Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
Now let’s stop all this talking, and let it fill our ears
 
So were you happy? I was happy. You still happy? Yes, and you?
Then more kisses! Why’d we stop them, when a million seemed so few?
– Kris Delmhorst, “Galuppi Baldessare” on Strange Conversation
Prod until your fingers bleed.
Insist against the absent seam.
Claim hope
while you can
until you can’t
refuse
to know anymore.
It is
was
will always be
only
a wall.
They call it a little before 8:00pm. Another snow day, even if it doesn’t snow. I pull out a foam mattress. He shoves the coffee table into the middle of the room and wedges the easy chair next to it. “Do we need music?” I ask.
“Oh, yeah.” His eyes are as bright as meteors. Motion ripples up from his bones. He slides across the bamboo floor after the dog.
Pitbull. Shakira. Usher. Something from the pop radio station preset that rides with us on every car trip. The rhythm snakes into a hula-hoop, yanking my hips into orbit. The coils I stash deep in the balls of my feet spring free.
Outside, warm rain coats sidewalks that will freeze to glass by morning.
“Mom, look at this!” He does the wave, his legs spread. Shoulders dip-dip-roll from a torso that refuses a center. “And this!” He jumps, spinning, landing with his rear end poking left-left-right tracking the beat.
Watch out, my outfit’s ridiculous
In the club lookin’ so conspicuous
My arms are the sea, my core a spout. I spin around, poke my butt out.
He crosses his arms, squints, leans, nods. Suburban OG.
How ya like me now?
I jut out my chin. Defy.
He weaves his arms around around themselves. Casts the strands.
Take that, rewind it back
I thread a cocoon with mine. Split the husks.
Palms flash. Arms sweep. Spine curls. Hip scoops.
Li’l John got the beat that make your booty go
CLAP
Motion begets motion.
Mine follows his.
His follows beat follows pulse
follows urge
follows birth.
Face opens. Eyes streak
like voice across skin.
“Like this! Do it like this!” He cries.
I do.
I do it just like this.
The dog’s anxiety has escalated to self-harm. She’s not burning herself with cigarettes, although once her toes can work the lighter, all bets are off. For now, her injuries are of the indirect variety. Her daylong bouts of howling shred her throat, leaving her hoarse and coughing through the evening. Between yelps, she thrusts her head repeatedly against her crate, bending the bars and tearing strips of flesh off her snout and cheeks. We come home to bleeding gashes and hysteria.
The vet is tapering her off one prescription and starting her on another. We have the number of an animal behaviorist who specializes in unique temperaments. New approaches could take several weeks to sort out, and new behavior far longer to establish.
At the beginning of the highest pressure work month I’ve faced in five years, I’m now the proud owner of a dog that can’t be left alone. Continue reading “15. Things I Can Hazard: Deep Fat Frying”
Is it
Honest mistake
or strategic play?
Miscalculation
or careful calculus?
Oversight
or bullseye?
Am I
Power
or pity?
Bristle
or breath?
Ram
or chump? Continue reading “14. Things I Can Stomach: 17 Hours”
Wets:
Dries:
Mix up all the wet stuff. Then mix up all the dry stuff. Add dries to wets and combine thoroughly. Shape into walnut-sized balls, roll in sugar, and place on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 for 9-11 minutes.
Yum!
The phone pings. Almost there. Come out and help.
He pushes his bare feet into sneakers and doesn’t bother to tie them. Outside, she pulls past in her father’s SUV, shoots a U in the street, and comes to a stop at the curb. The afternoon is warmer than it should be. The last crusted mounds of snow cling to the shadows under the eaves. Everything else is soft again. Somewhere close, a bird sings and sings.
“Help with what?” He calls. She steps out and goes around back to open the hatch. He squishes across the grass and down the driveway. Smirking a little out of the side of her face, she leans towards him without turning. She is busy shoving something sideways in the cargo area. He kisses the exposed cheek.
Inside the car, blue and brown plaid cushions flop forward. She tugs too hard at a wooden foot and one of the pillows escapes. He grabs it before it hits the damp street. The upholstered monstrosity is jammed up against the ceiling of the car. He stuffs the cushion in by the window and fits his hands around the back. She urges the front feet forward. It twists just enough and slides out in one smooth motion.
They stand there together holding the two ends of the chair and glance at each other. She cracks a grin. He begins walking backward up the driveway and she wobbles along.
“You bought me a chair?”
“No,” she huffs. “Hold on.” She sets down her end, adjusts her grip, and picks it back up. “I bought me a chair.”
“Shouldn’t I be meeting you at your house to do this, then?”
It is too wide for the door when they go through straight. They slow, back up, tilt the top. He guides it at an angle. The bottom corner catches on the door frame. He pulls without realizing it’s caught and she lets out a little yelp. The wooden foot has gashed the molding.
“Oh gosh, I’m sorry.”
He laughs. “You should be.” He steps over a pile of shoes and nudges aside a plastic bin of sports gear. The lid topples off and he almost slips on it. “You’ve comprised the integrity of this meticulously maintained home.” Once inside, they set the chair down in the narrow foyer. Reaching around, he pulls her into to the corner where he’s pinned and then folds her into a hug. Even though the sky has been clear, her hair smells like rain. “I’m on strike until you give me a clue. Am I storing this thing for you? What’s the deal?”
She leans back a little and warms her fingers on his bristled cheeks. She looks at him. “Hi,” she says.
He grins. “Hi.”
“Come here,” she says as she breaks free. She clambers over the chair and up the stairs. At the end of the hall, she clicks on the light to his room. The cat leaps up from a pile of laundry and darts past their legs. “It’s only me, dingbat,” she hollers. She walks around to the far side of his bed and pushes at the mattress. It scoots a few inches closer to the door. The she twists open the blinds on the small window behind her and muddy February light trickles into the room.
The corner breathes wider as she opens her arms into it.
“Here,” she says.
“You bought a chair for my room.”
“Yeah. But also, I bought a chair for my room.”
He shakes his head. Smiling but only halfway.
“This,” she says. She traces the small corner, its emptiness around her, with her hands. “This is my room.”
“And your chair.”
She shrugs and her face slides into and back out of one of its funhouse distortions, quick as a blink. She glances down and touches her fingers to the windowsill. A draft chills the wooden lip. “A place to write,” she says quickly. She hasn’t looked back up. “ReStore had this sort of side table, too. It’s really small and I’d like to sand it down. You wouldn’t believe how good a deal –”
“That’s so presumptuous,” he says. Now she looks up and her eyes register this blow. But he smiles. “I like it. I like that you presume. I want you to.” He starts to step around and stops a few feet short of her. “Can I come in?”
She lifts her hand from the windowsill and laces her fingers together. “Sure,” she says. “But take your shoes off. I just moved in and I want to keep things nice.”
He steps beside her and they stand leaning into each other, gazing out at the room. “It’s cozy in here,” he says.
“Isn’t it the perfect size for me? It took me a long time to find just the right place.”
His hand is on the small of her back. He feels her arch her spine into his touch. “How long do you think you’ll stay?”
She turns to to look up at him. His glasses are cocked a little on his nose and she straightens them. “The landlord hasn’t asked for a long-term lease. He’s letting me do this month-to-month.”
“He sounds like an idiot.”
“Oh, he is. But he’s good with a wrench.” She drops her voice. “Also, he’s sexy as shit.”
He groans and bends her back to kiss her once, hard. Then, into her hair, he whispers, “That is one ugly chair.”
She laughs and pulls away. “Well, good thing it’s not yours.”
“You’re crazy.” He takes her hand and leads her towards the hall. “Let’s see if we can make that monster fit.”
When you find $20 in your jeans you forgot was there, it’s win. Even if you don’t believe in karma, luck, or any other breed of metaphysical sentience, your rationality clocks out for its afternoon break. Someone out there has pinned a blue ribbon to your chest and given you a thump on the back. “Today, you get the prize.”
Why, you might ask?
“Oh, just because you’re you. And you deserve it. Let’s leave it at that.”
There’s a bounce in your bones when you stroll out the door. Continue reading “10. Things I Can Find: Riches”
Three weeks makes the difference. Twenty days of walking past the 7-11 with my own coffee has settled me into a habit of ignoring temptation. The devil and angel are no longer battling it out for my attention and my cash.
To consistently stop (or start) doing something for about a month seems to be what it takes to erase the pesky decision point and establish a new routine. This applies well beyond money. Take the stairs, stop playing brainless games on the phone, speak an affirmation, no sweets after 8pm. It’s not necessary to waste brain space considering the alternative. The new way is just The Way.
In two days, the financial fast ends. The exercise has worked wonders in our little family. Friends came for dinner one weekend and for board games another, giving us an excuse to pretty up our home instead of going out. On our quieter evenings, Bug and I read together and made art. The credit card bill has never been so low.
Tonight, with spending tamed for the time being, I dare to tackle the dreaded late winter chore: installing Turbo Tax.
Yep, this is Friday night in our rock-n-roll household.
At two hours past bedtime, Bug is still playing Minecraft on the couch. Meanwhile, the software whirs on my computer, masticating numbers and spitting out financial data with about as much compassion as a bathroom scale. I sip chamomile tea and brace myself for the blow.
Which turns out to be a sweet nothing.
For this odd, impossible moment, we have a clean bill of health.
The numbers have to spin and calculate two or three more times before I believe them. It doesn’t compute. It’s Tee’s year to name our boy both as a dependent and as a child care expense (tax code is a strange tongue for speaking human worth), so he’ll be absent from my return. This should mean I owe big money. I have to cut a sizable check each alternating year even though my salary is already stretched so thin, you can see the writing on the Goodwill tags.
This year, Turbo Tax tells me we may end up with an actual refund. Ten bucks or so, but still.
Event the slowest learners stumble into awareness eventually, so long as they keep plugging away. Five years into this single-parent deal, and I’m starting to figure a few things out.
Apparently, owning a condo means something other than crippling mortgage payments and neighbors reorganizing their anvils at 1:00 in the morning. It comes as a shock to exactly no one but me that mortgage interest is deductible. Sure, the bank makes off like a mob boss with a bag full of interest each month, but enduring the extortion means a smidgen of year-end relief in the form of a small credit back to moi.
Then we’re looking at the retirement account. This year, my income is higher than it’s ever been in my life (which isn’t saying much). I took on a few teaching gigs and an extra set of tasks at work, negotiating a temporary bump in pay. As December rolled around, I remembered it was Tee’s year to claim our boy, so I sent the paperwork to HR to take my entire salary for two pay periods and dumped it into pre-tax retirement. I came home and gritted my teeth as I wrote out a check with too many zeros and put it my traditional IRA.
This shell game wouldn’t have been possible without the few thousand liquid bucks chilling in my checking account. This is where the financial fast — and frugality in general — makes its mark. Forgo a takeout pizza here, a movie ticket there. . . In my non-child-claiming tax years, the spare change adds up and can land with a little weight in my retirement account. Thrift allows me to stockpile not only the upfront dollars but the deferred cash I would have had to pay in taxes on a higher income.
Sure, these scarily big deposits took a bite out of my checking account. But the pain paid off, quite literally. A lower income figure on my W-2 translated into a tax savings of nearly $2000. That’s a couple thousand bucks I don’t have to hand it over to the IRS. Instead, I stash it under my future self’s mattress. She’s breathing a bit easier now.
She even sends me a thank-you note.
With year-end paperwork all around, I slice open the statements for my personal IRA and my employer’s retirement plan. Another tilting moment finds me re-reading the numbers printed three and then four times. Added together, these accounts hold a measure of security that I hadn’t allowed myself to imagine. Not this year, not ever. My future self grins as I blink and turn it over in my hands.
This number — my number — is one that would make your average 41-year-old professional cringe, especially one with looming college costs and no spouse to share the pain. It’s a modest number at best. Hell, it’s not even a fixed number. 2014 was a good year for the stock market, and we all remember 2007 all too well. I won’t be kicking back anytime soon.
That said, now this:
Wow.
This lovely, round, many-figured number, planted right at the spot I’d tilled with all my anxiety? It is a marvel. If I retire today, I might be able to live about three years on that little plot. But I don’t have to retire today. The number and I, we have time to expand, to compound.
This number didn’t just fall from the sky. It is a nourished by habits. It is miles of walking instead of driving, months of Friday nights at home making pizza with my son, yards of outdated fashion hanging in my closet. This number is planted in rich soil. It drinks intention. I get to keep feeding it with thrift and care, each watering a small gift to the someday me.
She is watching. She welcomes what grows here.
She is what grows here.
Choose work
not body.
Commit to the quiet
desire.
Commit this small
suicide.
Shannon E. Williams 