Exhale: hurdles jumped.

Dear sister far away,
       I'm sorry that there is a stack of half-written letters to you sitting under the sewing machine behind the computer on my dining room table.  I'm sorry that our tuesday lunch-for-me, morning-for-you phone call was more hit and miss than a habit.  I'm sorry that it's been my turn to write here forever and ever.  I'll do better next semester.

     But I'll see you on Sunday!  And we'll have all of the conversations that are on backlog: teaching a college course, your trip to Anc. and reiki training, the million ways to use apples in the fall time, and how fall here refuses to end, in the most sparkly light-frost at night sort of way, how different is is cooking for two.  We'll make paper snowflakes and watch the aurora, and talk about ideas, just for the sake of their beauty.  We'll trudge down by the Tananananana's twisting lacy shores, and fall back into each other's lives for a moment.


And then I'll come home and go back to this:

These cranberry lemon rolls wrote a draft for me, I swear

And you'll inhale.  And on the exhale, your spirit will move the air and it will come find me.  And next semester?  Next semester we'll do better.

I love you forever.

Letters and Snow

I got a letter in the mail.  Handwritten words on paper.  Paper that had traveled thousands of miles, winging its way across an ocean, and a continent or two.  Bringing me the thoughts and feelings, the mind matter and heart matter, of a dear friend.  Time and distance are funny things.  As are sentence fragments.  Time and space though, they are collapsible.  And expandable.  As are sentence fragments, come to think of it.  Einstein intuits that time is merely a way create order and structure, healthy boundaries, for matter.  Time exists so that everything does not happen at once.  The sort of limitations that allow for creativity and manifestation.  But even then, a photon exists only in the now.  At the speed of light, time collapses again. 

I thought to write a letter back tonight,  but instead I read about anterior lines of myo-fascial stress conduction and sagittal flexion.  Perhaps I'll write that letter tomorrow.  There will be much in it of congratulations, and also the good kind of newsy gossip.  It will be written much as I write this:  back to a warm fire, dark night outside the window, cats curled, and keys underneath my fingertips.  Only the keys will be those of a much older keyboard, one from the 40's, and my keystrokes will place ink on paper rather than pixels on a screen.

I love them both: word thoughts placed on to a space betwixt and between, located in the always already now and accessible from anywhere – this little blog space of ours in the great sea of inter-netted twining; and the word thoughts placed on tactile space, tangible, traveling through air and across land, from one hand to another.  Winter is upon us here in the north after a welcome, if ominous, extended warm spell of rainy fall.  With the snow and the dark and the stars comes a sense of calm and peace.  A sense of settling.  Time is no different, really; yet I somehow feel I have time to write this when I haven't for weeks.  I'm drawn, as ever, powerfully to my loom, to my studio, to the heart fires and hearth fires of kindred souls.  Limitations feel constructive, supportive, and liberating rather than confining.  And somehow, in the dark and the cold, it all feels possible again. 

It snowed in Fairbanks...

Sugar maple canopy

... and I spent the afternoon reading in the Arboretum, under a fully green sugar maple, surrounded by red spider lilies, black eyed susans, and the hum of the mass exodus of people from campus in the late afternoon.  It was the first morning that I snagged a cardigan on my way out the door, it still being in the low 60's when I jumped on my bike and headed for the font of knowledge that is the red-brick oasis of UNC.

Red Spider Lily

Not to be confused with Spider Woman
(whose arch-enemies were Morgan le Fay and the Brothers Grimm!)

I've been cooking good things much less than I ought, sister dear, and I'm not sure why.  I spend so much time procrastinating from my mountains of reading that I should be rolling in beautiful platings and multi-ingredient wonders, but it's more likely that I'll get home and sauté some broccoli, or eat left over soup from the weekend.  It's a little sad...  I really do need to do better.  But instead, I spent this last weekend talking about thinking about writing about listening in the L2 classroom, and my gerunds just got the best of me.
The last few weeks (until the last few beautifully glorious days) I was jonesing hard for the touch of Midas that is fall in Fairbanks, trying to convince myself that the night air being perfumed by honeysuckle made up for missing the wash of color that is the transubstantiation of the birches (birch? are we sticking with that?).  That old king is somewhere laughing at my avarice, I know, but it is just so beautiful!  I stopped being jealous though, and it wasn't the snow (just ask my office-mates, they were a little shocked at how much I was longing for it)... it was walking to the library to return a book today, and seeing down the brick path between two buildings a bed of blooming roses, framed by the yellowing leaves of a row of locusts... It's my turn for the best time of the year!

Honeysuckle dreamin'

In celebration, I'm going to go read about fatal jealousy, violation, and defloration.  Because grad school.
Love n stuff.

Love in the Moonlight

Mmmm, cantaloupe!  Warm from summer sun, vine ripened and slightly damp from the earth…  I’ve been told of a melon strain being cultivated here in Fairbanks, from seeds of Russian farmers.  I’ve yet to see or taste it.  I hope to find the seed one day, and plant them in my greenhouse.  Cantaloupe was my very favorite fruit when I was little.  I remember my father teaching me about puns, the treasure hunt to find the secret other meaning of words and phrases.  And I remember the day, maybe 5 years old, sitting at the dining room table (the maple one now in my fathers lab/studio, its surface scratched by the hard use of a lifetime of family meals and projects), with a slice of cantaloupe and a spoon.  For a few minutes, moments? I couldn’t eat it.  I knew then, with the sure and blinding clarity of the very young, that if I took this bite of my most favorite food, I COULD NEVER RUN AWAY AND GET MARRIED.  I’d been listening to the sad ballads out of Ireland, the ones that speak of fateful love between ladies and highwaymen.  I’d begun to dream of the romance of eloping, the secret thrill of defying conventions, the surprise of coming home with my new husband.  And in that moment, I knew I had to either abjure cantaloupe for the rest of my life (oh terrible prospect!) or resolve to never run away and get married.  So I took my budding stubbornness, my urge to defy conventions and rebelliously resolved that I was going to eat my cantaloupe, that my parents would have to love and respect and approve of whoever I chose to marry. They would just have to deal.  And if my parents loved and respected my choice, then I’d never need to elope!  That next juicy bite of chilled orange sweet fleshy melon goodness was my defiance, my demand and my dare.

Next weekend I’m marrying two of my dearest friends in the world.  They actually did elope, last fall, for a courthouse wedding.  But the power of friends and family, of community, of love as the force that brings people together urged them into having a grand reception party this summer.  Preceded by a ceremony in front of family and the closest friends, at which they've asked me to officiate.  So this week is all about crafting decorations: buntings and signs sewn mostly of thrifted clothes I've collected and cut up for cloth over the past many years, party planning, and welcoming far-flug family and friends.  And then on Saturday, I get to hold sacred space for two beautiful souls to affirm their love for and commitment to one another.

Driving into town last night, the just-shy-of-full moon hung low over the hills. Breathtaking.  It seemed equal in size to hills it rested upon.  It glowed like a giant pearl in the sky, against a backdrop of periwinkle, pink, lavender, blue, rose sky.  What is the full moon bringing you?

If only I could grasp the Korean alphabet..

I like birch as a collective noun.  I think that it expresses the unity that exists in a monoculture - the beauty in it, rather than the mundane.  I also just like collective nouns.

Today was a day of finding out what section of Spanish 105 i'll be teaching (starting on wednesday!!), of bureaucracy and excitement.  A high summer day where everyone wears sweaters when it dips into the sixties.

To show all of the incoming TAs how scary it is to learn a new language, one of the professors in the department, who is from South Korea, gave us a 'shock lesson' in Korean.  So I can say hello!  and that I'm american, that I speak english, that I speak spanish, yes, no, and pleased to meet you!  I don't quite remember how to say the numbers, or the formation for question asking.  The cool thing is not, however, a few words in Korean (cool as that is), but that he taught an entire hour without using ANY english AT ALL, talking to people who had never studied any Korean (except for one of our lovely incoming PhD students, who is from South Korea) - and it worked so well.  I was so impressed.  It's so different than any beginning class I've ever seen, even those that pretended on the first day that they would be taught only in the target language.  And yes, it was only one class, and if I were truly trying to learn the language, I would have had a lot of questions that I would have probably needed to ask in english... But if that had been the first day of a class?  I would have been so very psyched for the next one.  I can only hope that my students feel a fraction of that.

There's a melon tasting at the Farmers' Market tomorrow.  Fancy some local cantaloupe?

Today is a day: Words from Fairbanks

Last night the thermometer showed 53 degrees and Raif made me fear for my (beautiful! Vibrant! Amazing!) Calendula blooms, and the finally flowering  and one squash growing squash plants with dire considerations of the spectre of 32 degrees.

The birch are dripping yellow leaf lace here and there along the long drive into town.

Sunset in town and sunset at home begin to move apart noticeably.  We left Freds last night (late) with a bag of bulgur.  The spectacular light of the most glorious moments of sunset already had faded by the time we came out of the store.  As we drove home, we drove into the spectacular light of the most glorious moments of sunset along the Elliot.  Its amazing the difference a handful of miles closer to the arctic circle can make!

Today is a day for drinking mugs of steaming black coffee, curled up with a blanket and a book on the chilly porch. 

Instead I’m at work, meticulously maintaining the codified structures of ownership, description, access and rights by way of which we as a culture have “tamed” the deep freedom of the land we live on.

** my word (TM) -based grammar and spelling editor tells me that “birch are” is incorrect/ that “birch is” or “birches are” are my correct options.  

Birch, singular, as a collective noun?  What are your thoughts? I like it.