Water

There was once a time when I was deathly afraid of water.  Lake water, particularly.  The dark depth of it, the squish of the shallow beds, the squirming, slithering creatures I couldn't see.  I remember when Madeline and I were just old enough to take the old canoe out to the peninsula on our own.  We'd wake with the sun, throw the sheets off our bare legs, pack a lunch of pickles and string cheese, steal our sisters' sunglasses and dark tanning oil, and slip quietly off into the water.  Our canoe, filled with innocence and penny toads, muddy bare feet and summery secrets, collided with the peninsula's shore.  Madeline would peel of all of her clothes down to her swim suit and jump out, tying our vessel to an unexpecting tree branch.  She'd plunge her toes deep into the muck, and search around to find skipping stones.  I stayed in the canoe, leaning over the edge, running my fingertips along the top of a body of my biggest fear.  I kept myself busy braiding my bleached hair into tiny braids, organizing the shells Madeline tossed in by size, color, magical capability.  She'd splash me, throw seaweed at me, squeeze her nose and make me count how many seconds she could hold her breath underwater. I squirmed when she'd catch tadpoles and hold them in the pool her cupped hands made, jumped back when she'd hold a crawdaddy between her fingers.

Eventually, I got over my fear of water.  But I miss it.  Now I'm afraid of bigger things... like confrontation, or loss of senses.

The Cottage

All of the trinkets, all of the sayings on the wall that I was once too young to read, all of the tattered children's books tucked on shelves, coloring books tucked in drawers, animal sculls stuck on wreaths, little notes and ancient photos... they're all. still. here.  The slightly sandy carpet and the flowered chairs, the hats hanging in the front bathroom, all of which we promptly tried on. The driftwood - all the driftwood in it's tangled shapes, with it's ponderous facial expressions.  I'm taken so far back - farther back than I've gone in a while.  And they are all of a sudden still here too.  On the white chairs, sitting on the beach, laughing together and waiting for us all to swim back from the second sandbar.  

I walked around in the dusk light trying to find her memory stone under the brush, kicking leaves aside with my feet.  Panicky after a while, like in a bad dream where the light was quickly fading, I eventually found it had been moved years ago when the old piece of property was sold.  Now it's near the swing set, where we used to give each other underdogs and try to make it all the way around the pole.  When I found it, Weston walked over, set one of the little ceramic angels upright, and put his arms around me.  When I found it, I felt better. 

We ate Jack's pizza, drank beers from Central Waters Brewery, listened to Fleetwood Mac on the portable CD player, and read from the 1998 New Yorker Cartoon book.  He said that he realized why I like 70's-style decor so much.  I smiled.  He talked about how he appreciated Lake Michigan a little more than he ever has.  Here, you have to give the lake some attention.  Here, like on an ocean, you have to slow down and look at everything.  The dune grass, the wicker cups in the cabinets, the made bunkbeds.  Everything.

Farewell to the Animal House

We first moved in to the 120-year-old red stone house in January, the acre lawn in front of it white with snow.  To welcome us, the steam radiators banged, hissed, and clanged.  The basement, dark and dank, seemed to breathe upward into the house.  Faded orange and green wallpaper from the 1940’s led through the foyer and up the spiral staircase into the second floor.  Nobody had lived here for at least a year.  The rooms echoed as we placed boxes in them, books in the dining room, paintings in the living room, a few pots and pans in the pantry.  Upstairs, we couldn’t decide which of the three rooms to sleep in. There were too many rooms to fill up with our few belongings, but the house filled up soon enough on its own.  

The first time I did laundry in the basement, as I fished the last pair of socks and boxers from the bottom of the washing machine, I found a dead bat, wet and clean and folded peacefully among our clothes.  Another one appeared in a bag of salt for the driveway, and a few more, these ones very alive, could be heard making love under our staircase while we ate dinner.  

The expected spider here and there reminded us of the house’s age, and of our location under tall trees and vast stretches of grass.  The cold feeling and slight awareness of ghosts began accompanying me as I placed the dishes into the cabinets.  I assumed that in a house this old, there must be visitors from the afterworld, and I found them rather friendly.  Invisible company while I was alone for hours on end in this quiet winter in this enormous house.

When the weather started to get warmer, the ants arrived.  We came downstairs to thousands of them, following one another in perfect lines, coming from holes in the walls we hadn’t noticed before, across the kitchen floor, up the sides of the cupboards, in the deep sink.  So, we cleaned up all of our crumbs and wiped down all of our countertops, and crossed our fingers.  The next morning, the sun shone on even more thin black lines, moving quickly and criss-crossing the white surfaces of the kitchen.  Eventually, we busted them all with boric acid, but now our kitchen seems so … empty. 

And then, the animals we became, when a spring thunderstorm would wrap itself around us, wet, loud and crashing.  When we were slowly surrounded by night and darkness, when we were slowly surrounded by our own beasts, crawling out from within, our real selves falling to pieces like shedding fur or molted skin.  At times, it was like looking into a mirror side by side, finally seeing our reflections.  Those times are gone now.  They were necessary, to tuck into the pockets of our relationship, to read in past diaries when we’re older.

With the onset of summer came our next guest: the woodchuck.  Weston found him under the front porch while gardening in the yard. He aptly named him Woody, and though I have never seen him, and fear the Dickens might be scared right out of me if I do, I know he’s still there, drinking last sips from empty PBR cans behind the lattice and watching out for intruders.    

Amber dropped the kittens off for a weekend while she was away.  One black one, Lucy, and one gray one, Charlie.  Someone else apparently named them after my cousins.  We tried to contain them in the library, a big space they could roam and play and read Harry Potter at their leisure.  Within a half hour, though, they escaped, wanting desperately to be near us, wanting desperately to explore.  Attacking one another every chance they got.  Attacking our noses with the smell of their litter box.

And finally, as we begin to take down the maps from the walls, fill boxes with books, and look around at the traces of the life that we’ve had here, we had one last four-legged guest.  We arrived home one Sunday evening to a rabbit, lounging in our living room.  I didn’t believe Weston when he told me, but then I heard the skittering of paws on our hallway floor, and found tiny bits of scat all around the house.  A trail of where he’d been all day, depositing little hints that he’d been in the pantry, the kitchen, on the couch, down the stairs of the basement.  We got him out the humane way, through the cellar door back into wild world where he belongs, with all the other animals that might eventually knock on these doors or slip through the cracks in the inviting walls.  Unfortunately, we won’t be here to greet them.

Ancient Footskin

It happened on a Saturday in June, about 2:00pm, on a strawberry farm in Fairfax, Vermont.  Weston and I had been commissioned to help our friend Corbett scrape, chisel, and brush at an archaeological dig site he and some of his students have been working on for the last 2 years.  Corbett's girlfriend, Maggie, and their dog Josie had come along too. They had found three fire pits among fields of Swiss chard and romaine, buried 2 feet below the worked soil.  They knew the pits belonged to the Abenaki tribes, and they knew the last of the coals of the fires had gone out nearly 2,000 years ago, right around the turn of the first millennium. 

We knelt barefoot next to one of the pits, dug out in a perfect square (3 feet by 3 feet in diameter), methodically scraping the top of the mud - or "Chocolate" as Corbett called it - until we got to black.  Black being the coal, the coal being the remnants of a meal cooked hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years ago.  We scraped while Corbett told us the history of the world, as slowly and as meticulously as our blades were moving across the ancient ground.  He started with 4,000 BC, ("When there were two miles of ice over our heads"), and went from there, in what seemed like 10  year increments.  As the afternoon sun beat down on my back, my sweat dripped into the pit, and I was fascinated at how much modern man knew, and also at how much we still don't know.  Here, we were looking for bits of discarded seeds or animal bones or tools that might tell us more about the lives of the original people of Vermont, back when there weren't state lines or political leanings or the Kardashians.  Just food, shelter, and survival. 

I took a break when there was a pause in the story of our earth's history (probably around 400 BC), and went behind Corbett's truck to pee.  Josie was happy to have the company; she had been tied up to the truck all afternoon.  When I started walking back through the fields to the pit, Maggie let out a piercing squeal.  I watched as everyone gathered around to see what she had sifted out of the soil.  Corbett looked fascinated, pulling and tugging on something small in his hands.  When I finally returned to the site, they had gone back to work. 

"It looked like someone had left a thumb print," Maggie told me, excited. "It was the perfect cut-out."  After being significantly grossed out, the archaeologists tossed the piece of skin into the lettuce rows, surely shaken by the strangeness of the find.  Corbett told us that if they found any part of a homo sapien, they'd have to pack up their shovels and go home.  It's illegal to dig on Native American burial grounds.  Things were quiet for the rest of the afternoon.  Though we hadn't found a scull or a recognizable human remain, we still felt a blanket of silence come over us as we realized that real people, people with forefingers and thumbs, actually existed here, so long ago.

We drove home after a couple of hours with dirt stuck in all of our pores and redness from the sun spreading across our shoulders.  We ate strawberries that we had picked and listened to Crosby, Stills & Nash, not talking much still. When we got home, I took a shower right away to wash the grime from off my hands and my feet, barely able to stand from exhaustion.  I had to sit on the edge of the tub to wash my feet, and as I scrubbed I felt something odd and looked down.  On the ball of my foot, there was a perfect circle missing just below my big toe.  An old blister from a few weeks ago.  A new artifact, tossed into the romaine leaves. 

Gator Jerky

We took the day off from Disney World, traded amusement parks for a State Park: from 4D ride to canoe.  At Wekiwa Springs, we were on the look out for wildlife.  Alligators, specifically.  As we paddled slowly along the river, canopied in Spanish moss, we saw mangy swamp birds, mating dragonflies, bullfrogs, red-bellied cooters, and loud Memorial Day revelers, but no gators.  When the rain began to fill our vessel we decided to turn upstream and drive back to Orlando. 

Just before Kissimmee, on Route 4, we passed two hand-written signs that shouted “GATOR JERKY” in big, bold capitals.  We figured if we couldn’t see them in the wild, the least we could do was eat them.  We pulled over to the side of the highway where a rusty blue pickup truck had parked, ass-out, under an overpass.  Rainbow-striped umbrellas gave the contents of the bed shade, and a woman with a few teeth missing grinned at us as we approached, cars zooming past.  She offered us a sample of the jerky right away, knowing that this was why we were here: two pasty tourists looking for an off-the-beaten-path Florida experience.  I was afraid to try it, so I stalled by asking how they caught the gators.  Weston was already munching.

“His uncle does it.” She pointed behind her at a man sitting with his tattooed legs dangling out the passenger door.  He was smoking a fat cigar.  “We give him a six pack of beer, he takes his airboat out on the St. John River, gets drunk, and comes back with ‘em.”  I took a bite, and it tasted, well, like jerky.  “I don’t get involved with the process,” she flashes her half empty smile again.  “I just sell it.”  She offered us a package – a Ziploc of jerky and a watermelon, but we told her we were just here for the meat.  I handed her a ten-dollar bill and we kicked dust back onto the highway.

Feeling good, like we had had an authentic gator experience, we munched on the jerky and turned up the base-heavy Cuban tunes on the radio.  A few bites in, Weston turned to me.  “This is beef jerky.”  Sure enough, it was a waxy, dark, salty meat straight out of a convenient store bag and repackaged for our willingness and gullibility. 

Weston immediately called the Kissimmee police to report the crime, not about to get jerked around.  I kept eating it.  

Fort Allen Park, Portland

Pine needles carpeting a ceiling made of three pine trees, their old homes that dropped them – set them free. Displaced drifters laying and looking longingly upward at their home. The salt in the wind is displaced - it used to be in the water. I breathe in the smell of sun, pine, dirt and sea. The rocks on the beach are displaced – they used to be part of a formation deep within the sea or high up on a mountain. A displaced seagull walks upon these rocks, not because he’s away from home, but because he’s home. And you can feel that way there too.

The smell of shit surprises me, makes me wonder if there is a port-a-potty nearby or if a displaced person without a home has used the park as their uninviting toilet. The seaweed sunbathing at the edge of the waves found a new home here at low tide, and is ready to be swept away, displaced but not forgotten, when the tide comes back to carry it away. This is where I feel most calm. Alone in a park, alone with the wind and the water and my wandering, haphazard thoughts. Each person in the park - a woman on a mat doing yoga with the bobbing boats as audience, a man jogging, an old couple making out, (yes, making out), and a young boy walking his enormous mastiff – each of them with thoughts whirling around their heads, each of them happy it’s Friday.

I count 54 boats tied to buoys, 54 boats with bright masts and lolling sterns, resting after long rides, or anticipating their next trip. A man in a Red Sox t-shirt rows towards land on his paint-chipped dinghy. The paddles dip and slide, dip, and slide across the waves, through the moving dark blue water. He paddles left a little and I see an old man in front of him, bending over the side of the boat to see what is below, how far down they’d be if they jumped in, his father probably. A musty, thick cloth lines the top of their small boat. Dad pulls out fishing gear while his son pulls in the boat, his hat backwards, his shoes topsiders. Dad takes his hat off and wipes his brow. He replaces his hat and takes a moment to consider the water. He’s happy to have spent the day with his son, happy that his son has told him that he’s going to propose to Amanda. Happy the sun is up, and his back’s not bothering him. His son backs up to latch the boat onto the hitch. Their shoes slide along the seaweed, but they’ve done this before. Back before the son went away, back before everything was moved around, displaced, changed. They drive away without a look back, leaving nothing but the waves to move forward and back, forward and back, glinting in the sun.

New York Loves Japan (Montreal)

We found Bob & Mariko's Bed & Breakfast the easy way. Google gave them to us without a blink. We had tried Priceline and Airbnb but found our wallets to thin and our expectations too high for both. Two hours before we planned to arrive, I found the website and the reviews were perfect, so Weston called. Bob's booming Bronx voice caught him off-guard, his tone seemed annoyed and crotchety.

"We have a room in the basement with a big bed but no windows." Weston whispered that to me and then told Bob he'd call back. We wouldn't be spending too much time in the room anyway, but his voice was extremely rude and so we called around some more with no luck. Bob & Mariko's it was. We grabbed a Dr. Pepper, tossed our bags in the car, and drove northwest into the setting sun. Literally. At one point Weston was wearing 3 pairs of sunglasses. Two hours later, we rolled up to the shady Park Slope-esque Rue Laval, and I saw a 70-year-old old man in a plaid shirt and a fedora sitting on the steps chatting with neighbors. Bob.

His voice was jarring at first, but he immediately morphed into a grandfather figure to me, his words slow and soothing, explaining that we should park on the other side of the road, that we're in the heart of dinner time, that they'll get you if you don't. His words all blended slowly together as he unlocked the bottom apartment door, asking if we got here alright, if the traffic was bad, and here's the corner where everyone looks at their computers, and breakfast is served between 9 and 10:15 and we have plenty of space and you have to stand on the bed to turn on the air conditioner and Mariko or myself will help get you all organized in the morning. He says he's like a Jewish grandmother (he sure sounded like one), he likes people, been doing this for 30 years. "Get yourselves a nice bottle of wine around the corner," he said, "they let you bring it into restaurants because of the province's ridiculous taxes on alcohol." He didn't dote or linger, just gave us the keys and told us to go have fun. After browsing the bookshelves in a corner nook of the basement, I was convinced that Bob and Mariko were lovers of the same sex, but you should never judge a book by his bookshelves, apparently.

The next morning, the creek and groan of the floorboards above our heads told us that it was time to make our way upstairs for breakfast. We were greeted at the top of the stairs by a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Mariko, a short, thin, John Lennon-bespectacled Japanese woman, which explained the bamboo and sumo theme in our guest room. I was way off. We were way off from the get go. Bob was hovering at the end of the breakfast table, a bit of jam dangling from his shaggy moustasche, getting everyone organized for the day - and invited us up to their apartment on the third floor to sign a few papers. After croissants, coffee, and a hard boiled egg, we climbed the winding stairs to Bob and Mariko's lair.

I was afraid it would smell like old people. I was afraid they would be smokers, or hoarders. But yet again I was wrong about Bob and Mariko. Their hardwood floors were clean and shined, their furniture sparse and practical. Bob had a typewriter balancing precariously on a pile of pillows in the bay window seat, along with the 1980's black and white television on mute. Their cat, Schwartz, slept quietly in a red sleigh on the floor. We sat on the couch and Bob told Weston where the market is, and what part of Mount Royal park there would be a drum concert. "There are a lot of alternative people there, you could go there to get a good contact high." His thick New York accent still didn't make sense to me in this posh French Canadian neighborhood, so we asked him how he got here. "I came on vacation 30 years ago and never left." I couldn't help but glance over at Mariko, smiling in the chair in the corner, pretending to read.

It goes without saying that if we had stayed anywhere else our experience in beautiful and strange Montreal would have been vastly different. We still would have tried on leather coats and cowboy boots at the vintage store down Rue St. Laurent, we would have bicycled too far past the old Olympic Stadium, and gotten caught int he rain on our way home. We would have still stumbled upon oddities like people in a vacant lot carving stones and people in wheelchairs watching children play in the park and drunk men stumbling into and out of fountains in the moonlight. But Bob and Mariko made the trip unexpectedly and extremely comfortable.