Today, I was selecting books to get rid of to make more space in the library. I pulled several in the parapsychology section out halfway, getting them ready to shelve on a cart. When I bent down to look at the bottom shelf, a book flew out and nailed the back of my head. The title? Telekinesis.
Nice.
It seems a little unreal that domestic partners employed by the federal government will have some benefits. I have confidence that, eventually, it will as illegal to discriminate against gay individuals as it is to discriminate based on age or gender. There’s no perfect world and discrimination still happens to all kinds of people all the time, but I look forward to the day when it isn’t sanctioned by the government.
For a second, I thought I might regret leaving the State Department in light of this change and the almost certain extension of more benefits by the Secretary of State. But I don’t. I don’t regret leaving for a second. It was no longer the right job and the limited benefits wouldn’t make up for that. Unfortunately, I’m confident that the good state of Virginia is unlikely to get on the progressive bandwagon anytime soon.
The whole thing leaves me feeling a little hopeless and unsettled. It seems like no one is able to make change. The President says it’s beyond his ability to change and if left to the general public, I’m afraid a vote would be to maintain the status quo.
At Capital Pride Sunday I watched a man my age walking with his pretty wife, their young baby and the baby’s grandmother tell his family that they could not use the restrooms in the area because (hushed whisper) “Look at that sign” (pointing to Pride banner) “we can’t go over there”. I couldn’t tell if he was afraid they might catch something, sheer discrimination, or fear that we might tar and feather them. Seperate toilets. Great.
This has been a rough spring. It’s the end of a long haul really. We’ve reached every pie-in-the-sky goal we set for ourselves in the last three years. I think we’re both floundering a bit in the mix of moving chaos and rudderless navigation. Suddenly I’ve switched from multi-year plans to very simple ambitions.
Stop the spiders.
Prevent raw sewage from entering the house.
Serve dinner for my wife on the porch.
Unpack the kitchen.
So far, I have accomplished none of these things (and not doing them is taking much longer than I thought). I’m on the second leg of a two week vacation and while I feel mentally well-rested, I don’t feel as though I’ve been on vacation. Perhaps this is the problem with “staycations”. Not going anywhere has left the days blending into one another.
I’m staring down four more days alone and a mountain of boxes. I can do it, right?
Another week of fresh veg, another week of spinach. It has been raining every Wednesday for a month. Rain every Wednesday means that the vegetables we pick up are dripping wet when we weigh them and stuff them into bags. As we drive home, mossy, damp air settles into our noses. It’s a peaceful earthy moment before we come home and start processing the packed bags. Greens swimming in a sink of water, rooty veg scrubbed, wet things dried, dry things put away.
The spinach was an easy answer this week – spinach, red pepper and feta quiche. It’s a favorite standby for summers at our house. Good hot or cold and perfect for warm evenings when you don’t feel like doing anything but sitting and talking. The maple syrup was delicious on buckwheat pancakes. We also brought home watercress and a tiny bit of cilantro both of which we’ve had trouble using. Salsa is on the docket if the cilantro has survived (or if it appears again) and while I know watercress is high in vitamin c, I just don’t love it in salads. We need an alternative dish. Waiting to be used: giant spring onions – the size of thick ropes.
The threat of shitakes still looms over us. The rain this season has put a damper (quite literally) on mushrooms and so the promised delivery was delayed until later in the season. This makes D happy since she’s not a fan of fungus but she has agreed to try a risotto should the shrooms ever show up. I’m looking forward to the chance to try a new dish.
We’re expecting strawberries this week. An unexpected delight.
We joined a sort of CSA* this spring. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years. In DC, the idea of a box of vegetables delivered to my doorstep was a temptation I couldn’t stop craving but also could justify paying for. I won’t eat beets, who knows what else they might deliver, and why would I pay someone to gift me with a brussels sprout? The answer? I would not. Sealing the deal was the effort going into getting those vegetables to me – gas for the truck, etc – vegetables that might well rot in the refrigerator in a wave of restaurant nights and lackadaisical cooking efforts.
It’s my downfall. I’ll admit it to you. I love the idea of vegetables, but not the reality of them. Not the earthy flavor that creeps into some bites. Not the wilted, wet blackening of lettuce. Not the contortionist thinking when I try to determine what to do with something my mother never cooked. I bring fresh veg home (and by this I mean only broccoli and green beans) and then I guiltily toss them after determining that we’re tired of tough broccoli or the black spots on the beans might be dangerous. I know. It’s criminal.
Charlottesville drew me in with the offer of a CSA drawing from multiple farms, offering a variety of pick-up spots (relieving me from the guilt of a door-to-door delivery) and providing a huge variety of produce. After much debate (and by this I mean me telling her repeatedly I was going to do it and her nodding sympathetically), D and I agreed that we would commit. Commit to eating our greens.
I’ve repented, mended my ways, found religion in this CSA. I had no idea that rhubarb tasted good. Historically, one bite of standard strawberry-rhubarb pie left me alternately scraping my tongue of sweetness and wondering why there was a slight vegetable taste. My lettuce lexicon consisted of iceberg (ugh), romaine (bland), and arugula (bitter and not really a lettuce). I’d never seen an actual beet. It’s shocking, really, that my love of cooking and food could have resisted variety for so long.
Last week, we picked up spinach, beets, rhubarb, chard and red sails lettuce. This was week three of spinach and so it went into a dip for a party (and by this I mean there’s a bodily limit to how much spinach a person can consume). However, the generous addition of dip ingredients and crunchy bread made up for the side effects. The beets are awaiting a sweet potato/beet roast while the chard will be joining us in a parmesan prosciutto pasta. We discussed the rhubarb at length (why does it look like celery? Does it taste like celery? Why are the leaves poisonous but not the rest? What is it about strawberries? How can we avoid the sickly sweet berry/barb combination?) before tossing it into a rhubarb bread pudding. In theory, this would be redeemable because D prefers bread pudding to even me and I prefer her happiness to everything else except yours. It went into a bread pudding looking weird and celery-like and came out of the oven tasting delicious. Horizons broadened? Check.
The real star of last week’s haul was the red sails lettuce. This beautiful cluster of tender, flavorful leaves trumped everything that had come before it (including both the apple butter and the honey). We’ve eaten it as quickly as we could, testing the previous leafy limits set by the spinach. I had no idea a lettuce could be anything so perfect. Pretty, delicious, slightly sweet and useable all the way through. I realize I was a hostage to iceberg as a child and only begrudgingly welcomed romaine into my life as an adult. For having never met the red sails lettuce, I am deeply sorry.
Here’s to this week’s bounty.
*for local folks, we joined Horse and Buggy Produce a “local natural foods cooperative”
In the books, there is always an older, crazier woman living in the neighborhood. She has cats and an overgrown garden. Maybe she’s mean (get off my lawn!) and maybe she’s kooky (pottering around with dirty nails and straggly hair) but people steer clear of her. The working adults don’t want it to rub off, assuming that this woman would have made better choices had she had her right mind, had the right opportunities, had the ambition. The kids dart in and out, trying to get close enough to see but not wanting to get caught. She always lives alone, or with the sickly husband or equally batty sister/cousin/other daughter/partner?
I caught a glimpse of that woman the other day. She was in my yard, in my clothes, digging around my plants. I had dirt smeared across my forehead because I hadn’t been wearing gloves (dirt, supposedly, releases serotonin). I swatted at the occasional mosquito stuck in grime on my ankles. The water at the house is off, so I only made it worse when I tried to rinse my hands with the stream from a small plastic bottle, dried them in muddy streaks on my shorts and tucked out of control strands behind my ear. I suppose it wouldn’t have been as peculiar if I had been potting tulips or setting a bed of pansies. Instead, I had been planting tiny echinacea roots (teas to head off colds), yarrow (to stop bleeding), feverfew (to tame migraines), lavender and oregano (for their astringent properties), lemon and bee balm for sore throat soothing and forget-me-nots for love. Kitchen herbs are tucked into pots on the deck.
In that light I’m suddenly twenty years older and that much crazier. Pretty soon I’ll be yelling at you damn kids to keep that ball out of my yard.
Note to the college students of today: the correct terminology is check-out, not rent.
As in “Hello Ma’am. Would you be so kind as to check-out this book for me?”
Not (moan, emo-lurch, sigh, lack of eye contact) “Uh…Can I rent this book?”
No, seriously. Rent is reserved for things which you borrow for a fee. This book? It’s free for a short time once you type in your number.
You are not renting anything. Please. For my sanity’s sake. Stop trying to rent these things.
I have moved too many times. The most exciting move was a quick one – from Flagstaff to San Francisco. The second I took a breath full of mist, I settled in as if I’d always been there. Always, yes, but also delighted at every new turn, each gardentucked away on a hidden stairway, and the taste in the air. It’s not salt exactly, but garlic and duck and oil and crab and salt. Although moving away wasn’t the most traumatic move (Evanston to Tucson) it was the most heartbreaking one.
Since then I’ve moved with relief (goodbye Maputo) and a broken leg (hello, Sao Paulo). I’ve moved across the street (2179 to 2200) and I’ve had moves that were goodbyes in more ways than turning in a key (1200 sq. ft to 900 sq. feet and thank goodness). Less than a year ago it was about goodbyes again (Lorraine) and success (a new career) and because D was there with me at both ends, it was the easiest move.
Now I’m sitting in my living room with a pile of boxes stacked against the stairs and a roll of new tape nearby. I’ve found it easier to clean up than to put things in those boxes, not because I don’t want to go but because I know we’re going to unpack it all again right away. Because this will be the best move. The move that, for once, sees all of the boxes unpacked. The one that is on a quiet street. The one that’s ours. The one that brings us home.
You’d think that would motivate me to get started, but it has only induced some sort of forward-looking hypnosis. I spent the time I should be taping thinking of paint colors, mornings on the deck, friendly neighbors. I imagine that once I get started, it will just come. The point is to get started.
One of the things I enjoy most about the place I work is the ability to be out and not once worry about backlash or changes in policy that would mean I couldn’t do my job. In general, I feel like where I am in has changed just enough that I feel insulated from the homophobic judgement I might have faced working in some other countries. Hell, I enjoy having a language in which I can refer to my partner without having to specify gender by the very nature of the word. More importantly, I don’t have to worry anymore about whether I’ve specified a gender that will earn discrimination and condemation.
Although the State Department has come a long way in ensuring that gay members aren’t fired simply because they are gay (presumably a gay person was more susceptible to blackmail), I’m still sad to see areas in which the Department (and the nation) have yet to recognize gayness as a normal human feature. Worse, I get a hollow sort of feeling when I see people who, while gay, don’t recognize it in themselves as a feature worth having and so stay closeted to their families and coworkers. I know it’s naive to assume everyone can just be out and proud, but that’s what causes the gut wrenching feelings – there should never be a barrier to being out. (I’ve handled this indelicately so far. Suffice to say I’m aware that there’s a long way to go.)
Several months ago one of the officers that I worked with was killed. I have fond memories of his eagerness to get started at a new post. However, his trepidation at being gay and single overseas in service to the Department startled me. I think, in my own outness, I had forgotten how challenging it was to carve out the space to be comfortable. His admission and subsequent reluctance to be out made me question my own resolve. Could I have gone overseas and been as brave as I was suggesting he be? In our conversations, I made every effort to assure him that he could be out without detriment to his career. He and I both thought the greatest risk to him was discrimination from his US colleagues and not, as it turned out, murder.
What turns the knife for me is the media coverage that doesn’t mention gayness. It’s not relevant to his death, no. People are killed all the time by friends, by lovers and by strangers. What hurts is seeing the bewilderment from people to whom he didn’t feel he could come out. Though it’s painfully obvious to me that it wasn’t a crime motivated solely by money or class (how often does the robber/murderer spend the night before acting?) it seems like a cover-up when the family is still quoted wondering at a senseless murder for a few electronics instead of recognizing a lover’s quarrel.
It’s true that if he wasn’t out, there is no reason to mention it. I suppose it’s not relevant to the general public either. But if the Department knows and is deliberately leaving it out, it makes it worse. It renders a class of people invisible and doesn’t do justice to a murder. It makes the crime look opportunistic and contributes to fear-mongering. It obscures the nature of the Department’s diplomats – all kinds of people from all kinds of places.
It’s not a crime to be gay. I wish we’d stop treating it like one.
If you consult my best friend the internet (hi sweetie) it will tell you that having a brush pile in your backyard is a good thing. While scrolling beautiful Bambi-like wildlife pictures across the screen, it will try to seduce you with thoughts of precious little bunnies, flocks of whistling bluebirds and troops of smurfy, adorable critters who pass their time baking you muffins and draping you with ribbons.
But the internet is also manipulative and sneaky and so it also makes all sorts of well reasoned arguments about being green, composting and saving the earth already. It’s so persuasive and sly that I look at my very own brush pile and think “If I dismember that thing, it will be like killing thousands of tiny, adorable, big-eyed ladybugs.”
I had no idea that owning a house would mean coping with environmentally friendly brush piles or, as I like to call them, Deathtraps with a Vengeful Spirit and Nefarious Intent.
This brush pile defies my eco-conscious imagination. It has layers upon layers of leaves and branches. At first I was excited about the dry leaves for compost. Then, as we labored in the hot soul sucking sun, I was excited about the dry snapping branches for firewood. Then, after we unearthed the first christmas tree, I was certain we were housing fleets of fast-footed bunnies. Then, after the third and fourth evergreen, I basked in the idea that there might be terrific compost underneath all those wet, mucky leaves. Just yesterday, I was delighted to see earth below the leaves. At least, until I sank into it.
Quicksand? A mole hole? Suddenly, I found myself more worried about snakes and spiders and other nasty biters than I was about disrupting a happy nest of finches. I backed away from the trench I was abruptly in and reassessed. Not only was I standing in what had once been some sort of small dimension warren, I was looking at loads and loads of yellow, compact…something…packed with largish holes swiss cheese holes. Mold? Insulation foam? Fungus? It broke apart, but didn’t disintegrate and looked, at times disturbingly, like masses of fur and wetness. All of a sudden, it was less snakes and spiders and more hanta virus, norovirus, and what in the name of green living is that?
It was a head, my friends. Possum? Mole? Vole? Rat? A nest of rats? A nest of rat babies? A nest of anything? I love nature as much as the next girl but once I saw that head I put down that rake faster than Bambi’s forest went up in flames.
So now we’re left with a few unappealing options. Leave the pile (absolutely not. I suppose I don’t mind the concept of a brush pile, but I want it to be my brush pile.) Break open the pile (spilling out whatever critters lurk beneath to find a new home.) Or call in some sort of professional brush pile remover (I can only imagine explaining to them about the quicksand and, well, the head.) I’ll let you know how it turns out.
