Author: jelizabeth

– A huge disconnect

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"At the Edge of the Quarry," July 2008

"At the Edge of the Quarry," July 2008

There is much beauty in the world and its people.

(Dear Reader, I beg your patience. In this post I’m going to attempt to start at beauty and end up at crisis. At this moment of beginning, I’m not sure I’ll find the path.)

There is much beauty in the world and its people. That is what I feel and what I believe. I would say, too, that beauty is what I see around me; it is my nearest and often most vivid experience. Children, what grows from the ground, surfaces, words on pages, good hearts. Beauty is real to me.

Last week I was in San Francisco, the first time since 1987, and I stayed with my friends Marcia and Steve, who live near the Presidio. On my first evening there, Steve and dog Henry walked me up there to look out over the city and across to Alcatraz and Angel Island, the Bay Bridge, a cemetery, the Golden Gate. We walked through cypress and eucalyptus trees that composed a woods both magical and spooky, and everywhere in the air was their scent.

Good words fail at these overwhelming moments. Continue reading →

– Lice removal machine

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Jimmy found some archival videos from an earlier time in our children’s lives when lice seemed to be visiting in regular waves. I hosted them on my head, too, more than once. I itched, and the girls diagnosed me. Here’s one of those lost moments:

Incidentally, the video captures a scene in “Little Creatures,” an essay I wrote about head lice, which is really about love. Last week I got word from PMS poemmemoirstory that they will publish it in the upcoming issue. Hooray.

Dear reader, did you land here looking for lice advice? Top searches that get visitors to this blog have something to do with lice, lice treatments, and lice removal, because I’ve written about this subject before. To answer the questions implied in these searches, Continue reading →

– Pink slipped, again

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"Model in a Pink Slip," Jules Pascin

"Model in a Pink Slip," Jules Pascin

Last week I had a meeting with my boss, and I learned that my job in the writing program at MIT is ending with this semester. Others in the program, too, have lost their jobs or had their hours reduced.

Three years ago, a little later in the spring, I heard similar news from my boss at Simmons College, where I then worked and taught.

Here’s a reflection on how I felt then and how I feel now. And let me preview the conclusion: Yes, one gets wiser — and more determined — with experience. Continue reading →

– Only the rain has such small hands.

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Althea Crome Merback knitted Coraline’s sweater. She knitted these gloves, too.

gloves

In this short video on her work, Merback calls herself, as far as she knows, the “only person in the world who knits conceptual sweaters and garments on such a small scale.”

Seeing these gloves for no hands reminds me of a conversation I had last week with one of Grace’s teachers, who said, “Art doesn’t have to have a use. It’s just… because.”

—-

Photo from haha.nu, which shows images of even more of Merback’s miniatures. And thanks to Rosemary, who gave me the idea to alter a line from a poem and use it as a post title. And to the late e.e. cummings, who wrote the poem, which I loved as a teenager. I see why.

– Proust, you can have your madeleine.

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Our friends were away on vacation, and Lydia was in charge of the cat and fish. She promised to daily feed and water the cat and clean its litter and occasionally to drop a few beads of food into the fish bowl.

One night I helped, and on another night — the last night of cat duty, in fact — I handled it myself. I followed Lydia’s instructions: pat and scratch Storm; refill dry food dish and replace water; scrape 1/3 can of wet food into wet food dish; play with Storm for a few minutes (mouse on string); sift solid masses out of litter cave and discard; wash hands. Easily done. (Interestingly, the cat seemed both to want and not want my company. Is that typical of cats?) Feed fish and otherwise ignore. Also easily done.

I tried once again to play with Storm, by dangling a strip of fabric near his nose. He walked away.

As I sat on the ottoman, not unhappily rejected, I noticed the dried kibble on the floor around the cat dish. I saw an electric carpet sweeper. I thought, “Who would want to come home to a messy cat?” With the sweeper I sucked up the scattered bits. Then I remembered the litter cave in the other room.

In the other room, I turned on the sweeper again and ran it over the floor and edge of the nearby rug. Satisfyingly, the grit whirred into the plastic, tick tick ticking like sand against a window pane. Bent over like that, vacuuming, suddenly time collapsed 30 years, and I was bent over, vacuuming like that, in a neighbor’s house I then cleaned weekly, for money. I experienced again the pleasure of being in someone else’s house when they’re not home, of leaning into the rhythm of a task, of restoring order, of hearing grit fly into plastic. Of the electric hum, and air.

This is still me, I thought. The vacuumer, the order-restorer, not in a hurry and at peace in someone else’s empty home.

– Chalk and mallet

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chalkandmallet

I envy sometimes that intense aimlessless of children, which prompts them, on a sunny and windless day, to overturn a bucket of chalk, find the family mallet, and experiment with the chalk’s friability. Just because one can draw or write with chalk doesn’t mean that one must only draw or write.

A person could, for example, pound it to bits. Especially the blue ones.

smashedchalk

I came across the chalk and mallet tableau while walking with Jimmy in a neighborhood we don’t live in, although it’s still nearby. The children, whoever they are, had left all their playthings strewn on a little front lawn, the steps, the walkway. It seemed as though they would come back to them; the action was suspended, not completed.

Little artists, they were briefly interrupted from testing their material.

(Or so I want to think.)

– Paper whites

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paperwhites13It was time.

The paper whites — the ones we had forced indoors in jars around the holidays — were spent and blossomless, and still we let them sit there, leaves flopped over the jar rims, on the table and mantle.

Outside, enough snow has melted that I see dirt everywhere.

This morning I put the jars on the back steps that go from the old screened porch down into the yard. I went into the kitchen and put on my coat, slipped on my boots. In the garage, I found the small spade and pruners.

Near the southeast corner of the house, where it warms early in the spring, I dug a mini trench, about six inches deep. Into the damp cold dirt I pressed the four bulbs, with their whiskery roots, some even holding on still to the pebbles from the jars. Continue reading →

For hungry gardeners

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Betsy and I drove out to Broadmoor today to walk the trails. Unlike in Boston and Cambridge, however, which experienced rain and melt in the past week or so, the walkways out in the far suburbs — especially in the wooded shade — are not cleared of ice. We tried for 20 minutes, then laughed at our slippery efforts and quit.

We left Broadmoor and headed to the Margaret C. Ferguson Greenhouses at Wellesley College, free and open to the public every single day of the year. Perhaps 10 miles at most from the Hub, in the midst of this New England winter it’s another world, indoors. Cacti, succulents, orchids, fish, ferns, flowering trees, forced bulbs, water, and two other women, who, in their own words, were “trying to learn to sketch.” And it seemed to us as though they had found the right place.