found

Long, slow slide into winter

/ jelizabeth / Leave a comment

I’m busy — go, go, go — but the yard is taking its time fading from its summer vivacity.

Jimmy is in California, so I’ve been doing both the late and the early shift around the house. This morning I drove Grace and George to school early for an optional gym class. When I got back home at 7:20am, I stood in the driveway for a while and stared up at the top leaves of the maple rising above the roof line from the backyard.

The previous two days have been beautiful around Boston; my time has been spent in offices, lecture halls, and labs. The long walk from the parking garage through the main campus and to my office, and then back again at night, I have welcomed. Rain was predicted today, and that the gentle weather still lingers seems akin to finding the last cookie in the box. I am going to stop and enjoy this.

Lydia left for the bus at 7:40am. More coffee tempted me and so did the laptop, but instead I went outside with the camera. The maple habitually persists in holding on to its red leaves, but I know from past years that I’ll wake up one day and the leaves will have been shed all at once, like a dog shaking water from its coat. I also know that someday I won’t live here anymore, and I’ll miss the tree like you miss a friend after they move away.

It turns out there are other fascinations in the yard right now even though growth has slowed or ceased for the year.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

As I stood on the front steps taking a picture of the rotting jack o’ lantern, I heard my name called from down the sidewalk, “Hi, Jane.” My neighbor Susan, all suited up for work and out with her dog, stopped to ask about Eli and his adjustment to college. Her daughter Emma is doing fine at her university, too. We talked too about the beauty of the New England fall, which seems always to coincide with the busiest few months of the year, ending with the exhaustion of Christmas. Susan told me that yesterday she had to go to legislative hearing at the State House and was grateful for being forced, in a way, to take the train and then walk through the Common to get there. Otherwise, the day would have passed her right by.

Meander: to move aimlessly

/ jelizabeth / 3 Comments

I worked at home today, and I really did. All morning the window in the kitchen, where my papers were spread out, was open, and I could hear the early grackles outside and the neighbor’s mower and little grandson. By mid-day, all of them seemed to be calling, Come out, come out, come out!

I put some money, keys, juice, phone, and, of course, my glucometer in an old backpack from my mother and sneakers on my feet, and I went. No exercise agenda, no time limit.

At the corner of Bellingham and Grove, I saw the iron cover for a town water or sewer pipe (it looks like a test tube stopper, about 8″ diameter) still popped off the pipe. It’s been like that for three weeks, and I have been thinking that one of the Bellingham people would notice and call. It seemed no one has. So I stood on the corner, searched for the Brookline DPW on my phone, and I called them. “We’ll report it,” said the lady who answered.

Past the cemetery entrance. I saw a Mercedes drive in and some town workers clustered around a dump truck. The cemetery is one of the nicest kept public spaces in our town.

Down Allandale, with the road quiet enough that I could hear my feet on the sidewalk and birds in the trees. I looked at the site where they are building three new houses where there used to be one old pink one. Next door, there is still an old house with newer garden steps and an old weathered garden elf whose feet are caught in concrete.

At the farm, I went in all the greenhouses, empty of annuals. One was filled with bamboo plants and another with trays of clover.

There were sparrows enjoying dust baths on the ground around a tractor. Some sparrows were even wriggling in the sand caught in the tractor’s big wheel treads. One sparrow wriggled in a puddle and didn’t fly away, like the others, when I walked closer.

Everywhere, boxes of gourds. In the shed behind the main store, where they dole out the weekly farm shares, there was a table laden with vases filled with sunflowers. A young woman, busty and with red-gold hair dressed in a black short-sleeve tee and knee-length black shorts, danced behind the table, in the style of Natalie Merchant, and showed off, I gathered, for the guys who work with her on the farm.

I wanted to take her picture, but I’m not a photographer and don’t know how to intrude like that. Later, I regretted not asking her. Inside the store, there were — amazingly — fresh strawberries and blueberries for sale. From Quebec, $8 each. The picture will have to do; the price was too dear.

Through the neighborhood and down to the West Roxbury Parkway and then the VFW Parkway. So many chipmunks, not afraid of cars whizzing by but afraid of me walking.

On a bench, I sat to eat the nuts I bought at Allandale and drink water. White spray-painted graffiti, one word: WRECK. On the edge of the bench, acorns, lichen, and a baby pinecone. Across the parkway, women with babies at the park, men playing basketball.

At CVS, a birthday card for Eli. On the sidewalk outside Bertucci’s, a woman with a face lift and in a denim jacket too young for her. This thought: your hands are still old.

Back up Independence. A leaf on the sidewalk like tiger stripes painted on. Just one leaf. Me, like a giant. The ruler of the sidewalk world.

A block later, a hole in a neighbor’s fence. Ah, a secret garden! I hoped. I looked in: only driveway and car. Disappointment.

As I walked, it seemed to me that everything in the world may be happening when I’m at work and not noticing. That birds wriggle in sand and pumpkins warm in the sun and the dwarf keeps guard and farm girls dance and houses get built and cemeteries are maintained — this is the action.

And usually I miss it.

Pillars of civilization

/ jelizabeth / 1 Comment

We unloaded the two busloads of Brookline fifth graders in front of the State House. Driving up Beacon Street, with all but the gold dome hidden by trees, I had not seen the huge Bruins banner hanging from the ballustrade and down over the portico.

Massachusetts State House, June 20, 2011 @10am

Our bundle of children, parents, and teachers stood on the sidewalk as the buses pulled away and left us. I leaned over to one of the other parents and murmured in her ear, “Ah, those twin pillars of civilization, politics and sports.”

Squinting, she nodded and agreed: “Especially in Massachusetts.”

This was the first stop on our Boston architecture tour. The teachers ran it like a quiz show with points for correct answers.

Teacher: Who was the architect of the State House?

Students: Charles Bulfinch

Teacher: Which English building did he imitate?

Students: Somerset House

Teacher: Who, in 1802, covered the wooden dome with copper?

Students: Paul Revere

Teacher: Why was the dome painted black during World War Two?

To this question, there were many responses, all guesses. One student answered poetically: “It was a dark time.”

Only the parent chaperones, all in their 40s, knew the answer to this one, having heard of the wartime practice of blackout. None of us, though, had ever lived it.

It was a bright, hot day at the end of the school year. Summer beckoned. The dome sparkled. Among the lucky, we feared nothing more than sunburn, lost lunch money, and a dawdling child. Our leisurely tour through Boston history — a stand-in for the American struggle for independence — began.

The Poet and the Helper

/ jelizabeth / 3 Comments

There is a difference between overhearing and eavesdropping.

Overhearing happens accidentally. You’re waiting for your daughter outside a dressing room in Urban Outfitters, and you hear two other teenagers comparing the merits of one pair of skinny jeans over the other. What they say flies like bits of paper through the air, bits you’ll never try to catch.

Jane's ear. 5.23.2010. by Grace maybe

Eavesdropping — what spies like me engage in — is deliberate. While I don’t go around eavesdropping on my children’s phone calls or my colleagues’ conversations with students, I feel that public conversations among people who are strangers to me are fair game. I’ll hear a snatch or two of something provocative and, without changing the expression on my face, begin to listen intently and for the record.

On a recent afternoon in a chain coffee shop in my town, for example, I sat down at the communal table. I like the idea of communal tables: it seems easier to sit alone at a table for 14 than it does at one for two. On this occasion, the place was mobbed.  People talked  to each other, and many were on their cell phones doing business. The high school kids who take over the place, doing homework and buying $5 drinks, were in full force.

To my left at the communal table was a young woman on the phone with a wedding planner, and her work email was opened on the laptop in front of her. Her boyfriend, sitting across from her with a laptop open in front of him, kept getting up and sitting down, waiting for their coffees. As I settled myself, they talked about something (him?) that was “demoralizing” her. He, leaning across their open laptops to close the gap, said he did not want her to be demoralized. Continue reading →

Fear, girlfriend, and sequin tank top

/ jelizabeth / 6 Comments

Sometimes readers land on Leaf Stitch Word looking for answers. WordPress keeps track of the search strings that bring people to a particular blog, and I’ve noticed that what brings people to this one are sometimes in the form of questions. Here are 5 from the past month, with my authoritative replies.

1. What is the number one fear?

The idea of one’s own death or, if one is a parent, the idea of one’s child’s death has to be the number one fear. (It cannot be public speaking, even though a survey of 3,000 people in 1973 claimed so; one skeptical writer debunks that claim. Link.)

2. Who sings don’t you wish your girlfriend were hot like me?

The Pussycat Dolls

3. What is a sentence using the word natatorium?

Samuel, distraught over his mother’s death that winter, spent Sunday afternoons in the natatorium, swimming lap after lap after lap until his mind was as clean as an abandoned shell.

4. Can you get head lice from leaves?

No.

5. How old is too old to wear sequin tank tops? Continue reading →

Season of stuff

/ jelizabeth / Leave a comment

Last night I couldn’t sleep, and so I watched Modern Family and then Hoarders via hulu. Even though our house is pretty neat, this was 2 am so of course I wondered if I am heading for a hoarding problem. There’s a basket of hand washables near the washer that I just can’t seem to get to, and on the kitchen counter I always have a 3 inch stack of mail I plan to re-read, which I keep sorting through and replenishing, so it always stays at that 3 inch height, never eliminated. In the basement are games and puzzles that haven’t been touched in years. On my bedside table are 6 books in play.

Plus, it’s Christmas, so even though Lydia, Grace, and I cleaned out our closets 2 weeks ago, I have brought an equivalent amount of new stuff into the house, currently in hiding and waiting to be wrapped and distributed. On the enclosed porch, which doubles as a winter refrigerator, are trays and trays of wrapped food and packages of paper goods for tonight’s party. There are poinsettias in the living room cluttering my sight line.

The Internet: a place for our shared hoarding, I think, whether information, ephemera, or wished-for holiday objects.

And still I dream of secret rooms.

More thoughts on this topic, much more of course, after Christmas.
—–

This useless objects Christmas tree is by another Jane, found on the style files via LikeCOOL via my brother Brian. The tree reminds me of the wonderful I Spy books by Walter Wick that Lydia and I were once obsessed with.

Candy store letdown

/ jelizabeth / 8 Comments

Its name is Sugar Land or Sugar Rush, and I never go in candy stores. Yet here I am, startled. This place is bigger in square footage than the pharmacy I worked in during high school and whiter and with more gleaming surfaces than a gym shower room.

There are bins and bins of candy. On the walls are candies hung in packages. The noise on the sound system is Usher or someone else as ridiculous. I swivel my head, hoping my eyes will magically land on what I walked in for. Instead, I see this girl, with a silver tinsel wig on, in a bob style with bangs. Mumble mumble, she says. It’s deafening in the candy store, so I hold my cupped hand up to my ear, the universal signal for “What?” She says, “CAN I HELP YOU?”

“Uh, yes,” I reply. “Do you have any chocolate Santas?”

She looks back at me quizzically, pauses, and then sweeps her glance across the walls and all the bins. “No,” she says, seeming surprised by her own word.

“No?” Perplexed, I need to be sure. Isn’t this a candy store? Isn’t this Christmas?

“No.” This time she is more certain.

I walk out. She does not try to interest me in anything else, and there is nothing else that I want.