A house, divided

An abstract version of the "house" quilt pattern, circa 1950s or '60s.
This quilt and others can be found at Folk Artisans.

Really, the yard signs tell the story.

There, among the fading petunias, were the plastic signs in navy and white, their respectful, conservative white lettering spelling out support for the Republican ticket. And in between them, looming over them, was a piece of plywood three times as large, and sprayed on the front in florescent pink were the words "Nader/Gonzalez."

"Don't expect to see that sign still standing when you come home tonight, boy!" the father said.

The young man only shrugged, and left his father standing in the drive way. In the past few years the man had turned old, strong still, but now old. His beard and head were filled with gray, and he spent many warm autumn afternoons sitting in a plastic lawn chair watching the traffic head home. He'd raise one hand in recognition of a neighbor's car, while the other rested on his belly, balanced between his thighs, suspenders slung over broad bare shoulders.

When I first moved onto H Street, the father mowed his postage stamp yard shirtless, sitting atop one of those riding lawn mowers. When he was done, he'd climb into his semi-truck and ease it around the block while checking out the neighbors' yards. But as his shoulders stooped and his son's broadened, the boy took over the lawn care, and the neighborhood inspections came less frequently.

His McCain signs were the first to go up on the street, divided -- almost house by house -- over the country's political future. The neighborhood has been written up in the International Herald Tribune. The city's been spotlighted on National Public Radio. Pundits say that who wins the county, wins the country. And while he could wave and smile to the Obama supporter, his son's homemade sign -- now dominating the yard -- mocked him.

"It's been World War III around here," his wife told me one evening as we chatted in the street.

Fists banged the table. Accusations flew. Someone threatened to put an Obama sign in the yard as well.

"Everyone's entitled to their own opinions," the mother said, taking a long drag on her cigarette. "First Amendment, you know. But me? I'm like Switzerland. I'm staying neutral. My vote is gonna remain private."

The young man stomped off to work. The old man stomped off to get another McCain sign. And that evening and the many since, the sun's orange rays glowed on both plywood and plastic.

Coloring a cold

Photo courtesy of Stryker w@sp

A nasty head cold, a persistent cough and a rollicking stomach bug are making their way through the family this week. This tiny poem came out of committee.

Sharp pencil hits floor.
Baby grabs. Mom squawks, "No! No!"
Mom grabs. Baby squawks.

To start the weekend off right!

My skin or my soul

Photo courtesy of amazonactivist.

Shelly followed me around the playground, not close enough for anyone to imagine we were friends, but behind me like some mangy, maggot-eating dog with its tail between its legs, and behind her came a cloud of stink, the smell of old, stale dirt melted with sweat to form a crust over the skin. The other kids were beginning to notice.

"Why's she following you?"

"Who?"

"Shelly. Are you friends?"

And the word was spit out like dirt. For even here, where everyone lived in trailers and most backyards included a junk car, there was a pecking order among us children, a ranking built on insults and exclusions, and at the bottom of the hierarchy was Shelly. She was the fifth-grade version of the thick, polluted froth found along the seashore. She was the brown foam of fat that collected at the edges of a boiling soup pot. She was scum.

And I was her secret ... something -- not friend, though. I felt sorry for her, sorry that she lived in a dirty family with dirty brothers who ate their boogers. I felt sorry for her when I saw her mother, whose skin was gray-brown as the cigarette smoke that hovered around her, and who smelled like B.O, sorry that she had a mother who bought cigarettes instead of soap for her children, lots of smooth, white, clean bars of soap to wash dirt out of matted hair and grime out of clothes. I felt sorry for Shelly, but I didn't like her.

She was surly and sour, stomping on the bus every morning and throwing herself into an empty seat where she'd stare out the window. She had dirt on her neck and knees, her arms, her face, everywhere. I wanted to take a fingernail and scrape the skin, erasing the dirt and leaving a white streak on her arm and crud under my own nail. Her stink settled around her and kids held their noses and moved. Some gagged and choked. Shelly scowled, eyes narrowed to slits and teeth bared, yellow and fuzzy for lack of a toothbrush.

"You have to be kind to her," Mom said, "like Jesus loved the poor and outcast."

I wrinkled my nose and breathed into my jacket for the rest of the bus ride, but I didn't change seats.

I'd been secretly writing notes to Shelly for a little while now, letters penciled, then folded and slipped to my teacher, who slipped them to Shelly. The teacher had approached my mom and me with the idea after her own efforts to share soap and clothing went unused. Maybe, she said, another child would have more success with this angry, filthy girl.

Shelly's only friend was a tape deck and a stack of Beatles tapes. She'd cradle the tape deck against her ear and listen to it on the bus. She listened to it on the playground as she walked the perimeter. But the music that warbled from the small microphone was an insult to the headbangers, ready to pound and pump head and fist for AC/DC. And so when she walked near some boys, one -- David, skinny and round shouldered, face coming to a nosy point like a rat's -- stuck out a leg and tripped her.

She sprawled into the gravel, tape deck bouncing out of her hand, popping open, tape flying. She jumped up, snarling, smarting, palms scraped and bleeding, blinking away tears. David tossed his sheet of hair out of his eyes and laughed.

"Leave her alone," I said.

"Shut up, scum-bag. She's scum, and her music's scum, and you're scum, too."

He kicked at the cassette-recorder, sending small rocks and dirt flying, and spit. Shoulders hunched, he walked away. But David remembered. Shelly remembered. And as kids began to avoid me, Shelly slunk closer, shadowing me during recess, shuffling behind me, not looking, not talking, but there all the same. My fall within the school hierarchy was clean and quick as a knife cut.

I had never been popular, but I had a true friend, a best friend I thought would shield me against the pecking order, but instead she stood back and let me bleed. First, she avoided me at lunch, then at recess, too. I phoned her after school one day to ask why, and she said kids were calling me scum.

"Do you want one friend that loves you, or a lot of friends who just like you?" I asked her.

"I want to have a lot of friends."

I hung up the phone and cried.

Most of the kids in the school were poor, and many of us ate meals bought with Food Stamps. I wasn't scum, I was clean, took a bath, used soap. But now, like Shelly, I was alone -- she with the Beatles and I with my books. I burrowed into books in order to forget I had no one to talk to. I carried them on the bus, took them on the playground, hid them in my desk. This was my routine until a new girl arrived and chose me as her friend. Once again, I had someone to share lunch with and talk with during recess, and, once again, I was being shadowed.

"Why's she following you?"

"Who?"

"Her. Are you friends?"

I turned and looked at Shelly, stared at her dirty clothes and tangled hair and her cloud of stink, and then spoke to her for the first and last time.

"Go away!" I said. "Stop following me. I'm not your friend."

Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. It aims to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion. Global issues like poverty are extremely complex. There is no simple, clear answer. By asking thousands of different people to give their viewpoints and opinions, Blog Action Day creates an extraordinary lens through which to view these issues. Each blogger brings their own perspective and ideas. Each blogger posts relating to their own blog topic. And each blogger engages their audience differently. For others, click here.

Time warp

Photo courtesy of jared.

If I could live at a different time in history, I would choose to watch the universe give birth to itself. I would like to see stars explode, spewing hot gases and dust into a dark, cold space. I would like to watch great swirling clouds of gases cool and glom and wring themselves of water. I would like to see particles of dust congeal into solid ground that I would one day stand upon, and I would like to be blinded by the shafts of light and warmth from the first rays of our sun.

Particles of stardust reside in my body, in my children's body, and in yours. In our dark flesh, we carry the glitter and gas that marked the dawn of time, when the universe heaved and shook with infinite possibility.

To read other people's choices for living in a different historical time, check out Sunday Scribblings.

Forbidden

Photo courtesy of mywoods.

Buried deep under her blankets, Connie woke to whooping and hollering from her little brother, who was clomping down the hall in boots, pajamas sticking out from the end of his snow pants.

"Connie! Get up! Get up! It snowed!"

Jason tugged at the blankets, and Connie poked her head out. Snow! She jumped up and scratched at the frost on the window until she could see outside. The snow was deep enough to cover sagebrush and clumps of cheatgrass, turning the desert into a giant version of Connie's own lumpy bed. With snow this deep, she knew the bus wouldn't make it down the long dirt road and school would be canceled.

It didn't take long for Connie to join Jason on the hill, really just a bump no bigger than the family's Honda Civic, but steep enough to ride a sled onto the alkali flat. When they got tired of sledding, they took turns pulling each other across the hard-pan until the sled tipped Jason into a tumbleweed. When Connie tried to help him up, he screamed that she had done it on purpose and began chasing her across the desert with part of the sticker bush until he gave up and went inside.

Connie slipped around the side of the trailer and in through the back door, and called her best friend, Michelle. They liked to say they lived on the same street, and they did, technically. Connie lived at one end of Shadow Lane and Michelle lived at the other, and between their homes were four miles of washboard road, two stop signs and one abandoned sheepherder's shack. Nothing else. Besides sharing a street, they both had annoying little brothers, they both were skinny, and neither had started growing breasts like some of the girls in fifth grade. Michelle's mom had given her a training bra, which Michelle used to sling pebble-sized jackrabbit turds at her brother.

Holding the phone to her ear, Connie stretched its cord down the hall and into the kitchen where her mom was pulling stickers out of Jason's forehead.

"Mom, Michelle invited me over. Can I go?" Connie asked.

"Only if you take your brother, and only if you walk," her mom said. "Dad had to take the truck because of the snow, and I'm not driving the Honda on these roads."

Jason grinned and Connie glared.

"Did you hear that, Michelle? I can go! But you better find your slingshot, because my brother has to come."

The whole walk there, Jason complained. By the end of the first mile, he had pulled off his hat and gloves, and by the second mile, Connie was carrying his coat. When they reached mile three (the sheepherder's shack), the snow on the road was beginning to melt.

"Come on, Jason! If the snow melts, we can't go sledding."

She yanked on his arm and squinted. Sunlight bounced off the snow, bright and sharp as diamonds, stinging her eyes and making them water. Far off she could see the second stop sign, which meant Michelle's home was close. Unlike Connie, Michelle lived in a real house, not a trailer, a two-story house nestled in hills that flattened into fields of alfalfa. From Michelle's house they could walk to a ditch, choked by tule and cattails, and follow that finger of blue through the fields and into the cottonwood trees that lined the Carson River until it dumped into the Lahontan Reservoir.

But now bare tree and dry tule were cloaked in snow. The four children sledded until the boys complained of the cold and went inside, leaving the girls to follow the tracks of rabbit and quail down to the frozen ditch. A small bird pecked at cattail fluff. Connie stepped onto the ice and feathery cracks spread under her feet. Michelle snapped off a column of tule and its dry husk released a small cloud of dust. She held it in her fingers like a cigarette.

"Do you think you could smoke a tule?" Connie asked.

Michelle shrugged. "It looks like a cigarette," she said.

"Let's try."

They smiled at each other. Michelle ran back to the house for matches. Connie walked further out into ice and cattail, looking for tule as thin and round as cigarettes. The tall dry stalks folded and bent creating small chairs and couches to sit on, and that's where Michelle found her.

Connie shook the tule free of snow and Michelle held the match to one end. It smoldered, embers glowing and then fading out.

"You have to hold it up to your mouth," Michelle said. "That's what my grandma does. When she lights it, she breathes in."

A second match. Connie took a deep breath and exhaled through the tule, blowing ash and dust at Michelle. They threw themselves back into the tule and snow and hooted.

"Noooo! Breathe in, not out. Here, let me try," Michelle said.

She put the end of the tule in her mouth, took a big puff as the match was lit, and spit out dust. Coughing and laughing she tossed the tule onto the ice.

"This is dumb," she said.

The girls lay on their backs in the snow and looked up at the sun, at birds darting overhead, at the dusty snake of smoke from the house slithering across the sky.

"Wanna try and kiss?" Connie asked.

"Okay."

"Just for practice. So when a boy wants to, we know what to do," she said.

"Okay."

They rolled over so their faces were inches apart.

"You have to close your eyes," Connie said.

They inched closer and bumped noses, red and a little runny from the cold.

"Ouch!"

"I think we have to tilt our heads a little so our noses won't bump," Michelle said.

Lips puckered, pressed, parted.

"Eeeew!"

"That's what you're supposed to do!" Connie said, giggling.

"That's gross. I'm never going to kiss a boy."

They rolled away from each other, and stood up, eyes searching for something to settle on, something other than each other. They locked onto their brothers making angels in front of the house, and headed back through melting snow and scabby patches of desert.

Prompted by Sunday Scribblings' challenge to write about something forbidden.

A wedding

Photo courtesy of WTL photos.

Ellie couldn't get married in her father's church. Not the Father, just her father, God's enforcer of commandments, confession and communion, said it couldn't be done. Never mind that six months earlier her uncle, married 40 years, paid a priest to annul his marriage in order to remarry. Never mind that his six adult children, now all bastards in the eyes of the Pope, weren't there to watch him stand at the altar with a wafer of Christ stuck to the roof of his mouth and kiss his wrinkled bride. No, her dad said, no matter what the state said, in the eyes of God, Frank was still married, and therefore couldn't marry Ellie in the family church with his two small sons as witnesses.

Ellie's dad had built the church right next to her grandfather's mobile home and just 50 feet from her own family's double wide. It was a squat building with a steeple that cast a long, wavy shadow across a desert ruled by dust devils, fierce, erratic winds that tore at their trailer's tin siding, and blew sand through the window cracks so that Ellie woke in the morning with grit in her teeth.

But once when she was nine she woke to a miracle of angels' wings, of a wind that carried sand from the four corners of the desert and built a mountain in her yard. She ran outside in her nightgown and joined her brothers and sisters climbing the slope, bare feet sunk deep into the mountain's soft sides until, breathless and hot, she reached the top where she was high enough to see over the roof of the family's trailer.

Eventually the mountain melted into hill, then puddle, and finally was nothing but a shovelful of sand that her father mixed with cement to form the foundation of the church. Figuring that the mountain was a sign from God, the church was built on the same spot. They filled it with statues of the Virgin Mary, hung a crucifix of Christ writhing in agony upon the cross, and hired a retired priest to come out once a month and mumble a service in Latin.

Ellie loved the church. She loved the black lace she pinned to her hair, loved the narrow, creaking stairs to the loft where she and her sisters, and sometimes an aunt and cousins from Carson City, sang Ave Marias and Kýrie, eléisons, their clear, high notes disturbing the fine sand blown in by the wind so that music and dust floated down onto the bowed heads of the (forgiven!) sinners. But she wouldn't be married there. Instead, she was getting married at the Senior Center, built a few months ago but already smelling of old people. She had risen early and driven over to the center to air it out.

She opened the door and wrinkled her nose at the smell of fish sticks and peppermint and urine. Quickly, she walked past tables and folding chairs that had been set up the night before, past the D.J.'s equipment, and the long table where the wedding party would sit and face the guests. As she went, she opened windows to let the wind in, the sand in.

She inhaled the hot air, sweetened by sage and tumbleweed, and stopped at the card table where the wedding cake would sit. She lifted the heavy silver knife that she and Frank would use to cut the cake. Frank and his boys. The three had to sample every cake in the bakery before settling on spice. Spice cake with cream cheese frosting, she had won that round at least. She locked the door and headed home to get ready for the wedding.

The ceremony was over in 10 minutes. Ellie had spent the whole time trying to remember the name of the man marrying them. Frank had introduced her a week earlier, told her who he was, but now as she stared at his red nose and cowboy shirt, smelling whiskey, she missed her cue, and Frank had to squeeze her hand to prompt her. "Oh!" she cried. "I do." And the guests laughed and the county commissioner? Judge? Bartender? laughed too. And she smiled up at her husband as he bent down and kissed her.

Friends filed past her and Frank and the boys, a family now. When her new sons grew tired of the compliments and handshakes, they joined the other children sliding across the dance floor in their socks, amusing the women who tapped their feet in time to the music and eyed their men, who were tipping back their chairs, tipping back their beer bottles. Ellie danced, with Frank, with her father, with her sons, holding their small hands and dancing in a circle, her dress swirling about their feet, tripping them so they fell in a fit of giggles to the floor.

And then it was time, the D.J. said, to make a toast and cut the cake. Children squeezed through the crowd to get to the front of the cake table. Couples who had slipped out in search of dark corners of the desert and soft sand to push their bodies into wandered back inside. Frank and Ellie wrapped their fingers around the knife and cut the cake.

"Should she be nice, folks?" the D.J. asked as Ellie tossed back her head and laughed, smooshing the cake into Frank's face.

Frank didn't wait for the D.J.'s prompts. He took his own piece and pushed it into Ellie's face, her head snapped back, she stumbled and was caught by her dad. Smiles. Glasses. Eyes. Laughter. All froze. Ellie's father pushed her behind him and turned back to Frank.

"Touch my daughter like that again and you'll regret it."

"Oh, Dad. It was my fault. I did it first."

Ellie moved past him, reaching for napkins to wipe away the frosting, praying she could erase the angry look on her husband's face, praying for the wind to bury her in sand.

In response to Sunday Scribblings' writing prompt: Weddings.

Hoops and hoppers

Because I recently shared my memories of gold earrings and small frogs, I thought I'd include their references in Luis Alberto Urrea's "The Hummingbird's Daughter." The first involves Huila, the medicine woman, and Teresita, the Hummingbird's daughter.

"Huila told Teresita to peirce her hears. Teresita was thrilled that Huila was interested in making her pretty. But Huila didn't care if she was pretty or not. Huila told her: 'You must pierce your ears to show God you are no longer deaf. You have not only been blind, but deaf. Punch holes in your ears to show God they are open, and you are ready to listen. God doesn't care if you think you're pretty!' But she gave her two beautiful gold hoops to wear once she had done the ritual."

Here is the reference to toads:

"In the summer, the rains came, and the magical event of toads bursting from the ground followed: toads started to shoot up from the soil, blinking their happy yellow eyes, excited by the first drumming of rain. Wildflowers were sure to follow. First toads, then flowers."

Still life

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). Woman Before an Aquarium, 1921–1923.

I think I'm pretty good at painting a vignette with words. I can set a mood, sketch a character, but try and make that portrait come to life and my brain bogs down, its wheels sink into sand and spin, spin, spin in place. I'm stuck, and I'm stuck good. All that journalistic training to act as the impartial observer has me creating still lifes instead of stories.

Right now I'm thinking about the passionate woman I created a few months ago, and her terrible streak of bad luck. What's she going to do about this curse? I ask myself in the shower as I shampoo my hair. I ask as I pour my first steaming mug of coffee and sweeten it with cream. What's she going to do? Do. Do. Do. Do. The word thuds in my head as I walk home from the kids' school. It slaps against my skull as my sneakers hit the sidewalk, beats out a rhythm, a tribal calling to circle the fire and listen to a tale.

But what is my story?

Muscle memory

Photo from Duke University Archives, courtesy of Duke Yearlook.

Twyla Tharp, one of America's greatest choreographers, offers real justification for copying another's words, brush strokes or dance movements. "Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else's footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill," she writes in "The Creative Habit: Learn it and use it for life."

She calls it "muscle memory," a skill learned through practice and repetition, which becomes embedded in our physical bodies and can be called upon decades later. It's what allows the dancer and the musician to perform pieces that they haven't thought about in years. It's what allows any of us to hop on a bike and pedal away, even if we haven't ridden one since childhood.

But how can muscle memory -- the calling upon of an automatic, unconscious skill -- be of use to the writer? Tharp argues that typing someone else's words forces the writer to pause and study the craft, and points to Raymond Chandler as an example. Chandler considered Hemingway the greatest American novelist of his time, and so wrote imitations of Hemingway's style to absorb what he loved about it.

"In this case, the exercise is less about muscle and more about perceiving structures and harmonies anew -- from the vantage point of the author rather than the reader," Tharp writes. "If there's a lesson here it's: get busy copying."

Writer's envy

Sometimes a writer leaves me coveting their words, wishing to see the world through their eyes so I may own their descriptions and phrases. Fruitless thoughts, I know, but sometimes I'm so overcome with a yearning for ownership that I copy them into my notebook, hoping that by forcing my hand to write another's words it will fire different synapses in my own brain.

Lately, I've been filling pages of my Moleskin with passages from Luis Alberto Urrea, a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist. He's the latest author I admire for his magical realism, the fusion between physical and psychological reality that also defines the gritty, lyrical prose of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and whimsical storytelling of Laura Esquivel's "Like Water for Chocolate." The fact isn't lost on me that these three writers are Latino, and that their countries and cultures infused my own childhood. It was in Oxaca, Mexico that I tasted my first Twinkie (yum!) and had my first taste of exhibitionism (at school, curious brown-faced girls stood in the door of the bathroom stall to watch me peel of my black leotard and bare my tiny white ass to pee). I was 5, and reality was magical: Rain-soaked roads bounced and bubbled to life with small frogs, and loops of red thread dangling from my earlobes (recently pierced with a sewing needle) promised to one day turn to gold.

Here is some magic from "The Hummingbird's Daughter." Enjoy!

Tomas rode his wicked black stallion through the frosting of starlight that turned his ranch blue and pale gray, as if powdered sugar had blown off the sky and sifted over the mangoes and mesquites.

But I like this, too:

"What are you eating?" she asked.

"Cherries."

"Cherries? What are cherries?"

He held one up. In the faint fire glow, it looked like a small heart full of blood.

And this:

As the light poured out of the eastern sea and splashed into windows from coast to coast, Mexicans rose and went into their million kitchens and cooking fires to pour their first rations of coffee. A tidal wave of coffee rushed west from the land, rising and falling from kitchen to fire ring to cave to ramada. Some drank coffee from thick glasses. Some sipped it from colorful gourds, rough clay pots that dissolved as they drank, cones of banana leaf. Cafe negro. Cafe with canela. Cafe with goat's milk. Cafe with a golden-brown cone of piloncillo melting in it like a pyramid engulfed by a black flood. Tropical cafe with a dollop of sugarcane rum coiling in it like a hot snake. Bitter mountaintop cafe that thickened the blood. In Sinloa, cafe with boiled milk, its burned milk skin floating on top in a pale membrane that looked like the flesh of a peeled blister. The heavy-eyed stared into the round mirrors of their cups and regarded their own dark reflections.

Share your beautiful sentences, whether you own them or not.

An oatmeal cookie that rocks

Photo courtesy of greg.turner.

The oatmeal cookie is a blank canvas for creative cooks, with its dough stiff enough to hold a whole mess of goodness. I've tossed in dried cranberries, toasted nuts, shredded coconut, sunflower seeds and fistfuls of M&Ms. And while I don't follow a recipe and can't recreate my cookies (which is a point of regret when the combination is particularly tasty), I cling to one cardinal rule and it must not be broken: never add raisins for then you've sinned, creating a morally corrupt cookie that promises chocolate, yet delivers shriveled fruit.

Given my slipshod approach to this kitchen sink cookie, I've held it in rather low esteem -- at least I did until a recent visit to Sup (pronounced soup), a tiny restaurant in downtown Reno that serves an oatmeal cookie with every meal. I was nibbling my cookie, trying to unlock its secret when a waitress leaned over my empty soup bowl and whispered that it was really quite simple: Follow Quaker's vanishing oatmeal raisin cookie and replace the raisins with 1 bag of bittersweet chocolate chips, 1 bag of peanut butter chips and 1 bag of toffee chips.

"That's it?" I asked, incredulously. Within a week, a special trip was made to the grocery store and these delightful cookies were duplicated.

Plants and politics

Poster by Scott Hansen, a participant in the Artists for Obama series.

There was a time not too long ago when my life was lived in stop motion, seasons slowly slipping away as I sat on the couch and breastfed my twin sons. From my living room window I witnessed my neighbor's yard burst in bloom, daises and tickseed unfurling petal by petal. Months later I was still on the couch nursing and watching as flowers faded and trees dropped their curled, yellow leaves into the cool grass.

On those days that nursing sessions melted into hours, and I feared my brain was being sucked out through my breasts because I couldn't remember what day it was, my neighbor's Thursday habit saved me. She'd emerge from her cottage to care for her yard, and when I saw her I'd breathe, remembering the week was almost over and soon my husband would be home to help. Then I'd settle back down into the couch, nurse some more, and sing my daughter the nursery rhyme "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary," because by then I'd learned it was also my neighbor's name.

When my babies began to toddle, I pulled myself out of the permanent dimple I'd made in the couch and went outside to dig in my own garden. With one baby on my back, the other fenced in the grass, and my 3-year-old daughter equipped with her own small shovel, I moved rosebushes and toppled fences, wreaking havoc in the yard and sowing sanity in my mind. The crash and splinter of rotten wood, the ripping of root from its earth made me smile, and I'd wave at Mary from across the street and ask her opinion on where to plant my catmint and whether grapes would fare as well in my yard as they did hers. Life was no longer tick ... tick ... ticking in slow animation. I could leave the house with three small children and not panic, as long as I confined my errands to stores with shopping carts (to contain the kids) or to garden shops (where they could run freely without attracting attention or disapproval).

Today there's no time to sit on the couch and watch Mary's yard grow, although it's still as quaint as the nursery rhyme's. No, it's not her marigolds that catch my eye now, but her political signs. Her irritation with the Bush administration has grown to weed-choking proportions she told me the other day after I put a Barack Obama sign in my yard. So I penned this one for her because we share a love of plants and politics:

Mistress Mary, quite contrary,

How do the Democrats grow?

With precinct swell and cash in the till

And Obama signs all in a row.

Flashback

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Discovering this video dredged up memories from college, and among the most vivid are my inky nights spent at the student newspaper. The Sagebrush offices were tucked into a dingy corner of the student union and served as the unofficial home to a rag-tag crew of students who agonized over AP style, memorized headline font sizes, and challenged authority for amusement.

It was just my cup of tea. (Er, though back then it was probably a wine cooler.)

I spent hours there pasting up pages, learning how to use a PMT machine and falling in love. Marcel wooed me from behind a Mac SE/30. He was a ceramics major at the time, skinny with big hair, rode a bike all around campus, and wore funky button-down shirts. While the skills I worked so hard to learn are now antiquated, and Marcel has lost the hair and funky shirts, he's still my No. 1 super-guy.

My neighborhood

"little neighborhood"
courtesy of everything.in.blue

"What's boyhood?" my son asked.

"The time you are a child. A boy's childhood is called boyhood."

"Oh," he said.

"When you grow up and become a man, it's called manhood."

"And after that you're a neighborhood?"

"Nah," I laughed. "A neighborhood is a place, not a state of existence."

But later, I got to thinking about my neighborhood, my street and my place on it, and decided that my son had hit on something. A neighborhood is more than a series of streets and houses and businesses. It can be its own living entity. Just like a corporation can assume human qualities imbued by the people who run it and work there, or a nation take on characteristics of its citizens, we become the neighborhood we live in. Our individual personalities shape the collective character of our street.

This became apparent over the summer when the rental across the street housed a family that was painfully out of sync with the block. Why did the neighborhood reject this family? Firstly, money -- the family had noticeably less than the rest of the street based on the number of broken cars in their driveway, and the number of times they knocked on doors asking for the phone, food, tools or rides. Secondly, (and this is harder to admit) I think they didn't fit in because of race, despite a diversity of ages and ethnicities existing on the street. In "Taking Care: Understanding and Encouraging Self-protective Behavior" Neil D. Weinstein cites a number of studies that have found that neighborhoods need a certain amount of homogeny to function. We need to share something other than just fence lines, and finding that link is getting harder in a neighborhood like mine with its shrinking percentage of elderly and expanding populations of immigrants and rentals units.

So I'm challenging myself to find the common denominator that defines my street. I want to develop a map of my neighborhood that not only employs physical boundaries and statistical spreadsheets, but uses the medium I feel most comfortable in: stories.

My summer vacation

Courtesy of OneGreatClick.

My recent trip to Seattle was a delightful detour from life, an escape from the hustle and bustle of a big family to the hustle and bustle of a big city.

In my suitcase I packed baby carriers so I could hop buses, a chocolate chip cookie recipe from the New York Times, and a list of Seattle chocolatiers and Japanese dollar stores. And for just shy of a week, two sisters and their two sons crisscrossed downtown, sampling chocolates recommended by the blog Chocolate Speak, dropping by Daiso to check out its bento collection, and then returning home to work on a cookie recipe.

Theo Chocolate won the taste test hands-down. A tour of the small company, which in one location transforms cocoa bean to bar, impressed me. Theo's commitment to organic and fair trade cocoa is well and good, but it was knowing that its Fig, Fennel and Almond bar involved soaking figs in a local merlot and stirring all that goodness into rich chocolate that made it divine. This is one craving I can continue to satisfy because I've discovered that Reno's Whole Food's carries Theo's chocolate bars.

My desire for the perfect bento box took me to the Japanese dollar store Daiso where I picked up some tiny squeeze bottles for soy sauce, and some equally small and cute forks and spoons. But I hit the jack pot at Uwajimaya, a larger Asian market that carries Lock & Lock, the Korean Tupperware by Hanacobi Co. These utilitarian boxes have taken the madness out of the morning lunch assembly. Woohoo!

In between the shopping we took a ferry to an island, watched the salmon run, and then returned home to work on the cookie recipe, which promised perfection after three days and a sprinkling of salt. Did it deliver? All I can say is: nirvana.

Another's words

Photo courtesy of psychedelicfivecats.

August is a month of too much. It's too hot. The kids have been home for too long. There are too many flies. There's too many zucchini in the garden. It's too hard to hold on to a writing habit. The dog days of summer snap my patience, but rather than harangue myself (for letting my writing wilt) or yelling at my kids (for driving me batty) or berating you (for being a silent blog reader), I throw us all a life line of exquisite writing and will meet you in September.

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightening, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.

Excerpt from "Tuck Everlasting" by Natalie Babbitt.

Fashion, part two

Tranky Doo danced to the "The Dipsy Doodle" from "Spirit Moves: A History of Black Social Dance on Film, 1900-1986." Dancers: Al Minns, Pepsi Bethel and Leon James.

My grandma, Jane Tankard Conlin, was 13 when she made her clothing scrapbook, filled with glued newspaper clippings of home decor, written reports on the difference between silk and linen, and pictures of models -- all tall drinks of water with their flipped hair and narrow hips.

The pages, now yellowed and crackly, sent me on a mission to the hot, stuffy attic to unearth my own book of fashion, circa 1980s. Inside are pages from Seventeen and Glamour that I had cut out in an effort to identify my own style. I'm still struggling, though I've given up the big bangs and permed hair, thank God.

I can't imagine my grandma ever wrestled over what to wear. She had a beautiful, refined style, though she was more like a shot glass of feistiness than a tall drink of water. She wore my grandpa's club pin and they had their own song (The Dipsy Doodle), but she insisted on dating other men up until they were married. Small and strong, she bore five sons and climbed mountains. Yet as a teen, she dutifully typed up notes on "Why We Should Study Clothing." Here they are:

To become more interested in the home. To become a better working member of the family. To become a better citizen of the community in which we live. To form habits of neatness and orderliness. To be able to select materials and ready-made garments. To learn how to sew by hand and by machine. To make garments using either a blocked or commercial pattern. To appreciate color, line, design and fabrics. To know how to shop wisely and courteously. To learn how to budget our time and money.

Stories, stock market and steak

Printed in 1942 by the National Live Stock and Meat Board.
Image courtesy of umpqua.

While on the subject of grilling, I'll share Great Grandpa William Levy's famous steak recipe. Bill Levy was a fastidious and rich man, who once owned his very own island in New York's Thousand Islands. (A fact that amazes my children.) As a child, he color-coded his sock drawer. When he grew up, he required his family to wipe the dock dry of all wet footprints, and fluff the grass after sitting on it. But by the time I met this man he was old and thin, and the only thing he demanded of his family was that he be able to watch his football uninterrupted and his martini be served dry, at 5 p.m., sharp.

He died earlier this year at age 90. He left my husband his captain's hat and stories to share. He left my children Krugerrands and, inadvertently, an interest in the business page, which they now read regularly to check the price of gold. He left me a to-kill-for recipe. I'm going to share it with you:

Take 2-inch-thick New York strip steaks, cover them with a thick crust of Jane's Krazy Mixed-Up Salt, sear over hot coals and then move to medium coals to finish. When done to preference, slice thinly.

It's a grill thing

Published in 1957 by the home economics staff of Tested Recipe Institute, Inc.
and with the cooperation of barbecue experts of Big Boy MFG. Co.
Image courtesy of umpqua.

When boys grow up, they replace their fascination for the pocket knife with the grill. Think about it: They hold long tongs, a big, round gas tank is usually involved, and the locker-room talk moves to the backyard. Here's one line I overheard the other night:

"I used to have one of those little grills, but now I have a big, gas one."

Ouch.