And We Don't Even Own This House

On days like these, I'm reminded of the ranch. We have a dead something festering in the walls or under the floorboards somewhere; all we know is that the smell is strongest at the spot just before you enter the kitchen. The Man comes home from football wanting to take a shower; but a pipe has burst, or broken, or done whatever it is pipes do, so that the kitchen is flooded with a sudden stream of water before we turn the main off. By sticking our heads in the cupboard under the sink (him in football kit, me in an oversized and ripped man's shirt and a pair of silk pajama shorts because I thought, silly me, I might have an early night) we ascertain which particular bit of pipe is the problem ("You see the silvery one?" he says. "No, not that silvery one, that silvery one."). But what good is knowing this? I have the imprint of a wet review section of the Guardian from six months ago on my feet and the Man can feel some "fraying," but neither of us is taking a bath tonight, I can guarantee that. As we carpet the kitchen in newspaper we talk about the smell, which the Man is convinced is like galvanized rubber. "It's dead rodent," I assure him. "I got very used to that smell in my childhood." Which makes my childhood sound horrific; it wasn't, quite the opposite, just infused, every so often, with eau de decomposing rat. Or eau de galvanized rubber, if you prefer.

A Country Evening

Just as we finish scrambling along the wet shores of a makeshift lake, my phone rings. We're behind a perfectly English stone wall, sheltered from the muddy road running away from the village. Just a 9-year-old boy and myself. We've been exploring the outskirts of the village, the secret swampy places between water and meadow, for nearly an hour. At one point, after I sink in the mud, I tell my companion about the time my Dad and I donned wellies and walked the length of our local creek, following it until it met the sea. Now he's calling me, my Dad. From Buellton, the truck-stop town of grocery stores and auto-repair shops. I can't see civilization from here (maybe the gleam of a thatched roof beyond the wall) but I can talk to California. I'm watching the 9-year-old leaping over a stream in the same way I used to do while I waited for my Dad to finish his work in the garage. I'm speaking to that same Dad while I watch the 9-year-old. There's something strangely circular about this, and something dizzyingly meta. And, more simply, something rather delightful.

(Also, re: the last post, this, from Alain de Botton: "Journeys are the midwives of thought.")

Sunday I'm in Love

We sit in Christ Church meadows by the daffodils, watching a stream of toddlers drawn as if by magnetism to the mound of dirt beside the pathway. One rolls repeatedly down the mound until his father tells him they're moving on.
"I don't want to go," says the boy.
"Well, we're going, anyhow," says the father, and scoops up his other son, dissapears behind some trees. Dirtboy takes one last lackluster plunge through the mess, then sprints after his family.

After sandwiches which are too big for our mouths, we share a banana. I practise pouting my lips, the Facebook face, the look that other girls take on when posing for profile photos. I can't plump them up enough without looking demented, descending into giggles. I give up and we watch more children, attracted by the mound of dirt. We watch the toddlers who have just learnt to walk careening down the path, thrilled by their own movements, unsteady but unwavering in gusto and intent. The Man says maybe I'm a little like that, too.
"I get the impression," he says, "that at the age of about four, you decided you'd mastered all the basics, and from then on out you were just going to read."

It's more or less true, I say back. (Later, walking down the flat surface of the High street, I trip spontaneously. More true than less true, I think).

At the kissing gate by Merton college he traps me, kisses me sweetly.
"Is that because no one can see us?" I say.
"It's because it's a kissing gate, you moron," he says. Kisses me again.

After we circle the city with our footsteps we come to settle at a bar on the High street where we sit close to the window, watching pink blossoms shuddering in wind. He reads the paper while I attack Essays in Love. There's the strange sadness of a Sunday as the afternoon wilts into evening, as we move away from weekend papers, ipmromptu picnics in the garden, towards alarm clocks, early morning stresses, hours spent at work.

I look up every so often to make a different point about de Botton's book. At the reference to Aristophanes, I balk.
"I find the idea that we're all looking for someone who was once a part of ourselves really lonely," I say. "Like, I want the person I love to be different. I want company."
"I'm not sure that's what that means," he says. Whether he's right or not I don't know, but it highlights how differently we can read things. "It's just about completion."

A huge clock hangs from the cieling of the bar. It makes me feel both unwelcome and excessively desirous of staying all at the same time. The same way that being in a train station makes me feel. I know I'm in transition, but I could stay for hours, I think, watching everyone else, going somewhere else. Rhythms marked by a minute hand (is it coincidence, then, that the Man tells me this bar used to be a music store?).

Later, I finish Essays in Love in bed. I have read the entire book in a day and feel heavy with de Botton's relationship woes. Sleep comes easy, and when it comes, it is quiet.

Wednesday Morning in the Countryside

This morning, after we awoke to the sounds of an electric guitar and feeling of two terriers bouncing on our bed, after we packed the kids off to school (no, not our kids and no, not our terriers), after we cleaned up the puppy poo from the floor and loaded the dishwasher (alas, also not our dishwasher--a dishwasher being in my mind the height of domestic luxury) and bought cinammon rolls from the shop next door, we indulged, whilst waiting for a taxi to take us back to our real life in Oxford, in some television.

Some people, channeling fond memories of childhood, might opt for cartoons or sitcoms, but as the Man and I were not television children, and neither are we in the least bit ordinary, our greatest TV pleasure is anything that has to do with houses. Programs about selling houses, buying them, rennovating them, decorating them, living in them: it doesn't matter. We both seem to have this sickening need to scoff at how badly other people have designed their bathrooms, and/or drool over their opportunities for buying (and therefore fixing up) property.

This morning it was a program called "Wanted Down Under". A family was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to stay in Britain or make the move to Australia, and we followed them on a house-hunting expedition, slightly sullen teenage son in tow. Then it was "Axe the Agent", which, sadly, we only got middway through before our cab arrived. The family with the seven-bedroom house had just finished cleaning it up, but I still wouldn't buy it (too reminiscant of the sprawling ultra-new California mansions I loathed as a youth).

I don't know quite what it says about us that the sort of television we most enjoy watching is on at 10 am on a weekday morning.

What We're Like

We've become these people that, like, act almost kind of cool, and adult, and stuff. We lounge around with our Macs, in our slightly hip outfits (him: Croc sneakers--though please don't picture these, because his are actually really, surprisingly groovy plus he bought them from a man on the street for the price of two pints--khakis, and a Banana Republic jumper; me: black skinny jeans (yes, I finally caved), slightly ethnic scarf, long cardigan (according to the Observer magazine, cardigans are "in")--actually, the image almost disgusts me. We cook breakfast, have friends over for casual lunches. I sit under a duvet drinking lots of tea and eating clementines (and I'm not the only one) while he catches the second half of the Spurs v Portsmouth game. When he comes home we watch a few episodes of 30 Rock and order a curry.

"You're not eating the nob of your sausage?" he says when I remove the end of my lamb and place it back in the container.
"No," I say. "I got bored with it."
He picks it up, eats it. I'm chewing and gesturing wildly, like I have something really important to say.
"You're going to make a joke about the nob of my sausage," he says. I swallow.
"Yes," I say. "Yes, I am."

(Maybe not so adult.)

A Cooling Down

It has cooled down, finally, become duvet weather again overnight--windows open, we reach first for the sheet, which we cast away days ago when even the featherweight of the fabric was enough to jerk us sweating from a tossing-and-turning sleep. But a heavy wind, which persists through the day, causes us to get up and seek out the long-abandoned summer duvet. We awake as two duvet sausages, enjoying what it feels like to be wrapped in fabric come morning, not swimming in our own perspiration.

We go to a friend's farm for the day; on the drive over, we stop by the Parkway Market, a pillar of my childhood, to buy a bottle of impromptu champagne. In the wine, beer, and liquor section of the store (which is substantial), there is a line of champagne bottles atop a shelf. They have a few pricey varieties of bubbly, but these look dusty, as if no one has given them a second look in years. In the refrigerator, however, is just what we need: a chilled bottle of a $4.99 variety. The kindly Asian man who has been the sole employee of the store for as long as I can remember looks up from his lunch to attend to us.

We drive on, down Santa Rosa Road. We turn off at the farm. There is infrastructure now, and detritus, where once there was none; the way I remember the farm is very different from the way it is now, but I suppose this is because we used it merely as the backdrop to our own (mostly horse-related) adventures. My knowledge of the place is punctuated by remembrance: this is where we used to ride along the river to cross; this where we set up a makeshift arena, complete with a series of crossbar jumps; this is where it was flat enough for long enough to gallop full speed; here we had to wrinkle our nose at the smell of fertilizer, and here the trampoline used to sit, where we would sleep on hot nights. Now we walk down to where the sheep are kept; they look as if they might wilt under their wool in the burning sunlight. We think we can feel a heat literally radiating from them, so we feed them quickly and head to the strawberry field to pick some berries for our champagne.

"I read somewhere that strawberries have more vitamin c than oranges," says our friend.
"They do," says my love. "They're not actually berries. They're aggregated droops."
"Aggregated DROOPS?" I echo, giggling.
"Yes. Aggregated droops. D-R-U-P-E-S."
"Oh," I say. "Drupes."

Inside, we pour a small glass each and drop our aggregated drupes into the fizzing liquid. I have had something stuck in my eye since dawn, and it starts to wear on me. I retire to the office to apply eyedrops. I swoon into a chair and look helplessly around me. We decide that the only thing to do about it is to go to the cinema, so we head to town to catch the new Indiana Jones--which is more (and I don't think I'll be ruining it for anyone by saying this--I may even rescue a few helpless souls from the experience) X-Files-meets-Tomb Raider than hunky- Harrison-Ford-blunders-his-way-through-the-archaeological-mysteries-of-a-jungled-country. The good news is that a solid two hours of holding my eye in a certain way seems to have set free whatever was trapped, and I feel like a new woman.

"It seems Harrison Ford is easy on the eyes," someone says.

At dinner, we eat a little too much because it is just that good. And when we step outside to go home, a tiny chill has set in, so that I have to put my cardigan on.

Hesitation Yields Stasis

The other day we went on a walk to the old sea wall, the one between Little Drakes and Bullito. I used to walk there in mornings with the dog, who would promptly find something that smelled filthy to munch on, but I never noticed because I would be bundled up in sweaters and daydreaming incessantly. Often in my adolescence it was travel I would dream of, and adventure. I even remember taking Olive with me once, and we talked about how we would go to Europe after we graduated from high school (and we did, though it took us several more years than we thought it would).

We walked down the cool winter sand to the edge of the hulking structure. Xander wanted to climb up the sheer sea-wall face, where a crack in the stone revealed humps and bumps enough to scramble over. I balked—I thought: this is my turf, I know it, probably I know it better than anyone else out here, because I know the dates on every part of the wall, I’ve traced the lines in the concrete trying to feel what the builders felt in 1919, 1929, 1930. I know that you must respect the beauty and the treachery: you can stand on the edge of the sea, looking over the waves at a horizon that curves with the earth (an illusion, but you can delude yourself in the emptiness of an open beach), but you must be wary of how old, how easily toppled the wall is, how remote a place it stands in and how high that edge really is. I thought: for the wall’s sake, not mine, I’ll take the easy route.

It is easy only in relative terms: a wild land of granite rocks held from the sea by rusted iron fencing. In sandals it is an added challenge: trying to keep the paper-thin shoes from slipping off into a narrow abyss, gripping with your toes.

I pitched my weight from rock to rock, balancing tenuously on the tips of sharp granite stones, leaning this way and that. The trick is constant movement: not to pause, not to linger, until you need a rest, until you’re on a flat, stable rock, where you can map out the next leg of your journey. Once you’ve gotten going, swinging like a monkey through the rock forest, it’s your own momentum that carries you forward, nothing else. Hesitation yields stasis.

At the wall, I rounded the corner and there was Xander, overlooking the sea. He had scrambled up in half the time it took me to leap from rock to rock, and now stood barefoot admiring the view. The wall was too narrow to walk hand-in-hand but we padded down the concrete close on each other’s heels. Respect for the wall comes in different forms: in acknowledging a challenge, in deferring to nature, in striding carefully but purposefully. In a place so recently populated by human vices—where Native Americans roamed for centuries but where the touch of steel, iron, concrete, of vehicle wheels and glass windows is still something the ground is getting used to—something that has withstood the beating of the sea, the howling of the winds, and crumbled gracefully, each year different, each year beautiful, deserves esteem for being so relatively old.

Today, we walked to the top of Gaviota Peak. A long hot trudge up; a tumbling down, pushed by gentle wind and pulled by a sense of urgency: I wanted a warm car ride, snuggled in the backseat so I could nap; another bottle of water, and, though I didn’t yet know it, I wanted fried chicken. We went into town to get some groceries and my mom had bought some greasy fried chicken and it tasted wonderful. I did hesitate at first--I thought of sticking my fingers in the paper bag and them slipping off the carcass of the chicken and the nubby, rubbery fried skin--but everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves so finally I let myself reach in and tear a steaming piece of meat and I'm so glad I did.

It is interesting to keep having to remind myself that I grew up here: I am not a stranger here, no not at all, but sometimes I feel like one. And othertimes I feel like I have hardly been away. Last night at the New Year's party I found myself telling a woman that: "I grew up here," I said. She has two young children and she and her husband are considering a move out here. If I could, I would convey all that growing up here meant in those simple words (I would slide into the sentence how horrible and glorious it all was, and how worth it, and try to make syllables speak volumes), but I was so taken aback at having said it at all that it was a flat sentence. I keep saying to Xander: I did this when I was young, I used to come here all the time, I hiked up here years ago, or last year. It is funny to realize you have a childhood home and nobody can take that away from you.

Supposedly Common Things that I've Never Actually Done

(just for fun--and because it makes the world seem like such an unexplored place--given my name there might just be a Shakespeare allusion here to a certain oft-quoted line)

• Been bowling (no, really, I haven't);
• Been skiing (or snowboarding, incredulous kids);
• Been stood up for a date (I'd greatly appreciate it, however, if no-one tries to use this as justification later, i.e. "you said you'd never been stood up, I was just letting you have the experience!");
  
• Actually been on a date, proper, that I understood to be such at the time (sample conversation several weeks after date--me: "so-and-so took me out the other night for dinner. he paid!" friend: "so you guys are like...dating!" me: "Oh no no..." *ruminative pause* "oh...ooooooohhhhhh. I seeeeee....");
• Played spin-the-bottle;
• Been sick from drinking too much (really, truly);
• Failed a class (closest I've come: Physical Education in 4th grade for the fabulously embarrassing reason that I refused to run properly, and would only gallop like a horse--see the "honesty" quote in the righthand sidebar to understand why I would divulge something like that--and Advanced Placement Calculus in 12th grade--no further explanation needed, though I will add I passed with flying colors, eventually);
• Held a single job for longer than four months (a staggering statistic, really...unless you count education as a job, in which case I've been a full-time employee for something like...seventeen years);
• Been to a high school football (the American variety) game (or any other kind, for that matter, but that's less surprising);
• Seen (insert favorite "everybody's got to see this!" film here)...examples include: any of the Godfather films, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Citizen Kane, Forrest Gump, Jaws (yes, really), Chicago, Singin' in the Rain...it's a random sampling. What, you wonder, was I then doing with all my free time? I can only tell you, in response, that I may not have seen Ben Hur, Rocky, or Grease, but I had read every single mystery novel that Agatha Christie ever wrote by the time I was midway through high school....(my God, I am weird. In many ways, the quintessential bookish nerd. I now point again to the quote in the right sidebar, but this time it is mostly for my own comfort--though also am making strides in my filmic education...two weekends ago I watched 16 Candles for the first time!);
• As a child, watched any Nickolodean television show with any semblance of regularity (awkward if you're an American of my generation--how many conversations have I had to sit out on whilst my peers excitedly hone in on a character or plotline from years past, gather round the memories, and shout and murmur and giggle for hours on end? I couldn't even begin to count);
• Slow danced with a boy (or anybody else);
• Been fired from a job;
• Had braces;
• Worn foundation or liquid makeup (I wouldn't know how, and it kind of intimidates me);
• Successfully sewed a button back onto anything

I know there are many more that will come floating into my consciousness at odd hours. This is certainly not to diminish what I have done; or to suggest that I will never do the things listed above. It is, however, an exercise in seeing how we can be identified as much by what we are as what we aren't; in piecing together something that shows mythology to be, sometimes, untrue; and, mostly, in making a public spectacle of myself by collecting a ramshackle array of embarrassing truths. Bless.

Tenessee Summer Part I

It was hot in a way the little girls had never known before. The heat stifled. It didn’t make any of them want to bare their legs and leap into a swimming pool. It made them want to find somewhere cool and shady to sit, and curl up, and sleep until winter came. What a relief some clear air to breathe would be, the girl called Em thought. Even the trees, arms heavy and drooping with thick green leaves, sweated. All the girls had patterns of swollen red dots up and down their skinny arms; “chiggers”, someone had said, their first night in Tennessee. Em had never heard of chiggers, but she didn’t like the name, and she didn’t like the idea of bugs so small she couldn’t see them crawling around in her sleeping bag, either. Bug spray was useless here; it was too hot for long sleeves. There was nothing to do but fall asleep knowing you were being feasted upon; and to wake feeling itchy, and filthy, and restless already.

The little girl called Liv had legs so long the models in Em’s mom’s lingerie catalogs would be jealous; except that they were bony legs, all knobby knees and soft blonde fuzz. Her hips jutted out like two things made purely of bone beneath her floral-print leggings—was there really skin under there? Em wondered. But she knew there was, because the girls went each day to the showers, and stripped naked to stand beneath the cool water.

None of the girls could stand to be in the showers for too long. The walls were covered in a patina of pale green slime, in hue not unlike the Spanish moss that covered the oak trees at home, but not so nice as moss, not so soft and innocent. The floors were unspeakable. The girl called Lindy burst into tears the first time she looked down, though no one could tell because of all the water that was already splashed across her face. Thick black slugs, looking sated, full to bursting, and immobile, lined the stalls. Spiders went scurrying to safety at the first touch of water; stains that none of the girls could identify marred the concrete. Nobody dared look up, for fear to see some horrible forest creature lurking; and after a cursory glance to be sure no slugs would be crushed, none of the girls spent much time looking at their feet, either.

The fourth girl, Hetty, was also the meanest. If she missed home, she didn’t show it. Em thought the chiggers must not bother her, for she snuggled up so soundly in her sleeping bag at night. Em could not sleep so well, thinking of all the creatures, sweat running down her forehead, hearing the buzz of crickets outside and feeling the chunks of dirt deep down in her blanket with the tips of her toes. One night there was a cockroach, the size, Em thought, of a mouse. It landed squarely upon Em’s shoulder as she was bending to get a fresh t-shirt out of her bag; she went to brush it off, and saw how big it was, how fierce, gleaming black, and screamed with fright. This set off all the other girls screaming, too. They chased the cockroach around the cabin, none of them sure what to do if it was ever caught.

Soon, mercifully, it was hard to tell if they were yelling with laughter or terror, and Liv cornered it and dropped her towel upon it, and then brave little Lindy was the only one who could get close enough to the heap to dispose of the cockroach. Em slept even more poorly after that; her mother had told her not to peer to closely in the dark, because that’s when cockroaches come crawling out.

Mind Your Language

On my way home from the White Hen Pantry this eve (my regular ice cream pickup) I followed a family down my street. An old man—The Grandfather—said, “Maybe that old lady’ll be there. And we can say, ‘outta our way, you old bitch!’”, chuckled lustily, choked on some spittle, and coughed. His tiny granddaughter, three feet high, in a skirt too large for her knobby knees, let go his hand. “Mind your language!” she said, and marched haughtily ahead.

Reminded me of the story my parents love to tell: me, four years old, at dinner. My mom—as she does, sometimes—reaching across the table to steal some of my food. “Mommy, you’re a P-I-G!” I spelled, dissolving the entire table into laughter. Think it shows more about my attachment to victuals than my precociousness, myself, but my family, bless them, tends to disagree.

Lovely day today: clear, sunny, windy, warm, smelling like the cusp of a real fall day. Walked all around the city. Have yet to really feel fall, but it’s coming. Dare I say we may be more or less done with this sticky Indian summer business?

Worked last night—and thought I was doing a great job when one of the men at my table said: “You’re doing a great job!” An hour later he sidled up to me and said, “Heeeeeelllo Sunshine,” and I realized I could probably spill icewater down the backs of everyone’s shirt and they’d still think I was fantastic—they were that boozed up. The large man with the tux and the potbelly wanted to dance with me. I kept telling him I wasn’t allowed. He kept telling me I was killing him. All I could really think about was how hungry I was, and how thirsty, and how lucky they were that they had me refilling their water glasses every ten seconds, because I’d been yelled at by a senior staff member for deigning to try to take a cup over to the water cooler.

“Oi!” she yelped at me, her skin going all splotchy. “Don't you dare touch those!”
“What?” I said. Someone had told me to take a cup earlier.
“That’s my coffee station,” she said. Her eyes burned crimson with rage. “Don’t you dare touch it. Jesus Christ. You people.”
“I was just really hoping for some water,” I said, trying the pathetic-little-me track.
“There’s a water cooler over there.” She pointed a pudgy, stubby little finger. I was almost hungry enough to try biting it and see if it tasted like sausage.
“I know,” I whined back. Officious people bring out the absolute worst in me. “I’ll still need a cup, won’t I?”

She just glowered at me until I skulked off. I wanted to find something really rude to say, but I’m pretty good, at this point, with minding my language.