Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
The hunger for sensation collapses into craving. The call seems to rise up from somewhere inside my flesh. It is deafening. My mouth obsesses. Sweets, yes, and the feel of pastry on the skin of my tongue. Nothing satisfies but the hook is in and pulls me from my desk, my book, my deeper pleasures. Continue reading “Pleasure Bank”
“Can bowls swim?” a question asked. I knew the answer they wanted was No. But bowls could float, even heavy bowls, if flat and large enough. The large, flat-bottomed bowl of an ocean liner, for instance. If Paul thought like that, too, he’d give the wrong answer. They meant small inanimate household bowls. Not the bowl of the deep ocean, say, holding currents, coral, plants, and creatures — itself floating on the earth’s liquid core of iron and nickel, whose swaying produces Earth’s magnetic field. Not the bowl of the earth floating — or, with so many life forms, was it swimming? — in space.
— Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love
It is all okay, just the way they say it is. By every measure, it is fine.
Rise weary. Shower off the animal, dress in unremarkable cloth. Speak in operation manual dialect. Meet only the eyes of the bus driver and snap straight the helicoid moment as you stride to claim your seat.
Write like a man, the librarian says. She scrubs her emails now. Each is an écorché peeled free of padding. Each correspondence a naked, muscled machine, its purpose laid bare.
Maybe we danced before.
Maybe we pretend we haven’t forgotten the petronella turn. Continue reading “Bowl Cut”
“Toss the word rain to her,” he says.
I do and she catches it
on the chin. Drenched, she climbs aboard
his shoulders and returns six drops
to the sky. A boy cheers
as his dog digs in the sand
for a smell long severed
from its host. Wild-eyed,
the two wear matching
grins on faces bright
enough to kill
or ignite
or like us
both. We try on hats
now that we see
we could have worn them
all along. Felt
and ribbon and feather, like the grandfathers
of other people whose everyday
days are like our holidays.
Our patriarchs wiped sweat
from their wrists with stained handkerchiefs
before their fingers slipped.
Some had one arm
from forgetting this. Some left our mothers
orphans even after returning intact
from war. We never hear the ones still here
say, It comes to this?
That’s some sick joke
because they only whisper such things
to a sagging ceiling, the most sympathetic ear
for miles. I toss the word blindness
next time
but no one sees it land.
Image: Justin Brown Durand, “careful now, don’t let me fall”
In the drawer, a tiny bundle of newsprint
waits for paper fingers
to untie its secrets. Inside
their China cabinet coffin,
glass eyes almost
see. I tilt
towards a convex wall
where iron and bronze
sculptures anchor those
who forget that the absence of corners
can lead to infinite revolutions. Continue reading “Unboxed Shadow (Hirshhorn)”
When you peel a peach, there’s a color right beneath the peach skin that’s hidden except for that very moment. It’s like there are all these little secrets moments in kitchen, and if you don’t pay attention to that, you’re missing so much in life.
— “In the Kitchen with Ruth Reichl,” New York Times, September 15, 2015
Safeway, as it happens, stocks every color of Jello except blue. The big package I bought earlier at Target should have been enough but half of it ended up on the wrong side of the saran wrap and the rest of it on the floor. The last thing I want to do is visit yet another store. As I stand here in the baking aisle, the kitchen’s engine idles. I can feel its thrum as it waits for my return.
I toss the unflavored Knox into my basket and hold out hope that I can find my stash of food coloring from last year.
Unpacking my groceries at home, I root around in the back of the cabinet and unearth the stained box. I’m relieved to discover the blue tube has a few drops left in it. This leaves me now with the small issue of taste — something I had rather avoided dealing with at the store. Continue reading “Sugar Spun”
The plants are multiplying. They need new pots which I don’t have so I find old ones and streak them with violet and gold. Brushes dry in the dishrack alongside the pizza cutter, the wooden spoons. Potting soil and paint collect in the veins of the floorboards.
Another flea-market dining table has joined our family of orphans and strays. On any given day, half the furniture is hidden under cover of old newsprint.
An explosion of of foliage in the quasi foyer threatens to displace the coats. It needs a haircut, a transplant, a new home, yet most of the walls here are too far from windows. The greenery plays musical shelves. If any one refrains from curling into brown husks, it quits the rotation and settles into its new role animating shadow. The prima donnas demanding full sun have to contend with Bug’s beads and colored pencils to stake out a spot near the sliding glass door.
Tonight, I will divide two into four and ferry several to the office on an inverted vacation. They will sip northern light from their perch on a woven throw draped over a low bookcase. Like the others, they will spill from their pots and climb the walls, feeling their way across the muted canvas. In the after hours of a 5th-floor shush, they’ll peel open and twine into inevitability.
Back home, the false starts of an amateur’s attempts at design clutter the walls and halls. At some point six or eight months in, I abandoned pretense and pushed the sofa to a nook along with the coffee table and lamps. The honey-drunk bamboo is clear for landing. At last, nothing is the everything. A person can puddle unobstructed all the way to the outermost window and maybe beyond. My son zooms his scooter in giant orbits around a living room which is every room.
From the corners, a fecund unfurling. We’ve shed the illusion of indoors. Tiny spiders loop from strands that dust the ceiling. My Mister and I lay in the bed and watch the epic journey of one who circles back on itself, forever beginning all over again. Its progress is like our own: A lovely conceit. A reason, anyway, to keep moving.
I sweep aside obstructions, machines and footstools, bigness, permanence. I own almost nothing I can’t lift on my own, nothing I can’t throw off the balcony when the time comes. In the space where things usually reside, now an invitation. A frame without a door. No lock, no knock, no fumbling for an excuse. I stretch my arms and almost brush the overgrown fronds of the philodendron. It was the first one, the one my Mister brought to welcome me home. No surprise that it’s the biggest. It has outgrown its pot. (“Out,” groans its spot.) The jade blades arch then bow like a suitor toward a patch of grass that springs from the opposite corner.
As them, us.
We expand to fill the space we inhabit. If we are wise, we clear the way for what we can’t stop anyway.
If we are ready, we live as if we’ve chosen what creeps in.
He asked, “What’s your style?”
Style. . . ?
“Decorating. Design. What do you like?”
“Um.” Catalog pages, gallery spaces, antique shops. It all fluttered and slipped around in my uncertain brain. Is Pottery Barn a style? If it is, it’s not mine. Bauhuas? Gothic? I don’t even have vocabulary for these things.
“Well, I have these friends. . .”
These friends. An couple of artist-writer-dancers, old as the hills. They live in a shambling D.C. house crammed with faded velvet chairs, books to the ceilings, creeping plants and instruments enough for a chamber orchestra. On the windowsills, dusty bottles jostle for light with the wire and stone treasures from Egypt and India. The thrum and jumble cascade out to the stone limits of the property. The back yard is a fairy garden. Tea lights and whirligigs, mismatched wrought iron chairs and labyrinthine shrubbery housing whole communities of pixies.
I tried to explain to him that this is what I envision for a home. I can’t quite wrap my mind around it, though, let alone my words. It seems so cluttered and non-functional, and anyway, how does a person decorate “bohemian”? You can’t find it on Amazon.com. It takes living along a certain edge, seeking-making-stumbling upon bits and bobs among the X-marked meanderings into the neverlands where treasure like that begins.
Who has time? Space? This is a condo, for Pete’s sake. Between the spider plants and the Japanese fishing buoys, where would a gal store her financial records? And let’s face it. There will be no trips to Morocco for a samovar and silk curtains anytime soon.
My style? Dorm-room cast-off on a Goodwill budget.
Five weeks in the place and clueless as to how to proceed, I attend to the basics. The scarred molding is out. With the help of a borrowed miter saw and a day off work, I’ve just about finished hammering in the new strips. Hooks are hung near every door. Kitchen is sorted. Bookcases and desk are all up in Bug’s room. Bathroom shelves hold the guest towels.
Progress is measurable but the yardstick is chilly to the touch. Form exists for function alone. It’s as if this home and I are on an extended first date. The interaction is all halted conversation and nervous tics.
Moving through the house like it’s a museum rather than canvas, I place each item an inch from the wall. I anchor nothing. The single photograph displayed — a shot of the Colorado sand dunes taken by a friend and hand-framed in rough wood — sits balanced on the mantle in a sort of half-squat. The bedroom walls beg for splash but every color seems wrong. The thought of choosing curtains paralyzes me so the hideous black ones left by the previous owner still scar my bedroom. Everywhere I look, bare space blinks back at me.
So? What’s your style?
Today, Bug and I made the trek over to Maryland to visit an old friend who has just landed here. Divorce and custody battles forced him into an 11th hour move over 500 miles to a place where he had no connections, no work, no place to live. All of this so he could be near his kids. He found the only decent apartment he could afford in their school district, signed the lease and unloaded his U-Haul. He’s been here a week.
I stepped into his place and fell open.
It was home.
Floor-to-ceiling kids’ paintings. Lush and spindly greenery spilling from every corner. Books and jumbled art and gorgeously scarred furniture. Wood and toys and color. Mason jars for water glasses. Everywhere, texture.
What’s your style?
Everywhere, life.
The boys played at perfect pitch. In between refereeing lego skirmishes, my friend and I talked easily. I nestled into overstuffed couch and felt rocked from all sides as if by the sea. Orientation, at last. Breath cracked open the closed place in my chest and light caught a corner of the treasure down in there.
When my kiddo and I landed back at home, I plopped him in the tub and started poking around. All of our art supplies and Bug’s drawings are still back at my folks’ house, but we had to have something. Where to begin? I pulled a wobbly shelf back into the living room. Playing around with angles, I gave it a home and unpacked books of poetry. I raised lights. I tucked away cable cords. After stories and songs, Bug conked out and I found my second wind. Perhaps my first? An old calendar of bright family photographs was crammed into the bottom of a drawer. I dug it out and started cutting.
I have no frames or picture hooks. I have no gallery pieces. But I have scissors. Colored paper. Thumb tacks. Inspiration.
I have a style. It’s pushing back out from its deep, sunless sleep. Taking my hands. Tacking the boat. Placing the brand. Claiming the place.
When are we no longer young?
I decline to order one for me. I watch as he catches a neon green spill falling down his cone. “Is this your favorite flavor, too?” He asks.
“Ben and Jerry’s has a mint cookie kind. Oh, it’s good. But it’s different than yours. White. It has these sort of Oreo chunks in it.”
“Mint chocolate chip is your favorite,” he says, catching another drop.
“Maybe. But you know what? When I was little, we scooped up snow from outside in the winter. We’d add strawberries and milk and mix it all up. Oh, man. That was dee-licious.”
“So, strawberry is your favorite?”
“Sometimes.” I tell him about turning the crank in my grandma’s Dallas back yard and the pockmarked peaches from her little tree. “Nothing better in the summer.” Then, my other grandparents, the Oklahoma folks. They always had a quart or two of Braum’s butter pecan in the deep freeze out in the garage. It was as hard as a rock and we’d have to wait for it to soften into that perfect, melty crunch.
On and on. The place in the Montgomery mall where it was always a scoop of chocolate in a cup with chocolate jimmies. Snickers bars churned into a monstrous carafe of soft-serv after waiting in a night-falling line at the window of Belt’s in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Green tea flavor, a diminutive scoop after sushi.
Bug is almost down to the soggy sugar cone. “But which is your favorite. I mean of these flavors, right here, today?”
Florida sun glints off the window of the froo-froo creamery. A Baskin Robbins would be run out of St. Pete’s if it dared show its face on the strip. This place even makes its own artisan truffles on a marble slab. “Maybe salted caramel. Or mascarpone. But they do have peach, so I don’t know. . .”
Bug sighs in defeat, sea-foam green lapping all around the edges of his face.
This is the choice. To own it all and also none of it. To claim a home base on changing terrain. We lay down roots and they slip free, like it or not, usually right at the moment we forget our stay is only temporary.
Bug wads up his napkin and tells me he does not like museums. Nonetheless, we toss the remains of our sticky mess and wander into the building with the black doors. From the entryway, we watch white heat turn sand to liquid to glass, then to the jade-rimmed elephant ear and the crimson explosion. Bug hangs back for a few beats but the Chihuly bowl with its azure whorls winks a little too brightly. He steps closer.
When do we become so rigid that we shatter completely? Do the bluster and dogma we imagine to be our eternal foes come to comprise us? I wonder if we reach a point when we can’t learn to love noise or inhabit silence when all we’ve known is the opposite.
When does it become too late to open?
My mother makes her way out from the exhibit into the gift shop to meet us. She has already been through and is ready for food.
“Let’s head out,” I say. “We can grab lunch and go straight back to the pool.”
Bug is lingering by a squat, floral oddity. “I want to go in and see,” he says. We hesitate. He has told me he is sick of art. That he is tired of walking. That all he wants is to swim. I am half a breath away from reminding him of this. Then something stills my tongue, though I’m not sure what. Maybe just that phantom trace of peach and pecan. Of long-ago chocolate.
Does my son really need me to fuse him to his claims? Sure, I pay lip service to the 31 flavors of favorites. Am I really ready to let him decide which now, which later? Which mood? Which self? No one needs fixing. No one needs to be unfixed, either. My boy can have his tastes, no matter if they are forever, fickle, or forgotten.
I glance at my mother, mindful of her energy levels. She shrugs. “I already bought a ticket. I’ll just take him through.” She pays the kid rate for him. He races in after her.
I sit and wait. I watch the film. They show how to make a sheet of glass from a melting cylinder trimmed up a perforation along the side. Geometry shifts. An object flattens into plane. Then, it lifts. Its bows. It catches sun. I once heard that if you find an old building somewhere out in the country with the original windows intact, the panes will measure thicker at the base than at the top. Glass is liquid even when it is not. We hold it firm and fit it into place. It melts away. It does not stay. Nothing does.
After, Bug shows me a roll of shots from the iPhone he has purloined from my mother. “See this one? I told grandma to pretend she’s making fireworks.” The photograph is a shadowland tinged cerulean. Mercury fronds reach skyward. My mother flares her hand and feigns a spell, her mouth widening in incantation and wonder. She is pyrokinetic. She is wizard. She changes right before my eyes.
My son wants to know what the plastic box contains. It is in his room on the dresser where I have stashed it in the hopes of a near-future move. We lift the lid and I show him the colored paper. The stack of card stock is a jumbled rainbow of hues. Inside the lid is pasted a stylized directive: Please place completed scrapbook pages here.
Bug reads it out loud slowly. “What does that mean?”
“The box was from our wedding,” I explain. “Our guests drew pictures for us so we could remember them.”
From the bottom, Bug fishes one of the blank pages left from that day. A goldenrod square is pasted onto a larger lavender piece. A tiny stamp in the center of the smaller frame reads, “Your photo will be here.”
“How?” Bug asks.
“Like this.” The scrapbooks are all in his room. Weddings, pregnancy, first tooth, first steps. Tee and I hug in faded sepia on the front of one. I pull it down and nestle with my son on his bed. “We made two books because we had so many creative wedding guests. One is for family and one is for friends. This is your family too, you know.”
We flip past all the announcements and shower invitations. In a save-the-date , a silhouette of Tee and me leaps against a Lake Michigan sunset. A handmade flower-petal paper sports its indigo raffia bow. The booklet from the wedding day slips around in a plastic sheath that protects the lyrics to James Taylor’s “How Sweet it Is” alongside the cowboy-hat story of our first meeting.
Someone had the bright idea to use one of the tabletop disposable cameras to capture a few shots of the scrapbooking table. A violet satin cloth is littered with stamps, stickers, pens. Everything is so very bright. Sunburnt guests brandish markers and grins. The daisies my friend planted months in advance pop from their hand-painted pots.
I point out cousins my son knows now as older. He has me read their wishes to us.
“Was I there?” He asks.
“You were the reason we were all there, but no. You weren’t born yet.”
He turns another page. “Nelson!” he cries. “He was there!”
“You know Nelson?”
“Of course,” Bug says. “He lives at Daddy’s house.”
Nelson. A stuffed plush banana slug from a trip to an Olympic Peninsula lodge was a key player in Tee’s and my courtship. Nelson was present at the third and final proposal. Sometime during the wedding reception, Tee snuck the slug out of his jacket pocket and propped him onto the cake table. Nelson’s big-eyed welcome is now a sunny flourish against our melting, blue sky confection.
Bug slips down from the bed and goes back over to the box of blanks. He pulls the lavender-and-gold card stock from the top and settles down at his desk.
“Are you going to make one?”
“Mmm-hmm,” he murmurs. He is already in the flow. He outlines the shape of a purple butterfly with his marker. A red flower. I let him draw for a few minutes as I turn back through the album. A few cards at the back sing out their happy wishes. The rooftop group shot with all of us jumping is a cascade of smiles. Grandparents, siblings, all so much younger. They glisten and wilt and whirl and bounce.
I try to feel sad but I just can’t tap sorrow. It was a gorgeous day. Tee and I were giddy. I couldn’t stop giggling as I walked down that makeshift aisle my mother rolled out on the grass from a bolt of rainbow upholstery fabric. The sunflowers arching behind fiancé and friend opened their delight to me. Happiness still pulses there, beating in a subdued major key.
“When you are done, baby, do you want me to find a picture of you to put on the page?”
He nods but does not turn, still bent to the task of making his garden come to life. “Yep. And then put it in the book.”
“Okay. We can make room for you in there.”
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
– Elie Wiesel
Bug creeps out of his bed and tiptoes into my room. “Mommy, I made twenty-eight bowls!” His eyes are far too bright for this ungodly hour. For the third time, I walk him back to his room and perch next to him on the bed. He has been drawing a Valentine’s Day picture. The pink and red markers are running to chalky streaks.
“You know it’s well past time for sleep, buddy.”
“I know, but see?” He starts to color in the legs of the lone person on the page, already forgetting why he called me in. Continue reading “Love before Love”
Shannon E. Williams 