I Think Your Great Big City's Very Pretty, Nevertheless--

It's the snow again. My mother said some parts of The Enchanted Forest haven't had power for two days, and I can't help feeling jealous. Oh, that's not right. I can help it. I can help it if I bake a lopsided lemon tart and eat it with a cup of tea and some homemade raspberry jam. By now, you ought to know how I feel about homemade raspberry jam. My mother also told me that up in Michigan, where Patty C. pouts because she never gets a proper antique oil-lamp power-outage (what with all the back-up generators), they're expecting another storm. All that snow is hardly news, but I'm green-eyed and restless upon hearing that Grandma Patty is digging out some cross-country skis to do a little old-fashioned trespassing.

Oh, it's just like the song. I want to go back to Michigan.

The Trustees Are Watching

"[Katharine Anne] Porter's irony is sometimes simply verbal and at other times tragic and cosmic."

-Darlene Harbour Unrue

Piety

At that Christmas service in December,

I talked you into driving down

so I could sit for awhile

and not feel bad about feeling small.

All photographs taken by my mother

Departures

You were probably wondering what I did at the Southwest Airlines terminal during my six-hour layover in Chicago. I read a few magazines. I ate a salad. I worked on some letters. Mostly, though, I sat at a tiny table with red vinyl toadstools planted around it in the "Kid's Corner" and watched Pink Panther episode after Pink Panther episode. It was a departure, I think, from the frenzy and noise and three screens' worth of CNN in the rest of the terminal.

Insulation

I shivered in Galesburg for a week, and I shivered so much that on the my last day, Wednesday, I stepped out of a leaky shower and got to dripping and shaking so hard that I convinced myself that I was frozen in place. I suppose I feel that way about a lot of things, like making phone calls and sending emails, and a January vacation to Western Illinois had little in the way of coaxing to do in order for those tendencies to surface. After seven days of poor insulation, I was certain I had to stay.

I did. I made some kind of scene to my mother over the phone, and I stayed in bed and cried, and I shook and I shivered and it was all too dramatic for my liking, really. Then again, it was just about dramatic enough. The Farmer's Almanac had only two words to describe the dates of my visit: "bitter cold". I stayed a day more and tried to thaw a little.

In the Mid-Atlantic, there are heaps of snow outside. The air is dry and quiet, which winter ought to be. Indoors, though, the heat is trapped behind thick glass and humidifiers whir upstairs and down, and there are overflowing bowls of citrus and kiwi on the kitchen counter. I took a long bath, and then wrapped myself up in a thin cotton robe and walked around the house collecting my plants, returning them from their vacation sills to the Little Room's window. My miniature rose is in full bloom now, and with any luck it'll last here until spring.

Lap Dog

One of these days,

I am gonna sniff you out.

I know you're in there.

For now, though,

I am gonna go back home,

because I haven't decided what I'm gonna do with you yet.

If You Insist

I guess I am not too surprised that the only time the Dean wants to meet with me to discuss my calamitous college career is the morning after my twenty-first birthday, when I have breezed into town to visit friends.

Transplants

My mother and I went out today, and we each bought ourselves a little plant. She, an African Violet, and I, a white potted rose. I paid for them, and had them wrapped up tightly in plastic while she ran out to get the car heated up and pulled around. They are such sensitive creatures.

At home, we pulled the bags and the tacky plastic wrappings off them and set about finding them little pots. I went to the basement, to my mother's makeshift potting bench: a long, laminate bookshelf filled with vases and vessels, covered with seedlings all tangled up together. It is the best sort of mess.

There with the starts of heirloom plants all jumbled in purgatory,waiting for bigger pots, I felt such overwhelming sadness. The jade plants have all caught some awful disease, and at the very same moment, drooped and shriveled in their separate pots. They are all relatives, of course, cut from the same ancient plant, and in the basement, on top of my mother's potting bench they were all dying.

I found a blue ceramic pot and went upstairs to my little rose. After wiping its leaves dry,I carried it to where it sits in my bedroom window, alongside a bell-jar terrarium and the last healthy jade cutting, which has no pot. I am afraid that our old, happy jades do not like it here in Maryland. They grew for years in Illinois. But I know what it means for a place itself to make you ill. There is only one small branch left. For now, while it's just a baby, I am rooting it in a bud vase. Sooner or later, it is going to need some soil. Maybe then my thumb will turn very green, and it will take root.

Coincidence

It JUST SO HAPPENS that I have this picture my friend Aly took of me at the Nordstrom Rack on State Street, trying on real ugly coats, looking sour, and it JUST SO HAPPENS that today I have been defeated by Nordstrom's, like I was defeated by Neiman Marcus "Off the Rack", like I was defeated by Saks "Off Fifth", like I was defeated by Lord and Taylor.

I just want a nice grey overcoat. I shouldn't have to blog about this.