All of the things all of the time, no but for real.

Dear sister,
Sooo..... Doing all of the things this summer was a great and terrible idea. And not unlike the other great and terrible entity inhabiting our public consciousness, there is a whole lot going on behind the curtain. In the interval since I last wrote you (which, yes, has been far to long- sorry!), I jumped from one yellow brick road (at least the trams were yellow) through another tornado, and into a whole new land. And here I'll commend my overly abused metaphor to the depths, and release it from its servitude.

Looking down to the castle, old town and river from the top of the Parque Eduardo VII
(on my way to/from school daily)

Leaving Lisboa (the 20something of June) was hard. It definitely built itself a big home in my heart while I was there. On my last day, I wandered down to the praza do comercio by the river -the port/square that was designed as the welcoming point of entry to the new modern city constructed after the earthquake. On that Saturday, it was full on one side with a giant screen and screaming football fans watching a game of the euro cup (yay Portugal! When they won the other night, I could almost hear the celebrations of Campolide and the rest of the city), and full on the other side with Pride.

I had a bus to catch before things got really going, but still.

It was a pretty perfect way to say goodbye.

Looking down the river from where the praza extends into the water do disembark visitors.

And then there were three days in Seville where I roared through all of the paperwork and bureaucracy that most people who do the teaching year have all of their first month to get through. I couldn't have done it without Elena. But everything magically fell into place, even a great apartment right in the center, so I'll light a candle to serendipity and leave it at that. 

In the office of empadronamiento, making me a resident!
Yes, still that pale after six weeks in Lisbon sun. #spf50always

Seville itself was as enchanting as Elena has been assuring me for the past year, but I'll have plenty of time to regale you with that when the time comes. So, then, to the north! I sometimes think that if I hadn't walked the camino when I was 16, if I hadn't made my way to Santiago de Compostela with mom's old exterior frame 70's (right? 80s?) Jansport, I wouldn't be doing now what I do. I would have followed one of the other life and career paths that have offered themselves to me over the past decade. It's not the only thing, for sure, but... Santiago has been in my heart for so long. And this city, it still feels like she loves me. Or at least, I love her enough to feel a mirrored echo of that emotion returning to me. It's just how I remember, and yet a very different city to an adult than it was to me then. I am glad that it is not my first time here, though, because the whole main façade of the cathedral, as well as the Portico de la Gloria (the main entryway) are undergoing an extensive restoration project, which is a relatively shocking absence-of-presence in the heartbeat of the city. 

But the real reason that I'm here isn't actually the whispers of old stones, but Galego Sen Fronteiras –this summer's iteration of the Real Academia Galega's language and culture course. While the course is not more intensive in terms of hours in grammar/conversation classes than Lisboa was, it has enough other (great! but time consuming!) programming to really fill the days: we have classes, lectures, and museum visits or other cultural events –poetry reading! workshops on traditional music and instruments! from 9:30 am to around 8:30 pm. It has definitely made me question my judgement a little bit, in terms of all that I am trying to cram into my brain this summer. When lady luck favored me and both of my finding possibilities came through, I clear-headedly decided that three back to back intensive language programs was an entirely good idea. I wouldn't change it, because we both know that I fling myself into the sea as soon as the water reaches my knees, but really, past self, really?  I worry that no matter how hard i throw myself at it, that these languages are either going to not open themselves to me, or they are going to be one huge clump of mush. And then I'll go to Seville and forget  everything. The rational part of me knows that this is not going to happen, that even though threading the paths between three closely knit languages is going to take continued work, that they will settle into themselves and that if I can still recite the first page of Harry Potter verbatim, I will be able to hold on to at least a good piece of what I have and will have learned. But that doesn't stop me from thinking that mayyybe my mouth size and chewing capacity were a little out of whack.

I haven't taken any outside in Santiago yet -weird, I know- so here's a triple spiral staircase.
Per the museum (Muesu do Pobo Galego), it's the only one in the world!

We've already talked about this, by which I mean I already cried at you, but seeing as this letter has turned into an airing of the vagaries of my consciousness, there's Leko. I've been gone from NC for over two months now (woah.), and it has been very nearly two months since she disappeared from her year-long foster home. There is a hole in my emotions, and I'm both grieving and still filled with an everyday-more-impossible hope. Hope that she's just so good at hiding that two months isn't too long for her to not have shown herself; hope that she will make her way back to a house and people that she barely knew; hope that someone will catch her and take her to the shelter where her foster can find her... Hope that she didn't suffer.

It's also hard to live the reality of her not being there, because I'm not there, and in the NC in my brain, she is still there, like I pressed a pause button with her staring out the window watching the leaves, and she will still be there when I get back to resume things. And that, I know, is not how time tends to work in this particular reality. 

To not end on such a downer, I have a visual present for you. In the Museo do Pobo Galego there are some traditional weaving accoutrements. Which of course I took pictures of for you. My comments are limited, as most of what I know of looms comes from you, but here:
Loom!

Loom!

Warping frame and warping square? Or the second one might be for winding skeins? Or...(You have yet to gush at me about your warping square, I feel like it's due)

If this reads as somewhat scattered, I both apologize and offer that as a good representation of my mental state. Soon I'll actually make some words happen about the pedagogical part of Lisbon and the structure of the program here, as well as ruins and beaches and beer, but for now, your turn!

Big kisses to the blueberriest summer child in the world. Hugs to all three of you, and all of ours in the great northland.
All my love to you,
your sister

Adulting is hard

The car went into the shop for some tune up work, and came out with a bill amounting to two grand.  It is ok.  It is almost 7 years old and has upwards of 100,000 miles on it.  It was due for a new timing belt, and all the maintenance that comes with that.  So we listed the old little red toyota truck for sale.  The one I bought partway through college, that saw us through the year without electricity and the year with electricity at the cabin.  That Raif has been using to haul firewood.  That first Griffin, then Misha, and also Sabine, were largely raised in.  Serving as a mobile kennel for husky pups resulted in an absolutely trashed interior.  But it has a buyer!  It is going to a dog-friendly home of friends.

And we listed the dryer for sale.  It may also have a buyer.  I wish we had gone straight to the propane dryer we have now and skipped the fancy electric one that cost us more than a thousand dollars in generator/off grid power system repairs this past winter.  Lessons learned.

Its funny.  The finances of it all stress me out.  Finances always stress me out when they are tight.  But this time, I'm feeling more able to ride it out with equanimity.  After so long with major systems of this house dysfunctional - water, electricity - even though the time of that dysfunction is fading a bit into the past, I'm keenly aware of all that we have.  I'm so grateful every time I take a shower or run a load of laundry.  Even if it has been days since I've showered and even if Avery screams the entire time, wishing mama were not hidden behind the shower curtain.  Even if I feel as though the bathroom is drowning in piles of dirty laundry.  A couple weeks without a second vehicle, a couple weeks of waking myself and my baby at 6 am in order to get to town with Raif so that we can keep an afternoon commitment seems manageable.  The back of the Joy of Cooking that sits on the cookbook shelf in my kitchen has this quote on the back: "Every kitchen should have running water, a stove and a copy of the JOY" - Saveur.  I am amused every time I glance at it.  It speaks to so much privilege.  Running water is a luxury.  One I am so grateful to have.  Avery is too, she LOVES baths.  She splashes and kicks and giggles.

I finished a thing I started many years ago.  I plaited the warp threads and hung it on river driftwood from the Tanana.  I adorned it with bone and stones and beads from jewelry no one wears anymore.  Mounted on the wall, it will bring goddess energy to someone's home.  There is something incredibly satisfying, oh so liberating, to finish things that have been languishing in the back of my mind, at the bottom of my project list, for so long.  There are more languishing projects waiting for me.  I'm looking forward to releasing them into the world.

Avery cries, suddenly and with passion, every time I go out of her line of sight.  She is not a huge fan of mama working - and this weekend is a marathon of weaving work under a tight deadline - so we are learning to negotiate between her needs for closeness and attention and the very real need for me to do the meticulous and time consuming work of weaving that helps to pay the bills.  She's a little monkey, clinging to me, reaching out from the safety that I am to her to touch the world.

A meditation on color and bravery.

Dear sister,
Sunday morning I got up in my hostel in Sintra –the epicenter of Portuguese romanticism, just outside of Lisbon– and explored a magical garden with cave tunnels, a waterfall, and all of the excessive and unnecessary ornamentation that brings it to be called the 'best occult landscape in Europe'. I got back to the hostel to take a quick shower about 4:40, and checked the internet for the first time. And then everything was just numb.

...
I hear.

Be careful abroad, especially traveling alone!

Are you here all by yourself? Where's your husband? You're so brave for traveling by yourself.

You went out of town by yourself? How brave you are!

You must be really brave to travel by yourself, I couldn't imagine it.

...

Telling LGBTQ people and women and people of color and anyone who falls outside of cishetwhitemalechristian normativity to be careful or calling them brave for living their lives isn't helping. Going to a bar with your friends –going to a safe space– isn't bravery. But it should be safe. Like going to school. Like going to church. Like going to the movies. Like arriving home to your own apartment and opening the door with your own key. I don't understand the obsession with bringing death to others. The desire to rend and puncture and leave holes in other people's lives. You are your own but they are not yours. Let them be safe. Harm none.

...

And then the news coming out of the US is all terror. And so many people in power are denying the identity of the victims the same way that LGBT existence has been ignored and denied and forced to the sidelines for so long.

...

Here, the news is about the homophobe who saw two men kissing and went nuts. All around the world, the empathy is not for victims of an ISIS attack, but for the victims of a homophobe who couldn't handle difference. It makes me not want to go back. Not in a rhapsodizing about how wonderful my time here is way, not at all. But in the way that language lessons are often conversations and I have spent the last five weeks trying to not only have problems to talk about.

...

Sometime I will write to you about the camelias and the gardens and the castle and the primary colored palace. But I can't right now. So here's a picture of a goldfish pond in that garden, fed by a water mine at the top of the hill, reflecting the trees full of peace and carrying the tiny daisies that I floated on its surface like the dancing flowers in Fantasia.

Portuguese has a color that English doesn't. It isn't blue and it isn't purple, but somewhere near them both. It isn't lavender or violet or lilac or periwinkle. It is the color of the flowers of the jacarandá tree in the light of the morning. It is roxo. It is love.

I love you,

your sister.

Skipping Spring, moving straight to summer

Dearest sister, 

It has been an odd spring.  So warm.  The foliage looks like July and it is only the beginning of June.  And yet the iconic springtime/early summer blooms are adorning the woods: wild roses, labrador tea's white clusters, cotton grass in the boggy places, bluebells, bunchberry's dogwood flowers that always evoke early childhood memories from humid southern woods.  

My strawberries are flowering, daisies growing tall with buds, and my lily is poking through the earth. 

I have a box of sprouted potatoes that need to be tucked into the soil, and I plan on a bed of parsley and one of calendula but I'm not feeling particularly drawn to the garden this year. Instead, my eyes are drawn to the woods.  My feet long to wander between trees rather than squat at the side of a garden bed.
So this will be the summer of riverside rambles and woodland wildcrafting.  

It feels odd, unsettling, to not have the seasonal urge to tuck cultivated roots into the ground and look after them.  I presume the gardening bug will return next year with a vengeance, and in the meanwhile I'm attempting to gracefully roll with the way the season is calling to me.  Of course as soon as I compose myself for grace, the doubts roll in: am I just being lazy?  am I giving up on some crucial part of myself, of life, of the aspirational standards I hold my self to?  am I failing at the commitment I made by purchasing this land/homestead by failing to put in a garden? for failing to really care that this year is not the year we fence in a giant swath of hillside and fight roots to till it?

Avery enjoys woodswalking.   She prefers it to lying in the grass while I weed garden beds.  She likes to reach out and grasp onto leaves.  I have a renewed appreciation of my knowledge of the local flora every time I see her stuff every leave and stalk within reach directly into her mouth.  There's little that can hurt her.  So far, she seems to enjoy the bitter flavor of dandelion and mature fireweed greens.

We spent a few hours rambling by the Tanana this week, collecting wild rose petals to dry and make into salves and steams once the snow flies.

The smell of fresh rose petals drying is absolutely and utterly divine.  I wish I could fill my house with it always.  

That's not strictly true, of course.  It is a fleeting seasonal moment, this time of the blooming roses and the drying petals.  Cultivating the seasonal cycles of a child-paced life is the lesson of this season of my life, I think.

I hope to spend more time this summer on the banks (and on the waters! we have a canoe!) of the Chatanika.  It is the river on which Avery will grow up.  With it only two miles down the road, I forsee frequent afternoon excursions in the years to come.  It will be one of the 'places' of her childhood.  It is a bright river, friendly and welcoming.  But there is something about the majesty of the Tanana.  The way that it allows personal issues and concerns to fade into their rightful relative insignificance.  I realized that its been almost a decade I've been going to the Tanana to walk the dogs, wandering the trails and the banks in the early afternoon, soaking in the early early morning stillness, or walking with a friend and coffee in cardboard to-go mugs, the warmth of the brew keeping our fingers from freezing as we talk through the ways in which the world feels heavy.   It may not be conviently close to our house but I want this place too, to be a place of familiarity and sanctuary for my daughter.

Avery is getting closer and closer and oh so closer to being mobile.  She rolls over and she scoots herself around in circles, the midpoint of which is her belly button.  She has cobra/seal pose down, and has recently added inchworm-butt pose to the mix.  This is accompanied by a faceplant allowing her to lick the carpet and arms that flail to the sides like wings.  

She spent the afternoon with Luisa last weekend. It was so fun watching her watch this other little person, noticing all the things that Lu could do, the places she could go with her own two feet.  Seeing the wheels turning in A's mind "I could do that too!"  We sat on the couch for a while the three of us, reading Beatrix Potter, and it was like a little future-viewing of life with a toddler and a new baby.  It is a pretty glorious era of life, this era I'm embarking on.  

Avery is discovering food.  It is so fun to watch her explore this new aspect of the world.  It is mostly play for her, but her the other day was flecked with mashed carrot bits, so at least some of it is going down! 

She's fascinated by toothbrushing.  She will grab at our toothbrushes, trying to move them in our mouths or stick them in her own, so we pulled out the kiddie toothbrush from the dentist.  Now she "brushes her teeth" i.e. chews on the bristles and/or handle of her toothbrush sometimes twice an evening while Raif and/or I brush our teeth.  It is ADORABLE.  And yes, capital letters are warranted.

  

As far as things go in the studio...  I'm having a lot of fun!  I gave myself permission to just play on the last piece of this warp.  Clasped weft, weft pinstiping, treadling changes.  It is really like painting with yarn.  It is slow - slower than handweaving always is.  But so rewarding.  It is just a different rhythm, endlessly captivating.   

In other news, I've discovered that I have a habit of resting bitch face when taking babywearing yoga selfies.  

all my love from across the world, 

Jasmine

P.S.  Avery is beginning to play with consonants.  "Tia" might not be very far away! 

Eight thousand kilometers

Dear sister,
Right now, we are verging on 5,000 miles apart as the crow flies. It would be one very tired crow before it got from you to me, and when it got here, it might have turned into a raven. Even though the city symbol of Lisbon is a crow, there's no separation in Portuguese between them and their gwork-ier cousins. Corvos all.

Apart from filling my brain with language (and four hours of what ended up being one-on-one instruction, plus another couple of hours after class to cement things in my brain is no joke energy-wise), I'm right now trying to find a balance between creating patterns and a temporary permanence so that I can get some work done, and not getting lulled into the living-here so much that I don't go and see all of the city's wonders. I know that I will never be the kind of traveller or person who will regret spending a day doing sitting in a garden instead of trying to 'get through' a specific number of sites or museums or what have you, but given the luxury of time that I have been gifted with, the lull of habit has a bit of danger to it.

Last Thursday was the Corpo de Deus, so I didn't have classes. Instead, I went out to a neighborhood of the city known for three things: The Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, the Torre de Belém, and it's pasteis de nata. Pasteis de nata –or, if they're from this little area, pasteis de Belém– are Lisbon's signature pastry, and the most common pastry accompaniment for a coffee. The coffee is espresso with sugar. The pastry is an egg-yolk custard baked in a shell that is somewhere between phyllo dough and puff pastry: the tooth and crispiness of the first, with the ability to hold together of the second. The pastries are baked traditionally (and almost everywhere still) in a wood-fired oven, leaving them with a delightfully mottled surface, like a creme brulée that is blow-torched without the sugar crust. Optional: a sprinkle of cinnamon. I promise to figure out how to make them when I get back.

The tower is lovely and gives views to the sea, but for me, had nothing of the allure of the monastery. As I wandered the cloister and visited the tombs of Portugal's two most famous writers, the serenity that still seeps out of the stones amazed me, made me think that, given the proper birth-century (and I guess, the proper biological sex), I would have been very happy as a monk. To live quiet, surrounded by stone carved into the heart of itself, giving a life to the quest for solidarity with or understanding of a higher point of being. To walk the halls and measure time in soft footfalls and the movement of the sun's shadow, quite apart from the sturm and drang of the world.

The stones echo still with calm and hold the sweet reverberation of song, the radiance of belief. They left in me the almost palpable sensation of waking with a winter dawn and singing life into the stones; to hear the wind roar through the archways and not bend before its fury. That piece of me that sees future fiction in the lives that temporality won't let me live almost saw a novel in that feeling, but it's not. Like the lighthouse keeper solitary vigil, a life of contemplation within walls of stone would be direly boring to read. Even I realize that the monk would have to be ripped from this heart-place to quest and adventure his way into having a plot. And I wouldn't want, I don't think, to do that to him. 

So I'll trade out the hard perfection of stone for the glow of streetlights in the evening, and contemplation of deeper meanings for preclitic, mesoclitic, and enclitic positioning of pronouns that, like the pronunciation itself, change their formation based on the phoneme that they abut or contract with. They're excellently complex. You ought to do it = Deve fazê-lo, from deve fazer-o, where the infinitive (or any word ending in r, s, or z) drops its final consonant but gains an accent, and the direct object pronoun adds an 'l'. I will do it= Fá-lo-ei, from farei-o, where the archaic compound future 'fazer ei' re-separates for a mesoclitic pronoun, and then the irregular future infinitive 'far' loses its 'r' and gains an accent. I won't do it (however)= Não o farei, because pronouns are preclitic in negative sentences, subordinate clauses, sentences beginning with certain adverbs, and sentences with indefinite subjects. I bet you can't guess what I covered in one of my classes today! :p Here's that streetlight, and yes, the colors are about accurate, even though that's a white curtain. 

All my love to dear Avery and the rest of the clan. Glory in that midnight sun for me!

Good night,

-your sister.

Hoppin' John rings in (another) New Year

Dear Sister,

Another year gone, the wheel turns again.  I find myself on an island that gives an embodied illustration of the term 'tropical paradise' and you are a stone's throw from Appalachia.  The husband is watching college football play-offs (I'm told it is the first year that the college teams are using a play-off format to prepare for Championships) and Alabama's Crimson Tide has been playing all evening.  They've just lost, the announcer informs me, but it brings to mind the hot sweltering summer days, nights of fireflies who taxi fairies in the woods, and early mornings harvesting (ok.  trailing our mother while she harvested) field peas on the farm.  I remember the dictionary I bought from the thrift store in Birmingham on whose cover some previous owner had scrawled "Roll, Tide, Roll;" I remember my six-year-old self, even less enamored of organized sports than my current self, who for perhaps the first conscious time, defaced a book and wrote in response "Please don't roll."  I remember the older self who found humor in the childish script refuting the sentiment with such firmness and such politeness.  You are on the northern edge of what can be considered 'southern cooking" and I have long and ago bypassed any Southern affiliation, claiming a home in the sub-arctic; and still:

This New Year's, as every New Years, nearly since I can remember; I cook Hoppin'John, a mixture of collard greens, turnip greens and kale, cornbread... and drink a glass or three of champagne.  Four thousand, four hundred and seventeen miles away, I know that you cook Hoppin' John, and three thousand, one hundred and forty four miles away, our mother cooks the same.  The years in the deep south have given me instant at-will access to the accent of a southern belle, and a lifelong practice of cooking Hoppin' John on New Years Day.

Across the cotton fields (whose post-harvest dried husks adorned our Yule tree as kids), the tradition of Hoppin' John eaten on New Years Day to bring luck in the new year and greens for good fortune rings across the years and across the many many miles. 

I imagine that you, like me, cook based off of the "Sundays at Moosewood" cookbook, with handwritten notes in the margins modifying the recipe.  This year, I read the recipe from a photo on my techno-magic-space-phone, and modified it again to match the ingredients of my in-laws Hawaiian pantry.  And its still the same.  Traditions such as this (watch out! I may possibly be getting maudlin from the consumption of champagne), link us across the years and across the miles; they speak to the past which helped create us, the future we will create, and the bond of sisters....

May the new year usher in three hundred and sixty five brand new days of joy and creation and love and success and laughter and great good fortune for us both!

Love,

your sister.

April snow in Alaska

Dear Sister, 

Last night was my husband (your brother now!) and our mother's birthday.  We went out to dinner in Fox, and I took this picture of the April snow we're having.  With the twinkle lights and the evening skies, it could have been midwinter, but it was warm enough to want to frolic in the flakes and catch them on my tongue.  It snowed all through the night, and is snowing still...

You gave me 'snow flower' earrings for my birthday, beautiful pearl petals strung together.  My middle name is April, so I think you might have catalyzed this happening...

much love, 

your sister