This room beneath the house in Upstate New York has an official title: "The Laundry Room." For two weeks now, ever since I landed here from Ireland, I've heard this title slipped into the chatter. "Oh, I left it in 'the laundry room.'" Or, "Just leave it there. I'll bring it down to 'the laundry' room later." This morning, I'm actually down here in this tiny room with its own door and a perfume-y smell and squat window. Through that window, the backyard snow looks a snow cap on a mountain that I have magically climbed. Today, the woman of the house, AKA, my American hostess, leans across from the left-hand machine--the one with the porthole window in the front--to the next machine. "When you're done, you just load your stuff into the dryer," she says. "But clean out the filter first; my daughter never does." Then she leaves, her bathrobe trailing behind her, because she still has to shower and go to work. Now, it's just me down here, in this silent, subterranean room with its own name and where I can push the buttons and where nobody has mentioned a backyard clothes line.
Manuel beckoned me closer to the plant, a Dieffenbachia like the one I’d been tending in my dining room for more than a decade, only this one was growing wild on the side of a road in the Costa Rican jungle, in a green and yellow grove with its brothers and sisters. He gestured, inviting me to look inside one of its unfurling leaves. I took a quick step forward and bent my head down where he pointed, then sharply straightened and stepped back again with a cry. “What is that - a mouse?” He grinned and shook his head. “It’s a bat.”
The cocoons have been fattening for weeks now. Vanilla lozenges of segmented fatty papery skin, they lie in a wide spiral on their woven bamboo tray on the side cabinets of wood so dry in this season, months from rain that I worry the delicate doors will splinter every time I close them. Under the cabinets the smooth shine of teak boards spans wall to wall connecting the dry slats layered one upon the other to connect floor to roof, above the hard earth. My husband’s mother’s house is built on solid stilts sunk so deep in the ground that the daily pounding of eight little feet back and forth as my children run from one end of the house to the other, laughing, shrieking in their games of tag and monster and hide and seek does nothing to rattle them.
1971. 22 years-old. Boyfriend gone south. Me in Maine. Drinking, smoking with strangers. Stuck in a house in the country. Hitch-hiking to work at a bar. Walking home after midnight. Hiding in the brush when a car cruised by. So no, it didn't seem "weird" when one day while I was walking down the road and a truckload of chickens went by and one fell at my feet and I picked it up and put it in my bag and went home and passed out until suddenly it's dawn and I'm sitting straight up in bed and the rooster on the chair next to me is crowing its heart out and with each wild, raucous note I see rainbows. Now THAT's weird.
This past Friday I met my son and his girlfriend at the University of New Mexico Art Museum for an opening called Push & Pull, featuring a number of abstract expressionists, with the main focus on work by Helen Frankenthaler. As we are walking through the exhibition, I’m drawn to sketches of bulls. These figures are familiar to me, not because I know these particular images but because I grew up near the border with Mexico and often went to Juárez with my family as a child. Posters of bull fights adorned our walls at home. I’m surprised to see that they are work by Elaine de Kooning. I’m further surprised to see that she taught at UNM in the late 1950s. The information card reveals that de Kooning was often driven to the bullfights in Juárez, which she loved, by one of her students, the poet Margaret Randall. My son’s girlfriend, an archivist at UNM’s Zimmerman Library, reveals she has recently completed a project that involved reading Randall’s email—collected with her papers there—for a book Randall is writing and that she will be credited for her work in the acknowledgements. I mention to my son that his paternal grandfather and one of his uncles, at age six, were once subjects of a de Kooning portrait. I’ve only seen a photograph of it. His girlfriend mentions that de Kooning also has papers at Zimmerman and maybe we can look for it or reference to it. We stop to enjoy the refreshments as we exit the exhibition. At a nearby table, a small elderly woman stands with a group who seem to be her friends. One is at the ready with a walker should she need it. Another says, “So, Margaret, you used to drive Elaine to Juárez.”
[It often feels like I inhabit a world of weird happenings, a bit like the world of the Jacques Tati film “Mon Oncle”, but today what is coming to mind is not weird, to me at least, but is along the unexpected line]
I was taking an advanced Animal Reiki (energy healing) and Teacher Training workshop with Kathleen Prasad at a beautiful animal sanctuary in California, BrightHaven. We had the opportunity to share Reiki with horses, cats, dogs, cows, geese, ducks, pigs and other animals, but one of my favorites was a mini-donkey named E.J. (short for Elton John. I felt a really special connection with him. On the second day of our training, we were asked to do a chanting exercise with the animals. I was trying, but I just felt like I wasn’t able to get my breath and my voice and the chanting to flow and connect. My anxiety around it wasn’t letting me find my center. The horses and E.J. had been in the shade to begin with, as it was hot. And they moved even a little further away. All of a sudden I felt a voice from E.J. saying “Don’t be afraid.” That simple clear message. I felt tears in my eyes, but also felt courage, and all of a sudden I was able to do the chant – I had found my voice! E.J. had sent me a healing. I felt connected with E.J. and all the horses, and with the wind, and the sky, with the warmth of the air, with the earth below me, with the trees blowing, and with all around me. So beautiful and so powerful. I thanked the animals, and felt such profound love and gratitude. Later on, what I found out about E.J. made the experience even more profound. Before he had been taken in by the sanctuary, he had been abused by humans, really treated badly. So it took him a long time to trust anyone and to really come into his own. I felt so humbled and honored to have received this message and this healing from him, a pathway to finding my own voice.
This morning, as I do most Wednesdays, I stop by the Adonis supermarket in Gatineau. The store is alive with the sights and smells of the foods I love -- olives from Spain and Italy; yogurt and baclava from Greece; cheese from France; hummus and baba ghanoush from Lebanon; dates from Palestine. At the meat counter, a boy points to a shelf and asks his mom, “what are those weird things in there?” “Offal,” she says. “Icky,” he says. I glance at the plastic-wrapped organ meats: liver and kidneys and hearts and tripe – all delicacies I have sampled at one time or other in my 75 years. But then I spot something I have never before seen in a supermarket: an intact brain showing both hemispheres, about the size of a yam. Pinkish in colour, the organ has blood trickling down the valleys between its ridges. The blood pools at the bottom of package. I am shocked and repulsed. I resist the impulse to abandon my shopping cart and leave. Later at home, I find a YouTube recipe for veal brain with parsley, garlic and capers. I cannot bring myself to watch it, so quickly turn off the TV. Why is it that eating the brain of animals is taboo for many carnivores like me who will happily chow down on other animal parts like the thymus gland or pancreas of a lamb (sweetbread)?
When Stephanie, my only aunt, died at age fifty in 1990 of L-Tryptophan poisoning, caused by the diet pill duo known as fen-phen, I hadn’t yet met Louie. It would take seventeen years for our paths to cross. And when they did, it didn’t take long for the conversation to drift to our histories, our childhoods, those formative years in elementary school shaped by the influence of beloved teachers. My girlfriend (now wife) and her sister, nearly inseparable in age, rattled off their favorites, their memories vivid. My own recollections were hazy; nine moves by the age of eleven, the consequence of a military father, had blurred my school days into a forgettable montage. Louie, the sister’s boyfriend, chimed in. Growing up in the same city where both my parents and I were born, he spoke of his cherished third-grade teacher: Miss Peszynski. The name hit me like a jolt. Peszynski? My blue eyes widened in disbelief. It wasn't a Smith, a Jones, a common name easily mistaken. I had to ask him to repeat it. You see, I was divorced then. My last name was different. Peszynski was my family name. And my aunt Stephanie? She was a teacher. The possibility, the sheer serendipity of it, sent a thrill through me. Could this be? It wasn't until I unearthed a faded photograph of her and me, taken before my high school graduation, carefully peeled from my mother's dusty album, that the truth emerged. Fifteen years before her tragic death, eight years after she'd stood at the front of that classroom, a beacon of knowledge for young minds like Louie's, my aunt's smile bloomed from the aged paper. He recognized her instantly, a ghost from his past made flesh again.
We were on the autobahn in Germany, zipping along heading somewhere I cannot recall, probably because of what happened. I had to pee and like every boyfriend before and after him, he objected to pulling off the road to let me go. I don’t recall what I said, but he relented and pulled over. I skittered into the bushes to take care of business but on the way out I spotted…a rubber girl. She was fully deflated (joke in poor taste could go here.)
“Hey Jim…..” I hollered toward the car. “Jiiiiiimmmm.”
Eventually he came.
“Look at this,” I said, pointing at the girl/toy as I attempted to flip her/it over.
“Don’t touch it,” he said, clearly disgusted.
“It’s just my foot,” I said, continuing to try to flip her/it. I just wanted to see her face.
We stood between the autobahn, cars and trucks speeding by, and the forest, looking at the flat, inflatable girl and each other.
This room beneath the house in Upstate New York has an official title: "The Laundry Room." For two weeks now, ever since I landed here from Ireland, I've heard this title slipped into the chatter. "Oh, I left it in 'the laundry room.'" Or, "Just leave it there. I'll bring it down to 'the laundry' room later." This morning, I'm actually down here in this tiny room with its own door and a perfume-y smell and squat window. Through that window, the backyard snow looks a snow cap on a mountain that I have magically climbed. Today, the woman of the house, AKA, my American hostess, leans across from the left-hand machine--the one with the porthole window in the front--to the next machine. "When you're done, you just load your stuff into the dryer," she says. "But clean out the filter first; my daughter never does." Then she leaves, her bathrobe trailing behind her, because she still has to shower and go to work. Now, it's just me down here, in this silent, subterranean room with its own name and where I can push the buttons and where nobody has mentioned a backyard clothes line.
Manuel beckoned me closer to the plant, a Dieffenbachia like the one I’d been tending in my dining room for more than a decade, only this one was growing wild on the side of a road in the Costa Rican jungle, in a green and yellow grove with its brothers and sisters. He gestured, inviting me to look inside one of its unfurling leaves. I took a quick step forward and bent my head down where he pointed, then sharply straightened and stepped back again with a cry. “What is that - a mouse?” He grinned and shook his head. “It’s a bat.”
First paragraph:
The cocoons have been fattening for weeks now. Vanilla lozenges of segmented fatty papery skin, they lie in a wide spiral on their woven bamboo tray on the side cabinets of wood so dry in this season, months from rain that I worry the delicate doors will splinter every time I close them. Under the cabinets the smooth shine of teak boards spans wall to wall connecting the dry slats layered one upon the other to connect floor to roof, above the hard earth. My husband’s mother’s house is built on solid stilts sunk so deep in the ground that the daily pounding of eight little feet back and forth as my children run from one end of the house to the other, laughing, shrieking in their games of tag and monster and hide and seek does nothing to rattle them.
1971. 22 years-old. Boyfriend gone south. Me in Maine. Drinking, smoking with strangers. Stuck in a house in the country. Hitch-hiking to work at a bar. Walking home after midnight. Hiding in the brush when a car cruised by. So no, it didn't seem "weird" when one day while I was walking down the road and a truckload of chickens went by and one fell at my feet and I picked it up and put it in my bag and went home and passed out until suddenly it's dawn and I'm sitting straight up in bed and the rooster on the chair next to me is crowing its heart out and with each wild, raucous note I see rainbows. Now THAT's weird.
This past Friday I met my son and his girlfriend at the University of New Mexico Art Museum for an opening called Push & Pull, featuring a number of abstract expressionists, with the main focus on work by Helen Frankenthaler. As we are walking through the exhibition, I’m drawn to sketches of bulls. These figures are familiar to me, not because I know these particular images but because I grew up near the border with Mexico and often went to Juárez with my family as a child. Posters of bull fights adorned our walls at home. I’m surprised to see that they are work by Elaine de Kooning. I’m further surprised to see that she taught at UNM in the late 1950s. The information card reveals that de Kooning was often driven to the bullfights in Juárez, which she loved, by one of her students, the poet Margaret Randall. My son’s girlfriend, an archivist at UNM’s Zimmerman Library, reveals she has recently completed a project that involved reading Randall’s email—collected with her papers there—for a book Randall is writing and that she will be credited for her work in the acknowledgements. I mention to my son that his paternal grandfather and one of his uncles, at age six, were once subjects of a de Kooning portrait. I’ve only seen a photograph of it. His girlfriend mentions that de Kooning also has papers at Zimmerman and maybe we can look for it or reference to it. We stop to enjoy the refreshments as we exit the exhibition. At a nearby table, a small elderly woman stands with a group who seem to be her friends. One is at the ready with a walker should she need it. Another says, “So, Margaret, you used to drive Elaine to Juárez.”
[It often feels like I inhabit a world of weird happenings, a bit like the world of the Jacques Tati film “Mon Oncle”, but today what is coming to mind is not weird, to me at least, but is along the unexpected line]
I was taking an advanced Animal Reiki (energy healing) and Teacher Training workshop with Kathleen Prasad at a beautiful animal sanctuary in California, BrightHaven. We had the opportunity to share Reiki with horses, cats, dogs, cows, geese, ducks, pigs and other animals, but one of my favorites was a mini-donkey named E.J. (short for Elton John. I felt a really special connection with him. On the second day of our training, we were asked to do a chanting exercise with the animals. I was trying, but I just felt like I wasn’t able to get my breath and my voice and the chanting to flow and connect. My anxiety around it wasn’t letting me find my center. The horses and E.J. had been in the shade to begin with, as it was hot. And they moved even a little further away. All of a sudden I felt a voice from E.J. saying “Don’t be afraid.” That simple clear message. I felt tears in my eyes, but also felt courage, and all of a sudden I was able to do the chant – I had found my voice! E.J. had sent me a healing. I felt connected with E.J. and all the horses, and with the wind, and the sky, with the warmth of the air, with the earth below me, with the trees blowing, and with all around me. So beautiful and so powerful. I thanked the animals, and felt such profound love and gratitude. Later on, what I found out about E.J. made the experience even more profound. Before he had been taken in by the sanctuary, he had been abused by humans, really treated badly. So it took him a long time to trust anyone and to really come into his own. I felt so humbled and honored to have received this message and this healing from him, a pathway to finding my own voice.
This morning, as I do most Wednesdays, I stop by the Adonis supermarket in Gatineau. The store is alive with the sights and smells of the foods I love -- olives from Spain and Italy; yogurt and baclava from Greece; cheese from France; hummus and baba ghanoush from Lebanon; dates from Palestine. At the meat counter, a boy points to a shelf and asks his mom, “what are those weird things in there?” “Offal,” she says. “Icky,” he says. I glance at the plastic-wrapped organ meats: liver and kidneys and hearts and tripe – all delicacies I have sampled at one time or other in my 75 years. But then I spot something I have never before seen in a supermarket: an intact brain showing both hemispheres, about the size of a yam. Pinkish in colour, the organ has blood trickling down the valleys between its ridges. The blood pools at the bottom of package. I am shocked and repulsed. I resist the impulse to abandon my shopping cart and leave. Later at home, I find a YouTube recipe for veal brain with parsley, garlic and capers. I cannot bring myself to watch it, so quickly turn off the TV. Why is it that eating the brain of animals is taboo for many carnivores like me who will happily chow down on other animal parts like the thymus gland or pancreas of a lamb (sweetbread)?
When Stephanie, my only aunt, died at age fifty in 1990 of L-Tryptophan poisoning, caused by the diet pill duo known as fen-phen, I hadn’t yet met Louie. It would take seventeen years for our paths to cross. And when they did, it didn’t take long for the conversation to drift to our histories, our childhoods, those formative years in elementary school shaped by the influence of beloved teachers. My girlfriend (now wife) and her sister, nearly inseparable in age, rattled off their favorites, their memories vivid. My own recollections were hazy; nine moves by the age of eleven, the consequence of a military father, had blurred my school days into a forgettable montage. Louie, the sister’s boyfriend, chimed in. Growing up in the same city where both my parents and I were born, he spoke of his cherished third-grade teacher: Miss Peszynski. The name hit me like a jolt. Peszynski? My blue eyes widened in disbelief. It wasn't a Smith, a Jones, a common name easily mistaken. I had to ask him to repeat it. You see, I was divorced then. My last name was different. Peszynski was my family name. And my aunt Stephanie? She was a teacher. The possibility, the sheer serendipity of it, sent a thrill through me. Could this be? It wasn't until I unearthed a faded photograph of her and me, taken before my high school graduation, carefully peeled from my mother's dusty album, that the truth emerged. Fifteen years before her tragic death, eight years after she'd stood at the front of that classroom, a beacon of knowledge for young minds like Louie's, my aunt's smile bloomed from the aged paper. He recognized her instantly, a ghost from his past made flesh again.
We were on the autobahn in Germany, zipping along heading somewhere I cannot recall, probably because of what happened. I had to pee and like every boyfriend before and after him, he objected to pulling off the road to let me go. I don’t recall what I said, but he relented and pulled over. I skittered into the bushes to take care of business but on the way out I spotted…a rubber girl. She was fully deflated (joke in poor taste could go here.)
“Hey Jim…..” I hollered toward the car. “Jiiiiiimmmm.”
Eventually he came.
“Look at this,” I said, pointing at the girl/toy as I attempted to flip her/it over.
“Don’t touch it,” he said, clearly disgusted.
“It’s just my foot,” I said, continuing to try to flip her/it. I just wanted to see her face.
We stood between the autobahn, cars and trucks speeding by, and the forest, looking at the flat, inflatable girl and each other.
Too bad it was 15 years before iPhones.