsoever about this country. But that can't be the reality. They were not beyond the human tendency to hold fast to the comfort of familiar things.
Look at how immigrants moved in pockets: they settled together, in places where their language and culture could be supported and survive, where they could pass traditions on to their children. Just look at all the German speaking grandmothers in North Dakota. The Ingas and Arnes of the Red River Valley. Our state paints a portrait of bordered homogeneity.
Of course they struggled, and they missed their homes with an ache that can't be understood without making the same permanent trip across the sea. Their grandchildren still steadfastly cling to language and tradition and culture, remembering that they are of another country as well, one that they've never set foot in. This dark haired woman, neither German nor Norwegian, who spent eleven 'magical and charming' days (her words) in her father's country, who was so proud of his poverty and struggle as an immigrant, had sadly missed the irony of her prejudice.
My mother and I, immigrants both, went upstairs for our coffee, and felt a little sad without really knowing why.
Monday, October 1, 2012
Autumn on the prairie
It’s autumn on the prairie. In the last few weeks, the
cottonwoods, elms, maples, have all turned from green to yellow, orange, and
red. It’s a short-lived burst of color out here, and the leaves soon drop to
the ground, covering every browning lawn in a blanket of gold. Driving through
Bismarck takes a little navigational know-how if you want to take full
advantage of the season. The old neighborhoods have wide avenues lined with
American Elms, their branches arching over the streets and interlacing far
above the cars and bicycles, forming a cathedral ceiling for those passing
below. Look up and you’ll see blue sky peeking through the gaps, and at the
right time, the sun turning each translucent leaf into a tiny pane of stained
glass. It’s like Harry Clarke designed it himself. If you take the right route, you can keep going through leafy tunnels much of
the way across town.
This has been a dry September, and the leaves, once they've finished rustling in the wind, are
satisfyingly crunchy underfoot. A fine dust blows through the air, a product of
dry leaves ground into nothingness. The soil is sending up dust, too, and
allergies have been predictably rampant.
Fall is the season of the church supper out here. Country
churches unfailingly host a community meal, often served on picnic tables in
the field outside, with mountains of roast beef, mashed potatoes, sweet yellow
buns, seventeen different kinds of pie, and coffee that flows unceasingly from
huge silver vats manned by elderly women. Bingo and horseshoes serve as
entertainment, though be wary of trying to beat any man sporting a cowboy hat –
he’ll know his way around a horseshoe throw. There’s almost always a thrift
sale with a baked goods counter set up nearby: whatever you do, don’t pass up a slice of eggy, sweet, creamy kuchen, especially if it was made by someone’s
grandmother.
With all the beauty of autumn, there is the knowledge that
at the end of these bright, colorful weeks, we will find winter. Winter here is
often harsh, frigid, bitter, and by the time we’re in the dark depths of
January, seemingly endless. Does anyone look forward to it? Best to enjoy the
gorgeous days we have now, with the sun warming the leaves, raising up the
smells unknown to any other season.
Percy Bysshe Shelley had the right idea, to approach the
chilling of the year with an optimistic note: to remember that if winter comes,
spring won’t be far behind.
610. Ode to the West Wind
|
I
O WILD West
Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being
|
|
Thou from whose unseen
presence the leaves dead
|
|
Are driven like ghosts from an
enchanter fleeing,
|
|
Yellow, and black, and
pale, and hectic red,
|
|
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O
thou
|
|
Who chariotest to
their dark wintry bed
|
|
The wingèd seeds, where they lie
cold and low,
|
|
Each like a corpse
within its grave, until
|
|
Thine azure sister of the Spring
shall blow
|
|
Her clarion o'er the
dreaming earth, and fill
|
|
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to
feed in air)
|
|
With living hues and
odours plain and hill;
|
|
Wild Spirit, which art moving
everywhere;
|
|
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O
hear!
|
|
II
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
|
|
Loose clouds like
earth's decaying leaves are shed,
|
|
Shook from the tangled boughs of
heaven and ocean,
|
|
Angels of rain and
lightning! there are spread
|
|
On the blue surface of thine airy
surge,
|
|
Like the bright hair
uplifted from the head
|
|
Of some fierce Mænad, even from
the dim verge
|
|
Of the horizon to the
zenith's height,
|
|
The locks of the approaching
storm. Thou dirge
|
|
Of the dying year, to
which this closing night
|
|
Will be the dome of a vast
sepulchre,
|
|
Vaulted with all thy
congregated might
|
|
Of vapours, from whose solid
atmosphere
|
|
Black rain, and fire, and hail,
will burst: O hear!
|
|
III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
|
|
The blue
Mediterranean, where he lay,
|
|
Lull'd by the coil of his
crystàlline streams,
|
|
Beside a pumice isle
in Baiæ's bay,
|
|
And saw in sleep old palaces and
towers
|
|
Quivering within the
wave's intenser day,
|
|
All overgrown with azure moss, and
flowers
|
|
So sweet, the sense
faints picturing them! Thou
|
|
For whose path the Atlantic's
level powers
|
|
Cleave themselves into
chasms, while far below
|
|
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods
which wear
|
|
The sapless foliage of
the ocean, know
|
|
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray
with fear,
|
|
And tremble and despoil
themselves: O hear!
|
|
IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
|
|
If I were a swift
cloud to fly with thee;
|
|
A wave to pant beneath thy power,
and share
|
|
The impulse of thy
strength, only less free
|
|
Than thou, O uncontrollable! if
even
|
|
I were as in my
boyhood, and could be
|
|
The comrade of thy wanderings over
heaven,
|
|
As then, when to
outstrip thy skiey speed
|
|
Scarce seem'd a vision—I would
ne'er have striven
|
|
As thus with thee in
prayer in my sore need.
|
|
O! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a
cloud!
|
|
I fall upon the thorns
of life! I bleed!
|
|
A heavy weight of hours has
chain'd and bow'd
|
|
One too like thee—tameless, and
swift, and proud.
|
|
V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
|
|
What if my leaves are
falling like its own?
|
|
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
|
|
Will take from both a
deep autumnal tone,
|
|
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou,
Spirit fierce,
|
|
My spirit! Be thou me,
impetuous one!
|
|
Drive my dead thoughts over the
universe,
|
|
Like wither'd leaves,
to quicken a new birth;
|
|
And, by the incantation of this
verse,
|
|
Scatter, as from an
unextinguish'd hearth
|
|
Ashes and sparks, my words among
mankind!
|
|
Be through my lips to
unawaken'd earth
|
|
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
|
|
If Winter comes, can Spring be far
behind?
|
A big shout out to the publishers of Soundings, as well as Miss Harte and her Leaving Cert English class of 1998. We never covered Yeats in time, so some of us missed out on valuable points, possibly a place in medicine at UCC, but look at us all now - we're fine. Totally fine.
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Into the West
We left by 9 am and rolled out of town in the orange glow of an autumn morning, heading west. We crossed the Missouri River, passing a flatbed truck piled high with hay bales. The fields on the west side of the river that divides North Dakota in two were the bright gold of early fall. Tall, fat jellyrolls of hay dotted the landscape, topping small hills or set in glacial depressions, like they had become stuck there. The sky above us was blue, blue, blue, except for the little puffs of white cloud here and there. Rolling yellow hills for miles and miles and the hard road in front of us.
We turned off the interstate at Beulah and the road
rollercoastered onward. Sunflowers, dry, hanging their black heads in droves
along the road, their leaves drooping as though they’d just missed out on
something big.
To the left of the road was an old red barn, with white
letters that announced ‘The Ideal Farm.’ It certainly looked ideal, tucked into
a hillside. A white, broad front porch and a window nested in the eaves – maybe
from the 1920s? Trees shaded the yard, their leaves turning from summer green
to yellow, and a pond curled around the property, tapering towards a cottonwood.
A black bull lay warming itself in the morning sun, lines of muscle visible beneath
its skin. Up and then down a sharp hill, we went into Beulah – coal mining
country, power plant country, cowboy country.
Main Street Beulah is full of shops, bustling with cars and
pedestrians, a sure sign of a town untouched by big box stores or shopping
malls. Two cars in a row had dogs that stuck their heads out of windows to woof
at passers-by. A sign of the nearby oil boom, once empty lots now hold RVs, an
occasional Airstream trailer, sometimes a real honest-to-goodness trailer.
At the Country Kettle restaurant downtown, a help wanted
sign sat in the window. Concrete grain silos ten stories high loomed over the
road. The train tracks sit behind it, and the trains rumbling through town send
vibrations that move right up through your legs and shake the bones in your
chest. Inside the café, the tables were
nearly full. A grey-haired man sat in the sunshine with two white-haired
people. His t-shirt boasted ‘oil field scum.’ His narrow face was deeply lined
and he let out a curse word or two at considerable volume. At the next table, a
young woman cradled a sleeping newborn. The waitress left a carafe on my table –
the coffee was good and strong. I drank it black and eavesdropped as people
leaned across tables to talk.
“How many grandchildren do you have now? Is it fifteen?”
“Well, I sure hurt my hand bowling last week. Look at that finger! It didn't always bend that way.”
“The special today is fleischkeuchle. It’s a steak wrapped
in pastry and fried. People around here like it. It’s different.”
“What do you hear from your mom these days?”
“Well, my Vernon, he’s a picky one. He eats toast, French
fries, chips… oh, and steak, of course, and ribs…”
After three cups of coffee, a walk around town brought me to
flat fronted shops. I wandered around a bit in a dollar store that stocked
tomatoes, zucchini and squash, piled on the floor beneath the 99c greeting
cards.
An old car dealership sits crumbling at the end of Main Street, just before
the houses start lining the road. A Chevrolet sign is still out front, and concrete
parapets on the roof spell out Oldsmobile. Inside, it looks as though dripping
water has ruined the roof and ceiling, caused the tiles to drop down onto the
showroom floor, where they sit, crumpled from the fall, next to an old maroon
sofa and chair. In front of the plate glass window, a dead bird lays on its
back, drying in the sun.
The husband’s interview, the reason we came to town, lasted for two hours, and I spent
the time walking around Beulah’s dusty streets, over the train tracks, past the
new gas station and houses with neatly trimmed lawns. One house looked the way
my neighborhood in Bismarck used to – an old bungalow with a huge elm tree
arching its branches over the yard, a layer of dust covering the steps, and an
old wire fence tracing its way around the property line. Old Dakota style,
maybe a hundred years old, and it made me miss the houses that stood where the
hospital parking lots are now.
Once we got on the road (after stopping for knoephla soup in
a tiny café near the highway), I kept noticing the dust. It went from yellowish
brown to scoria red pretty quickly. We rolled past Dickinson and the natural
gas flares burning next to the highway. We saw oil rigs nodding on farmland,
trucks and semis barreling past, a huge metal sculpture of geese over a sunset.
As we aimed westward, the landscape changed from rolling farmland to the cut
lines of buttes striped with black lignite coal, bluish gray bentonite, yellow
and red scoria.
Why the romance of heading west? Don’t you feel it when you
hit the road, heading west from anywhere? Maybe it’s all tied up in old western
movies, in the line ‘go west, young man,’ in the idea that the frontier is
still out there, dusty and wild and free. I even felt that way whenever heading
west in Ireland –to Kerry, Galway, Connemara or Donegal – a surge of excitement
in the chest: a feeling that, as the landscape becomes more rugged, so do I.
A surprise in the laundry room...
I found a dead bat in the washing machine the other day.
That’s right, a dead bat. A bit mummified, really, and quite,
quite dead.
Earlier in the day, I had been looking around the storage
room in the basement in our hundred-year-old house, digging through boxes that
had once belonged to my husband’s old roommates, who have all moved on to their
own adventures in homeownership. I was looking to see if anything was worth
keeping. Something caught my eye that I thought would be good for our pup.
We only recently got a dog – just three weeks ago, actually.
She’s a good dog: seems very smart, mostly obedient, though she likes to jump
up on unsuspecting people, worryingly, often the elderly. Anyhow, she sleeps in
a kennel – if she didn’t, she’d be in bed with my husband and myself, which, as you
know, would have us end up squashed together on the far end of the bed while the brazen hound takes up the middle. So, to keep her comfortable in the kennel, we’ve put
in an old pillow, a comfy old blanket, a few of her toys in an attempt to make
a nice doggy comfort space.
Righteo now, don’t forget about the bat. While digging around in
the storage room, I came across a box with old books, childhood knickknacks, and a frayed blue towel, presumably all from ancient roommate times. Looking at the towel I thought to myself, gee, this would be great for the dog
to slobber on instead of the couch corner. So I pulled it out, popped it into
the washing machine with a few blankets that needed a freshening up, and went
on my merry way.
Guess where the bat was?
My suspicion is that it was on the old, raggedy blue towel. Somehow, I
didn’t notice it when I pulled it out of the box, or when I put it into the
washing machine.
When the wash cycle was finished, I went back down into the
basement, folded the dry clothes and started lifting the wet blankets and
towels from the washer into the dryer. Something strange was at the bottom of
the wash tub – something dark and rumpled, with a few sticky-out bits, like the
top of an eggplant looks a few hours after being cut off.
I poked it with my finger.
Squish.
Oh no, I thought: that’s not an eggplant top. Realising that
it might be something that once had a pulse, and praying that it hadn't survived the spin cycle, I pulled a clean dusting cloth out
of the pile on the dryer and slowly, gingerly even, picked up the rumpled dark
thing.
I turned it over, and ah! It had a face! A fuzzy, tiny face
with slightly chubby cheeks! Slightly chubby, mummified cheeks.
The dog was standing right behind me, as she always does, little
shadow that she is, and was looking up at the thing in my hand, head cocked to
one side, ears perked up with interest. I assumed, of course, that she wanted
to eat it, being a dog that will eagerly eat horse poo.
I took a slightly closer look at the thing without actually
bringing my face closer to it – was it a mouse? No, those arm bones were much
too long and papery looking – that was a bat, and it was (eek):
a) in the house
b) in the flipping washing machine
Pinching it between my thumb and forefinger as far away from my face as possible, I dropped it into the trash bin along with the used dryer
sheets, lint, and the remnants of the ‘I’m single, not desperate’ mug I’d
accidently knocked off the counter with a broomstick a few weeks ago. And out with
it to the trash can in the alleyway. In went the bleach to the washing tub,
along with the now definitely unclean but clean-smelling laundry.
I’ve never found a tiny, creepy animal in my home before – and I’ve had a
lot of homes. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true. There was the time when a
squirrel came in through the skylight of my yurt in Idaho, ran a panicked
circle around my roommate’s legs, and beat a path out the door. That was really
only for a minute or so. It hadn’t set up residence, and it certainly wasn’t
there long enough to become mummified.
Mummified! That brings us back to thought of how it squished
a little when I poked it. I think it might’ve become rehydrated in the wash.
Ew.
My sister in law once had a family of skunks set up home
beneath her porch in college. That was probably worse than this. Skunks carry
rabies, too, and with them comes the danger of them spraying the whole place with their foul odor... and if they’re
living under the porch, there’s probably a good chance that they’ll scurry into
the house while you’ve got the screen door propped open on moving day. Just imagine that for a second.
I suppose my dad has caused a few creature-in-the-house
near-misses himself. My father has what you might call an affinity for
squirrels, a desire to bond with them and develop lasting human-rodent friendships. He
loves to feed the neighborhood squirrels, and has even attempted to train them to
eat from his hand as he crouches down on the ground nearby. Yes, he's retired. About four years
ago, he started laying a trail of unsalted in-the-shell peanuts along the top
of the garden fence, with the last peanut set just outside the front door. The
result was this: arriving to visit my parents and coming face-to-face with a squirrel, perched on the fence mere inches from my nose, a squirrel now totally unafraid of
human contact. One day, while home from his faraway job, my
older brother opened the door to find a squirrel, upside down, suspended by its
claws from the screen. That was not something that my mother
had ever hoped to experience. By the end of that winter, all of the trained squirrels
had since died without teaching their offspring to trust the white-haired man on the
corner.
Well, no more bats have shown up since the fuzzy cheeked,
mummified squashy thing emerged from the washing machine three days ago. By now it can be filed under ‘just another horrible story to tell in the pub.'
Hopefully.
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Buen Camino
Right, we were going to talk about the Camino de Santiago, since we already talked about the cake. It's a gorgeous autumn morning, the sun is shining, and now is our chance, so let's take it.
The Camino, as people who've walked it call it, is an ancient hiking trail that runs about 720 miles or 900 kilometers across Spain, if you go all the way to Finnesterre, or the End of the Earth. Yes, that's what the Romans called it, the End of the Earth.
If you don't do the extra bit at the end, it works out to be around 560 miles. Now, whichever you choose, that's a pretty long way if you've never walked further than the safe, paved distance between your car and the front door of work. The long version, of 720 miles, is in North Dakota terms, like going from Bismarck to Cheyenne, Wyoming. It is, as our friends and neighbors would say, a ways. And you're walking, unless of course you're one of the minority group who choose to ride horseback or bicycle. Let's be honest, though: unless you're willing to wear an all-spandex outfit in 90 degree weather (oh dear, oh dear, the chafing), or to get Mr Ed his own plane ticket, you're most likely going to walk it.
Imagine that for a moment: stepping out of your front door in B-town, NoDak, with a light pack on your back, shoes on your feet (preferably ones that won't ever cause blisters) and walking out across the prairie, past the bustling, booming oil country, turning left somewhere south of Billings, and making your way, all day every day, to Cheyenne. Walking for ten hours a day, napping in parks after lunch, eating six or seven meals to keep the energy going, and falling into bed every night. When you think of it that way, the distance becomes clear. Mind-boggling, almost. Or maybe you'd rather not think about it at all.
But thousands upon thousands of people think about it, and then do it every year. It's a pilgrimage trail that has existed since Roman times, which means that millions of people have done it. You may well ask: in God's name, why?
Well, that's exactly the point. Most have done it in God's name. The city of Santiago de Compostela is named after St James, aka Sant Iago, one of the twelve apostles of Christ. As the story goes, St James the apostle was martyred in the middle east. His followers placed his body in a stone boat and set it off to sea. The stone boat eventually washed up on the shores of Galicia, where it was found by shepherds, and brought to the site where the great Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela now stands. It is widely assumed to be his burial place, and so, starting in medieval times (and indeed, in Roman times) people often times made the journey as a pilgrimage in penance for crimes or sins. Actually, if you're doing the hike with blisters on your feet, you very well may think that you're doing penance for some past wrong yourself. But don't let that idea dissuade you just yet.
Now, why the name Compostela? Pilgrims often escaped the brutal Spanish heat by walking at night, and according to camino lore, they made their way to Santiago by following the milky way, or the field of stars. In fact, while walking the camino at night, if you look up, the milky way seems to stretch straight out from where you've been, to where you're going. Santiago de Compostela = St James of the Field of Stars. Beautiful.
Spain is dry, hot and dusty in the summertime, remarkably so, when you compare it to the lush, humid French side of the Pyrenees; but it is made of spectacular stuff. From the start of the Camino, way up in the Pyrenees mountains, which divide France and Spain, peregrinos (as the pilgrims are called) cross through the vineyards of Rioja, the wooded mountains of Cantabrica, winding through thousand-year-old cities like Leon and Burgos, through tiny towns with names like Villaviciosa and Carrion de los Condes, crossing mile after mile of trail before finally ending in Galicia, on the northern Atlantic edge of the Iberian peninsula.
It takes roughly a month to traverse the whole of Spain on the most popular route, the Camino Frances. Modern pilgrims have their own reasons for checking out of their day-to-day life and following the trail: some for sport, some for religious or spiritual reasons, some to get over a heartbreak or to grieve. And some, of course, just because they've always wanted to. For many, it is a life-changing month: a time of daily reflection, of meditation, and of the purest simplicity.
Some of the more memorable points include a wine fountain, where pilgrims can drink wine for free (!) from a tap coming out of a vineyard's wine cellar wall. People often carry a small stone in their pack to leave at the Cruz de Ferro, covered in mementos, ribbons, photographs, and yes, stones. Worth an overnight stop is the pilgrim hostel at Manjarin, run by Tomas and the modern Knights Templar (or so they claim to be), who will feed you, put you up in a barn, and perform a blessing ceremony after dinner in tunics... with swords! You won't forget that anytime soon, nor will you forget picking up a scallop shell on the beach at Finesterre, proof that you made the journey in its entirety.
Of course, the most memorable things are the feeling of comradarie amongst pilgrims: of sleeping in giant rooms stacked with bunkbeds; of shared meals along the side of the road; of greeting familiar faces at different points along your journey; of making new and sometimes lifelong friends from the other side of the world. It's like a big, migrating United Nations summer camp for grown-ups and the occasional donkey.
Does this even begin to encapsulate the camino? It doesn't. As LaVar Burton would say, you don't have to take my word for it. Sure, have a look yourself. You should probably give it a shot sometime.
The Camino, as people who've walked it call it, is an ancient hiking trail that runs about 720 miles or 900 kilometers across Spain, if you go all the way to Finnesterre, or the End of the Earth. Yes, that's what the Romans called it, the End of the Earth.
If you don't do the extra bit at the end, it works out to be around 560 miles. Now, whichever you choose, that's a pretty long way if you've never walked further than the safe, paved distance between your car and the front door of work. The long version, of 720 miles, is in North Dakota terms, like going from Bismarck to Cheyenne, Wyoming. It is, as our friends and neighbors would say, a ways. And you're walking, unless of course you're one of the minority group who choose to ride horseback or bicycle. Let's be honest, though: unless you're willing to wear an all-spandex outfit in 90 degree weather (oh dear, oh dear, the chafing), or to get Mr Ed his own plane ticket, you're most likely going to walk it.
Imagine that for a moment: stepping out of your front door in B-town, NoDak, with a light pack on your back, shoes on your feet (preferably ones that won't ever cause blisters) and walking out across the prairie, past the bustling, booming oil country, turning left somewhere south of Billings, and making your way, all day every day, to Cheyenne. Walking for ten hours a day, napping in parks after lunch, eating six or seven meals to keep the energy going, and falling into bed every night. When you think of it that way, the distance becomes clear. Mind-boggling, almost. Or maybe you'd rather not think about it at all.
But thousands upon thousands of people think about it, and then do it every year. It's a pilgrimage trail that has existed since Roman times, which means that millions of people have done it. You may well ask: in God's name, why?
Well, that's exactly the point. Most have done it in God's name. The city of Santiago de Compostela is named after St James, aka Sant Iago, one of the twelve apostles of Christ. As the story goes, St James the apostle was martyred in the middle east. His followers placed his body in a stone boat and set it off to sea. The stone boat eventually washed up on the shores of Galicia, where it was found by shepherds, and brought to the site where the great Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela now stands. It is widely assumed to be his burial place, and so, starting in medieval times (and indeed, in Roman times) people often times made the journey as a pilgrimage in penance for crimes or sins. Actually, if you're doing the hike with blisters on your feet, you very well may think that you're doing penance for some past wrong yourself. But don't let that idea dissuade you just yet.
Now, why the name Compostela? Pilgrims often escaped the brutal Spanish heat by walking at night, and according to camino lore, they made their way to Santiago by following the milky way, or the field of stars. In fact, while walking the camino at night, if you look up, the milky way seems to stretch straight out from where you've been, to where you're going. Santiago de Compostela = St James of the Field of Stars. Beautiful.
Spain is dry, hot and dusty in the summertime, remarkably so, when you compare it to the lush, humid French side of the Pyrenees; but it is made of spectacular stuff. From the start of the Camino, way up in the Pyrenees mountains, which divide France and Spain, peregrinos (as the pilgrims are called) cross through the vineyards of Rioja, the wooded mountains of Cantabrica, winding through thousand-year-old cities like Leon and Burgos, through tiny towns with names like Villaviciosa and Carrion de los Condes, crossing mile after mile of trail before finally ending in Galicia, on the northern Atlantic edge of the Iberian peninsula.
It takes roughly a month to traverse the whole of Spain on the most popular route, the Camino Frances. Modern pilgrims have their own reasons for checking out of their day-to-day life and following the trail: some for sport, some for religious or spiritual reasons, some to get over a heartbreak or to grieve. And some, of course, just because they've always wanted to. For many, it is a life-changing month: a time of daily reflection, of meditation, and of the purest simplicity.
Some of the more memorable points include a wine fountain, where pilgrims can drink wine for free (!) from a tap coming out of a vineyard's wine cellar wall. People often carry a small stone in their pack to leave at the Cruz de Ferro, covered in mementos, ribbons, photographs, and yes, stones. Worth an overnight stop is the pilgrim hostel at Manjarin, run by Tomas and the modern Knights Templar (or so they claim to be), who will feed you, put you up in a barn, and perform a blessing ceremony after dinner in tunics... with swords! You won't forget that anytime soon, nor will you forget picking up a scallop shell on the beach at Finesterre, proof that you made the journey in its entirety.
Of course, the most memorable things are the feeling of comradarie amongst pilgrims: of sleeping in giant rooms stacked with bunkbeds; of shared meals along the side of the road; of greeting familiar faces at different points along your journey; of making new and sometimes lifelong friends from the other side of the world. It's like a big, migrating United Nations summer camp for grown-ups and the occasional donkey.
Does this even begin to encapsulate the camino? It doesn't. As LaVar Burton would say, you don't have to take my word for it. Sure, have a look yourself. You should probably give it a shot sometime.
Buen Camino.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
The flop of shame
Yesterday, I went to the grocery store in sweatpants. Not just any sweatpants, but the stretchy, black workout leggings that everyone is wearing these days.
This wasn't the first time I've worn them out in public, but I don't make a habit of it. Every time I do, however, there always seems to be a reminder waiting. Some invisible mirror being held up, perhaps by a complete stranger, showing me that I used to be different from how I am now, no matter how subtly.
I found my reminder easily enough, rounding the corner of the cereal aisle: two young women, standing in beautiful linen summer dresses, reading aloud the sign hanging overhead labelled 'jam, peanut butter, pickles.' They had Scandinavian accents. Foreign women, looking like real grownups in public.
A mother in jogging shorts flip flopped by with a young child, also in jogging shorts and flip flops. Flop flop flop flop flop flop.
Standing there in my stretchy black leggings, my Irish self inwardly frowned at my American self, remembering Fiona, the Boston girl from my undergraduate English tutorial group in Dublin. Fiona, who would appear for small group discussions in sweatpants with words printed across the backside, a hoodie, flip flops, and a huge bun leaning over the side of her head. Pajamas, essentially. She'd fold herself up, legs under her in her hard backed chair, like she was watching a movie in her living room, instead of discussing literature at the same university that James freaking Joyce had attended. She would drawl out her words in a half sing-song as she offered her analysis on the week's novel.
"I don't knoooow, you guuuuuuys, IIIIIIII just thought this book was kind of boring?"
Oh for feck's sake, Fiona.
That was not how things were done, and her extravagantly casual way embarrassed the bejaysus out of my American self. To be honest, I worried that my classmates would equate me with this groggy creature swathed in comfy fabrics and shod in plastic.
And then, on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, there I was, standing in a prairie grocery store aisle in flip flops, stretchy sweats and a tee shirt, with a big messy bun perched on my head.
sigh.
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