In the recent UVM Quarterly (Fall 2011), this find: Rachel Comey, designer.
She’s become known for non-trendy designs in eye-catching prints that make for a hip librarian look.
Want, this and more. Ironically, no librarian (or teacher) could actually afford these clothes.
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Photograph by Kathy Minh Bach
My brother Michael has appointed himself the family archivist. He has been scanning old snapshots, giving them titles, and posting them on Facebook. I look at the images of myself, siblings, and parents from the 60s and 70s with wonder, and a pang.
My impulse is to say, “This is everything we were before [fill in the blank] happened.”
As I first stared at this image of me on my tricycle, I actually felt myself to be on the tricycle. I looked down at my chubby legs; I felt my rump on the curved seat. I remembered the time I rode the bike without sneakers and imagined that I felt my own innocent curiosity: I am going to do this because my mother said not to. My toes got stuck in one of the pedals, and my mother had to call Mr. Galaski from two houses away, because my father wasn’t home, to bring his tools to undo the pedal and get me out.
I stared at the image, too, from the perspective of today and had a feeling of looking at a picture of my own baby. The equation is as simple as this: I = my own baby. I even wanted to nibble on myself in the picture, as I wanted to nibble on my own children when they were infants and delicious.
I teared up, too. “This is everything I was before [fill in the blank] happened.”
Bountiful possibility. An almost-blank slate. Continue reading
Last spring a Christmas cactus died slowly from neglect in one of our bathrooms. In late May, in a flurry of post-semester cleaning and organizing, I moved the pot with the petrified soil and dessicated leaves out to the back steps. I wondered if the roots of the plant, soaked by whatever rain should fall, would sprout a new plant. And, if not, I could toss it into the nearby compost.
The pot hid among some other more viable planters all summer. It was only two weeks ago, when I brought in the plants in advance of the Halloween snow, that I noticed it was alive again. Not a new sprout — the old thing, alive.
I brought it to work and proceeded to lose track of it again. (Why do I do this?) Thursday night, on the way out the door for the three-day weekend, I reached up to water the Kalanchoe and Pothos and noticed that the cactus, hiding again behind the two bigger plants, had… blossomed.
Perhaps all the time I had believed myself to be making mistakes with the cactus I had been doing exactly what it needed, and what it didn’t.
Are those... could they be... buds?
Buds indeed.
One show stopper.
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.
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.
Lydia stood at the top of the steps and yelled down. “Mom, Brian just texted me and asked if we could take care of his cat this weekend.”
I yelled back, “Sure.”
A few seconds passed.
Lydia continued, “He wants to know if you’ll give him his injections.”
“Only if I can write about it,” I replied.
A few more seconds passed.
Lydia: “Of course.”
So I did. Link.
I can grow sunflowers and potatoes. I can propagate perennials. I can coax along a sapling into a tree. I’ve also had pretty good luck with cultivating infants into people.
I am unable to keep a front lawn alive.
On beautiful Sunday, I took the first step at solving this persistent problem, which has followed me to this house on Puddingstone Road from our old place on Davis. Following the soil sampling instructions, I dug up several 4″ cores of soil from various points on our front dirt patch, mixed them evenly, and put them aside to dry. Today I’ll mail a cup of this soil in a zipped plastic bag to the UMass Soil and Plant Tissue Testing Laboratory.
A diagnosis will be the first step toward getting to the bottom of this guessing game.
Years ago, Jimmy and I were quite taken by Barbara Damrosch‘s advice on gardening: It’s “very simple, really. You just have to learn to think like a plant.”
But thinking like a lawn? How does one do that? I, lawn-like, drink a lot of water but can barely remember to take my own vitamins. This may be connected to my failure to properly fertilize the lawn as needed.
Perhaps I want my lawn to be neglect-able, and it is very needy. I need to learn to think “needy,” to be high maintenance, which I think a lawn is.
I am willing to give it one last try. Why lawn? Why not a xeriscape? I do like that look, and two years ago I blanketed the front yard with sunflowers. But I like a little grass too.
And the thing about grass is that you don’t really need a design. You just plant it, and it becomes big green blank space.
Uncluttered, that’s what a lawn is.
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P.S. to my father, a lawn master. Dad, I know what you’re going to say, “Water.” I do. And, in fact, the lawn in the back yard is alive. Why does our front lawn die off — and I do mean die, not just go fallow — every year? Help.
This afternoon at Larz Anderson, up on the hill. Lydia next to me, memorizing something Shakespeare for homework. Grace nearby in the shade, reading a murder mystery. I, like a cat in the sun, with the new book love of my life: The Art of Fielding. And of course the coffee.
At some point, Lydia turning to me, “Happy October!”
rubber band heart, found by Grace on table, June 9
The ego can only bear so much.
On Sunday — skates tied, blood sugar checked (low), juice box drunk, and gloves on — I stood for a few minutes at the entrance to the Babson ice and watched the activity. There were about 8 young girls in shorts, heavy tights, cute sweatshirts, and lush ponytails jumping and turning and skating backwards with precision and verve. There were an equal number of adults in black track pants and black parkas standing near the boards, studying the girls. Occasionally, a girl would skate over to one of the adults and listen to instructions. Sometimes, the adult would demonstrate, beautifully, what s/he wanted the girl to do. The girl would do it.
And there was me. I stood there for a couple of minutes, hesitating. I had already paid my $30 to get on the ice for freestyle/practice time, and I had an appointment with Fred, who was already out there with a young girl, about halfway through the 80 minutes. I had arrived intending to practice. I stood there, losing my nerve.
As I told my friend Rosemary last week, as we stood in front of the shelf marked “Buddhism” in the Trident, my internal dialogue, for better or worse, is turned up pretty high. (I’ve heard this called “mind chatter.”) Sunday, as I stood at the gate to the Babson ice, I thought, “Why am I doing this? Nothing can come from it.”
“But I am doing this,” myself said to myself. I began.
As I skated, I was overcome with intense self-consciousness, and not of the good kind. I imagined myself getting in the other skaters’ way — the real skaters — and so I tried to stay out of their way. I imagined that one coach, a woman about my age, was giving me the hairy eyeball, as if to intimidate me off the ice.
I practiced the easy things, not wanting to make a mistake among the masters. I scolded myself. I propped up my ego by remembering something Grace once said when I was skating with her and confessed to doubts about my ambition. “Mom!” she said. “At least you’re out there and not sitting on the bleachers!” I practiced harder things.
I imagined again that hairy eyeball turned in my direction. I mentally constructed some believable excuses and apologies I would give to Fred when my appointment with him began.
Get a hold of yourself, Jane. Think other thoughts. Continue reading
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.
I stood at the reserves desk in the library where I could check out the assigned reading. This was in the fall of 1985; I was a junior in college; and this was before the age when text could be digitized and placed on the web. When professors assigned readings, students had to buy or borrow a physical copy of the text to read it.
Kathleen M., a senior who was passing through, saw me and walked over. She was funny, and I liked her. “What are you doing?” she asked me.
“Obviously, I am getting ready to do my reserve reading.”
“No one does the reserve reading,” she remarked. She smiled.
“What?” Wait a minute, I was thinking. She’s a brilliant student. (Kathleen went on to a top-tier law school.) Don’t all good students do all the reading? I did all the reading. It was killing me.
“Only read what you need to, is what I mean,” she said.
To me, reading meant starting at the cover, turning to the first page, reading the first word, and reading every word until I got to the last page — all the while taking notes — and doing this for every item on the professor’s list. Kathleen explained that I should look at the syllabus, see what was coming up next in class or exams or papers, and skim what seemed most relevant to what the professor was covering. “You can kinda tell from the syllabus,” she added.
The librarian returned, and I took the folders full of photocopied book chapters back to my table. I got out the syllabus and looked at lecture topics and exam and paper descriptions. Indeed, it was all right there, a set of clues as to what to read (and what to skim or even skip) embedded in the class schedule.
I didn’t read all the assigned reading word-for-word, that night or ever again. I figured out how to read what I needed to. This was a paradigm shift for someone who (a) loved (and still loves) to read and (b) took some pride in her academic duties.
Interestingly, I became a better student at that moment because it prompted me to start managing my work, as opposed to simply doing it, and I also believe I learned more. I also started talking more in class, which helped me learn more and become more visible.
What would my professors have thought, if they knew I was suddenly reading less and sometimes skipping reading assignments altogether? As a college teacher now, I know that my colleagues and I put together our syllabi with great care and think and talk about what readings are fundamental to the course. When I taught at Simmons College, I recall one long lunch date with a political science prof during which she spoke agonizingly about her students’ failure to do the reading. “You’re a writing teacher. You must have them read stuff,” she said. “How do I get my students to read?” Continue reading
leaf stitch word 