The Season

It occurred to me recently that I'm somewhat of a season whore, by which I mean that my favorite season is whatever season it currently is. I love summer for Orcas Island and slow motion sunsets; spring (although I don't know if spring is ever my favorite) for the Pike Place Cheese Festival and the end of classes; winter for the crisp air and twinkle lights and snowy nights when the sky never really gets dark. I love them all, but right now fall, for its scarves and peppermint hot chocolate, its bare timber and the way it has of illuminating the beauty in decay, is pure, unadulterated perfection. 

I wrote a story once--well, it was really more of a short, untidy vignette--that I've entirely forgotten except for the very last scene. A mildly autistic man named Gus Honey (his name is just Gus, but everyone addresses him as "Gus, honey") is sitting in a cafe with his face pressed to the glass, watching leaves fall from a maple tree near the parking lot. At the booth next to his, a couple is fighting. Gus covers his ears and wonders what the world would be like if people were like leaves and became breathtakingly stunning right before they died.
I don't have all the kinks worked out in that story, and I may never, but it's beautiful to imagine that when our time comes to let go we do so gracefully, brilliantly, as the best possible versions of ourselves.

This picture on the left is of a Japanese maple tree in our yard--what my family calls the Lee Tree. When I was ten, my best friend's dad died of cancer. He was the best kind of man. Always smiling, always playing his guitar, calling me "Libby" and asking to see all my "boo-boos" which he would kiss, and of course the pain was always instantly gone. He was my second father, and I will ache for him every day for the rest of my life. After he died, my family planted a tree in his honor out our kitchen window. It has grown to around seven feet and is the first thing you see when you look up while washing dishes. Every autumn the leaves turn a radiant red and we collect a handful and mail them to my best friend's family. Watching the Lee Tree change with the season is undeniably my favorite part of fall. I like to think that it's Lee himself bringing the beauty, kissing each one of the leaves and making them blush.

Last weekend I went for a hike with my friend Ellen in St. Edwards State Park. The weather was blissful (see photo on the right) and the ground covering of leaves conveniently masked the muddiness of the trail from the past week's rain. The path wound down through the woods to shore of Lake Washington. There's something about fall in the Pacific Northwest--maybe it's simply the fact that we have it at all--that makes me endlessly grateful that I live here of all places in the world. I adore Australia (and may in fact move back there someday) but Seattle is constantly perfect in the way that very few things are.

STOMP

Last night my mom and I went out to dinner in Seattle with some friends, and then headed over to the Paramount to see STOMP. I really enjoy show titles that employ some exciting grammatical or punctuational quirk, so STOMP, with its lovely capslock typeface, scored big points before it even started.

I've seen the show twice before, and let me just say that I find very few things in this world more entertaining than watching six people use push brooms in a percussive manner. Seriously, these guys play everything: newspapers, plastic bags, paper cups with straws, basketballs, garbage cans, garbage can lids, steel sinks, tin cans, wooden poles, match boxes, giant inner tubes, metal cups full of water, plastic buckets, rubber tubing, ribbed plastic pipes, Snapple lids, pots and pans, even their own bodies. I heard them play in the KUOW studio on NPR last week and they were using coffee cups and lampshades. If you've never seen them (or if you're like me and could watch them for all of eternity without getting up to use the bathroom), check them out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu15Ou-jKM0.

Naturally, after watching these people turn themselves and common household items into musical instruments, my mom and I became determined to create a percussion group of our very own. This morning as I was doing the crossword I started tapping my pen on the newspaper and my mom chimed it by banging two apples together and sliding her foot in and out of her shoe. A little while ago I jammed to the melodious sound of scissors cutting plastic while my mom rattled a wine cork between her teeth. I have to admit that I was vaguely disappointed in the silence at work today (more than usual), having fallen asleep last night dreaming of the entire office breaking out in percussive hysteria--typing rhythmically on the keyboards and hanging up phones at perfectly timed intervals.

For your viewing pleasure I have included this link to a wee video of what happens when my mom and I are left unsupervised in the kitchen. I have titled the video "Gibby and I Get Our STOMP On." See if you can guess my favorite part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnqF4T23lpk

UPDATE: Unfortunately, I have a soul. The video is no longer accessible because my mom didn't like what she was wearing. Perhaps we'll do a revival tour in the near future--one that is mother-approved.

I thought you, my two loyal readers, might enjoy this exchange that took place after I'd put the aforementioned video onto my computer:

Me (walking into the kitchen beaming): So the bad news...is that there was an error every time I tried to post the video to my blog.

Mom: Then why are you smiling?

Me: Because the good news is that there was no error when I uploaded it to YouTube.

Mom: OH MY GOD, OLIVIA. I WOULD NEVER HAVE SAID YES TO THAT!

Me: Then it's a good thing I didn't ask you.

I am every mother's worst nightmare. 

(But look out, STOMP. We're comin' for ya.)

Poetry Corner Monday

I don't think I've posted this one yet. If I have, um, I meant to do that. It'll do you some good to read it more than once.

Being Early
by W.S. Merwin

When you were born 
I was a small child in a city
and even if somebody had brought me news of you
I would not have believed them

already I had seen an ape chained to the sun
with a bucket of water
I had heard bells calling from wooden towers
stone towers brick towers
I had seen blood coming through bandages
on a hand holding candy
and a shadow shining on green water
where tall birds were standing
and I knew the notes of street cars
and the smells of three rivers
and could have told you about all of them
if I had known you were there 

So That Happened

It has been brought to my attention (by me) that I rarely post photos anymore, and it must be dreadfully tedious (do I sound like a Jane Austen novel? That was my project for today!) to read my posts when they're so dense with words. Who does that? This week I will break up items in my list by inserting pictures of things I find amusing. You're welcome.

Killarney, Ireland (aka my future homeland)

 1. My cat loves melon. We've had a honeydew ripening on the counter for a few days, and yesterday my mom and I were betting on how much time would pass between her cutting into it and my cat wailing for a chunk. I guessed 15 seconds, my mom guessed a minute. She had barely stabbed the knife into the rind when Taffy, who was asleep in the middle of the dining room, perked her ears up. In less than seven seconds she was in the kitchen at my mom's feet. If only she could use those remarkable powers for good.

This is a painting by Frank Loudin, an artist featured prominently at Crow Valley Pottery on Orcas. One afternoon this summer I was hanging my laundry on the clothesline in the yard and my mom told me I looked like a Frank Loudin painting. It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.

 2. Today is a day that shall live in infamy as the day Olivia unwittingly gave her watch a bath in the washing machine, followed by a spin in the dryer, only to recover about half of it, in pieces, with the second hand still ticking. If you knew how much this watch and I have been through together, you would be weeping right now at its untimely (ha--get it?) death. I've lost metal links, the battery has died multiple times, and when I arrived in Australia last year the four had dislodged itself and was floating around in the face like a lost child at a carnival. RIP, dear watch. Time would have been nowhere as easily kept if it weren't for you.

This is, of course, entirely necessary. I love very few things in this world more than I love Huddy.

 3. Here's one from a while ago that I just found in my journal but realized I never posted: A couple months ago I went downstairs to find my dad eating at the kitchen table in nothing but a t-shirt and his underwear. I asked if he enjoyed eating without pants on, and he responded, "I don't know. I thought I'd try it out and see."

I should have posted this when I mentioned how images of baby porcupines never fail to brighten my spirits, but I wasn't smart enough to think of that. Just look at that face!

 4. My family has coined a sort of language, if you will, in regards to the enchiladas my mom makes for Michael's annual grape crush. These enchiladas, known in our household and among our friends as woman's single greatest contribution to the culinary world, are made by layering fried corn tortillas, red sauce, cheese, onions, lettuce, another tortilla, more sauce, cheese, onions, and lettuce, and a topped with a fried egg. This is the standard model, known in our house as the double-single (two layers, one egg). There is a variety of possibilities, though, from which people may choose based on their hunger level. We've known friends to have single-doubles or double-doubles. I myself have an interesting relationship with eggs--I find them vile and revolting unless hard-boiled or scrambled with so many toppings that you can't taste the egg--so I go for the double-zip.

     Now, if you ask any of our annual crush attendees, they'll tell you that it's generally ill-advised to take on more than a double-double because consuming another bite might send you to the brink of bursting. But one of Michael's friends, who'd been hard at work all evening, finished his double-double and followed that up with a single-single, thereby making his total for the night a triple-triple (which is, in our house, unprecedented). 

     This year for the first time ever we had enchilada leftovers the night after the party. Having heard about his friend's edible undertaking at the crush, Michael placed an order for a triple-triple--a straight-up triple-triple (three layers, three eggs) as opposed to his friend's collective triple-triple. After cleaning his plate, he pronounced himself the winner and texted his friends to gloat, writing something along the lines of "I just massacred a triple-triple!" One friend, famous in our house for referring to a slab of steak as "spotted owl rare but not unicorn rare," responded to Michael's text with two simple words: "Holy shit!" I cannot express to you how happy it still makes me that he knew exactly what Michael was talking about.

Thanks for tuning in this week. As my good friend GK says, "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."

Girl Seeks Southern Hemisphere

Or anywhere, really.

I am a total Bill Bryson freak.  At any given point in my life I'm in the process of "reading" at least two of his books. I use the term loosely mainly because I spend the same amount of time laughing at the words that I do looking at them. I'm currently reading Notes from a Small Island, and aside from giving me a violent, insatiable case of wanderlust, this book has boosted my determination to become a travel writer. You can't beat such nuggets of literary genius as this:

"The windows, I recalled, could be opened only by means of a long pole. About ten minutes after we arrived each morning, one subeditor so old he could barely hold a pencil would begin scraping his chair about in an effort to get some clearance from his desk. It would take him about an hour to get out of his chair, and another hour to shuffle the few feet to the window and finagle it open with the pole, and another hour to lean the pole against the wall and shuffle back to his desk. The instant he was reseated, the man who sat opposite him would bob up, stride over, bang the window shut with the pole, and return to his seat with a challenging look on his face, at which point the old boy would silently and stoically begin the chair-scraping process all over again. This went on every day for two years through all seasons.
     I never saw either of them do a lick of work. The older fellow couldn't, of course, because he spent all but a few moments of each day traveling to or from the window."

Or this: 

"Among many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, 'You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass.' Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows." 

I promise I had a point to this post when I started, but I think that point has long since escaped me. 

Hang tight for this week's overdue So That Happened. I'm working on it.

20 Ways to Make or Break My Day

If you ever need a surefire way to ruin my day, here is a list of things to do:

1. Make me call someone I don't know (or, like they love doing at work, make me call 30 someones I don't know).
2. Have the Sounders lose.
3. Get me excited about the most recent Wait Wait only to have me realize that I've already listened to it but iTunes seems to think I haven't.
4. Air a rerun of House instead of a new episode.
5. Make it super rainy so my bus is late getting into Seattle, thereby making me exactly on time to work rather than my usual six minutes early.
6. Utter the words "loan repayment."
7. Announce that Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler will never be together. 
8. Announce that Bones and Booth will never be together.
9. Announce that House and Cuddy will not stay together.
10. Tell me that I'll never go back to Melbourne. 

If after you've ruined my day you wish to make amends, here is what perks me up:

1. Pictures of baby porcupines.
2. Homemade applesauce.
3. Tea.
4. When my cat lets me pet her without "mistaking" my hand for a small rodent.
5. Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
6. Ira Glass, Peter Sagal, Carl Kasell, Paula Poundstone, Amy Dickinson, PJ O'Rourke, Tom Bodett, Adam Felber, Roxanne Roberts, Kiri O'Connor, Paul Provenza, Roy Blount Jr, Luke Burbank, Jen "Flash" Andrews, Garrison Keillor, Sue Scott, Tim Russell, Fred Newman, Terry Gross, Steve Inskeep. By themselves or in every possible combination.
7. Everything ever written by Bill Bryson.
8. Australian accents.
9. Indian accents.
10. Accents of any kind. 

Note: #s 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, and 10 in the first list cannot and will not be forgiven, no matter the extent to which you adhere to the second list.

Poetry Corner Monday

 You're probably rolling your eyes at my inclusion of yet another Ted Kooser poem, but this man writes perfection. Truly.

A Letter

By Ted Kooser

I have tried a dozen ways

to say those things

and have failed: how the moon 

with its bruises

climbs branch over branch

through the empty tree;

how the cool November dusk,

like a wind, has blown

these old gray houses up

against the darkness;

and what these things

have come to mean to me

without you. I raked the yard

this morning, and it rained

this afternoon. Tonight,

along the shiny street,

the bags of leaves--

wet-shouldered

but warm in their skins--

are huddled together, close

so close to life.