Already I’ve skipped a day of #frontstooppoetry. But I’m not daunted. I had missed more than a month before putting up this poem on Thursday, so a one-day gap is a big improvement. Right?
In any case,yesterday was a work day, and the start of a weekend so also a play day. And here I am today, and there’s a new poem on the chalkboard, so…progress!
Today is a Slow Saturday. I’ll get a haircut (overdue), get the rest of the Christmas decorations down (overdue), make a grocery list, maybe make or write a postcard or two, and otherwise probably just hang out with the pack. I’ve been on walks with both dogs already (separate ones, as somebody needs some serious leash work), so I already feel like the day hasn’t been wasted.
Looking for a good book?
Today’s reading is Parable of the Sower, my first Octavia Butler book ever. I’ve just started it. But there are two books I’ve read recently that I’m recommending widely:
Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures, by Katherine Rundell, is a beautifully written collection of essays about some of the many animals that are threatened or endangered. I found it simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming, a combination that seems impossible even after experiencing it.
The Barbizon: The Hotel that Set Women Free, by Pauline Bren, tells the tale of New York City’s women’s residential hotel, along with many of the famous women who called it home, including Grace Kelly, Sylvia Plath, and many more. For me, it also was an unparalleled look at the culture of the 1950s and what it meant for women.
And if, like me, you’re a fan of mysteries and noir, check out March Violets, by Philip Kerr, set in Nazi Germany before World War II. If you’ve got a reading suggestion for me, drop it in a comment.
Several years ago—back in the During Times (before the Before Times)—I was inspired by (i.e., copied) a friend and start posting short poems or poem snippets on a chalkboard on my front porch. It helped me connect with the world in a time when I badly needed to do so, and it helped nurture creativity, which nurtured me. I did it regularly, pretty much daily, for probably about two years, then less regularly, then sporadically, and now so rarely that there’s been little excuse lately for me to keep that chalkboard on the stoop.
Yet keep it there I have, likely because it has nurtured my soul in days past. I’ve met people through my front stoop poetry, mostly people stopping casually to say hello or even thank me for my words, but also one person I truly call a friend (You know who you are, M!).
I’ve tried numerous times to get myself back into the daily habit but haven’t succeeded. I’m trying again today. We’ll see what happens. Cross your fingers for me. You don’t have to want to read it; just know that it seems good for me.
In addition to the front porch, I’ve also shared #frontstooppoetry on social media, mostly Facebook. That’s a lot of hashtags I’ve posted—actually, a lot of the same hashtag. But now, I think I’m getting ready to swear off Facebook. It’s been feeding me what seems like 80-90% ads and suggested groups/posts for a long time, rather than my actual friends’ missives. While that has been frustrating, it’s Zuck’s decision to get rid of the fact checkers that is finally driving me away. Too much of social media is already an echo chamber, feeding people only what it knows they already want to hear. To do that without any concern for whether they’re propagating malicious lies is simply unconscionable.
Front stoop poetry needs a new digital home. So here it is. When I put a new poem on the porch, I will also put it here, instead of on social media. I’ve already done this occasionally (see posts tagged #frontstooppoetry here), but I’ll try to do it every time. Maybe that will even be daily; hope does spring eternal.
Meanwhile…Skirt side back
Skirt side back? What’s that about?
It’s part of a postcard that I made recently and sent off to a friend.It started out as a failed endeavor, something I tried and hated and set aside but didn’t throw away. That was a couple of years ago, I think, but I came across it recently and salvaged it by approaching what I had done as a foundation to build upon. I think it worked, and there’s a lesson there about viewing things in different ways, trying to find fresh perspective. Seeing something from a new or different vantage point can mean seeing something through someone else’s eyes as well, something I think we all and our world could profit from more and more these days.
Stop me before I climb up on my soapbox of kindness and start sprinkling fairy dust around the room.
I opened Facebook this morning to track down a link shared by Escape Into Life for a daily literary meditation exercise for January. I’d been meaning to start this on January 1, so I’m already four days behind, and to be honest that seems at least par if not better than par for these stay-at-home, end-of/start-of-year times. Don’t judge me. I’ve been filled with ennui here at the start of 2021.
Facebook greeted me, as it usually does first thing in the morning, with a memory. I looked; the algorithm-driven memories are probably my favorite facet of Facebook. Today’s was a photo of an apple—a ripe, red apple pendant on a tree—that for the life of me I couldn’t remember taking. Possibly I didn’t, because it was connected to a poem fragment I had quoted with a link:
“Medieval physicists thought gravity was love. They catalogued it attraction.”
I clicked the link to re-read the same poem, but got a different one. It turns out the one I shared last year had (probably) been the featured poem of the day on Autumn Sky Poetry. And the poem of the day for today was another one—also utterly lovely: Why I Have to Sing, by Kitty Jospé.
I read it and then found the one by John Calvin Hughes as well. What a lovely start to the day.
To top it off, I did follow that up by starting on the literary calendar for January, which fed my soul. Now feeling hopeful, I head off to start my day—first by mailing a poem/card to a pen pal (what a lovely, old-fashioned phrase) before turning my attention to the work that pays my bills.
I have so many things I want to write about today! Reading, the end of this seemingly endless year, the deer that visited our front yard overnight while we slept…
Let’s start there, with the deer.
I took this photo thinking it would be a Wordless Wednesday post here on the blog. Then I got up this morning and wrote it into my #frontstooppoetry for the day. So, words, which means not wordless.
My husband and I saw this in the snow when we opened the gate from our side yard to head out to the sidewalk for our first walk of the day yesterday.
A single deer had walked right into the branches of our front-yard lilac tree, and from there we couldn’t tell where it had gone. Right on through? Maybe, but the tracks on the other side were definitely a rabbit’s. Either a rabbit obscured deer tracks, or the deer backed out the way it came. We could see only about three hoof prints, so it’s possible this deer used the sidewalk and veered into our yard only for a quick snack. I’ve seen it happen in the daylight. I know lots of people consider deer pests; to me, they’re graceful and beautiful creatures, with whom I’m generally happy to share a garden. It brightened my day to know I had hosted one in the wee hours.
Reading out the year
Lots of my friends are tallying up the books they’ve read this year and sharing the numbers on social media. Not me. I’ve found reading difficult this year. Oftentimes I’ve found myself too anxious to focus on reading anything longer than a poem, and for a short while leading up to and following Election Day, I couldn’t even read poetry. As a friend said to me recently, my relationship with books has been a troubled one. On the bright side, I’ve actually read more poetry books than usual this year. Among the ones I finished the year with was The Abridged History of Rainfall,by Jay Hopler (McSweeney’s Press), which is absolutely super. One poem in it, Elegy for the Living, is so heartbreakingly beautiful that I was compelled to read it aloud for the Twitterverse:
My unread book pile grew the other day when a friend emailed to ask if he had loaned me a book that he couldn’t find. He had not, but I’m pretty sure I own the book, and I thought, “If I can find it and have already read it, I can just pass it along to him”—an elegant solution to get him the book he wanted and clear one object out of my too-cluttered life, don’t you think?
You can probably tell already that this didn’t work out as planned.
I, too, found that I couldn’t track down this book, which for all I know might have decided to take a forbidden vacation with its sibling of the same name from my friend’s book collection.
But in the process of looking for it, I came across three other books that I had forgotten I had and really do want to read: two murder mysteries and Joe Biden’s book about the death of his son Beau, Promise Me, Dad. So those vaulted directly to the top of my next-read pile. The good news is that I’ve just finished reading one of them. Care to guess which one?
As we’re counting down the days to Inauguration Day 2021, and I’m looking forward to change in the White House—and, I hope, the country—it seemed appropriate to end 2020 with Biden’s memoir. I took the rediscovery of this book as a sign that the time was right to get to know my next president a little better. I’m glad I did. Although, of course, I cried at the end. So be forewarned.
Next up is one of the murder mysteries, a little lightness to start the new year.
My husband’s political advent calendar
Speaking of lightness, the new year, and the countdown to Inauguration Day…over on Escape into Life my husband, renowned cartoonist Phil Maish, has created a post-Christmas advent calendar to count down the last days of the current White House administration. Each day he opens a new door to show a new cartoon. Day 25 will be Inauguration Day.
After the overnight snowstorm that revealed the deer tracks yesterday morning, we had an utterly gorgeous day today, sunny and clear and crisp. The husband and I took a nice walk, to and through a neighborhood park, and I couldn’t resist taking a few photos, including the one at the top of this post. It was a simply perfect winter day; I couldn’t have asked for a better one to end 2020. We’ll be spending our New Year’s Eve the way we like best: watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies and trying to stay awake until midnight. Tomorrow’s lentil soup is already made, and the traditional Swedish rice pudding will follow it up; if I recall correctly, we started 2020 without either of those good-luck staples, and look where that got us.
One of the things I love most about holidays, especially Christmas, is remembering. Every ornament—and we have a lot (a lot)—has a memory attached, a story. Every recipe comes from someone I love. The very activity of decorating reminds me of putting up the tree with my mother, both as a child and as an adult after she suffered a series of strokes and came to live with us. She couldn’t hold and hang ornaments any longer, so I would unwrap each one and bring it to her to see on the couch. We’d remember together each one from my childhood, and I’d tell her the stories of the ones I’ve acquired as an adult.
Here’s the glass police officer we found in the bargain bin in Marshall Field’s basement on State Street after Christmas one year. Here’s the clear plastic globe with angel inside, which hung each year on the mini-tree in the bedroom I shared with my sister. And here’s one of the glitter-swirled silver balls that were among my mother’s first Christmas ornaments and that she disliked for their ancient tattiness by the time I was born, the glitter all turned dark; she relegated those to the inside of the tree, where they might add sparkle but not be seen for the ancient things they were. I hang them in places of honor because of the memory they evoke.
Our tree holds ornaments from my husband’s family, too. Here’s a favorite: a fragile, glass baby head that seems almost macabre on a Christmas tree. (We’ve given it fellowship with other, newer oddities: aliens and skeletons, Krampus, a luchador.) Wait, here’s an equally cherished relic: the faded yellow, lumpen fruit or veg with a face. We don’t even know what it is—melon? squash? clown?—but we love it dearly. There’s the fuzzy old snowman from my husband’s childhood, and scattered around are ornaments we gave to his mother, which made their way back to us after his parents died.
When we excavate the ornament boxes, we find ones we bought as a young couple, ones given to us over the years by friends, and a whole set of ornaments collected and repurposed from special occasions. These started life as table decorations at friends’ weddings, my grandparents’ silver wedding anniversary, and other life celebrations; as Christmas ornaments, they’re mementos that bring back these occasions, along with the loved ones who were there.
And, of course, my husband and I are parents, so there are ornaments our son made as a child. These keep company with two rather ugly baubles that my sister and I made as children, hand-painted and decked out with glitter. Again, the word tatty is apt, but their very tattiness endears them to me.
This, I think, is what makes holidays special: their ability to evoke cherished memories and remind us of loved ones. Perhaps it’s why we reach out to loved ones on holidays also, with phone calls and texts, cards and postcards. Our Christmas cards this year, as in many years, are drawn by my cartoonist husband, so each one we send shares a bit of him with the recipient. I make cookies and pesto and sugared nuts as gifts; he makes a drawing. We give them all as reminders of our love. They connect us with those we love, even in this very distant time.
We’re working our way through the holiday movie (and cartoon) season, and I’m trying this year to combine a mixture of old favorites and movies I’ve never seen. Last night was one of the latter, a 1940 entry called both Beyond Christmas and Beyond Tomorrow (apparently Beyond Tomorrow was the original title).
It was filmed in black and white, but I watched the colorized version, and while I’m not always a fan of colorization I have to say last night I was happy for it. For reasons I’m uncertain of, black and white seemed last night like more work than color. Even with the color, though, I can’t say I came away a big fan of Beyond Christmas/Tomorrow. It’s pretty sappy and overtly religious, neither of which win points from me. I still enjoyed it, though, possibly because of the combined accents of Charles Winninger playing Michael O’Brien and Maria Ouspenskaya as Madame Tanya, or possibly because the winter holidays are the right time for schmaltz.
Not just movies at home; also movies filmed at home
Before putting on the movie, my husband and I were glued to the television screen for a very different kind of showing. Once again for reasons I don’t know, the husband pulled the old (as in oldest—we have more than one) video camera from its bag and found in it a tape labeled Christmas 2000. Once we started looking at it, we couldn’t stop. We relived the opening of Christmas gifts with our young son on Christmas morning, his first test run on his new scooter, frolic in the park, the pre-school Christmas pageant and more. My husband was transported back to the childhood home that has since been demolished to make way for a McMansion. And by the way, who were those two young parents cavorting with my son? Just wow.
The holiday season seems a great time to relive home movies, so full of memories and nostalgia. Or maybe it’s the pandemic that makes this seem right. Whatever the reason, I thoroughly recommend it. If you have old home movies anywhere, pull one out and revisit it. Maybe get on Zoom/FaceTime/Skype with far-flung family and let them see it, too. And while you’re at it, have a latke or Christmas cookie.
