On the Inevitable

I am convinced that it skips a generation.

Three, Too, Is an Auspicious Number

                                    

Photographs: The foster-kittens (Big Edie, Little Edie, and G.G.) out for a picnic, taken and suggested by my mother

Fear of Heights

Photographs taken by my sister, Kylie, the real tree-climber between the two of us

Same as It Ever Was

I am so small when I stand next to buildings, and so scared of just the silliest things, and Community College is a place full of people who say things like: "Now, at a four-year college they're not going to do this kind of hand-holding", but I have looked around, and fallen on the ground a few times, and I do not think there is anybody here to hold my hand. This is probably a good thing, because as stern professors remind me daily, hand-holding is a terrible, awful, undesirable thing, and I ought to avoid it if I can, and if I can't, I'd better cut that out as soon as possible. It's much better to go it alone, and pretend you know what you're doing, and just be terrified. That's what real people do.

Every day, my mother drops me off at a school where there isn't room for me to sit inside any of the college buildings, so I crouch outside next to a low stone wall, in its pitiful shade, under a two-story steel pergola without vines. It casts enormous, dark shadows on the quad, which is covered with people I do not know, and will never know. They leave me alone, in my smallness; in the bigness. I do not call home, and tell my mother to come pick me up. I do not even, while sitting on that lawn, call a friend to whimper over the phone about sobbing in a bathroom stall, or fainting in class, or just plain sitting all alone for fifteen hours of the goddamn day, most every day. I am tempted. I try to remember that I am propped up by a low stone wall. I am already leaning. Hand-holding would be different.

Ode

Things are strictly concrete, steel, and glass at present. It makes me feel like writing an ode to bricks again, which I'll never do, and I'll always want to do, because "An Ode to Bricks" is a hypothetical poem that tells you everything I've ever felt about home, and not-home, and distance and resolution, and dissonance again. It can never ever exist, of course, because I just don't write things like that. Still, bricks are important. Sometime, somebody ought to write them an ode.

Photographs taken in Frederick, MD

Swamp-Bottom Brown and the Muck-Buckets Present: An AGAINST IDLENESS Tribute to Seasonal Appropriateness

This summer, I hope you found rocks to hop on, and somebody to hop with. I hope there was a great clear pool, full of tiny bubbles to dip your toes in-- but only to dip, because for all you knew it could have been bottomless. I do hope you found some natural mystery, and left it that way, even if you could've solved it, if you engineered something clever enough.

I hope you found a nice place to sit this summer. That's important, too. I hope it was warm, and if it was too warm, I hope you remembered to appreciate it. I hope you soaked in something, like some sunshine or muddy river or weedy lake. For goodness' sakes, I hope you at least did that.

If you were lucky, your hair might have started turning gold again for the first time in years, and I hope that it did, and that your sister once referred to the color as "Swamp-Bottom Brown". I hope you remembered to take a picture of what you look like now, at the end of the summer, as tan and gold-flecked as you get, so that I can see it sometime in the wintertime, when the sand you kicked up these past few months has settled.

Seed-Savers

Did you know that it's a sin to eat store-bought jam? That, and downright un-American. There's victory in the garden, you know-- in the raspberry patch, and on the labels of the gold-lidded glass jars in the cupboard. If you lie to me, and take the summer-fruit's name in vain, and offer me "Smucker's" one day for my english muffin, don't expect to get away with it. Not without a proper talking-to, anyhow. Did you know I could tell a ripe berry at two years old? What do you mean? Of course I'm not exaggerating! I was practically raised in a raspberry patch! Practically born in the brambles! There were heirloom patches on both sides of the family! Once, we found a kitten in Great-Grandpa Daniels's raspberry bushes and took her home, and fattened her up, and we might have named her "Raspberry", too, if we were the sort of family that did things like that.

Did you know that it's a sin to plant Bradford pears? That, and downright un-American. If I catch you cultivating a cultivar that's invasive to the Mid-Atlantic, I'm afraid there's going to be trouble. My mother is a Master Gardener, you know. Did you know that she thought it would be an nice outing for us to go pull garlic mustard from Whipp's Cemetery when Grandma Lu came to visit us in Maryland one spring? You'd better hope nobody planted a Bradford pear over my favorite little plot in the back with the twisted gate, because next ice storm that hits, you can be sure those limbs will crack. They'll drop like tiny twigs, and those beautiful old stones and I will just be crushed.

Did you know that it's a sin to buy a pound of ripe figs and let them go to waste? That, and downright un-American. They're the favored fruit of still-life painters, if we forget about pomegranates for a minute, and that's got to count for something. What? You can't eat them just because we're out of chèvre? You can't pretend you plucked it from the tree? What do you mean, am I going to roast some potatoes to have with the steaks tonight? Of course I'm not! What do you need potatoes for? You're going to eat figs with your steaks tonight! You're going to like it! What? You don't like it? In Florida when I was small, we'd go to Winn-Dixie to pick out treats, because it was vacation, and somebody would pick out frosted pop-tarts, and somebody would pick out fruit-snacks, and my father would pick out "Fig Newtons" every time. Now, I don't know why we picked up all this beautiful fruit if nobody is going to finish it. "This isn't how we eat them in Kuwait" my father says. "But, I guess a fig is a fig."

Irony/History/Cookery/Anniversary

For your fifty-first birthday, may we suggest that you reenact the Battle of Antietam, and march your daughters along Bloody Lane Trail until things get literal? May we suggest a late lunch in Frederick, another Civil War town, another cemetery town, also a college town and a church-spire town? How about a kitten left on the porch for you to find later? May we suggest you name the kitten after Vice-Admiral William Fitzwilliam Owen, charter of Great Lakes, explorer of African coasts? We frequently recommend, and wonder how you'd feel about: a boozey espresso gâteau de crêpes with chocolate ganache, homemade, improvised, because your daughter meant to make a chiffon cake but the eggs just wouldn't beat, no matter what she did? May we suggest you eat the cake cold the next morning, when it will probably taste better, because it is still as hot outside it was on the battlefield yesterday? May we suggest you bring some water next time? Some gauze?