Oh, but it is

Portrait, II

The night we stay up until 4 am talking about all the things in the world, Mike tells us about his earliest memory, nine months old or maybe five. It doesn’t matter really.

What matters is this: 27 years ago, he stood in his crib, shook the side, thought, “this is what I do.” Mike has never thought like a child in his whole life, I’d wager.

The first time we meet, it is in a sweltering room on the first floor of the Hamilton Smith building at the University of New Hampshire. We are learning to teach 18 year olds how to write. When they tell us to write a bad story, we pair up, write nonsense together with Nate. Mike puts a horse in the story—later, I know this is for Jess, always for Jess.

I think he is a little weird. This is mostly right, but so am I, and it only takes me a few weeks to figure out that doesn’t matter.

What matters is this: Mike speaks no language, writes poems, holds things in his mind I’ve never dreamed up before.

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20th May 2013 | 3 notes

It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.

—

Gertrude Stein, qtd. in The Paris Wife, which I am reading at the suggestion of C.

(I’m still trying to think about what France didn’t take from me. I’ll let you know when I figure it out, okay?)

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20th May 2013 | 2 notes

Down Cellar on a Sunday. Chocolate caramel tartlets for a 1st birthday party coming up in June, made with home made butter caramels.

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19th May 2013 | 1 note

The beginning half of this video gives me anxiety, you guys, but its message redeems it in the end.

Awareness. If nothing else, try for awareness.

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18th May 2013 | 2 notes

All you smart girls, all you wanna do is play with animals.

—A man, to a woman, over Indian food.

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17th May 2013 | 6 notes

Five Things.

1. You guys, this week might have been utter shit, but at least this is the view I came home to late Friday night.

2. Solo Portsmouth walk through chain links, down by the harbor.

3. This week has been about dining well. Thursday night, after scallop ceviche and mango salsa, I made a variation on this rhubarb cake. So. Damn. Good.

4. Shavasana, interrupted by Clementine, who clearly needed petting more than I needed centering.

5. Pretty berries | pretty bowl

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16th May 2013 | 3 notes

On Movie Night Regrets

Scarlet: Was Gatsby amazing or just mediocre?
Me: It was worse than mediocre. I'm having a hard time reconciling with it, so I haven't blogged or talked about it.

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16th May 2013 | 3 notes

I’m currently reading Michael Pollan’s (I know, I have a problem…) The Botany of Desire. Though I have moved on to the chapter concerning the ever-illicit marijuana plant, I can’t stop thinking about tulips after reading his chapter on beauty and the flower. Similarly to Pollan, I believed tulips to be a fairly lame flower, in the grander scheme of things. Who needs tulips when you’ve got peonies and lilacs and roses and orchids and those crazy things that smell like rotting flesh? But it turns out tulips are far more diverse than the rows after rows of singular soldiers of primary colors you see in places like the Skagit Tulip Festival in Washington, or Holland. I love the one in the lower left, that looks like someone distressed its edges with a razorblade. You know you used to do that with your jeans in high school.

In any case, the book is excellent, and has me thinking not only about our relationship with the four plants Pollan discusses—the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato—but also about our human understandings of beauty, desire, sustenance, and control. Also, there’s lots of fascinating tidbits like the one here, on page 119. WHO KNEW that’s what brooms were for?!

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