winter, photos

looking off the front porch, © 2015 Amber Schley Iragui

Winter in Portland is mild. Snow is unusual, and lasts a few hours or maybe a day. It usually changes to rain, freezes again, coats trees and walkways in ice—and the city literally shuts down. Mostly though, winter here is wet. It is damp and cold and dark and rainy. But it is not bitter. It is the end of January and already daffodils are sending up green shoots, the crocuses are blooming. I have the window in my office open a crack and I hear the crows making plans outside.

At this cheerless time of year, an hour of sunlight is like gold. Yesterday afternoon it was sunny for a bit, and joggers appeared in running shorts. A boy walked down the road in bare feet. A quarter of an hour later it was dark again and raining.

after morning drop-off, © 2015 Amber Schley Iragui

walking to the grocery, © 2016 Amber Schley Iragui

puddles, © 2016 Amber Schley Iragui

ice storm, © 2015 Amber Schley Iragui

{More winter photos over at Day's Dearest Wish and Eine Hand voller Stunden}

of stars and tsunamis

I am sitting on a rooftop in Arch Cape, Oregon, surrounded on three sides by the crowns of pine and fir, one papery birch at my back. Before me lies a mist-smudged horizon and between us the cold Pacific, incessant and majestic. Overhead the sky is a dark, cloudless blue. The first night we were here, after everyone was in bed, I climbed the ladder to close the roof hatch and happened to look up. An intricate light webbed the space above me, perhaps a deck light reflecting off millions of wet pine needles. I screwed my eyes to make sense of the ghostlike streaks and stopped with a bolt of fear. The Milky Way lay parallel to the roof, a pale arc in the dark vault of ever receding space. What I understood as something near was instead our galaxy; the reflection of light off needles the burning of a million suns.

It's been twenty years since I last saw the Milky Way like this, bright in a moonless sky. The face of night seen as humans have seen it for two hundred thousand years at least, but unfamiliar enough to momentarily unlatch my breath and set my heart thundering. As if my heart wasn't thundering enough.

I shouldn't have read the article. I quickly flipped the page when I first saw it in the New Yorker. I ignored links to it on Facebook, the accompanying blood red map. I've heard this before, earthquake to hit Portland, skyscrapers tumble, bridges collapse. Twenty-year-old fears reared their gigantic heads: friends sleeping in tents, withdrawing wads of cash from the bank, stocking up on bottled water. I was at the beach on that day, in the mid-1990s, when some outspoken Evangelical man predicted--based on a dream--that a massive earthquake would hit Portland. I fell asleep imagining the water being sucked out from shore, leaving fish flopping and exposed like in the story of the Seven Chinese Brothers. And then a roar, a wall of water.

But that was then. Heck, now I've lived through two nice rattley earthquakes, nothing major. I was just outside of Manhattan on September 11th and watched the towers fall on television--the broadcast sound cut out while grainy images of smoking buildings and things falling from the sky shimmered silently on the screen. Less than ten years later I waited in Washington Heights for Hurricanes Irene and Sandy pass through Manhattan, each time stocking water in the closets, filling the bathtub.

But what the New Yorker earthquake article predicted was something far worse. And it was no dream; it was good science and vivid storytelling. And I read it, heart racing. A few days later I drove down to the beach for a few days with my dear friend Julia, all jittery. And now, less than a month from when I read the article, I am here again, enjoying two full weeks at our favorite house in Arch Cape.

Let us say that while the days have been generally relaxing and mostly wonderful, I am nonetheless on edge wiggle-wise, jumping at the noise of a truck downshifting or the slam of a door. Mid-conversation I find myself assessing my location, panickedly rehearsing what I'd do if the room started to wobble, the trees bob, the sand boil. The locations of children appear before me first, then husband, shoes, purse. A calculation on whether my iPhone is worth it. Or the beach tent, in the back of the car. The tsunami maps appear, the names of roads and alphabetized meeting places. (I drove the route on our second day here). I see myself dashing upland, grasping my son by the hand. I calculate the minutes I have until I hear the wave, high as the second or third floor this beautiful house. I take consolation in that, according to Google Maps, the walk time to high ground from where we sleep is only four minutes; the run time must be less.

Each morning I thank the earth that it continues to sleep, stuck; silent rock jammed against silent rock and staying so. I have three more nights to sleep perched next to the beautiful Pacific, and as much as I have enjoyed these two weeks of blackberries, tide pools, creeks washing out to sea, ice cream, and quaint beach town grocery stores, I will be happy to get in the car and drive out of this godforsaken tsunami zone. A hundred miles back to Portland affords me the luxury to worry about earthquakes minus tsunamis; and I will take that hundred miles thank you very very much.

a corner in harlem

On my street in Harlem, October 29, 2009, © Amber Schley Iragui

I
I'm not sure I should write this. It is difficult. It is full of potholes and heartbreak. Heartbreak that is not particularly mine, but to which I stand witness. There is a young man standing on a corner in south Harlem. It is an early November evening, and violet light deepens in the shadows between the buildings. He is looking at me earnestly, shifting his weight back and forth between his feet. He is smartly dressed, a messenger bag slung over an unbuttoned pea coat, with tan corduroys and brown wingtips. He is asking me for something. My mind is jogging back for an answer, coming up with answers which will not do--not for him. I don't have an answer. He speaks gently, as if to assure me, but also with an edge of desperation. He's sure I have the answer. I am uncomfortable and afraid. I don't know if he will let me go home, let me walk the few short blocks toward Central Park and my infant son with his sitter. Part of me worries that the young man will follow me; part of me longs to help him--but his questions triggered a mental avalanche. What he wants is reasonable, but the implausibility of him asking for it from me lodges between us. There is too much between us. I walked home, but he remained standing on that corner in my mind for six years now.

I sit before an open window of a beach house. Beyond the scaly limbs of a shore pine, a shallow beach rises toward electric lines and low shingled homes. A stretch of Hwy 101 bisects the seaboard and from where I sit the sound of passing traffic is just slightly louder than the sound of the surf. Yesterday, before driving west two hours to the Pacific ocean, I saw one person of color. He was working at the car rental where my friend Julia and I had hired a car, and he explained that it was only his second week on the job. He was well dressed, overdressed even, as he walked with a clipboard around the white economy, apologetically checking for dents and scratches.

I do that now, count the black people I see. The day before yesterday I saw two: a mother with a magnificent afro and flowing orange gown pushing her fairer-complexioned toddler, similarly afroed, in a grocery cart. They were leaving the market as I was arriving, and she was narrating their departure in motherly sing-song. The day previous I saw no Afro-Americans, although a Hispanic family of four walked by our home around lunch time. And the day prior to that I espied a black arm resting on the window ledge, in a car ahead of me one lane to my right.

I recently moved home, to the eleventh whitest city in America, from New York City, arguably the most diverse place to live in the US. My husband and I moved here to be near my family, but also because the school situation in New York City was frustrating. For one thing, the students in my son's kindergarten class, at a public elementary in upper Manhattan, were primarily Dominican. It was by no means a bad school, the principal--a diminutive Afro-American woman who glowed in pastel cardigans--was a stellar leader. I whole-heartedly adored her. But the natural concerns of a school with a majority-Dominican student body (for whom English was mostly a second language) were at odds with my goals for my son. I just wanted him to like school, to love his teacher, to associate learning with positive emotions. I didn't need to "bridge the literacy gap"; whether or not he learned to read in kindergarten was irrelevant to me. After months of fighting with him over homework, and regular reports on his failure to learn to read, it was clear his education wasn't going the direction I'd hoped. He disliked school and I began longing for a simpler, and more appropriate, educational environment. And so, for that reason and others, we moved to Portland, Oregon. To a tree-lined neighborhood with craftsman homes and a novelty butter shop. A neighborhood with antique malls and boutiques selling linen smock dresses and raw-crystal jewelry. And not a black person, not a brown person, in sight.

It took a few months for it to sink in that I didn't see many non-white people in my day-to-day activities. When I'd moved New York in 1999 it took a few months to realize that the cloudy weather I was accustomed to in the Pacific Northwest wasn't going to appear. Ever. In New York it was mostly going to be blue skies. And now moving home it similarly took awhile to register the homogeneity around me. The cashiers, baristas, gas-station attendants, receptionists, garbage-haulers, even my friendly postman, were all white, mostly tattooed, and generally thirty-something. The families transitioning through the homeless shelter where we volunteered were surprisingly all white too. The parents and teachers at my children's new school were white. One child in my son's class had olive-complexioned skin. Blink, blink: one child was a wee bit not white looking. So I started noticing the people of color I saw each day--I spotted a young black man with dreads riding a skateboard north on 33rd, another young black woman crossed Williams at the slow pace I associated with people crossing the street on 125th in Harlem. Once a day, or once every-other-day, I saw a person who was, or could pass for, black.

I'm not sure what I think of this. I'm sad. I'm sad for the loss of color and I'm sad that this loss of color makes life simpler and less exhausting. Life is flattened, less beautiful but easier. School here is good for my children, they love their teachers and classmates and excitedly relay what they are learning. Playdates do not involve bridging inscrutable social barriers, or a require tireless diplomacy. When I express my concerns for my son's education with teachers or other parents there is nodding and recognition. We are on the same page, a mostly white page it seems. And I chose this page, dare I say fled to this page, out of frustration and fear.

When I moved to South Harlem in 2008, a few months before my son was born, I had already lived in New York for nine years. I loved the diversity of people and languages in New York. I loved the Jewishness, the way you could go just a few blocks and find an entirely different ethnic group, a Puerto Rican barrio aside a Polish enclave. I enjoyed the way people in New York asked "what I was"--a baffling question in any other American city. So when we moved to a renovated building on 111th street, between Adam Clayton Powell and Frederick Douglass, I expected much of the same. To me it just seemed like we were moving near our parish so that Charles could be on time to church and I could be late with minimal hassle. Columbia University was close, and Central Park was one block away. It was an easy commute to work. I hadn't considered Harlem at all.

But we did live in Harlem, albeit a rapidly gentrifying corner of it. And almost immediately I sensed the hostility. Not from the black tenants in our building, who were young and upwardly mobile, but from the people on the street who felt my presence meant the displacement of their people. I was used to being largely ignored by black people, a geeky white girl in glasses with long brown hair. But suddenly I was visible to them because I represented the white people taking over. I didn't understand this; I didn't self-identify as the white people taking over. At that time I was mostly concerned with the things first-time mothers are concerned with: lack of sleep, nursing, teething, high temperatures, what happened to the person I'd been before I'd had a child. I was walking to Duane Reade to get more diapers not to make a point about race relations. Not to flaunt my white privilege. I don't think I'd even heard that term, white privilege.

But despite my foggy brain something of what was happening around me did sink in. I found myself packing my son into his stroller and heading south, out of Harlem. Away from where my presence meant anything. I walked to the Duane Reade that was farther away because it caused less anxiety for everyone. And there was also the fact that when I stayed in Harlem I was asked for money, more than once with the preface, "I'm not going to hurt you, but..." A black man once yelled at my husband, across a street: "You rich white people moving in and pushing us out! You know that!" I also noticed something else, black people attributed far more importance to my actions than I did. I often stopped to take photos of light falling into empty lots between buildings, but whenever I did someone would pass by and make a comment like, "Gonna put a building here?" or "Is that lot going up for sale?" It took awhile for me to register that when black residents saw me taking a photo they thought I was in the position to own, or sell, the empty lot--or at least I was working for someone who was. I wanted to say, "Look I'm just some bedraggled mother who likes to take photographs. I can't buy and sell New York real estate." But over time it became clear that for them that I was in that position, that somehow being white made me eligible, in some way that they weren't, to buy empty lots in Manhattan.

Which brings me to the boy on the corner and what he wanted that November evening. I was raised poor, in poverty that was, at least economically, more severe than the average black Harlem resident. My parents, while more than qualifying for food stamps, never applied for them because food stamps meant not depending on God. We prayed that God would provide our modest mortgage payment, because often my parents didn't have it. And sometimes money did arrive in a white unmarked envelope, brand name groceries in brown boxes. We also prayed that the gas in the tank of our car would stretch like the oil in the widow's jug in the First Kings story of Elijah and the famine. We were homeschooled because our public school was abominable and there was no money to live elsewhere or for the unbelievable luxury of private school. I do not want to dwell upon this too much, but suffice it to say that what I carried with me to New York and into Harlem was the sense that I was far less privileged than most people. And although my adult choices, and education, had propelled me out of poverty I did not feel particularly entitled. I had arrived, a white woman with a baby and a hardworking husband, in Harlem because Harlem was conveniently located and had reasonably priced housing. And I arrived into a Harlem coffee shop with free wi-fi where I was busily working on freelance design project when I realized my babysitter's hours were nearly up. And I stood, stowed my laptop, and headed for home--noticing as I did so that a young, well-dressed black man had watched me get up, had got up also, and had followed me out the door. I noticed that he followed me to the corner, where I stopped and he stopped and I gripped my laptop bag tighter and he turned to me and asked, politely, what work I did and how I got my job and that he was looking for a job and didn't know how to get one. He said he'd applied and applied and never got any responses. He said he'd finished college but still couldn't get a job and that he'd been to libraries and read newspapers and asked friends. And he wanted to know how I'd gotten my job and what I did to get it. And did I know of any jobs he could apply for?

And that is when it first occurred to me, foggily, as I paced back through my life for some answer, some bit of direction, that while I had risen a good way in my life due to university and wise choices and good friends and a few moments of serendipity, the culture I'd risen into was my own. I did not have the obvious barrier he had. The world I now inhabited, old Harlem residents aside, held no animosity or fear or anxiety on my part. I stumbled over a memory of a job posting I'd accidentally come upon a year after graduating from university that sent me to a small publishing company. And the publishing company didn't hire me but offered me an unpaid internship. And when the internship was done, a part time job, and from there a friend sent me a job opening at a publishing house in New York. And my godmother happened to know the director at the publishing house, and sent a letter of recommendation. And here I was, gainfully employed doing work I loved, with a home and a husband and a baby. And while it was not impossible that a similar train of events could happen to this young man within the circles he inhabited, there was something more--what exactly I couldn't say--between myself and his reality. Between where he stood, earnestly asking, and my minor successes, backing away unsure.

I wish I could say now that I took his name and number and helped him find a job. I didn't, though. The street was dark and my babysitter needed to catch the train, and I needed to nurse my son, and I was awkward and anxious standing there. Why was he asking me, I wondered, and not someone more obviously qualified to help? Charles told me, later that evening, that I should have taken the young man's number and he would have called him. Why hadn't I thought of that? Maybe I hadn't thought of that because when his questions revealed to me the gulf between us, a gulf I hadn't acknowledged was there until that moment, I was left off balance and speechless.

Other people have written eloquently about this gulf, about the difference between the reality of Afro-Americans and white people in this country, and that is not my purpose here. I write this because it is mine to stand witness. To acknowledge my part in this sadness, and my flight nonetheless from gazing too closely at it. A year or so after the incident with the young man, when I was pregnant with my daughter, I begged Charles to let us move someplace less stressful. Less black. Where I didn't have to face animosity walking down my street. We moved up to Hudson Heights, a diverse but predominately white (and Jewish) neighborhood in the Northern reaches of Manhattan. A cliff overlooking the Hudson river with nice parks and large apartments. And then, when the school situation there seemed less than ideal, we moved here--to the eleventh-most-white city in America. Where the number of black people I see in one day has never exceeded the digits on one hand.

The young man still stands on the corner in Harlem. I still don't have any answers.

The landscape I know

Sometimes I cannot remember where I am. I cannot remember if I'm in Oregon or New York. For example, I just read that Jonathan Safran Foer lives in Brooklyn and I thought Of course and I pictured Brooklyn as a grayish spot on a map, a hub of brownish buildings cobbled up over sidewalks lined with black garbage bags and London Plane trees, all far east across the continent. And then I thought, No, it's just across the East River. And just a few days ago I thought of London Plane trees and how their hardy leaves make good ghosts and that we should go pick up some to paint for Halloween and then stopped because I don't know if London Plane trees grow in Portland. I think they don't. Because I was in Portland then. (Where we have two enormous healthy elm trees that make as good company as the Hudson River, but that is another story.)

The story today began with a trip up the Hudson to Cold Spring, NY, where we bought pottery and dress-up clothes. We had duck with fennel and guinea hen with apple ragu for lunch. The leaves along the Taconic were orange and yellow, and sometimes blew across the road. The sky in the afternoon turned dark blue-gray and splattered us with some heavy drops, but not too many. There were barn sales and tag sales and traffic. And I said it was odd, the way I love the Northeast landscape. The old rocks and huge deciduous trees, the soft hills and majestic light. It makes sense to me. Woods with little underbrush and white three-story farmhouses. Its odd because I still feel like I'm a foreigner here; all the memories of these places were made by my adult mind in the last 15 years. And even though I've repeatedly visited places like Rhinebeck or Saugerties or Cape Cod I know I don't exactly belong. That is not to say that I do not drive like a New Yorker, or expect people to be direct and knowledgeable like New Yorkers, but that in my heart of hearts I am not a New Yorker.

And it is the opposite in Oregon. I feel that the landscape is my own, not because it makes sense to me or is beautiful, but because I just know it. Because as we drive the geography reveals itself like the shape of my own arm. I know where to turn for Canby without knowing that I knew where to turn for Canby. I can guess that the trees in the orchard we are passing are hazelnut, but I wouldn't have known three minutes ago how to describe a Hazelnut tree. Not the way I could describe a Linden, Honey Locust, or Copper Beech. New York is my adult mind. Portland holds my child's mind, a mind that holds far more than I knew.

Years ago my Dad came to visit me in New York, and then we drove out near Akron, Ohio, where he was born and raised. And as we rode down wide, flat lanes lined by brick houses so far back from the road that the lawns seemed oddly large, he would tell me things like, This is where Aunt Anna lived or This is where we sold flowers on Saturday or This is the road to the old coal mine. And while the landscape seemed hot and yellow-green and sort of all-the-same to me, it spoke of different things to him. I wonder if he has felt like Oregon is a foreign country all this time.

To my adult self the hills around Portland are dark and spiky and a little unfriendly. They seem too new and the deciduous trees too small (and too few). There isn't any schist lying around sparkling, not enough rock in general. I despair of split-level or ranch homes or slanty-wood-fronted buildings. I despair of people who never disagree with you, of people who drive slow. People who drive as if they are apologizing for their carbon footprint with timidity, No, no, you go ahead. At least the bicyclists are worth their salt and seem to think the point of transportation is getting there.

And yet, despite all this, Portland is where I belong. The land is connected to places and people that are my own. The roads lead to Dad's house or Mom's house, to the old nursery, or by skate church, or near my high-school, or my university, or Saint Nicholas. Hippo Hardware hasn't changed, nor all the strip clubs, or the coffee shops. I pass the place where I fell out of Dad's truck and Heidi yelled Amber's dead! and I felt myself all over and thought I don't think I am. I live a few blocks from the dry cleaner where I worked two afternoons a week in high school. I don't feel even remotely foreign there.

I think of the children's book by Allan Say, many times read to my children, Grandfather's Journey. When the grandfather was in Japan he longed for California, and when he was in California he longed for Japan--and when the grandson grew up and moved from Japan to California he felt much the same way. (Allan Say, coincidentally, lives in Portland, Oregon.) And I too, long for a different landscape: for golden magnificence of New York when I am in Portland, and for the damp clean of Portland when I am in New York.

old dogs; new tricks

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." I have found this line on my lips more than once in the last few months, spoken to a five-year-old who emphatically insists on his explanation of how things work. I don't know if he grasps what I am saying because the conversation usually takes a sudden turn to identity of Horatio and then Hamlet, and then a reminder that his stuffed tiger is named Horatio.

But the words keep coming to mind. And I suppose they rise to mind as much for me as for him. My Alexander Technique instructor lately has used the word plastique in our work, referring to the neuroplasticity of the brain, its ability to make new pathways in response to changes in behavior or environment. I don't want to think about neuroplasticity, however. I just want it to happen in some quiet way. So that one day I notice things have changed and I can say, Ah! My brain is still so malleable, and then, pleased, go about my day. (I can't imagine myself using the word plastique without sounding ridiculous.)

Which actually happened recently. I was sitting with a friend at lunch and was describing our plans to move to Portland and realized how smoothly things were going. Not with the trip itself, per se, but with us. Charles and I have hardly argued about anything, our ideas about homes and schools and jobs and neighborhoods not so much aligning as forming a conversation in which we know and accept our parts. Yes, I did wake up in the middle of the night worried we hadn't applied to enough schools—and feverishly applied to two more the next morning. And yes, Charles did think I was worrying too much, yet mostly kept a respectful distance. And yes, I did get snappish about some of the neighborhoods where Charles wanted to investigate homes. And I all but stopped listening to the discussions of mortgages, insurance, and property taxes—but not before grasping the outlines of the situation. I cannot be expected to understand all the financial maneuvers, but I have learned that I must continue to ask questions until I can translate the finance-speak into something I understand. Which is to say on the whole things have gone well. Which is to say I have changed—new paths can be learned. Nobody is claiming that it was easy or anything.

So what I'm telling myself is: yes. Old dogs, new tricks. On to the next challenge: my health. I hope to be more systematic and optimistic this time through. I bought a neon, hard-bound, pocket-sized journal with three words on the cover: find your happy. I know, sappy. But it will come in useful as I attempt to make some more changes.

a view of the kitchen

This photo was taken two weeks ago and nearly 3,000 miles from my closet-sized kitchen in New York. I pull out my phone to look at this other, cheery kitchen from time to time. And as of today, I own it.

Last week New York City was frigid, like the week before last week was frigid. Like nearly every week of winter this year. The heaps of snow along the Manhattan sidewalks are solid gray ice, littered with garbage and dog business. Walking my children to school I say over and over in the same exasperated tone, "Don't touch the snow! It's full of poop!" They climb on it anyway. On Saturday it warmed to 50ºF and the snow began to melt. It was a lovely day—the pigeons were as elated as the parka-less people on the sidewalks. And the previously rock-hard ice crushed nicely when my children jumped on the piles. Dog poop, however, does not melt along with the snow.

The week before last I walked down mossy sidewalks in my hometown with my husband. Dark fir trees and melancholy crow caws, drizzle from newsprint gray skies, coffee shops with ample tables. Damp everywhere, no poop anywhere. It was a busy week. By the time we boarded the plane back to New York, we'd applied for Ike to attend three of the eight schools we toured, put an offer on a home, had numerous business meetings, and even found a French-immersion summer camp for the kids. We are, it seems, moving to Portland, Oregon.

Before we left for our trip to Oregon I was full of nostalgia for all I love here: the old beauty hewn out of schist and granite, the view of the Hudson from my windows, the Metropolitan Museum, the North Woods of Central Park, spreading deciduous trees lining slate sidewalks, sunlight through tall windows, the Museum of Natural History, the languages spoken everywhere, Grand Central, Wave Hill, the Hassidic families in our neighborhood, my four quince trees in the magical cloister.

But coming back, all I saw was garbage. The cold trudge to school past overflowing trash cans and heaps of garbage bags. Sewers clogged with litter. Rats eating garbage in the subway. Garbage trucks trapped behind double-parked cars, honking. The hustle to get anywhere, the tiresome planning and coordinating of each trip, the throngs of unsmiling people pushing past. Competition for everything. Competition for a handful of pole on the A train, my face inches away from the black (always black) back of someone's parka. I am exhausted by this anxious city, the impossibility of parking, the lines, the urgency. Once the decision was made to move, I lost all my energy for it the rush and crush of it.

I have been in New York a long time: fifteen years. I am hardly the young woman who left Portland years ago. In fact I'd say that since I left the West Coast I have been four different Ambers. Four different faces of the same person, four different sets of priorities, preoccupations, dreams. Some things have remained the same of course. Like my best friend. Our friendship has been one constant in my life during these years (except that now we talk about our plans for retirement). And my faith has remained too, although grown in new and interesting directions. But in suddenly moving back home I am faced with that earlier Amber, that Amber four Ambers ago. We have a lot in common, but we are not really the same person.

However, she comes in handy. She told me I'd want to move to Sellwood, preferably on the bluff overlooking Oaks Bottom. But the new Amber insisted on looking at real estate all over the place. No, no, no: after a few days we were restricted our searching to Sellwood. Not too many light-sucking fir trees there. And charming, flat, walkable blocks with coffee shops and old Craftsman style homes. A yarn store, a children's boutique. The dry cleaners where I worked during high school still on the same corner, still with the same name. Our new home is, reassuringly, in Sellwood.

And while the move date is still a few months away, I am ready to be off. It's not as glamorous as some of the plans we've kicked around over the years. Most recently we'd been researching Geneva— French and English speaking, a beautiful family setting and good prospects for Charles. But for one reason or another we never really followed any of our plans through. Ultimately family took us back to Portland—Grandma, Papo, Grandpa, two aunties, three uncles, some cousins. Charles also has two cousins there, with their own families. And Hawaii is much closer, as is the rest of Charles' family. I am at peace with the decision. And can't wait to have a window over the sink and a working dishwasher!

birthright reclaimed by rocks and roots

photo by Veronika

I have a college memory of myself on a bright Spring day, unusually warm for the Pacific Northwest, walking through downtown Portland's leafy park blocks toward the Portland State University library. Although I was a student at a university on the other side of the city, I used Portland State's library from time to time and was now returning a number of well-overdue books. The semester was nearing its end, the leaves were emerging on the trees, and the sun was miraculously shining.

As I ambled through the park blocks, I commended myself: "I am one of those people who returns her library books." I recall feeling unusually pleased, joyful even, as I contemplated my efficiency. Never mind that most people return their library books, and many probably do so before they become overdue. But what was important to me then was that I was returning my books. That I'd driven downtown to do so, had found a parking spot near the busy campus, and was now walking under budding trees to drop them into the metal slot at the front of the library--this was the crux of the matter. The fines I may have accrued did not diminish my self-satisfaction.

This memory stands out for me because the sort of self-confidence that proclaims, "This is exactly what I should be doing, and I'm doing it so well!" isn't exactly a birthright of mine. I am prone more often to doubt myself, to overreact to "oughts" and "shoulds", and generally to be running behind while castigating myself for my incessant tardiness.

This memory gave rise to yet another college memory, this time from the slave narrative of Frederick Douglass read in my African-American Literature class. The enslaved Douglass had been hired out by his owner as a farm hand, where he was regularly beaten. One day, after a particularly bad beating, a fellow slave gave him a root and told him always to carry it in his right pocket to ward off beatings by white men. Douglass put the root in his pocket and went back to work, suspecting the root business was nonsense. However, the next day when the slave owner came out to beat him, Douglass fought back. From that moment on, Douglass' courage and faith in himself increased; he was not beaten again. My professor contended that the root was a symbol of Douglass' empowerment, specifically a phallic symbol of his reclaimed manhood. I was a little embarrassed by the phallic reference, but the meaning of the root was not lost on me. In fact, it has remained with me through the years--perhaps because I like natural objects, symbolism, and empowerment.

I carry rocks in my pockets, my purse, my car, my messenger bag. Lately I've been carrying a small white agate, roundish, from the Oregon coast. It is the size of a large pea, and an intricate pattern of opaque white mottles its translucent surface. Sometimes I think of the root in Douglass' pocket when I feel the little rock in mine. My particular agate is a reminder to me of who I am, that the joy of life doesn't reside outside myself but in me: I am the glowing self I carry, I protect, I affirm.

And I do not mean to imply by this that God is in anyway tangential, or to propose carrying roots and rocks as talismans of empowerment. I think you should carry whatever you want in your pocket: because God is in the rock, the root, and in the world all around.

I am the lens through which I experience God, and my rock is a reminder to honor myself, my lens. Self-confidence and joy are not something I will get someday, perhaps, when I become someone impressive who isn’t always late, but is already mine. One could say, in fact, that self-confidence and joy are my birthright. I can be late for things and be happy. And I can be on time too. I can make bad decisions, or good ones, and be happy, confident, walking across the park blocks in the sunlight returning overdue books.

a little potter with chocolate goes a long way

It's hot in New York. I'm sitting on my futon with all four fans running, thinking. Thinking about what I could do tonight, since I'm not going up to New Haven to see Nostalgia. I could go to Trader Joes. I could do some of the freelance work I didn't do while on vacation last week. I could go jogging in Bronxville. I could unearth my suitcase from under the pile of clothes I pulled out of it and clean my room. Or I could finish off the chocolate bar I bought at the airport and then take a nap with my face buried in the next chapter of Harry Potter.

All options--besides unpacking and the freelance work--sound good to me, and seem equally likely ways to spend the evening.

It's been a bit of a rough ride of a week, and I've got a lot to think about. My Mum got remarried to a man I didn't meet until a day before the wedding. Two people I know died last week--one quite tragically. A close family member had emergency surgery for a critical condition. And I've had a few serious conversations with the man I seem more or less to be dating.

Mid-July I went to Portland for a week, ostensibly for the wedding. I hung out with my brother and sister, bantered around with my Dad, slept in my childhood bedroom, had dinner with my ex-husband's brother's ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, talked to people at the wedding I haven't seen since I was a little girl (they all seemed to think living in New York was paramount to living on the moon), fielded awkward questions from people at church, spent a few misty days at the Oregon coast, and hiked up by beloved Eagle Creek in the Columbia Gorge. Since I haven't been back to Portland in four years--for reasons too complicated to discuss here--the trip was both exhilarating and exhausting. In the short time I've been back in New York I haven't really managed to put myself back together again, much less readjust to Eastern time. My refrigerator is empty, my clothes need to be put away, and my mail needs to be opened. And Fr John, Jenny, Anna Pepper and Natalie are arriving this weekend for yet one more funeral.

No wonder a little Potter with chocolate, while laying on my bed, sounds enticing.

P.S. Photos from Oregon, and the wedding, can be found here: oregon, family, wedding set on flickr.

a call from portland

You're in a car somewhere I called home,
sky wrapped around the windows, witnessing
swelling subdivisions, gas stations; the franchised,
highwayed loam turns red, then gold.

And then you come to rain. That cold mother
grows everything, even the asphalt gives way
to green. I miss her cold face, but also the way the
dull landscape brightens when the sun burns

the sky clean. You complain about the clouds casually,
as if I would agree, but I think of rain jealously.
I see evergreens under wet blurry skies, cafés, coffee
brewing, wide windows under awnings, dripping.

Here, above my eastern apartment, the clouds
themselves are ancient, the heavens august. A land
settled, its stone walls tired, its trees don't know me.
But here is where I wait for you, and wonder.

Return from my horizon, from the drizzle of memory.
Bring with you the slip-shod light of morning, the creak of
stairs, and a bed full of library books: my childhood under
the wet sky run down the eaves of my parent's home.