A Christmas tree in Maine

My dear friend and the talented author Caitlin Shetterly and I have been leading interconnectd and parallel lives for the past couple of years. She and her husband moved to L.A. from Maine just a year before we headed out here, and she wrote a wonderful, poignant blog about their colorful experiences here in L.A. and their eventual decision to move back to Maine just as we were getting ready to move out here. Her blog about their year of misadventures is now about to become a book called "Made for You and Me," and she continues to update us on her life back in Maine. Her latest segment is about getting their family Christmas tree in Maine, and I highly recommend it as a cultural compare and contrast to our experience in the City of Angels!

http://caitdangowest.squarespace.com/

Our Lady of the Plastic Donkeys and Stripmall Christmas Trees

The reality of things is often unromantic, but no less wondrous somehow I think. Mistletoe, that comely green sprig adorning many of our doorways these days to sanction the holiday smooch, has a pretty amazing if slightly scatalogical back story. It's actually a parasite on trees here in the southwest, though rarely a very destructive one. It has beautiful, translucent white berries that birds nourish themselves with. The plant, looking out for itself, happily produces these lovely berries for the birds, and sets the seed within them, coating it with an irritating film. The birds, upon digesting the berries find themselves in some discomfort when expelling the seed. To relieve themselves they wipe their, ahem, posteriors on some nice tree bark, and thus the seed is then deposited on another tree, and primed to produce more mistletoe and beautiful white berries for bird consumption or for doorway decoration at the holidays! Cool, huh? Marvel at that while you kiss your sweetheart under it.

Christmas in L.A. is.....weird. Like lots of things in L.A. But that doesn't really make it less wonderful somehow. In preparation for the holiday I went to a craft fair last weekend at the L. A. Historic Park, just outside of downtown. It was really hot and dusty, which kind of makes things feel decidedly un-Christmasy and the traffic was terrible, but we finally made it there. This was not your grandma's craft fair and all of the silkscreen t-shirt printing hipsters were there and endless funky cards and beautiful jewelry and wonderfully weird little stuffed animals. There was also a dj and food trucks and lots of dogs and babies. It was a slice of etsy in real life. Totally worth the traffic and dust for sure!

While I was still fighting my way back through traffic Tim and the kids picked up the tree from a Home Depot lot down in the valley. Home Depot Christmas trees are a tough cultural pill to swallow for me. I'm from VT, where as a child we would drive through picturesque country roads dotted with red barns and farmhouses between snow covered mountains to places where we would cut our own tree out in the snowy, silent woods and then pay $15 to an old guy in a checkered hat with earflaps. Back in Maine we have a small balsam stand in the field in back of our very own old red barn which we can cut our tree from and bring it in by hand on a sled. Norman Rockwell all the way baby. But here in L.A. there is not a balsam growing in the woods for thousands of miles and Xmas trees on the west side cost in excess of $100. We sold a little bit of our souls and saved a fair amount of money by heading into the sea of strip malls that is the San Fernando Valley and buying the tree from the Home Despot for only $35. I've come to learn though, that the sacred is not elusive. Wherever it came from though, and whatever it's been through, it's our Christmas tree. It's very pretty standing in our front window and it smells fresh and cool, exhaling piney forest breath and basking in our adoration. It has made a great sacrifice in leaving its home and riding on trucks for hundreds, maybe thousands of miles and sitting in hot sunny parking lots bound in plastic netting. I'm happy for it to spend its final days being fragrant and regal as the centerpiece of all our holiday joy, and an evergreen reminder of the yearly perseverance through darkness again into light. Thank you little tree!

We may not have snowy, silent woods but there are some special Christmas delights for L.A. only, and I'm not talking about L.Ron Hubbard's fake Winter Wonderland on Hollywood Boulevard. We have a big pot of poinsettias on our dining table outside, and X-mas lights adorning the orange tree in our yard, which is heavily laden with ripening yellow oranges. Last weekend after we dropped Shannon off at the train we went to visit the Mexican market at Olivera street just across the way from Union Station. We were in luck that it was the feast day for the most highly esteemed holy lady of Mexico, the Virgin of Gualadelupe!!!! The protector of home and family and special patroness of all things Mexican. The Olivera Street market was teeming with families out to celebrate the day and do some Xmas shopping for pinatas, gorditas, jamoncillo, saint candles, ponchos with pictures of the Virgin on them, tote bags of Frida and countless other low-cost treasures. And to order their holiday tamales! We passed a troupe singing rancheras to the Virgin statue that was all festooned with flowers and candles and small offerings. In the square at the end of the street under the huge, ancient oak tree a troupe of Aztec inspired dancers clad in feathers and bells led children in a dance circle. Perhaps best of all, there was a line of people waiting to have their pictures taken in one of a stack of velvety sombreros while sitting on a life sized plaster donkey in front of a huge painting of the Virgin on the hill in Tepeyac, where she first appeared to the indigenous peasant Juan Diego in 1531 to give him the message that Mexico was forever more blessed and protected by her presence. L.A was part of Mexico then I think, so I figure she claims us too. I really wanted to stand in line for a photo on the plaster donkey but I thought I might creep out or offend the Mexican families. So I just ate a tamale and some burnt milk candy instead. Yum! Seriously.

I'm sure there are more L.A. holiday delights headed my way over the next weeks, and I wish all the best to everyone this season as we celebrate the turning of dark to light and the end and beginning of another year!

Dia de Los Muertos, Hollywood Style

The heat wave here is long over and as New England gets colder and darker, and L.A. gets greener and cooler, my grumpiness about living here wanes, at least until it starts to get nice in Maine again next spring (wink, smile). I have been a very busy, antisocial and very productive girl this month as I have continued work on my masters, started a self imposed storyboard course, finished another book illustration, started another icon, built a website, and written a grant to the Maine Arts Commission for Tim and I to finish our book. Whew! The last week I have had some good fun in L.A. though, and I want to share it.

Last weekend on an overcast afternoon Tim and I rode our bikes down the beach to the boardwalk in Venice. The Venice boardwalk is an L.A. must-see in my opinion. If you ever wanted to feel like you are in an '80's high school movie set in California, go down to the boardwalk. Rollerblading in bikinis is still totally hip, and you even still see the old school skates sometimes. I've actually seen people bopping along on bikes or skates with big boom boxes blasting hip hop on their shoulders. On this particular day we saw actor Johnny Holiday, who has been called the French Elvis, cruising along on his bike. We rode a little further with all the speedracers, the vintage cruisers, the be-bopping bladers, past the homeless caravans in the parking lots, the swinging gymnastic rings on the beach, the drum circle down by the waves, and into the skate park between the boardwalk and the beach. As if this scene wasn't fun enough, we happened into a rollerskating and hula hooping dance party! It was almost too much fun. There was a couple doing choreographed dance moves on their skates together. Their skates moved in absolute synchronicity and although she was small and Caucasian and he was very tall and African American, they moved like twins. There was a shirtless guy with corn rows doing splits on his skates. There was a nutty old guy with white hair dancing like crazy in the middle of everything, even though he had no skates on. Perhaps most amazing though, there was another young couple dancing with hula hoops. These were serious hula hoops though, large and made out of metal. The young dancers could put their bodies inside them, like Da Vinci's Vetruvian Man, and spin themselves around and upside down like living gyroscopes. It was beautiful and stunning, and just another Sunday at Venice Beach.

This weekend, since all the kids were with us and not too busy, we went in search of a traditional fall experience, u-pick apples! Believe it or not this is available in the L.A. area, you just have to drive inland and out of palm tree zone, and up into the San Bernardino Mountains. We headed east for about two hours, then wound up from the highway. In the 10 minute drive from the I-10 to the orchard the temperature dropped about 15 degrees and we exited the car into brisk fall weather in a picturesque, hilly orchard under a conifer studded white rocky peak shrouded in misty clouds. This orchard aimed to please, with a general store, BBQ pit and lunch hall serenaded by bluegrass musicians in vaguely colonial costume, (in fact, everyone working there was in vaguely colonial costume, I don't know why, since colonial American culture never actually made it to CA in real time. It would have been more authentic to have Spanish missionaries and Native Americans, since that's who lived in CA during colonial American times. I guess that wouldn't attract homesick New Englanders like us though.) Anyway, they had a press your own cider tent, several pick your own pumpkin patches, and yes, apple trees with low hanging fruit. It cost a lot more than u-pick orchards in Maine, but we had fun eating, picking, and we did press our own cider in one of their pretty hand turned presses. It was really good! It was nice to find something earthy and rural and with a patina of age here in SoCal.

Next event of the weekend is one long awaited and anticipated by me. One of my favorite holidays ever, and very favorite events that L.A. has to offer, Dia de Los at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery! At dusk last night we made our way through the inching traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard and parked on a side street. Then we followed the streams of people in Mexican peasant outfits, clubbing gear and full-on calaca makeup past the street vendors selling hot dogs with roasted jalapenos and on to the gates of the resting place of the moviemaking elite of days gone by. We entered and wove ourselves through the crowded walkways, past illuminated altar after altar. We saw retablos honoring and celebrating lost sons, brothers, fathers, grandmothers, soldiers, Mexican cultural traditions and movie stars. There was an altar celebrating Mayan Gods, with beautiful paper mache figures. There was an altar celebrating the old sitcom The Golden Girls, (las Chicas Doradas), with gold painted skeletons with wigs and dresses sitting on a couch together drinking what looked like pink zinfandel. Some were art, some were statement, some were just people humbly remembering lost family members. It's mostly a family event, and there were lots of couples and kids, but it is Hollywood, so plenty of young hipsters as well, and some abueltitas out late. Chorizo was grilling and beer was pouring, musicians were playing and people were dancing, incense was burning and Mayan dance troupes were performing in full body feather suits with torches in front on Rudolf Valentino's moat surrounded white marble mausoleum as people remembered and celebrated the spirits. This event is wildly artistic and creative, deeply spiritual, and the Hollywood location and makeup and costumes also make it fun and cheesy, all at the same time! It's so awesome. Good times! So sad I have to wait until next year again to celebrate it again.

As I sit writing this the kids of Topanga have finally finished streaming to the door in droves looking for candy while their well-costumed parents stand by, drinks in hand, talking about their latest documentary or photo-journalist assignment. We live in one of the few relatively flat, neighbor-hoody parts of the canyon, so we see a lot of Halloween traffic. Now the Jack-o-lanterns and luminarias are blown out. It's been a fun evening, to cap off a fun weekend. I'm the last one up, on the now dark and quiet street. Just me and the spirits, reminiscing about the fun we've had.

The Absurd, The Ironic, The City of Angels

I so want to complain about L.A. in this post. But I won't. Not much anyway. I've been putting off sitting down to write it because I knew I would feel like this, and I don't even want to sit and listen to it myself, much less make others read it. It's just......it's October! It's colorful foliage and pumpkin season, it's my favorite time of year in New England, when everything smells frosty and smoky and the light is so bittersweet, golden and beautiful. My Dad is harvesting his grapes in VT this week and starting this year's wine. It was 114 degrees downtown last week with air quality warnings. I would just rather be there. Ok I'm done now.

Whenever I have trouble appreciating life in Los Angeles, I look for evidence of the absurd, because I love absurdity, and I find that L.A. rarely disappoints on this subject. I love a flyer that we got in the mail the other day for a local realtor, touting her capability, 20 years of experience and solid knowledge of the market alongside her photo, in which she appeared with windblown hair, sultry half closed eyes and parted lips covered in wet-looking red lipstick. She looks experienced and competent maybe, but real estate is not what she's really bringing to mind. I guess it doesn't matter, she got our attention, and that was the point. Sex sells just about anything, so why not real estate?

Another funny thing about L.A., in not such a good way, has to do with the fact that everyone is so friendly and laid back. Or at least they act like that in person. I'm always like a confused beat behind in delivery of these over enthusiastic greetings that seem to be expected when seeing other parents from Brick's school or friends of friends that I have met just once or twice before. Anyway, there's the facade, or perhaps the reality of extreme friendliness face to face, but it all disappears as soon as people are safely locked away in their automobiles. Then, most interaction turns to greed, incredible impatience and barely controlled rage. No right of way for bikes or pedestrians, honking automatically if the person in front of you is moving one iota more slowly that you would like them to at a stop sign or red light, screaming obscenities at each other in parking lots, and weaving around each other like madmen on the freeways. But then out of the car and those ultra-bleached pearly whites flash again!

Another, more sweetly ironic L.A. thing we noticed just the other night on an evening stroll down the pier in Santa Monica. The pier and the 3rd street promenade shopping area are some of the biggest tourist attractions in L.A. There are tons of nice hotels, restaurants, shopping, the beaches, a bike path, fountains, landscaping, lots of people dressed very stylishly and a real upbeat, modern, consumer vibe. At the very end of the pier though, all through the evening and late into the night, lower income, decidedly un-stylish and un-consumer and un-tourist Latino families hang out together with poles and buckets and fish for their dinners, or for fun, or for some extra cash. Who knows, but there they are just out of view from the fountains and lights, talking and playing with their babies and gossiping in Spanish on folding chairs on the farthest, fish smelling, worn concrete deck leaning over the rhythmic, dark ocean below.

A hundred years ago L.A., as a town, barely existed. Now it is one of the largest cities in the world, with most of this growth happening since the 1930s. Most everything here is fairly new, and most everyone here is from somewhere else. Sense of history in L.A. is very short, evidenced by this example that Tim gave of a situation in which a couple of middle aged dads at one of Nick's baseball games were complaining about the Dodgers and their east coast influenced management and how the team should go back to its roots, to being a real west coast team, like it was 20 years ago in the '80's. Apparently these guys are forgetting that just 20 years before that, in the '60s, the Dodgers were still playing at their actual roots, in Brooklyn!

Perhaps one of the most absurd L.A. events of late happened for us at parent's night at Nick's high school, where we sat in a small classroom in a row of plastic chairs behind comedic genius, "Curb Your Enthusiasm" star and "Seinfeld" creator, Larry David and were introduced to the school's film classes by a couple of stuttering grad students. It's just so weird to see someone you watch on TV suddenly standing with you in a real life, unglamorous place, like a high school. He looked sort of washed out and somewhat confused, like the rest of us, shuffling through the florescent hallways, sitting in rows of narrow plastic desks, listening to the teachers of our kids' classes. The one difference being I guess that he's a genius billionaire, and I'm, well, me.

I may not be a genius billionaire yet, or likely ever, but I am working pretty hard these days. I'm taking some pretty demanding classes again this semester which keep me heading back to the drawing board, literally, much of the time. Also, after a few unsuccessful trips looking for waitressing jobs left me wanting to shoot myself in the head, and that was just at the thought of actually getting a position at one of these places, I've decided to take the next few months and build a website and some more finished work so that I can go looking for some actual illustrating or storyboarding work. Wish me luck!

Beginning Year Two In the City Of Angels

We’re back in the City of Angels. We had a wonderful, golden summer in Maine! It was full of fresh food from the garden and the farm market and family and friends visiting. It was the kind of summer where your bathing suit never fully dries out because you go swimming every day and your feet get dirty and dry from being barefoot in the garden. I feel refreshed, and as the seasons turn to busier times I reluctantly re-purpose myself.

I can’t believe that it’s been a year since I started this blog! I promised that I would keep it up for my first year in L.A. I had envisioned that I would have reached some kind of peace or have some kind of clearer purpose in my new home by now, and I’m not sure that I have lived up to my own expectations on this point. I definitely need to keep writing, digging through words to help me find my footing in my life these days. Thank you so much for being with me. Writing this helps me so much, keeps me clearer and more honest and positive than I can be when my words are just for my eyes alone.

So far this week sort of feels like an, (albeit much milder,) echo of my disoriented arrival last year. A little over a week ago I was eating fresh peaches from my tree in Maine. I was closing up the house, cleaning for our winter renter, putting the garden to bed and trying to squeeze in some last minute visits with friends and family. Then a long plane trip away from the cold northern coast and finally a descent into a sea of lights. Tim agreed, the first few days back in L.A. after a summer in Maine are disorienting. The dusty sunshine, the traffic and freeways, the city blocks stretching on and on, Carnicerias and lowriders with la Virgen stickers on them, and all the stylishly dressed and coiffed people on the west side. These are just things that, for better or worse, you never or rarely see in Maine. We went to the farmer’s market in Hollywood and wandered through the crowded maze of amazing fresh figs, jewel-like plums and tomatoes piled high. I ate a fresh date, which was lightly golden in color with surprising flesh the texture of an apple. It was like something wonderful from another planet. And speaking of another planet, the first day that I descended into the asphalt solar collector that is the San Fernando Valley to go on some soul scarring errands to a series of big box stores, I felt like I was on one. I really can’t complain too much though, now that I live in sunny Topanga, in the mountains between the sea and the valley, where the sun almost always shines, but not too hot, and we hear coyotes and owls in the night. Even here though, in this new place I love, my heart goes out to Maine with its bad weather, dilapidated houses, bumpy roads and poor dental hygiene.

I can’t say that I am always particularly happy to be back here right now….because sometimes I’m not. But a week in Maine alone without Tim and the kids was enough to remind me of how much I love and miss them and don’t like to be far from them for long. And this first week back has brought me that wonderful taste of fresh date, a celebratory dinner party with some good friends and a visit to the hospital in Burbank to meet another friends’ beautiful, brand new, elfin baby daughter. I’m so happy to be here for these events with these people that I care about. And I’m happy to have the anchors of friendship to tie me to both my homes.

Last Dog Days of Summer

These are the last dog days of summer. It has been clear and sunny and in the high 80s and 90s for the last several days in a row. The sky is blue. The sun is burning. The flowers are browning. The garden is drooping. The dogs are comatose under the furniture. The children are sweating in their school desks. We are packing up to leave and it is almost like L.A. is coming to get us!

My agricultural impulses chafe at me. I made pesto and froze it. I want to make more, but why? We leave in a week and it won’t be good by next year. I can’t ship it to myself in CA. I have a tree full of apples, and a foley food mill. I could can sauce. A pile of cukes ready for pickling. Tomatoes heavy on the vine for jars of marinara. But what am I going to do, spend probably a lot of money and fossil fuels shipping this food to myself for the winter in CA where oranges hang heavy on the trees and the markets are bursting year round? That isn’t very reasonable, thrifty or ecologically sound, which are some of the major factors in favor of the work involved in preserving your own food. Another is pleasure and another is pride. In this heat it wouldn’t be such a pleasure to stand over a hot stove canning anyway. I guess that just leaves pride. There’s my real problem, pride.

In my twenties when others were perhaps interning and career building and building an economic future I was traveling and having a good time and learning how to feed and prepare the soil, preserve the harvest, save the seeds and propagate the important heirloom varieties of food crops. It still burns me sometimes that I can’t fully use these skills in my life these days. Now I’m 33 and I can speak Spanish, play guitar, draw and run a small subsistence farm. But you can’t run a small subsistence farm in a split life on two coasts. And more than I need canned tomatoes these days I need to make a living. I haven’t figured out how to draw on these, my hard earned skills, and turn them into my career and economic future. I may have some ideas but I am not there yet. It kind of hurts my pride sometimes. Shouldn’t I have this stuff figured out by now? Ah well.

To use some farm terminology, this is what “gets my goat” about going back to Cali more than anything else. I need to put aside my farm girl self, the one that I made when I thought I knew what I was doing with my life. My comfortable, simple old farm girl self that I revisit in the summer. Back to the work of creating a place for myself in the big, strange world of L.A. No resting on any agricultural laurels, I’ve got so many more and different things left to figure out!

At least at this point, as opposed to a year ago, L.A. doesn’t feel so big nor so strange. I’ve got a home there, some neighbors, some friends. I’ll be slowly chipping away at the masters program again this fall and looking for part time work again. (Not going back to the English Café full of English fruitcakes, bless them.) I’ll build myself some new garden beds at the new house that we rent in Topanga. I have galleries and stores and places that I look forward to going. I’ll be so happy to see the beach, the wild parrots, the coyotes. It’s really not L.A. that I have a problem with, I know that now, it’s my concept of myself in it. I wonder when I will feel as at home there as I do in Maine and what will happen between now and then?

Summer Party

There is nothing like a good party to really stir up a bunch of good energy and memories. It’s also handy for cleaning up and getting things done around the house that you’ve been meaning to do for a while. We had a party last weekend and cleaned the barn, mowed the yard, painted the bathroom, took a load of stuff to goodwill, and made a lot of food. We also got to see a lot of old friends and some new ones and visit and play together. It’s particularly rewarding to see the many kids we know and love as they grow and change from season to season. We ate potluck, played whiffle ball, had homemade ice cream sandwiches, (thanks Anna!), and finished the day off with a quick trip to the beach, and then a houseful of guests overnight. We drank a bottle of Dom that night to celebrate Tim’s recent sale of the magazine, and as I wandered around the house with a flute in my hand looking for Cortaid for 3 year old Kate’s sore bottom, I was aware of my life feeling particularly full and satisfying. I sat on the kitchen floor gossiping and telling stories with Tim’s cousin Sonja late into the evening. Or at least it felt late after that day. I really appreciate the infusion of joy and fun that came with that gathering though, and it was a perfect end celebration to what has been a near perfect and beautiful summer.

Food!

(First of my potatoes headed for my table!)

I love food and love to eat. I was a horrible picky eater as a child and my picky eaterness has continued in some version into adulthood and perhaps gotten worse because while now I will try just about anything, I have become a very informed eater, perhaps an overly informed eater some would say, and I am quite picky about what I buy. I like to buy my food with love! I do have to meet the needs of my family, most of whom are not happy with bulgar salad and beet greens as snacks, so we do have to have frozen pizza and boxed mac and cheese around at all times for the independent snacking needs of growing boys. But it is one of my great pleasures in life to find and buy and cook good, fresh, healthy, whole food for our meals. Having worked in agriculture I can really appreciate the work that goes into well produced food, and it deserves some love. I do keep to a budget, and even though we try to keep it on the generous side I don’t frequent gourmet shops and I almost never buy processed anything except jam and condiments. Even in my most impoverished periods in my youth though I always bought as high quality fresh food as I could. As my husband’s father liked to say, “You cheat your stomach, you’re cheating the wrong man.” Or, another way to look at it is, you are what you eat. Who wants to be a factory farmed beeflot cow or a genetically modified chemical laden dorito just because it saves a few bucks?

I don’t want to talk about how bad mass produced, processed, factory famed supermarket food can be though. It’s becoming common knowledge and Michael Pollen, Barbara Kingsolver, Vandana Shiva, Alice Waters and many others have already written just about everything there is to say on that matter. I just want to crow about how GOOD my food is these days, and what a joy it is to buy it and support the hard efforts of farmers, fishermen and other producers in my economically strapped area.

I’’ll start with one of the joys of my life here in Warren, ME. Beth’s Farm Market, hidden up a quiet road on the way to the transfer station, this place is a hub of activity because it is seriously the best farm stand that I have ever been to or can even imagine. They’re not strictly organic and they’re not perfect but their vegetables are so perfectly fresh and delicious and they run such a tight ship over there and everything is so good….it’s pretty impressive. They must be serious overachievers. Plus, in this busy age they cater to the one stop shopper. You can get your all your produce needs, frozen local grass fed beef and all natural pork, fresh bread, biscuits and donuts, oysters, lobsters, jams, jellies, fresh eggs, cream, canned juice, and absolutely the very best ever, perfect strawberry shortcake! All day every day all summer. I love to go there, can you tell?

If I want fresh local bread I can buy really excellent sliced or shaped loaf bread in at least 5 different locations in close vicinity.

If I want wine I can ride my bike right up the road to my favorite wine makers in Maine and also my neighbors and buy their Villager white blend or a nice dry tobaccoey merlot with grapes from long island. If I drank harder stuff I could also get an excellent locally made gin or passable rum right up the road the other way to Union.

If I want fish I am seriously in luck here because 5 minutes from my house is a fish wholesaler with very fresh stock, or there is another great fish shop in Rockland and there is just no shortage of fresh fish buying opportunities in my life now.

There are two stores nearby that focus almost completely on locally produced goods, and there I can be sure to find local meats of all kinds, as well as fresh local cheeses, yogurt, milk, butter and the ever present eggs and bread and vegetables.

I can even get local, organic milk, butter, shrimp, smoked fish and some produce at Hannafords.

I do also have my own garden full of green and cukes and potatoes right now, and my neighbors across the street have some really happy organically fed chickens and I can run over there and chat with her and get some super fresh eggs most any time.

Even though I live on 8 acres in the middle of a blip on the map called Warren, ME all of this wonderful food can be bought freshly every day within a 15 minute drive from my house.

This food is really fresh, and often surprising and varied in its taste. Granted the yogurt that I buy doesn’t taste even remotely like yoplait. Yoplait is its botoxed up Valley girl cousin. This food is not homogenized. It tastes like the soil and the rain from right here that went into it. It reflects the practices and preferences of the hands that made it. It is varied and influenced by the seasons. I find it to be so fully nourishing and grounding, tying me to this small patch of earth and the other people that live on it.

Empty Nest

(This is an image created from the nest for an auction to benefit animals affected by the BP Gulf oil spill)

A few weeks ago I was cleaning up my very overgrown vegetable garden. I was pulling milkweed and goldenrod from between the beds, and preparing to saw down a Christmas tree sized thistle. As I get closer to the thistle I saw, about 2 feet above the ground hidden in the branches, a fresh bird’s nest with four small, pale blue speckled eggs in it. I gasped and backed up, suddenly terrified of what I had almost done. I hadn’t touched the nest and hoped that I hadn’t disturbed it too much, but I had almost exposed it. I propped brush back up around it and wrapped string around the outside of the pile and didn’t go near it for a week. Tim checked on it though and told me that he had seen the bird back on the nest again. I was very relieved.

Then a week or two later I was back at work in the garden and thought I would check it myself. I peeked through the thick brush and was heartbroken to see that the nest was upset and empty. We hadn’t ultimately been the cause of this nest failure, but something else much lower to the ground had reached up, tipped the nest, and devoured the eggs without leaving a trace. I pulled the nest out and cut the thistle and brush down. The nest is about 6 inches in diameter, with a center hollow of about an inch and a half. It’s soft and thick and perfectly round, all created one blade of dried grass at a time carried by beak and wing. A wonder of engineering and a work of art. I’m so very sad for the mother bird. It is such a tragedy. A small, common tragedy perhaps, but no less truly sad.

I’ve seen a lot of small tragedies lately that would probably never have haunted my thoughts before. I am attuned to them, and each one hurts these days. A perfectly plumed seagull truck down by traffic, a tiny mouse running in the gutter inches from truck wheels, a friend’s disappointment. There have been a few moments when I feel overwhelmed by despair. How can we stand it? This world full of unfairness and small and large tragedies and no way to ever fully protect ourselves. My skin got thin and exposed in the recent loss of our baby, and it hasn’t fully thickened up yet. I do heal, I am fine. I spend most every day very happily right now, and feel quite healthy. I just know something else about the world to be afraid of now. I have experienced a little more of the world’s darkness, a little more of our fragility. That knowledge will seamlessly become part of who I am, but while it is fresh and new now it feels heavy and raw sometimes. This is part of the work of healing. Feeling the sore spot and acknowledging it and watching it fade to a pale scar on your consciousness.

Home Again!

I love Maine in the summer. Love love love love it. And I love my life here. I work sometimes at one of my favorite restaurants, where we love to drink wine and eat great food and get silly at the back table after the customers leave. I love to get my groceries at a network of small fish shops, farm stands, neighbors’ gardens and local businesses. I love my weed filled, neglected garden. I love my studio. I love my simple, beautiful old house filled with picturesque, sentimental and endearingly shabby things. I love driving to cool, clear Megunticook lake to swim, or to sheltered Birch Point to dip in the frigid ocean. I love how half of life here looks like a Wyeth painting. I love getting our old car fixed cheap from Kirby Mank down the street. I love the clean, dry smell of fir trees in the heat. I love the sweet perfume of greenery as you pass through a shady glade. I love the ripe, briny smell of the ocean breeze, as refreshing as a cool compress on the forehead. I love the magic action of fireflies filling the air above the tall grasses in the fields on a humid night. Truly, could there be anyplace else as beautiful and pleasing in all the world?

I’ve been so happy the last week or so that it frightens me sometimes. I wasn’t happy, couldn’t imagine ever being completely happy again 3 weeks ago. But I’ve been so blessed by friendship and family and beauty and a bunch of fun in the last few weeks that every day, happiness has been filling me up a little more, getting in a little deeper, winning me over. But happiness has burned me before! And not long ago. Some moments I catch myself paroling the edges of my days for the next struggle or pain. Examining each decision, each turn of events, could this be it? Which way will the trouble come from next?

I know that’s no way to live though. Tim and I have had some major personal, professional, and financial disappointments in the year since we left this house, in fact, probably some of the worst that we could have imagined for ourselves because they were tied to our greatest hopes for ourselves at the time. But the reality is that we’re back here again, and all in one piece too. And much worse could have happened, because technically it always could. But it didn’t. And these days we’re really, really happy moving through our fields, our beautiful old, junk filled barn, the time worn rooms of our house, and at night falling into our creaky, soft, old wrought iron bed to sleep while the fireflies make the most of the night outside. May these days last as long as they possibly can and fortify us with comfort and peace.

Ciao Cali

I am back in Maine now and living it up in the thick high heady delight that is sweet, fresh, green, firefly filled summer here! But, before I get into that I need to write a bit about my last week in the Golden State. California really had quite a send off for me.

Within a few days of our personal tragedy of late being over, and me being not nauseous anymore, my friend Rinko and I went on an L.A. adventure that was so weird and great and fun, you really couldn't have it anyplace else.

It was a Wednesday. It was hot. We met in Burbank around noon, and hopped on the freeway in my old Volvo without air conditioning. In about 45 minutes of un-luxurious highway commute we were in the southeastern edges of L.A. in a neighborhood known as Little India. I'd heard about this place and wanted to check it out ever since last fall, but just hadn't made time until suddenly I was going to leave L.A., and also was really in need of some fun. Rinko and I both love to eat and cook and are both really visual people who can spend a lot of happy time just looking at interesting little things. Little India was a good fit for these enjoyments. As may be be inferred from my uninformed account here, I know pretty much nothing about Indian culture except that I find it pretty and interesting and I like the food. We went immediately into a restaurant to get some lunch, thinking along the lines of saag paneer and nan. Well, were we in for a treat! A unexpected treat but no less delightful as we realized that we didn't have to order but instead were to be served a complicated and extensive set menu on a silvery tray, consisting of an incredible myriad of strange and often delightful little silvery cups of food the likes of which I have never seen nor tasted before. There was the bean and vegetables in red sauce, something of cabbage I think, the toasty dry crunchy noodles in spicy sauce, a potato dish, a cup of sweet, vibrantly orange pureed mango, and perhaps my favorite, a bit of fried donut immersed in rich, watery yogurt with spicy mint sauce. I am forgetting a few things I think and I should also mention the refilling pile of fresh, hot flatbread. The waitress tried a little to help direct us on what to dip with what and which bread goes with which dish but it was too confusing so we just mixed and matched and tried our own combination. A culinary adventure! To wash it down we drank ice water and salted buttermilk. Yum. We did get to choose our own desserts though, and perhaps my favorite happening of the day was the arrival of the last dish that Rinko chose. I had a dense, dark yellow cardamom mousse with pistachios, but she had scoop of bright pink, flower flavored ice cream garnished with basil seeds soaked in rosewater until they resembled chewy caviar all topped with a spray of chewy rice noodles. All the floweryness made it taste like whipped commercial perfume but as far as creativity goes I have never seen the like. Soaked basil seeds and rice noodles on ice cream! It was a brand new experience for us.

Then we ogled our way through the food market downstairs, wandering through stacks of rice and lentils, 5 lb bags of turmeric, toothpaste with Bollywood stars on the label, dried chilies, strange, inedible looking silver candies and much much much more. We went to the pastry store and with the aid of the very polite and helpful young man behind the counter bought some soft milk candies and a few pieces of a complicated but delicious nutty, pistachio layer bar. I'm sure that these sweet delights have real names but I was so sensorily overhwelmed that I don't remember them. We moved away from food and browsed housewares at this point, looking through stacks of pillows and embroidered curtains and wall hangings and quilts, every inch of them covered in colorful handstitched animals, little mirrors or gossamer ruffles. I could have perused the stacks all day but our adventure was FAR from over yet, and so we bid Little India goodbye to head on down the road again.

Next stop DISNEYLAND! Can you believe it? I went from Little India and flower ice cream to Mickey Mouse and Disneyland all in one afternoon!!! I think you can only have that kind of fun in L.A.

Anyway, because Rinko's husband and our other friend, David, works for Disney she has the privilege of bringing herself and a guest for free. Thus at 33 years old, overall feeling kind of sad and old and in need of cheer, I entered a Disney theme park for the very first time in my life!! Thanks Rinko! We drove the 15 minutes further down the road to Anaheim, parked in the massive parking structure and took the tram in to the hive of fun. And it was fun! As we entered the village I had a childlike feeling of awe as we came upon the statue of Walt and Micky with the Magic Castle behind it. The remembrance that this now huge corporate empire is originally built from one animator and his creation of those incredibly endearing characters that have lived in the hearts of Americans for generations brought a tear to my eye. To create something that is so well loved, that is a great thing. At some points in my life I would have felt judgmental about or alienated by the consumer and corporate aspects of the park, and if I looked closely I still probably would, but that's not why I went. I went for a new experience and to be cheered, and it was impossible not to feel the cheer from all of the happy people enjoying themselves around us. There were so many people there, even for late afternoon on a random Wednesday! Excited children and jostling teenagers and overstimulated families on vacation. From a child's perspective there are endless delights. Every time we turned around there was a parade or a show of some kind beginning. We rode the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, which is older than the Johnny Depp movies and fun and campy with robotic pirates lighting port towns on fire and singing. We also rode a riverboat ride past characteristically Disneyish cute plaster jungle animals. Disneyland was the first of Walt's great theme parks, and it has an old fashioned feel. The kinder, gentler Disney of days gone by can be experienced there. We could have stayed for a light show, we could have seen another parade, the fun never ends at Disneyland though, so we decided to call it a day at about 8 pm. We watched fireworks going off from the top of the parking garage as we got in the car to leave. What a send off to an amazing day!

Thanks Rinko for having some fun with me when I really needed it. Thanks Walt for the inspiration. Thanks Little India for the invaluable gift of new flavors. Thanks California for my first year with you and all of the life experiences that you've given me to work with. See you in September!

Recent Losses

The past three months or so have been really transformative in some deeper ways than our external environment. Right around the time that we moved to Topanga I learned that I was pregnant. This was a fairly long anticipated and an incredibly joyful development for us. I’ve been working really hard and using all of my energy for most of the time since just keeping my body going through fatigue and near constant nausea, thus the lack of blogging or painting for the last three months. I’ve been in survival mode, but also basking in gratitude, joy and hope for the arrival of this new person into our lives. It’s been a pretty amazing journey to totally give over my body and undertake this kind of biologically creative work. Unfortunately though, this particular journey doesn’t have a happy ending. At about 12 weeks we learned that this baby had some very serious problems. Over the last 3-4 weeks we have had a lot of testing done to understand more the nature of these problems, and we arrived at the very sad knowledge of this baby’s inability to survive into this life. I can’t really think of any news that I have received in my life that was more immediately crushing than this. I didn’t quite get to the halfway mark with this pregnancy, and was never able to feel the baby move, but I did get to see it very clearly on the high powered ultrasounds, and I heard it’s heart beat. I did give over my body to the process of growing and nurturing it and I had enough time for the strong surges of love and protectiveness to develop. For however short and ill-fated this pregnancy was, this was my baby and I’ve never had a baby before. It changes everything. For a few days after receiving the bad news I didn’t know how life would go on. But of course it does.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this through the last 3-4 weeks as we waited for answers and tried to learn more about our situation. For the past few weeks I wake up almost every day at about 5:00 am and re-examine the facts and feelings in my head and heart. Some things have come clear, and others probably never will. First of all, I can accept this. Growing life and giving birth are dangerous events and there are so many things that can go wrong. Having worked as a farmer and gardener these are facts with which I am familiar. Not every seed planted will bloom, not every chick hatches, not every piglet or kitten born into the litter will make it. There are natural laws that we will never understand and to which none of us are exempt. I know that I am also far from being the only woman ever to experience this, and breaking this news to my grandmother and mother in-law, two women in their ‘70’s and ‘80’s, I was certainly met with sympathy but no surprise. A story like mine and stories more tragic than this were very familiar to them, and probably are more familiar among my peers, even with all our advanced modern technology, than I had before realized. Concerning western medicine and modern technology though, which I am not always convinced solve more problems than they create, I am glad to say now that I have regained some confidence and gratitude that I was lacking for some time. We were saved a surprise late term miscarriage, still birth, or dying baby by the amazing advances in fetal diagnostics. We were also able to get clear answers about what our baby’s problems were, what might have caused them, and if they are likely to repeat themselves in future pregnancies. We were lucky and relatively comforted to know that our baby’s problems were not genetic or chromosomal, not caused by anything that we could have done or not done, and extremely unlikely to repeat themselves. And this then leads into the fact that we will never understand why this, and things like this have to happen. We were the 1 in 5,000 or so to have a baby with these particular fatal problems. Why us? I feel so disappointed and abused by life, to have waited so long for this, to suffer through some of the toughest parts of the journey, to have come so far, and to end with a loss. It’s very bitter. Sometimes lately I feel old and scarred, and marked with a mantle of tragedy. I’m afraid that I’m wafting the scent of sadness wherever I go, and I’m socially reluctant and protective lately. I was waiting to tell friends and family that I don’t see all of the time about this pregnancy, thinking that if it didn’t work out I wouldn’t need to mention it to everyone, but now I find that it would feel too isolating to try to hide this. While I know that I am really ok, and in a few months of taking care of myself mentally and physically I will be totally fine, I will never be quite the same as before this happened. It’s been a very powerful life event.


In our last 3-4 weeks of waiting and agony it’s been particularly painful to continue with the fatigue and nausea knowing that it was in service to developing a baby with pretty much no hope for its future. The pregnancy ended a few days ago, and I could almost immediately feel energy and appetite coming back to my body. We’ve done everything that we could to see this terrible, grueling episode through, and it is over, and I’m ready for the healing to begin. The grief still comes and goes, but I think I’ve seen it’s peak, and the same goes for my misery at this point as well.

Despite all the pain, some really good things have come out of this. As discouraging as this experience could be, I am almost surprised to find that I finally feel sure that we will actually have a baby someday. I used to wonder and feel much less sure of it than I do now, and that is a strange relief to find that I just don’t feel worried about that anymore. It was also good for me to realize that my body, for all the trouble that I have had hormonally over the last few years, was doing a great job supporting and growing this baby. I felt pretty miserable, but in a totally normal way for the first trimester. My overall health has been good, and I feel strength and energy restoring quickly to my body. Also I understand that although this was our personal tragedy, it was a straightforward, inexplicable event that doesn’t need to scar or torture us into the future. We’re healthy, we’re very lucky and happy in our marriage and family, we have an interesting and happy life where we get to spend a lot of time doing things that we love. It’s also been interesting to realize that the most recent chapter of our life in CA, including the move to Topanga and this pregnancy, seems to have effectively effaced whatever remaining unsettled feelings or unsolved questions I have had about the direction and turns my life has taken in the last few years. It’s been a wild ride, but I feel myself coming to a more fixed point. I started out over five years ago as the homesteading, activist, young New England farmer and that identity disintegrated and morphed into where I stand now, which I’m still defining but seems to be coming more clear as something along the lines of a bi-coastal, artist, wife, mom type figure. We did lose this baby, and that is very sad, but I also lost some questions and anxieties and confusions that I didn’t need anymore, and so they just fell away. The transition doesn’t plague me anymore, and I feel fully pulled into the present.

New Chapter: Topanga

Well a lot has happened in the three months since I wrote last, and this will be one of my last entries from the first year in L.A! It’s been a very transformative time, on a very deep level, especially these last three months. I’ll start with the external changes. First of all, I found my spot in L.A. Everybody loves to hate L.A., but in order to stay here, you gotta find your neighborhood that you CAN love. Some friends of ours love their work project of an edgy/artsy neighborhood in east Hollywood. My youngest stepson’s mother, no matter how broke she is, will live nowhere but the palm lined high rent shopping areas off Montana Ave in Santa Monica. There is a fierce pride amongst my new Chicana artist friends for their neighborhood around Cesar Chavez Avenue, where many of them are third or fourth generation residents. I have fallen in love with Topanga Canyon, our new home, and it is my sweet spot in L.A. First of all, I think I partially love it because it is so NOT L.A. Except it is. We have the same school district, the same water system, have to drive the same freeways etc. etc., but we are separated from the smog and the glare by the largest preserved track of wilderness this close to a metropolitan area in the U.S., Topanga State Park. The park stretches up over a mountain range, ending a corridor of wilderness stretching to Oxnard and is home to countless coyotes, deer, mountain lions etc. When we drive up off the Pacific Coast Highway toward home now we pass along a narrow, windy road through the canyon in between mountains and bare rock outcroppings and see no houses or sign of people for several miles. It’s only about five minutes in the car up to the town, but in those five minutes it feels like you pass into another world. Topanga is known for its heyday in the sixties as the L.A. hideaway of various famous musicians like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, and for the herds of dirty hippies that flocked up here around them. Being close to Palisades, Santa Monica and Malibu, it has gone up a bit in price and esteem around here as the years have gone on. It’s still dusty, and you can still find plenty of hippies, but now they’re mostly old and rich, and intermixed with famous actors, young families, artists and ultra pure living yoga instructor types all at home in their houses and compounds tucked into ravines and the sides of mountains. There are so many Om signs and Buddha statuettes in this canyon that archaeologists are going to be very confused someday. Topanga has a small town feel and takes community very seriously. When we moved onto our street we got several welcome visits and a community roster with everyone’s names and contact numbers on it for communication and for coordinating the shared green space at the end of the street. We found a car pool to Nick’s school, and it seems like there is always some community event or festival going on that is much anticipated and well attended. It’s nice. Most of all though I think I love the mountains, the coyotes at night, the wild parrots, and the feeling that the natural world here is close, right outside your door, fluttering in your window. As the seasons turn and spring has passed into soft, beautiful summer in my beloved Maine, the lush greenery and regular rains of winter here have given way to Santa Ana winds and stronger sun, to browning hillsides and dusty roads. It’s harsh summer in L.A., and I am ready to be back in Maine. But I know it will be all too soon before I come back again in the fall, and I am glad to feel at least that I’ll be happy to dig in more deeply to this landscape and community when I get back here again for year number two in L.A!

Out With the Bad, on With the Good

(bear for introspection and protection)

This is another one of those rare early morning blogs. Usually I am rather like a mute beast in the early morning, shuffling and groaning, but once in a while a piece of insight comes bubbling to the surface in my sleep in surprising clarity. Clear enough to wake me up to write about it! Even though I may still get frustrated about the ways that I think my life is not coming together, (moving again, tight money, stuck somewhere in an abyss of career change), I had some clarity this morning on a part of my life that has come quite a long way in the last five years of transition. I want to talk about my perspective on a certain situation because, well, I never have before, and the weight of not talking has sometimes been a burden that I want to let go of now.

Once I was in a bad relationship. I was with a partner who often disregarded me and regularly made me feel bad and small. It didn’t start out this way at all, but slowly over the years the more em-partnered we became, the less I seemed to matter. I think that when people basically feel bad about themselves, they sometimes have a desire to make something or someone else feel bad too, and under these circumstances for my partner I was the safest, easiest target because I was there, and as my loyalty became more proven, I became more and more a chosen recipient of bad feelings. I’m not saying that I am at all without blame here. It takes two and I was never able to make this person feel better about himself. In foolishness, carelessness and youth I often made him feel worse. Also I don’t mean to paint my ex-partner with the mask of a monster. We were very young, inexperienced, passionate and sometimes unbalanced in our early, relationship building years together. He may well have regretted treating me with violent anger, apathy or verbal cruelty sometimes, and I’m sure that he did because we all do those things once in a while and then feel bad about it. The difference between an outburst of frustrated anger or a verbal dig and an ongoing, corroding, abusive situation lies in what happens after the anger or the hot words. If there can be an apology, a conversation about what deeper emotions were really at play, acknowledgement of a misstep, then the hurt can be quickly resolved for the time being. Pretending that it never happened though, that it didn’t mean anything, or worse, sticking to the conviction that one has a right or is justified in treating another in this way, that’s when the painful web of lies begins. And it is a web of lies. It keeps one person tied in the position of perpetrating abusive behavior again at will, because it’s been established that they can, and it keeps the other person stuck on the receiving end because it is established that they will.

The saddest thing for me now is that I let this happen to myself. I don’t generally believe in spending much energy on regret in life, but the fact that I let myself live in that situation for as long as I did is a small tragedy for me. I chose to believe, because it was somehow easier and less painful for me at the time, but worse in the long run, that it must really be my fault somehow. I complied with the justified act. I chose to believe that he wouldn’t really treat me like that unless I deserved it, because a lot of the time he was such a good guy, and he was really so nice to everyone else in the world. I was the only one that he was cruel to, and only in private, so it must be something about me like he said. I know now that that’s never true though. Nobody deserves to be made to feel small by the people they love most. I transgressed myself deeply by thinking that, and it has taken years and some help and a lot of luck to recover.

People who have never been in an abusive situation may not be able to understand what I’m talking about here, or may wonder for the umpteenth time why other people are foolish enough to let themselves be treated like that when they don’t have to be. For those who know though, these situations build slowly over time with the right combination of neurosis, manipulations and blind spots. It’s incredibly insidious and disorienting from the inside. If you have been in an abusive situation, then you probably don’t even need to read this, you know what I’m talking about immediately. I now realize that some pretty nasty things go on behind closed doors all of the time, and really smart, sane, normal or even extraordinarily wonderful people are sometimes taking part in them. If you are wondering if your relationship is abusive, and believe me I know that convoluted headspace well and climbed those walls for a long time before it finally ended, the answer is probably already there in the question. Human rights are a part of our biology. We instinctively know when we are being treated unfairly.

My final realization is that this is not some secret I need to keep anymore. I don’t want to talk about it all the time either, but I don’t need to not talk about it. When we broke up and my social world shattered I felt like I needed to keep my lips zipped for some reason. I guess I didn’t want anyone talking about me any more than they were already. I also still hadn’t fully realized that this wasn’t my fault, and quite honestly I had let my ex-partner assume such a role of power in my head that I was quite afraid of him and of the ways in which he could hurt me with words. I even found out about some ridiculous lies that he was spreading about me, and I still didn’t want to talk about the truth. Once an ugliness has been planted in secrecy it is hard to dig up. That plant is withered and gone now though. It was quite a while ago, and seems far away because I think that I finally understand it enough now that it will never happen to me again. I don’t think that I will ever be in that same dark place again, because I would never do that to myself now. And that is a huge step that my life has taken, with help from my loving husband and family who I thank so much.

(I just want to say thank you as well to my Aunt Judy here who by her example and subtle encouragement helped me a lot! Thanks Aunt Judy! Oxoxo)

Saturday in L.A. Without a GPS: Circling the Culver City Triangle and Finding the Dosa Truck

This Saturday morning we awoke, made some breakfast, and went out to run a couple simple errands before getting on with the rest of our day. That's an uncertain presumption to make in L.A. though, that you will be done with something quickly and then get on with something else. Perhaps we should know better by now, but here is a tale of how we don't. Setting out to do much of anything in L.A. has an element of stepping into the void, mostly because of traffic. That famous, incredible traffic that we have here, created by our complicated web of clogged freeways and arguably the worst public transportation system imaginable for a city of this size in a country of this wealth, is a mysterious force influencing our every endeavor. Will the traffic gods be with you today? Or will there be a lane closed, a sports event getting out, a detour, or god forbid an accident in your path to impede your progress and remind you of how insignificant your plans or desires may be in the face of the universe. For those of you who aren't familiar with driving in L.A., when you request directions within the city on google it will give you the route, the mileage, and your best and worst case scenario, with the same trip often ranging from something like 23 minutes at best case to something like 2 hours and 15 minutes in traffic. And there's usually traffic.....and then inexplicably sometimes there's not! It's quite absurd. L.A. traffic is a mirror of that terrible reality of life that we all fervently yet pointlessly try and keep ourselves from facing all of the time in order to hold on to our sanity; you can't control anything and you never really know what's going to happen. And so it went with our day on Saturday, driving the streets of L.A.

So we needed to get some tools to start fixing up the yard of our new rental house. (Yes, we are moving and we did find a nice place but I am still in a little bit of denial about the whole thing so I won't start in on this subject until next week!) It was hard to find the tools that we needed without paying exorbitant prices near our house so after checking a slim yet very expensive selection at a local garden store we headed for the nearest awful chain store that I feel really guilty to support but I knew they'd have what we need at a price that we can handle. Anyway, off we head to Culver City. I had been to this particular Home Depot at the request of our landlords last fall to procure some garden supplies, so I knew about where it was but couldn't remember the street name. We don't have a GPS, which is somewhat unusual in L.A. I think, and leaves us prey even more to the whims of traffic chaos. Tim has a free navigation program on his phone which we have used once or twice with mixed results, but we decided to check the address on there. It came up and looked right to me so we worked our way along the freeways and then surface streets heading for the location. As we drove further and further east toward Hollywood the road became more and more detoured and complicated and the directions more and more incomprehensible. We drove back and forth and around and around this little area at the eastern edge of Culver City looking at warehouses and overpasses and stores and apartment rows and a sad river trickling through a concrete riverbed and the empty construction mess where in 3 or 4 years if we're lucky the metro train running through East L.A. may actually extend to the western half of the city. We became hungry, thirsty, exasperated and gave up. We couldn't find a phone number for this Home Depot and when we finally got through to another Home Depot they explained that this one had closed. Apparently all traces of it had been obliterated since I had been there last fall and shifting detoured streets and vanishing corporate retail spaces were creating for us a small Culver City Twilight Zone. We drove away from the vortex to Inglewood, a bit farther but nothing like the driving we had done so far in search of the lost Home Depot. We bought the tools, made one more stop on the way, and feeling alternately grumpy and slap-happy at this point we fought the traffic home five hours from when we had set out on a 45 minute to one hour errand, best case scenario that is I guess. But the day was not over yet!

We got home, unloaded, I made some late lunch and cleaned the kitchen up. Bricky's friend came over to play video games but the battery ran out so I helped them make and paint wooden swords to battle in the back yard sunshine. I made the kids dinner and then rushed into the shower to get ready for a fundraiser that we were going to for Nick's new school. I kind of dread schmoozy things like that where people stand around all dressed up and you have to make conversation with people that you don't know and usually don't really want to know. Nick's school has GREAT financial aid though, and fifty percent of the kids enrolled benefit from it including us, so it was totally worth it to support this cause. I put on my one cocktail dress and glued my black heels together in the car. We dropped off Bricky's friend and headed to the school, only like 35 minutes late. Except no one is at the school. So we call Nick and he finds out where the event actually is, somewhere in Culver City. Hmmm. We put the address into Tim's phone, head into Saturday evening traffic. We inch along the highway, we get off onto surface streets, and things begin to look eerily familiar. We're back!!! Back on the same detoured streets, underpasses, apartment rows etc. We're in that Culver City Triangle again! And once again the navigational system is making no sense and once again we are hungry and thirsty and exasperated only now we are dressed up! AND, now we are getting to know this mysterious little vortex of confusion. Much like the hero on his journey, we have acquired some powers and skills from earlier trials that we will use to overcome this one. We systematically drive the nearby streets, spotting sights that we recognize from before, until finally we find the right street and pull up to the valet parking for a converted warehouse event space. We're like 2 hours late. Whatever though, we're there. We go inside, get our free glass of wine, talk to some jerk, talk to some nice people, look around hungrily and fruitlessly for food. We get tipsy and bored. We go have fun dancing like crazy to some pretty bad d.j.'d music, find out that we didn't win the audi in the raffle, then we leave. We drive to a nice gallery nearby to see an opening, and amazingly don't get lost. The opening is ok, but we're getting tired though and starving at this point. It's been a very long day, and our trials have been many, but they are soon coming to and end for now. Luckily parked outside the gallery is the Dosa Truck!! Now as bad as L.A. traffic is, that is how good its truck food can be. It can be bad too, of course, but Dosa Truck is one of the good ones. Their cuisine is southern Indian and their motto is, "Ommmmm good." We stood on the curb with the other hipsters in our heels and tie and ordered a dinner of fresh off the griddle thin lentil pancakes filled with delicious sweet potato, spinach and ginger goodness and fresh ginger limeade all for under $20. Ommm good. We've faced confusion, uncertainty, frustration and felt our lives in the chaotic palm of the unknown. But we triumphed in the end, and it's over for this Saturday, and we go home.

Cesar Chavez Boulevard

(etching like the one I am learning to do, but not by me...)

Tim, my brave, self possessed and optimistic husband who rarely if ever complains, is often chagrined at my lack of good things to say about L.A. I know I do sometimes have a grudge against this city that I didn't choose, and that's NEVER a healthy thing. It's kind of like L.A. and I, with her botox lips and her Juicy Couture handbag, got stuck in an elevator together and I initially jumped to the conclusion that we have nothing in common, and that maybe this would be over soon, but the longer we're here together and the more we get to know about each other the more my presumptions get challenged. Like for instance, I can't help but admire her habit of sprucing herself up all over with jasmine and hummingbirds. Few other urban environments can boast those charms to the extent of L.A. Also she has an artsy/edgy side and a Dia de Los Muertos skull tattoo which I must admit is pretty cool. She is definitely Mexican-American, and this week I learned more about some righteous aunts and uncles in her heritage. I am going to try and up the ante for myself on communicating things that I like about Los Angeles. The longer that I am gone from Maine, the more I realize that we are really going to have to make friends! In fact, L.A. is probably already considering herself my friend, and I am just all self-absorbed and shy and not noticing it. Man, I live here now! That reality is STILL sinking in. I'm an earth sign, these things take time. I'm waking up, rooting in, getting my feet on the ground a little more all the time. L.A., sorry for my cold shoulder. Thanks for all the sunshine and flowers and the interesting places and sometimes beautiful scenery. I'll try to give you more of a chance!

Last week I started a printmaking class at an East L.A. community art center called Self Help Graphics. East L.A. is a long highway drive from my house, but I really want to learn printmaking, and this place has a nice print shop and the classes are very reasonably priced. Also, it turns out that this organization has a totally awesome history, and is in a really inspiring neighborhood! First of all, East L.A. is very Hispanic, and has a very strong, established community. It has its problems of crime and gangs sometimes, but the area that my classes are in has the feel of a very strong community which has fought long and hard, and is fighting still for a safe, positive and clean neighborhood. Self Help Graphics is located on Cesar Chavez Boulevard, which is a vibrant street of small businesses like carnicerias, groceries, auto body shops, panaderias, and hardware stores with broad sidewalks and parts of the street have nice, old fashioned iron streetlamps. Self Help Graphics itself is located on a corner in between a Community Youth Center and the local High School. The entire outside of the three-story building is covered in sparkling, colorful hand-set mosaics of glass and broken pottery. The back parking lot has canvas murals covering the chain link fence gates and a big Virgin of Guadelupe statue in the corner. It was started in the 1970's by a Franciscan nun and printmaker named Karen Boccalero and several other local artists whom I unfortunately can't remember their names. Their initial goal was to use art as a tool for social change in the neighborhood and in the Chicano rights movement. Their work came to be seen as part of a Chicano Renaissance of the 1970's, and many of the prints that came out of their shop are now preserved in archives and museum collections as important and instrumental art in the United Farmworkers Uprisings. I find this to be unspeakably cool, because anything having to do with Cesar Chavez pretty much reduces me to tears immediately; I admire him so much for being such a brave, powerful and peaceful warrior for human and ecological justice. Over the years the organization had a "Barrio Mobile Art Van", which drove around the area, (which is pretty rough territory slightly south), bringing art classes and materials to all. They had a punk club on the premises in the early '80's, and they currently offer lots of community and youth programs, including computer graphics and what is now a well-outfitted print shop. My class is made up almost entirely of 25-55 year old Latinas. There is one Asian fellow and myself to add some diversity. The class is taught in English but flows easily back and forth into and out of Spanish like waves crossing a line in the sand. There is warmth, "snacktime," and a very supportive and friendly environment. Many of the women in this class know each other and work together regularly on group projects and exhibitions. I am excited that L.A. has given me such a cooperative and active art community to learn from!

Home

Over the last fairly uneventful month, so uneventful in fact I have been hardpressed to write anything worth posting on this blog, I’ve been brooding over the idea of home. I miss Maine but I don’t think that I would trade a sun and flower-filled winter for darkness and ice at this point. I still feel pretty ambivalent about being here though. I have flashes of affection and appreciation for L.A., like when we went to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings at the Troubadour a couple weeks ago, or driving down Sunset Boulevard coming home from a movie with the city twinkling below, and my mind is numbing to the unpleasantness of the freeway and traffic as a constant companion on excursions out of the house, so I may profess to like this place someday yet!

Despite my lack of conviction on where I feel I belong, I’ve realized that I’m ready for a home. I want a home, perhaps more deeply than I have in my adult life. I grew up in one house. Well, actually my parents bought it the year before I was born and over my lifetime it has been transformed again and again by their hands into several different houses, now only traces remaining of the one that I remember as a child with lime green seventies wallpaper where mushrooms grew through the rotted floorboards under the sink in the bathroom. But it is the same structure, with some of the same trees and those same two parents living there still. I was lucky. I really had a home as a kid and I knew most every person, cornfield, body of water and hillside. I knew every season and it’s sounds and smells and the angle of the light.

We hardly ever went anywhere though, except to Maine for a few days each summer, and I accrued such a hunger for travel that as soon as I turned 18 I went to college and took every opportunity to move around as much as possible and see everywhere I could. I moved a lot. Ohio, Texas, Boston, Honduras, New Hampshire, Arizona, The Northeast Kingdom, the border of Mexico. I lived in all of these places between the ages of 18 and 23. And in between I went to Guatemala, Nicaragua, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Turkey, Bulgaria, Italy, Paris, London, Slovenia, Croatia and Spain and all over the United States for brief visits pretty much during those same years. I owned nearly nothing and each move was full of wonder and excitement.

Then my first husband and I bought our homestead together, and my life totally changed. That place was, as inconvenient and desolate as it could sometimes be, a near complete embodiment of my ideals. I put my whole heart and soul into making it my own, painting, sewing curtains, searching antique shops and hardware stores, hauling and shoveling and spreading truckloads of manure, pounding fence posts, building a greenhouse, tilling fields, hauling brush, cutting trees and stacking wood, insulating pipes, planting an orchard! This house and land and the way we wanted to live on it were so important to me. I thought I would live there forever. I was only there three years, but it was longer than I have lived anywhere in my adult life, and I settled in like I have no place since. It wasn’t meant to be though, not for me there anyway.

Since my divorce and leaving of the homestead five years ago (this month!), I’ve been on another series of moves, but they’ve held a lot less wonder and excitement, (except perhaps for excitement over the amount of times I can lose and then find again the same bag of Christmas tree ornaments, or wonder at my new husband’s propensity for keeping precious family photos and documents in mildewy boxes sandwiched between 20 year old real estate flyers from Bangor, Maine and muscle-building magazines from the late 1980s), and a LOT more stuff. I moved to a shared apartment on the west end where I had a picturesque little garret which was marred only slightly by a neurotic housemate but then promptly ruined by a new landlord and near constant construction. I moved from there into Tim’s house in South Portland which was already pretty full of everybody else’s stuff and many of my belongings except for clothes and a bookshelf went into the basement. In two years we all moved out of that house and into a smaller house with a better school district, shedding and piling and storing and losing stuff along the way. Then we moved out of there last summer in order to clean it up and rent it out and we went to our farmhouse for two months, where we hurriedly shoved everything into the barn for a month, and then dug some of it out and wrapped it in old blankets to have it hauled out here to California. The rest of it is still sitting there, undoubtedly a playground for mice where hay bales and tractors used to rest through the winter. It’s all been rather unsettling to say the least. I sometimes think of books that I own and haven’t seen for years. I think I know what pile of boxes they are in, but I’m not sure at this point. What ever happened to all of Nick’s clothes from last summer? Where did Shannon’s prom shoes go? Who knows. Perhaps the barn will cough them all up someday…..perhaps not. Our lives and that of much of our stuff have parted ways it seems, to hopefully or haplessly be reunited at some future point.

Over the last few weeks it has become clear that we will possibly be moving again. Possibly pretty soon. There is a good reason for this move though, as there has been for all of our other moves, virtually all having to do with getting better educations for or more time with the kids. This one is happily motivated by the fact that Nick, who hated the public school here, was accepted at and is now attending a nice little progressive private school and he is much happier already. So….we don’t need to pay exorbitant rents to live in this supposedly great school district anymore. My initial reaction to this was a mild depression. I’m not that attached to this place…..it’s very nice but I don’t love it that much honestly. I just don’t want to move anymore.

I’ve been thinking about this, and wondering why I really have a problem with it. It would be better for me to just let go. Become like the wind. I mean this is America, and the era of globalization where we move around like no one else, and many people think nothing of it. We even have all these predictable chain stores set up everywhere so everywhere you go you can fill your house up with the same old stuff purchased on the side of the same identical highways. I just can’t be like that though. I believe in seeing the land and people around you, and looking for what is special and unique about it all. I believe in learning and looking deeper and striving to live lightly on our land. Knowing a place and it’s own native sights and smells and sounds, that must still count for something in this world, right? It’s a conundrum. I’m so ready for a home. Now I live somewhere that I’m not sure I ever want to be my home though, and I don’t know where I belong, and I am starting to question whether the idea of belonging in a place is something that even exists anymore.

But I want it. I want to stake out a corner of this crazy city where I must live part of the year for the next decade or so at least. I want a home where I know the neighbors and the birds and the trees and the smell of the seasons. I want to have a garden and a compost and collect rainwater and live a little more lightly on this ravaged earth.

We went to check out a house today for rent up in Topanga, a rural mountain town just a few minutes north and inland from here where the houses have great yards for dogs and are cheaper though still close enough to drive the kids to their schools. When and if we are ever ready to buy we will look in this area. A young woman showed us around her home on a secluded ridge with a nice deck and some beautiful terraced gardens where she planted fruit trees and once grew vegetables. She and her husband are getting a divorce. She doesn’t want to live there anymore alone and is leaving the gardens and orchard that she built behind to start a new life. Wouldn’t it be ironic, strange, but pleasingly so, if I could take over her lost orchard to replace my own lost years ago? If I took it over with a happy marriage and family and a rebuilt life? That would be sweet like crisp apples or California figs. I don’t think it’s in the cards for me at the moment though, but just the thought of it is something to hope for.

Hedgehog

Written Approximately January 24th.

The wind and rain have pounded us here in L.A. for much of the last week. This is usually a cause for rejoicing in my book, but it wore on me this week. To match the weather I succumbed to some howling, rainy depression about the supreme court throwing our democracy to the corporate dogs, and the tarnished promise of this once so hopeful democratic regime of late. Also, like many, many fellow Americans, we continue to have enough financial difficulties at least to see some of our plans fade into a more distant future than we had hoped. I know that there are many, many people out there having such a harder time than us and I wonder when and how it will really end.

I just read a lovely novel though about finding joy, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”. It’s heavy on philosophical musings and the main characters are tormented by the kind of existential dread and ennui that pretty much only has time to occur in a socialist democratic country with one of the highest standards of living in the world, (it’s French,) but their suffering is no less real, and their unexpected discoveries about life and each other are no less profound and beautiful.

The 12 year old existentially depressed protagonist writes in her journal after a visit to her grandmother, “We have to live with the certainty that we’ll get old and that it won’t look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it’s now that matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength. Always remember that there’s a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity.”

And the other protagonist is an intellectual but mousy and lonely little Parisian concierge. She is likened to a hedgehog, which are very lovely, helpful and peaceful little creature with prickly outsides. She’s a wonderful character and it’s a good read. I cheered myself up this week by looking up hedgehog references for this icon. They really are adorable and there is something absurd yet noble about them at the same time.

Today, while painting in the clear, sunny morning, I had a wonderful feeling of satisfaction. I felt like, “Oh, this is all I really need to do.” Other than eating, sleeping, praying and loving my family, this is all I really have to do. Funny how I forget that about every other minute or so, and then need to learn it all over again. Creating equals happiness. It doesn’t equal community, income, fame or prestige, at least not for me, but it’s actually doing the work, making the piece, that is more important than most of that anyway. Without that nothing matters anyway.

Whether you read these or not, thanks for being on my list, because having to send one of these out a week keeps me writing, and writing keeps me cleaning out my insides and putting everything in better order. It makes me better understand, accept, forgive what I find there, and challenges me to acknowledge kernels of lightness and goodness that I might just let stay buried otherwise.

Cigarettes and Accordions

Well, I've had quite an adventure since last week. I've been to Serbia and back, to attend a really interesting and strange film and music festival at the home and personal village of famed Serbian auteur moviemaker, musician and actor, Emir Kustarica, deep in the mountains of the Mokra Gora region near Bosnia. As I sit here on the couch back in L.A. at 5:30 am, (it's something like 2:30 in the afternoon in Serbia and my body, though never really adjusted to European time, nonetheless made some motions in that direction apparently, because I am usually not wide awake and craving a greasy meal and a pilsner at this time of day,) it all seems like a dream that I was in Belgrade yesterday morning. I hardly know what to write about, it was such a trip. Literally.

I should probably start with Emir Kustarica, one of my favorite filmmakers and a great artist and the benefactor of this trip for Tim and I as representatives (loosely on my part) of Moviemaker Magazine. Kustarica's films 'Black Cat, White Cat' and 'Time of the Gypsys' are two of my favorite films, but I like anything he does. His movies are not for everyone and his one foray into Hollywood with 1993's 'Arizona Dreams' produced a movie with a somewhat weak storyline and galvanized him as a studio outsider, so don't place that one as a priority, but if you like the absurd and can find patience for magical realism and lots of accordion music I recommend them all as alternately a rollicking good time and a complex and melancholy look at cultural reality/political history/social problems/psychological portraits and loosely defined animal husbandry practices of the Balkans, particularly the former Yugoslavia. He has created this festival in a historic Serbian ethno-village, Drvngrad, nicknamed Kustendorf, that he built as a set for one of his movies and then had turned into his personal home as well as a rustic tourist resort and national park. Kustendorf is a play on his nickname, Kusta, and also means village by the sea in German, which it plainly is not. Absurd, and apparently meant to be some dig at his government for their attitudes toward the Germans at the time that he built it a few years ago. As despot of this tiny kingdom of little wooden houses, cobblestone streets named after remarkable characters like Nikola Tesla, Federico Fellini, and Che Guevara, a few restaurants and bars, some kittens and happy little dogs, an indoor swimming pool and incredible, timeless views of the misty, moody mountains and humble little homesteads in the valley below he has managed to pack it over the last 3 years with lots of young, mostly Eastern European filmmakers, journalists from all over Europe, the Cannes mafia, and a few high profile lefty Hollywood rogues, like Jim Jarmusch and Oliver Stone in the past, and Johnny Depp and Ralph Fiennes this year. It was a really good program, with an interesting, sometimes claustrophobic scene of stylish people jammed elbow to elbow in the theater, the restaurant, and bars while accordion music seemed to play incessantly and nearly everyone chainsmoked in all venues like they were their own little personal nicotine factory smokestacks. Pork, potatoes and cabbage were featured at every meal, as well as beer and slivovic at most. Slivovic is plum brandy that you could strip your furniture with, drunken out of little shot containers shaped like lab beakers. I love Eastern Europe. I love the absurd and the irreverent. This phrase was actually said by Johnny Depp in a workshop that he gave at the festival, but it rang so true for me, and so appropriate for this festival that I wrote it down and it's been ringing in my head ever since. Kustarica is a master of the absurd and irreverent, which seem to veritably breed in the Balkans, along with accordions and cigarettes. The opening night band, a Slovenian and Austrian group, covered some local favorites as well as Proud Mary, Like a Vrigin and Besame Mucho in the Austrian folk tradition with an accordion (of course), trumpet, trombone, guitar, clarinet and smoking lead singer babe. It was absurd and wonderful. We unfortunately had to leave before Kustarica's band, The No Smoking Orchestra, (which now having been to a Serbia and had my clothes, skin, hair and innards no doubt fumigated in a stew of second hand smoke, I recognize as the most absurd ironic name of a band ever), rocked the house for the final ceremony. Overall I found it to be a really stimulating and artistically inspiring event, in a melancholy and beautiful part of the world.

I traveled in Eastern Europe extensively about 10 years ago, but couldn't get into parts of the former Yugoslavia with an American passport at that time, so this trip filled in some of my missing passport stamps and refreshed my sense of place to that region. A few other fun Americanized observations from the former Eastern bloc that were reinforced for me this time were the unnerving fact that although people there really are very friendly, helpful and kind, smiling is not widely practiced, but staring is. As soon as help is requested or a question is asked though the somber mask will be broken and people bend over backwards in helpful kindness. And many Eastern European women really are very hot, or even if they're not that hot they really know how to dress so that men won't notice that. Many Eastern European men on the other hand are really big and tall and often (sorry), more in the range of not so good looking all the way to ugly, greasy or scary looking and have a habit of wearing their pants up around their ribcages, yet they always have these really hot babes on their arms, making them perhaps some of the luckiest men in the world! Also, as our cab driver explained to us, Serbian salaries are amongst the lowest in Europe, but still every cafe, restaurant, bar and club are full from morning to....well, the next morning because parties start late and go all night, any night of the week there. As he said, "Serbs live like today is the last day on earth." A short, cold, grey, drunken day but filled with lots of passion, music and cigarettes. And really, who can begrudge you a few cigarettes, and plenty of passion and music if they help to lighten the tortured slavic soul because as a different cab driver explained to us, "Serbs never forgive and never forget," and that's a hard way to live through thousands of years of wars and occupations and broken alliances and broken dreams. Serbia is hopefully on it's way toward dealing with some of the horrible events of the past two decades, joining the European Union and improving its economy. I hope Serbia can change in the ways that it needs to....but not so much that its soul loses any of the beauty, just some of the torture.

I love travel. I love an adventure and am willing to go through a lot to get one. Adventures are often expensive and usually involve being jet-lagged, tired and at least occasionally lost, being stared at and not being able to understand what everyone is saying, eating and drinking strange things and for me anyway, usually being sick for at least short periods of time, and from time to time being pilfered from, robbed or swindled. In short being palpably vulnerable to the world. And that vulnerability, although it induces some fear, also opens something up that lets the beauty in with the volume up. I won't even start on my reminiscences of those unexpectedly beautiful travel moments coined in my memory that are like riches from the universe. Well, ok, just a few; an evening spent in a small hut perched on a volcanic hillside being served beans and rice and playing with a small girl as the fireflies and an electrical storm flashed above the lake outside, waking up on a bus pulling into majestic Istanbul at sunrise and having my hair ruffled and being handed a homemade pickle by a Bulgarian grandpa sitting near me, finding a little town where they make chestnut ice cream and then driving a winding narrow road down through the mountains of Provence to the sea. Now I can add perching in the cold between a railing and the rooftop of a little wooden Serbian house to get a picture of the crowd below drinking and smoking and dancing and waiting for the opening ceremony as fireworks shot up over the wooden roofs and cinders fell down in our hair. My memories of beautiful travel adventures are as dear to me as anything I own. It's all worth it for that wonderful 'soul in wonder' feeling of learning about people living a different kind of life, and being a stranger in a strange and wonderful place. The world opens up, or more likely I open up, and I feel so alive and lucky to be alive and so in love with whatever patch of the globe I am standing on.