a different kind of summer

It’s summer now here, not brutally hot but humid even in the mornings. This is my tenth summer in Georgia, and it is my least favorite time of the year. When you grow up in a northern climate, especially one on a Great Lake that acts as a natural air-conditioner, you revere summer. The sky is bright and blue but never too intense. You can smell freshwater on a breeze. Your entire spine unkinks, it seems. When we were little, we spent those days out on the river or lake on my father’s boat, and we would take a ride after dinner down to the shore and get frozen custard. You could spend the entire day outside on a deck, under a red maple tree, reading a book. It was Buffalo’s gift to you, those summers. It was what kept you there, or coming back.

The summer here reminds me not of possibility, but of loss. I’m pretty acclimated, in that I still walk every day at four pm, sweating through my sports bra. I like being outdoors too much to acquiesce, or maybe I’m just fucking stubborn. But I love the sun, and walking is good for my brain, so I slather on the SPF and the No Natz! spray that is mostly just rosemary essential oil but works pretty well, and I try to get in two or three miles. And I feel something like stubborn pride on my walks, when the air is perfectly still and everyone who drives by is cocooned in their vehicles with the air-conditioning blasting, like, Yeah, I’m out here. And I’m not even from here, y’all! I can hang. 

This May, as the calendar creeps toward June but nothing else marks time, the onset of summer has hit me hard. I have no escape hatch, no flights with airport codes of MQT or MSP. I have a garden that I need to rip apart, a task that exhausts me just to think of it. The summer shouldn’t feel all that different from ones past, which as an academic I tend to spend at home writing or reading, but of course the difference, as my husband put it, is the difference between a closed door and a locked one. It was one thing in February to turn down a residency in Iceland, ready to spend time at home. It is another to have the world cancel on you.

I am writing this in our enclosed sunroom, which might be the best thing of many good things the previous owners, who designed this house, built. It is open to our kitchen and living room via two sets of doors, and three of the four walls are sliding glass doors. We spend hours out here, less so in the summer when it feels slightly wasteful. I spent last spring and this one planting around the patio: rosemary, which winters well, a million varieties of lantana, purple spiderwort and lavender. There are birdfeeders, now, because I have turned into a person who delights at watching the hummingbirds and cardinals and titmouses. In the corner of the yard is a huge French hydrangea, bright blue in this soil. I learned in my first summer here to resist the call to cut them for the house. The blooms will die within the week inside, but last for weeks outside, even as the sun grinds down.

The cruelty of a Georgia summer hits different than a Buffalo winter, and so I accept it. Things are green and damp here. The sun shines most days, even when I wish it wouldn’t. Everything is a compromise, of course, and this one is pretty luxurious. The thing about a blank calendar or a hot day is their oppressiveness openness, their sheer possibility. You can clip the gardenia and bring it inside, put it next to the sink as a reminder that right outside your garage door, something blooms.

just try to survive this

I’m writing this on a Tuesday that feels like a Saturday or a Sunday or a Thursday or any day, really, since days of the week no longer mean anything. The last time I went to a restaurant was March 11, the last time I went to a friend’s house was March 13. I’ve been to grocery store maybe six or seven times in the last seventy-three days. I do not know anyone who has died from coronavirus, and I am safe in my house with my husband and three dogs and I remain employed, one of the 40% of Americans who was able to transfer her work fully remote.

I have gardened in my garden and sketched out plans for a new one. I’ve pulled kudzu out by the root and seeded clover and watched it sprout. I’ve planted strawberries and lettuce, read more novels in two months than I have in two years, gotten drunk on Zoom and made sour cream from scratch. I watch movies and television, I ordered new running shoes, I have let my bangs grow out and my eyebrows too. I am bored and sad and depressed and safe and grateful and I spend a lot of time thinking about my next meal and whether or not it is too early to start drinking. It often is, and I do it anyway.

I have made to-do lists and then erased them, wrote maybe just try to survive a global pandemic on the white board instead. I have started and abandoned poems, gotten angry when I look at photos of vacations I would normally take at this time, mourned the fact that my calendar once showed that I was going to spend six weeks of this summer teaching abroad in Lucca, Italy. On the day that I went into Google Calendar and erased Lucca, then erased Sewanee, I didn’t cry. I saved that for later in the week, when I got very drunk on wine, watched the last episode of The Good Place, and then cried hysterically and lubricated with merlot. Even in quarantine, it seems, I struggle to emote in healthy ways. I’m aware. God, am I aware of my own brain. Why do you think I drink so much, and gobble lorazepam every morning, with my single cup of mostly decaf coffee?

It’s been a minute since I was active in this space. Since then, we put Truman to sleep and acquired two more dogs, bought a house, gained and lost weight and gained it back, got tenure, published two books. I’m back here now, tentatively, to see how it feels. Maybe it will help, maybe it won’t, but either way it can stand as a record of what 2020 did to me and my efforts, futile as they felt some days, to survive it.

another fork

First I wanted to stick a fork in it, then I came back briefly. Now I think that the fork was the right call. Time to reinsert the tines. But before I do:

• My second book of poems, Terminal Human Velocity, will be released by Stillhouse Press in late 2016 or early early 2017. Keep an eye out for it, would you?
• I have a couple chapbooks out: the Law & Order-inspired narrative Rook & The M.E. and the poetry chapbook Weird Science.
• There's a Shackleton poem up at Virginia Quarterly Review. (Suggested listening, speaking of Shackleton: Have Gun, Will Travel's album Science From an Easy Chair).
• I'm writing this from my desk at Willapa Bay AiR, which might be the greatest residency in the whole goddamn world. (Sorry, VSC. I still love you.)
• I forgot to do the year in photo review for 2015 and this kind of bums me out. 
• Our second dog is very cute and a holy terror. His name is Jonesy.
• I spend an awful lot of time on Instagram. 

these things are fading

Sometimes I can barely remember what it was like to live in Michigan for three years. It seems so utterly far away now: what it was like to be able to step outside and head out on foot to a library or restaurant or neighborhood, shaded by the trees that line the streets of Heritage Hill. I used to head out, messenger bag slung across my body, and catch the bus out to campus from downtown campus; I used to shop for groceries at Meijer or, when I was feeling like a treat, at D&W Fresh Market; I used to jolt awake in the mornings when our bumbling drunk neighbor, Andy—bless his heart—would slam the glass door of our house closed. Sometimes I miss the little kitchen with its black-framed windows, or the way the locusts in the backyard would create a lacy canopy in late summer. I forget what it was like to be cold so many months out of the year. Most often, I miss being able to distract myself from myself by simply taking a long walk around the city, or what passed for one. 

But more often, I can’t remember things, or I can only by trying very, very hard. It seems that we have always lived here, shared this one Honda, always holed up in the sticky summer heat. Always been disappointed by the grocery stores in this town. Always had these friends, always been able to drive down to Jacksonville for twenty-four hours and then back up the coast. I have always turned off the interstate and rolled down my window, I have always driven the last ten miles to town while listening to some alt-country song, I have always worn Ray-Bans and a plaid shirt, I have always seen the haze of burning fields and the shady pecan groves as I wind my way back to the little house on the corner, where my aging dog waits for me to come home.

up nort

Sometimes, after a long year, you gotta get on a plane and fly to a place where summer still exists, where the sky is high and blue and the peonies are still blooming and you think a lot about those Minnesota summers you had in 2004 and 2005 and 2006 and 2007 and it's good to sit at a table outside with very old friends and drink beer and be glad, so glad, that you made it.

Oh, California.

 

glad to know it

We were at AWP Minneapolis last week/end. When we left Georgia, the azaleas were almost done blooming. When we landed in Minnesota, the fields were brown and starting to thaw. It snowed briefly on Friday morning and was sunny and warm enough to eat a picnic outside the convention center on Saturday. Meanwhile, back home, the season had turned from spring to summer. In the four days we were gone, the trees unfurled into full green. 

Driving home from the airport Sunday afternoon, I marveled at the lushness, the closeness of all the foliage. MSP had been a lovely buzz of all the things--reunions with grad school advisors and peers, the release of my prose chapbook Rook & The M.E., breakfasts and beers with former colleagues, closing down the conference on Saturday night reading at a bar--and it was good to see people, good to come back to something that felt equally full.

I found out the week before AWP that I am the new assistant professor of creative writing at this school of ours. This coast--where we've been for the last four years--will be our home for a few more years, it seems. The droop of Spanish moss, the little ferns that wave from the limbs of the oaks. 

This is an adopted landscape, but I'm glad to know it. 

learning to navigate

It's been a hard couple weeks. There is a job application looming. Our neighbors have left the building. The weather has been blustery and chilly, for Georgia, and we got the flu the day we came home from Wisconsin. I miss sunlight. And the dog that attacked our dog last month, while we were out on our daily walk, is still chained in its yard, likely to attack another animal.

I miss my neighbors. I miss my old walking route. Those two things connected me to this town in very physical ways, and I'm learning to navigate life without my friends' cars in the driveway, learning to run down the greenbelt in the woods instead of through town.

Recently, my photos reflect this winter-ness: blue, gray, dark, snow. I'll be fine. I'll learn new paths. Still, on a day like today, it's good to look over the set of picture from the last month, finish editing a friend's teaching philosophy, and make another cup of lemon-ginger tea in my newly gray office.

au revoir, 2014

It's the annual year in photos review time! You know, I do this purely for myself, and every year I feel a little like a goob when I start, and then by the time I get to the December folder, I'm always like THIS IS SO IMPORTANT IT'S GOOD FOR ME TO REMEMBER ALL THE THINGS I DID THIS YEAR GOOD JOB, ME. But then again, that's keeping a blog in 2014, huh? Pure self-indulgence.

You know the rules. See also: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013. Also worth noting is that I have stopped labeling years as "crotch punches" and "smell ya laters" and now just enjoy life. Ah, sunshine and autonomy at work, how you make me happy.

To the new year, but first--goodbye to the old one.

 

rivers + roads

I would like to tell you that we met our next-door neighbors on our second day in Georgia. On the day we moved in, a sweltering July day in 2011. I will tell you that, actually, because I think it is true. I know that I was sweating profusely after moving all of our possessions into our house, the lease on which we'd signed approximately one hour after arriving in this town on a Friday afternoon. The next day was a Saturday, and the heat index was predicted to be 105 degrees, and the B and I were up early, fresh from the Baymont Inn, and stocked with Gatorade, ready to wrestle a couch.

As physical moves go, that one was surprisingly easy--having your own driveway leading up to a one-story house is so very, pleasantly, different than trying to move furniture from an 1880s home with no driveway and limited street parking--and we were finished by perhaps 11 am. I was wearing a Buffalo Bisons t-shirt from the 1980s. Our neighbors came outside at some point, and they noticed my shirt, and it turns out we were all from the same corner of New York State, and then they greeted us and went back inside. A few weeks later, I wrote to my friends in an email We hung out with our neighbors on Saturday night, which was fun, and it will hopefully become a routine. 

In literature, this is known as foreshadowing. 

Or maybe I should start earlier, in the 1990s, in the suburbs of Buffalo where I grew up. For a couple short years, there were about four houses on our block with young families, families like ours. As an adult, I've actually wondered how well all these adults got along, since in retrospect these families were pretty different. But what matters more is that in photos from that time, the adults are standing in each other's driveways, drinking cans of Labatt Blue. The kids are sitting on blanket, watching for shooting stars, or dressed up in Halloween costumes, or swimming in an above-ground pool. 

In a few years, of course, things would change; families would fracture, or move away, or the friendships borne of geographic convenience would shift as kids entered high school. Still, for those years, I entered my neighbors' unlocked doors as if their houses were my own. I stood on their back porches and asked them questions through their screen doors, and they would motion for me to come in already.

Later, when we lived in our little white house in Minnesota, five of us and the dog squeezed into that shoddy place, we never locked the door. One of the roommates didn't even have keys to the place, and anyway, like all grad students, we had nothing worth taking. Some nights, when I walked home from night class or came home early from the restaurant, I would have to push open the side door. Coats and boots would be piled in front of the door, most of them not ours. Our friends would be over for dinner, or to watch television, or to sit on our couch. In those moments, I knew that we had built something in that town. We had friends. We had a community. 

Here's the thing: when we left Minnesota in 2007, I had had that experience twice in my life. I didn't ever expect it to happen again. I thought perhaps it was something faintly magic, that it was something like lightning. 

Once in Buffalo, well, that was what happened in the suburbs when all the houses are only ten feet apart. And in Minnesota, well, that was happened in graduate school, when time and pressure and booze--great rivers of booze--and slightly damaged, pleasantly misanthropic people found themselves locked in classrooms during cold winters, workshopping poetry and prose. 

My theory held up for a while, too, because our circles of friends in Wisconsin and Michigan were good, very good, but not quite the same. I figured we were Becoming Adults, and part of that meant that the raucous dinner parties and the whole community thing was a natural casualty.

Then we met our neighbors here in Georgia, and they blew the fucking roof right off of that theory of mine.

Our neighbors are funny and incredibly kind and charming. They worked for the same university we do, and through them we met a whole network of university-affiliated ex-pats. They helped us navigate this town, its Southern-ness and its quirks, and we developed our own shorthand: a Statesboro moment, for example, like when you go to the pharmacy and though there are five other people conceivably waiting for a prescription, no one is in an actual, recognizable, line. Or when the local grocery store runs out of all milk--all of the milk, from full-fat to skim, all sizes, like the entire library of milk is currently closed for business--and the clerk just shrugs and tells you there might be more, you know, tomorrow. If y'all want to come back then. 

Our neighbors and I would talk about what it was like to go to college in small cities in New York State, stories that inevitably included chicken finger subs. They brought us things when they went back up north, like cases of Western New York beer, or this shirt referencing McKinley's assassination, which I wear when I work out, not because I want to ruin it with pit stains but because I want to wear it as often as possible. They gave us copies of their house key, and we gave them ours. We swapped dogs and brought in each other's mail during holidays and gossiped over text messages about what the other neighbors, the weirdo ones, might be up to.

Our neighbors and I would sometimes go out to get the mail about the same time, both home from work around 5:30, and we would stand in the driveway with our arms lightly crossed, our dogs sniffing the grass near our feet, and we would talk, swatting gnats, until it was time to go in and start dinner or the sun set behind the old elementary school across the street.

Our neighbors came to our raucous dinner parties, our taco nights that ended in dance parties. And they held their own, nights that earned the ex post facto nickname of casino nights, because hey, it would be seven o'clock, then ten-thirty, and then suddenly it was four in the morning and we were drinking whisky out of a glass bottle shaped like a soccer cleat.

Our neighbors invited us out to dinner and to soccer games and took us to the way-sketch pool hall downtown. They knew the restaurant owners and seemingly everyone who was also out on those nights, and, though I'm making them sound like much bigger party animals than they are, that's because our most famous Boro nights happened in the company of our neighbors, and because they like to talk to people and make connections. They are those kind of people.

And other times, we didn't see our neighbors for days or weeks, because we were all busy, but I knew they were next door, coming and going as we were, and knowing they were home fifty feet away just made me feel better.

When the B and I decided to elope last summer, we did so because of our neighbors. Through them, and in them, we had made and met friends here that felt like a real community. We had built something, something tangible and firm, something that felt like home. It felt right to go to the courthouse, then back to our house, and turn on the music and make tacos and push the furniture out of the dining room and turn it into a dance hall. Our neighbors brought their dogs and we all danced until 2:30 am, even as we ran out of liquor and the stove randomly short-circuited and we had to kill the breaker.

Part of working for a university, especially when you are contractual faculty and your friends are staff, means you make friends that won't always be around. Your friends are often on their way up, promoted and moving out, looking for a place that's a little closer to home. I should have known. I've done it myself a few times now. So in fall 2012, when I came across a song by the band The Head and The Heart, which starts, A year from now we'll all be gone/All our friends will move away /And they're going to better places/But our friends will be gone away, I played that song for anyone who would listen, including our neighbors. I played it twenty times in a row. I knew that it would apply to nearly all of us. I knew it might apply to me and the B, again, one day. 

Last week, on the night our neighbors told us they were leaving for Binghamton, I sat on the kitchen floor and played that song three times. 

This, as it turns out, is my love letter to our neighbors. Though of course you already knew that. Foreshadowing.

I am sad, so terribly sad, that my neighbors are leaving. At the same time, I am so happy that they are, in fact, going to a better place, a better university in a town nestled in the hills, nearer to their families. I keep trying to steel myself for the day that is rapidly approaching, when their cars are no longer in the driveway I will think of, always, as theirs. 

I will sorely miss them, and what they helped us make here, in this town. They are, in some ways, our first four years in this town. But I am forever grateful that they were an integral, heart-beating part of our life here. I am grateful that they helped us build a life here that resembled something I now fiercely defend. 

I wish them the very best on their journey over the rivers and roads that will lead them back north, toward something brighter, maybe something even better than we--together--got to build here. 

a certain kind of aloneness

Yesterday morning was clear and chilly, the first time since March that it felt like summer might be really and truly over. On Friday night, a cold front had swept through, and the sky on Saturday was bright blue, the kind I used to see in Minnesota, in Wisconsin. It had been two long weeks of grading six classes' worth of essays and narratives, and hosting visiting writers, and wrangling InDesign, and on Thursday I dropped my trusty old iPhone hours after ordering my new one, and its screen, already lined with dozens of microscopic cracks, shattered. First world problems, to be sure, but they are the ones I know.

It was a good day to get out of town.

I aimed the car north and drove to Augusta. It's a pretty drive, so light on traffic that I can zone out for minutes at a time. The road dips and crests small hills, through some of which homeowners have carved driveways, and the red clay that shows is shocking against the browning grass and sky. It's strange for me to remember sometimes that I live south of Augusta, that now I live just 100 miles from Aiken, the town in South Carolina where we lived for a few years in the 1980s. It was in Aiken that I split open my face on the concrete steps of the Baptist church, where I attended day care, on the day it snowed and I jammed my hands in my pockets, where they remained when I slipped and broke the fall with my face.

Sometimes on the road to Augusta, I think about my parents, freshly arrived in Aiken with two small kids, strangers to a part of the country where everyone drawls maaaaaaaaaam and many stores still close on Sundays and adults admonish children to refer to their teachers as Miss Christina, a habit that I try to break in my college students now.

The route goes through a few small towns, the kind with a Dairy Queen and a handful of gas stations. On one lawn were three convenience-store displays, the kind that you can spin like lazy susans, complete with single-serving bags of chips clipped into place. The sign: FOR SALE/B.O. One town's water tower proclaims it the bird dog capital of the world, a distinction that seems self-appointed. I opened the sunroof. The air was warm, and the cotton fields were starting to puff white. At one small airport, the planes whirred, a man ducking as he removed the blocks from the wheels.

I stopped at the Costco, decided I would, in fact, be the sort of person who bought flannel shirts off the table. While I tried them on over my t-shirt, someone ganked my cart. I sampled the chana masala and liked my recipe better. I priced beer and stomach meds. I bought tenderloins, and big packages of provolone, and bagels, looked down, realized my cart was my father's.

(In January, when the B and I bought this Costco membership in order to purchase our new mattress, we came in on a Saturday morning. He's never been to a warehouse store, and a Saturday morning is obviously the busiest time, everyone wrestling oversized shopping carts and pausing to cram tiny hot dogs into their mouths. He looked a little startled. But for me, it felt just like those high school weekends in Amherst during the 1990s, my father and I making the rounds to BJ's and Wegmans, our carts filled with pork and cheese for homemade pan pizza. This is how we function: he shows me how to walk through fields of cows, and I show him how to navigate suburban hellscapes.)

And after Costco, I took Walton Way across town, past the university and the mansions, the road curving around the pines. As I headed downtown, the mansions were replaced by gas stations and pawn shops. Over the canal and in the little shopping district. I walked up to Farmhaus Burger. I ate my chili dog and sweet potato tots outside, watched four guys brunch, complaining that the pimento cheese wasn't as good as they remembered. Another little family fed their dropped fries to the golden retriever at the other table. Tourists wandered the streets. The talking crosswalk had a Southern accent. The sun felt warm on my yellow cardigan.

I was alone. I was content.

There is a certain kind of aloneness that I'm used to, that I miss if I go too long without it. It's not loneliness, which I knew too well during those first months in Mankato, or that hard year out of grad school, or that year I lived in the murphy bed apartment in Michigan. Those were hard times, not knowing if they'd end or stretch on for years yet. Those were lonely times.

But aloneness is different. Aloneness is nice. It gives me time to think through the minor annoyances of the week past and sort them out; lets me listen to the same track eight times in a row, rewinding it each time the spot right before the drums kick in; lets me drive with the window down and the air whistling through the car, too loud for conversation anyway.

Aloneness is a safe and structured time. At home, there is a husband and dog waiting for me, and the same old fires to put out in my inbox, and the little life I've built for myself. The same five-mile walking loop through town and trivia at the bar on Tuesdays. I love my routines. I build them because they comfort me. I will return to them soon enough. But sometimes on a Saturday, it is nice to be alone, to be a stranger for a few hours, finding my way around a city I don't really know, enjoying the first day of fall.

would you look at that

Would you look at that. As soon as I stepped away from this space, I had things I thought I might want to say here. Mainly, because I am the biggest narcissist of all time possess a healthy ego, I missed my own voice.

I don't journal, so this little blog and some Gmails to two grad school friends serve as my biography. As the years have gone by, and we three find ourselves busy in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Georgia with our full-time jobs and local lives, the Gmailing has slowed down. Turns out I miss writing to my friends. I missed writing here.

Summer 2014 was a good one, though pretty work-oriented. There were a couple conferences, and an online course, and I agreed to freelance for my department and fix our janky-ass update our web site. Friends bought a house in Florida. Other friends bought a house in town with a pool. The B holed up and revised three hundred thousands words of a novel-in-progress. I carved out just enough time to turn some new poems--and salvaged parts of Dear Stupid--into a new manuscript.

Now it's September, and there are six classes and lots of committee work on the schedule ahead, and summer feels like a long time ago.

What else is new:

Work is up here and here and here.

There are job openings at our school. In May, we'll find out whether we live here for a long time or take off for someplace new. I'm rooting for the former. Georgia has her claws in me these days. Still, if it's the latter, I feel like we can handle it. There are benefits to being in my thirties.

Current projects: an essay drawing comparisons between Pablo Escobar's hippos and a Wisconsin lion story my father-in-law told me two years ago. A game of telephone I'm playing with my Canadian visual artist friend. A chapbook about doomed explorers.

Thai basil won the garden this year. No bugs eat it and it donates itself gladly to this awesomely easy weeknight dinner. It's the steady middle child of the garden, not requiring any attention, just quietly succeeding at life.

I didn't get to the photo albums this summer, but I did order the prints. The Snapfish art deco prints (above) are velvety smooth and worth all the pennies they cost.

This weekend was what all should be: a soccer tailgate with friends on Friday night; a pool party and kebabs on Saturday; a lazy Sunday with new nonfiction and roast pork and a nap on the couch. Now the thunderstorm is roiling overhead and the dog is whimpering in his red-and-white bandana.

Here's another fork. See you around.

a fork, for now

It's probably telling that when I went to compose this post, Chrome refused to autofill Blogger. Either Chrome thinks Blogger is totes 2008, or maybe it's just been that long.

It has been that long. The post below here is about the great ice storm of 2014, the one that grounded flights and canceled school twice in two weeks and made my entire semester a little wonky, but fine, and now it's nearly the end of May and I have been off school since the 10th. The end of our third year at this school brought some interesting developments, all them good, and anyway, here we are, headed into our fourth year here when we thought it would be just an eleven-month pit stop. Oh, life, you wacky bastard.

Which leads me to this little blog, the one that started during my last year in Minnesota and carried me through Wisconsin and Michigan and three years of Georgia. It's not the first blog I had--oh ho, that one, the one in which I bitched publicly about all the things you are not supposed to bitch about on the internet, like my grad school colleagues and my students, ho ho, OH, OLSON, YOU GENIUS--but hey, 2004 was such a heady time, and there was no Facebook with its privacy settings and no Instagram, which is all I actually want from social media anyway, just photos. And now I am not so interested in telling you all about the places where work is up--that's what the web site is for--nor I am super interested in narrating recent photos. It's been eight years here, and while nothing is going away or being boxed up, it's time to put a fork in it. For now.

So I'll be in other corners of the internet, and I'll be doing what I do, which is growing some plants and taking pictures of my feet and writing poems about William Taft and making a big mess in the kitchen. I'll come back here now and again, like to do the year in photo review, and you can find me in other places, the links to which I have thoughtfully littered in the graf above, and we shall see each other when we see each other.

You look very nice today, and I hope you are doing well. Me, I feel just fine. See you around.



p.s. to answer the question that I think no one's ever asked: it stands for Dead Bitches Don't Say No!, which is what the super-crazy girl who lived in our basement apartment in Mankato, Minnesota, in 2006 wrote all over the wall, in permanent marker, the week before she moved out.

You're welcome.

eleven scenes from a frozen south

1. We woke to US Airways calling, telling us that B's flight out to MSP had been canceled. Charlotte was grounding flights. Savannah was grounding flights. Outside, something that sounded like ice but might have been just pine cones bounced on the roof.

2. I made coffee and pancakes. I took a hot shower. In this way, Wednesday was essentially a Saturday.

3. The power went out as we played Scrabble. Something down the street--a transformer--went blue three times and then silent.

Out in the front yard, a pine branch fell on a cable that ran from the pole to the corner of our house. It wasn't live, but it swayed over the road. In ten minutes, three cars drove into the cable, then panicked, slammed the car into reverse, and backed up. In doing so, they hit the cable twice.

We called the non-emergency police line. We know about the cable, they said. In the hour that it took them to send someone, fifteen more cars drove into the cable, panicked, backed up.

B dragged the recycling bin to the road, in front of the cable. As he did so, a woman in a red Camry slammed on the brakes, honked, threw up her hands. B pointed to the cable. The woman didn't see it. He pointed again. She waved. It was an angry wave.

The third time, she got it.

4. The pines in the backyard looked gray, hung with ice.

5. I desperately wanted beer.

6. I scored two turns of 48 points apiece and still lost Scrabble by 50 points.

7. The police volunteer said, You put this out here? That was a good idea. As he said so, another car nearly hit the recycling bin.

He replaced our bin with two cones and drove off.

8. Friends texted: We have no power, but a fireplace, beer, and hot dogs.

9. On the way over to their place, the lines wrapped twice around each drive-thru.

10. The beer was delicious. We played cards and roasted hot dogs over the fire. The dogs slept on our laps. I was dressed as if it was BockFest, in layers of pants.

11. The power came back on. We left at midnight.

On the way home, cars were lined up at the Wendy's. Each waited for three minutes before realizing that that the employees must have left the lights running when they left during the power outage, hours earlier. Each time a car pulled out, another pulled in, not realizing that no one was working.

Inside, the lights blazed yellow in an empty restaurant.

a road trip to oxford

Oh, hey, 2014. How you doing.

We're back at school--week three starts tomorrow, and although I have four entirely online courses, all of which are already designed and didn't require updating, I find it hard to get back into the swing of the workload. Maybe it's because I decided to join three committees and do all that service even though I'm not contractually obligated and there's no guarantee that doing such work will even result in an offer of non-temporary, possibly-TT employment? Maybe it's because I'm an overachiever and like to see things done right and like to have a stake and a vote in my place of employment? Maybe because I enjoy coming home on Thursday evenings and getting knocked sideways with the first stress-induced aura of the semester, and then lying on the floor, drinking an IPA and listening to Dave Hause at top volume? WHO CAN TELL.

(p.s.! I am actually not angry like that paragraph makes me sound. Here's proof: a friend from up nort came to visit and we ate family-style at the boarding house in town with the funny vagina name! Poems and nonfiction recently got picked up by Quarterly West, Nimrod, CutBank, Birdfeast, Salamander, Sundog Lit, and The Nassau Review! I have been wearing cozy flannel shirts and RIGHT NOW, REAL TIME, this pie is a-coolin' on the sill!)

On that note, let's get in the time machine and go back to the early weeks of January, when we took our delayed honeymoon roadtrip over to Oxford, Mississippi, and spent two cold days in our version of literary nerd heaven.



Most people didn't understand why Oxford. But it's the home of Larry Brown, and Barry Hannah, two of the B's literary heroes. The program there has fostered some of our other favorite writers, and the food in town is excellent, and so is the bookstore. We ate lots of catfish, and might have gone out to Tula to find the Brown house, driving slowly down the back roads and squinting at the phone photo I'd taken of a page in a book titled A Literary Tour of Mississippi. We lurked around the bookstore until we screwed up the courage to introduce ourselves to the owner and former town mayor. We drank beer underground on a cold night. We found the cemetery where Faulkner, and later Hannah, are buried. We went to the Ole Miss special collections and asked to pull the files and spent a long afternoon looking through first drafts and unpublished stories and letters from Brown's editor at Algonquin Books. We walked around the sort of town that our current one would like to be. And as we drove back to the Boro, the sun set over Dublin, and I twisted the camera over my shoulder and took a few photos of the sunset at 71 miles an hour.

that's 2013 for you

It is the annual year in photos time! This year, I wrote some things, and went to many beaches, and saw a bunch of bands and drank a lot of beer. There's a surprising lack of green in the first couple photos, which surprised me, but hey, that's 2013 for you. Maybe, now that I live south, I'm less stunned by green year-round? And I want to die less? Maybe. Also of note is the varying square-ness of these images, which could bother me, but I'm trying to let small shit go these days, so it stays.

To the new year, but first--goodbye to the old one.

something comforting about this routine

I'm wearing a plaid shirt with a toothpaste stain on the front. This morning, I ate two over-easy eggs on a bed of leftover cornbread-and-sausage-and-pecan stuffing. The sideboards and bookcases have been decorated with white lights and holly that I hacked from the bushes in the front yard. In the last three days, I have been hungover, eaten pizza for three meals, gone to see a band that didn't take the stage until midnight, made pecan pie, and cleaned out my work inbox.

OH, END OF THE SEMESTER, I LOVE YOU.

Ahem. Yes. The semester is over! Just like 2008, I have entered all the final grades (although, ha ha, remember only teaching three courses? HA HA HA HILARIOUS). Just like 2009, I have been wearing final pants! Just like 2010, I will miss my class. Just like 2011, it's fairly warm out. Just like 2012, lives go on, even with the surprises of the last week and the unexpected wheels that fell off right at the very end. There's something comforting about this routine, realizing that every December is sort of the same, whether we live and teach in Minnesota or Michigan or Georgia.

And just like 2006, we had a holiday party on a Sunday. I dragged the outdoor furniture inside, covered everything that didn't match (ed note: all of it) with white tablecloths, threw a Belgian-ale brisket into the oven, and turned up the Christmas music. The guests brought potatoes, so many potatoes, and the dogs wore sweaters, and we drank growlers and talked about "The Christmas Shoes," which, in case you forgot, is the worst.

(Unlike 2006, I did not end up on the kitchen floor, wearing cookies for eyes, and we did not trek outside to make a snowman and use frozen dog turds for eyeballs. ADULT.)

Before we sat to eat, around our lumpy table, I asked people to raise their glasses in a toast: To the holidays. Whatever they may bring, at least we have tonight. And then we clinked our glasses, and laughed, and this too was like old times.

It's a good life.

this fall and all it brings

Monday, and the windows are open. But last night, there was frost on the panes, and today I am wearing my trusty fall shoes, my Clarks.

We spent the weekend in Ohio, celebrating these nuptials of ours with my mother's side of the family. When we left Atlanta, the foothills of the Piedmont were red-brown below us. When we landed in Dayton, I could see out the window that the farms below were stitched together at ninety-degree angles, punctuated with shockingly yellow trees. It was autumn all around us, and on the ride from the airport to the hotel, I counted the sumac and sugar maples. I may not miss winter, but I miss fall. My fellow Southern ex-pats requested that I take pictures of trees, and I did. They almost matched my tights.

It was good to be back in southern Ohio. I drank a Kwak on Friday night downtown, ate chicken and waffles and frites with my cousin and his wife. I had a few hours to myself on Saturday morning and got to wander the aisles of Target, purchasing (ACT SURPRISED) a plaid shirt and striped dress (I SAID, ACT SURPRISED). On Saturday afternoon, we gathered at my aunt's house, and there were platters of food from Kroger and the football game blaring from downstairs. The bathrooms have been remodeled, but I still know that in the upstairs one, the switches are flipped, and reached for the far one to turn on the lights.

This is why we eloped: so that we could visit in some meaningful way with the people we love. Not trying to jam it all into one night in a reception hall. Not overwhelmed by the context of these friends from college mashing up against these people who saw me in diapers and these people that I've never met. Not in between bites of fancy food and shouted over a song we specifically requested the DJ not play.

But this way, so that we could sit around the table and stand in the kitchen and coo at the babies and steal out to the garage to filch beers from the cooler. That Midwestern sort of Visiting with a capital V. You sit around the table, you tell the new stories and then the old ones. You see where you come from. You know, in those moments, that no matter where you go, these are your people. And later, when you are on the plane headed home, you rest your head against the window and have one brief moment to be thankful for this fall and all it brings.

like a blur

Eesh. Two months, and they passed like a blur.

It's almost-fall today in Georgia. The sky is gray and a little wet. The students are wearing more jeans than shorts. The dogwood leaves have turned brown-red and fallen. Soon, the pecan and live oaks will go brown, or what passes for brown, and we will have to close the windows at night. For now, it's enough to put an extra blanket on the bed and wake to a chill.

Another semester, another daily grind of online teaching and hard-copy essays. Red pens, flannel shirts, leftovers packed into matching containers for lunches. The house is a series of small victories: finally, a new screen in the one window that didn't have one and air whooshes down the hallway. The front room, decked out in furniture my brother couldn't take to California, has a guest bed and a world map. I have been re-reading books I've already read, and some new ones that changed me a little. The poetry manuscript keeps making its endless rounds, but at least new work has found a home or two.

It's been a good semester for music, too. When we moved here, we thought perhaps the bands would come through Savannah, but they rarely do; too many art school kids, maybe, or just not worth stopping south on the way from Charleston to Atlanta. So instead, we have been driving: to Atlanta to see The National; to Jacksonville to see Frightened Rabbit and Augustines; to Athens to see Son Volt. How good it feels--how good it's always felt--to stand with a beer in one hand, dripping its condensation on my oldest shoes, and press in to hear.

And on a Friday night, we gathered in the kitchen and had another Libras, Gettin' Older party. There were some new friends, and some old ones. The cakes were the same as the year before. Carrot with cream cheese, almost-flourless chocolate, white buttercream. The dog sat on a chair. It was enough to drink beer from the new growler station in town, and make a little sampler of cakes, and enjoy where we are, this place we call home.