So in lately I’ve been enjoying the whole idea of “series”.

The “Big Question” for September and December kept me focused on central themes, which was a lot of fun and kept me coming back to the blog and getting connected again with some other amazing writers.

Even though my family keeps me really busy, I’m keeping up the momentum this month. But I’m publishing in a few other places.

You can see my January series over on my main webpage. This month I am participating in a beautiful series created by Fiona Robyn and Kaspalita called “The River of Stones.” I’ve given my own group of “small stones” a title: “What Details Know.”

Please come over and visit me there. I’d love to hear what you think.

Meanwhile, I’ve dusted off my journalism skills and I’m writing some regular feature posts for the Stratford Patch. It’s been lovely to get to meet and know some of my neighbors more closely this way. Thanks to my editor Jason Bagley for supporting me on this.

Oh, and by the by… there is one cool lady I’d like to mention.

Off the subject but definitely worth a look.

In our recently travels, our family met another very cool family, also with four kids. The lovely matriarch of this bunch is Alma Schneider. She’s a foodie, but her business is fascinating: she a counselour who helps people like you and me back from the brink of convenience food. “Take Back the Kitchen” is just one of her super-cool projects.

No related posts.

Our house had so many little projects after we moved in. Not the least of those was the gardens. The previous owner had some kind of psychotic idea of planting… Which is to say, she is exactly like me.

So I really love to putter in the flower beds and took on the notion that planting perennials would solve all my problems.

You know… you only have to plant them once and water them a bit and Voila! Ignore the garden for forever.

Sigh.

Why the hell is life so damn hard??

You know we had all this cool and wet weather in April and May? Well that’s good, and makes things grow right?

The problem, however, was that LAST year we had all this SUPER HOT weather in our west-facing flower bed.

Combine that with the sun reflecting off of our white aluminum siding and you could basically convert our bed to a pizza oven.

The spring before that, I had dug up and split a few hostas… just to fill in some empty spaces in our bed.  They grew nicely last spring, but nearly bit the dust when the nuclear heat kicked in.

Well, now you can guess what has happened. Prehistoric isn’t the word for these plants. happy with the cool wet spring, they are crowding out EVERYTHING.

Sigh.

I dug one hosta up and divided it again… into FIVE medium plants. Planted them in some areas where it would genuinely be fine if they exploded.

Meanwhile, it rains on.

Oh, and please, don’t even get me started on the damn yuccas the previous owner planted. (was she planning on COOKING THE ROOT??!?)

ARGH.

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Montrous
Snow peaks, huddled at
Road edges, yard edges
Crowd the winter in.
Barely room for me to slither by
In my repressed Town & Country.
I remember you,
snow, as
Individual, unique
Flakes, and I feel
The same lonely.

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On Day 27 of #reverb10, Brene Brown asked:

What was one of your most joyful ordinary moments this year?

My moment was an accumulation of split-second realizations: each about the same and exquisitely lovely. They were those moments when you are looking into the eyes of someone and you suddenly see the glimmer of returned love and friendship.

Because we have passed mile marker “Year 3″ in Connecticut, it seemed logical that some of our friendships have started to stick. But logic has nothing to do with that vast expanse of loneliness that I always seem to forget about when I get all excited by the prospect of moving somewhere new. I was glad this year to start to feel that “safe” feeling with my friends: where you can begin the task of ordinary friendship and all its wonders.

It’s all well and good. After all it should take a LONG TIME to find “the people” again; you know the ones. The people who:

• get me
• forgive me and come back
• ignore me when I forget to flip the “tact” switch
• (Actually find my lack of tact sort of charming, and kind of a relief.. in that “She said that! Hah! WOW! I would never have said that. Hmmm, but it WAS what I was thinking….”)
• laugh AT me at at just the right moments
• laugh with me the rest of the time
• don’t act all that surprised if they find me blubbering over in a corner now and then
• wear their own skin like the most comfy fleece ever!– because those are the only kinds of people I seem to attract
• carry VIP membership to the Generosity Circle of the Universe.

So today, right now, I am thinking of the sweet friends I earned, gained, grabbed, nabbed, or just got lucky enough to nudge into with the minivan in 2010.

I often am unsure why they hang around me, (waiting for Colin to get home and make dinner?) but I am thrilled to have them for any reason.

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1. Ordinary Rockstar
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#Reverb10, Day 4

Prompt: Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year? (by author Jeff Davis @JeffreyDavis108)

Wonder isn’t an experience: it is a spiritual geographical location, a destination I can choose to visit, or live in. It is exactly a “sense” — just like smell or sight. I live through it, as much I want to or need to.

The answer to this prompt is the answer to why I write here: which is to say that this year I continue my love affair with SMALL THINGS.

This is, and is not, the small things, you think.

Wonder, for me, is in the smallest bits of life.

As a human, who exists on these details… riboflavins and proteins that keep our bodies healthy.

As a local, who exists in the radius of home, which is to say in my house, with my neighbors, in my town.

As a lover, giving attention to minute corners of desire in my own life and in his.

As a mother, that 24-7 convenience human existence, living largely in the banal moments– interacting with lunch boxes and school papers that maintain them and reveal their evolving identities.

As a writer, making space to uncommon metaphorical relationships– inviting the HRH QE2 to sleep on the futon for the night, to have Cheez Balls and cocoa for supper.

As a photographer, desperate for the chance to show you the melancholy loveliness I see in each of these perfect existences.

Wonder is an essential for me. It is where the ideas come from, and also the ability to follow through on them.

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…And Other  Existential Observations on Home

My colleague (we both teach at university) said, quite innocently:

“I guess I don’t think of Wisconsin as the Midwest.”

This while I was rapping a heavy mix of Madison virtues and Midwest easiness.

“Oh,” she said when I called up the map. “I guess I thought it was over by Ohio and Pennsylvania.”

She said she wasn’t that great with “geography.”

Living on the East Coast is like being trapped in an episode of the Gilmore Girls.

Insanely intelligent-sounding people are constantly rattling in run-on sentences, fueled by tidal marshes of Dunkin Donuts coffee. They’ve got so much to say about staycations, community gardens, the humane treatment of turtles, and “red states,” they quite often ramble themselves into thoughtless places of emotionally conjugated human illogic.

Whenever I watch “The Gilmore Girls,” though, I can’t help but remember that Lorelei has never left Connecticut. She’s an expert on the trivia of pop culture, and can perfectly analyze a muffin without opening the bag. But could SHE find Wisconsin on an unlabeled map?

What I Mean To Say…

This is usually where people expect me to say that the Midwest is BETTER than everywhere else. I don’t mean that.

I will say that it surprises me that no matter where I go, people seem to be really glad to tell me how much better “HERE” is than someplace else. And usually that is followed by their complete lack of knowledge of that someplace else.

Personally, I love other places. I suppose my failing is not being able to love HERE enough, while I am living it.

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A Guest Post by Karin Kuczynski-Holmgren

It’s a small cottage on the water in Bridgeport, Conn., a peaceful setting despite the overgrown parking lot and chainlink fence that surrounds it.

Just beyond the rows of parked Hondas and Priuses, the harbor twinkles with reflected factory lights. This vegetarian restaurant is called Bloodroot, run by a collective of women, and I haven’t been here since high school, with a Ms magazine and a paperback collection of essays by Dworkin, Faludi, Steinem, Pagila, Roiphe in my backpack.

In 15 years, the décor hasn’t changed. The cobwebs in the rafters  look familiar.  Gathered around the table, this could be a staging ground for revolution, political intrigue, or at the very least, serious conversation. Shelves in the bookstore reveal a specialty niche: feminist, new age, multiculturalism, gender studies.

No filler music. The windows are open to let in the autumn sounds and breezes.

Small groups of people sit together under the beamed ceiling, grasping hands across the table, sipping water or wine. A  gray-braided sprite greets us at the door and takes our order. Menus are handwritten on the walls; you need to walk the floor to decide what to order.

“No waitresses,” the owner says. “Just listen for your order to be called. ”

And bus your own table. Women may cook here, but there’s no serving. We order– escarole soup, green salad, and a local pinot grigio– then pay, cash preferred. We spot our friend, Annie – leaving soon for California – and join her, wishing for her career in acupuncture.

Portraits of women look out from the walls in black and whites or sepia tones. They gaze straight and determined into the camera, carved jawlines and a weariness around their eyes. You see that photographs taken when work lasted sun-up to sundown. At Bloodroot, customers are strengthened by its sense of community, built on the backs of these women, and fortified by a whole, vegetarian meal.

Work Done, and Not Done

The kitchen workers talk over quinoa, butternut squash, and farm-to-table salad on mismatched plates. They were all over 50 years old. How much has changed in the socio-political space for women since this place opened? Did this tiny restaurant influence their lives, the lives of their loves ones, the local political climate? Surely, they could measure the changes – in milestone laws, events and even in the crowd of customers on a Wednesday night. How did their opinions change with time?

Here sits the old guard, original revolutionaries and their stew. What are they thinking? Are they uplifted by Connecticut’s civil union passage? Did they cheer when women governors were elected? Now women surpass men in sheer numbers at undergraduate colleges. Girl Power succeeded against Raising Cain, right?

The women seemed subdued.

My thoughts turn to my friends at the table. Out of the group, only 4 of us were under 35. The rest, older. I didn’t see any young people in this restaurant. Did they know about this place? Did it not interest them, with the odd location and old school feel? They have no Facebook page or Twitter account;  just a barebones, 90’s-style website. They aren’t working to attract a younger crowd. And frankly neither is Feminism The Concept.

Old School Feminism has given me and my generation choices. Many choices. Overwhelming choices – from education to career, to have children or not, to choose and union with any partner. To rise up, sometimes only to a glass ceiling, but slowly, slowly, it’s changing.

But what is Feminism The Concept today? Madonna, Nancy Pelosi, Anita Hill. Are these the modern feminists and role models? Who are the modern feminists?

Old school feminists complain that modern women and young girls have forgotten the hard work and efforts of the prior generation to lift us up from the Mad Men working world. We don’t pay due homage when we wear belly-baring shirts and Jimmy Choos. They expected not only gratefulness, but someone to take the torch and carry on.

Is there anyone to do this?

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I just got back from what I like to call “unshopping” — a painful and ludicrous part of consumer culture.

This is when we de-stuff-ify ourselves. In this particular hour, I made four stops:

1. To the church recycling dumpster, which takes cardboard and #5s, so I don’t have to throw them away.
2. To return cans and plastic bottles, which has the cursed (ker-SEHD) bottle deposit on them. This 5 cent bottle and can deposit went out of fashion like everything else in Connecticut in 1874. However, if I want to get the money back I paid on the containers, I must stand at the automated machine that sucks them in and regularly spits them BACK out to get my loose change back.
3. To the Burlington Coat Factory parking lot, where the Goodwill pickup truck is always parked. To drop off the outgoing clothes, toys, shoes, etc.
4. To the liquor store, to return the beer bottles, because they don’t take them at the automated machines where they take the cans and bottles.

Net result of UnShopping: $6.80 and a temporarily slightly more tidy garage. (It was a big week, as we have recently had a party.)

I know some of you will tell me that I can take the cans and bottles ALL back to the big drop off center. I have done this before. However, this place is a horrific spot, filled lod clanging noises, and with people who collect cans for a living. There is ALWAYS a queue, and inevitably I wait there, squeezed in tighter and tighter between hundreds of bulging garbage bags filled with Diet Coke cans.

As I kick my blue bin of cans forward, other collectors eyeball my bags and sneer.

whywhyhwhywhywhywhywhywhy

I don’t much care for UnShopping, but I do it, because it is apart of putting things away properly, the things that I am responsible for. Also, I want my two dollars!

But ask Colin sometime what he thinks of it and he’ll say something like:

I AM NOT STANDING THERE FEEDING THOSE STUPID CANS INTO THAT MACHINE. I HAVE LOOKED INTO THE THIRD LEVEL OF HELL AND IT IS A STICKY MACHINE THAT LAUGHS AT YOU, COUGHS, THEN SAYS (as Eric Idle), “PARDON ME, BUT I CAHN’T QUITE READ YOUR BARCODE, MY DEAR FANTA CAN! GOODBYE!”

Colin says “Leave em out on the curb… someone will take them!” But I’ve seen the trash guys throw REAMS of cardboard into the garbage compactor and I quake with fear.

It takes a lot of effort to undo our consumer habits. Driving around, following our state’s rules of returns (in order to get the full 5 cents back on beer bottles, they must be returned IN the cases. In order to get money from the automated machine, the machine must be able to scan your retinas and be given a cheeseburger.)

Being a conscious consumer is the perfect recipe for madness brought on by inanity.

I want out!!

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There is a lot of wasted life, and so much of our time is used beating back the natural cycles.

Shouldn’t we just leave the rabbits be? Let them mate and mate in our back yard, eat all of our hardwork, hard-earned?

Shouldn’t we look at them and see the best of them? The softness of their fur and all their finest qualities?

Shouldn’t we make excuses for them, and say “Well they are hungry too?”

Even bunnies make mistakes, and end up dead in the road, under apathetic car tires.

The old fairy tale likes to paint Peter Rabbit as the prodigal son. He’s punished by losing his dinner, sent to bed with no blackberries.

In the winter, though, what will the farmer’s wife eat, if Peter Rabbit is too selfish?

You’ve got to dig down deep, buried the fence where they can’t see. You’ve got to work around their gnawing manipulations. If you want to best the rabbits in your perfect garden.

Some rabbits are not rabbits at all.

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My friend Bonnie wants to know what is wrong with our town. Well, I have an opinion about that. Here it is.

The Pieces

First, there are a bunch of us liberals that live in one area of town, up North here. We are mostly white, Judeo-Christians, or has-beens like me who jumped ship and became a Unitarian. We have a certain amount of money and we live in the neighborhood we live in because, whether we admit it or not, we prefer our houses to NOT be rundown or NOT be nextdoor to the former Mr. Ps shooting gallery and bar.

Second, there are a bunch of conservatives who live in the SAME area of town. In fact, there are MORE of them than there are of us. They live here because they like the school systems, they like their privacy, they like white people like themselves and they will ADMIT that they NEVER wanted to go inside Mr. Ps shooting gallery and bar, not even out of curiosity.

Third, (but not because it’s LESS mind you!) there are the social liberals who ALSO voted for Obama who live at the other (south) end of town. They may or may not work at the former Mr Ps shooting gallery and bar, and they live in whatever type of abode a service wage can afford them (after all, this is Connecticut and us whiteys like to be served).

Which isn’t much. And it IS rundown, because they have NO time to fix it up because they work 70 hours a week and have three kids to take care of. They are exhausted and even if they rent, they can’t be bothered to call the landlord, unless it’s dire. They TOO would like to have time to plan their youngest birthday party, and also have to fill out all those friggin’ kindergarten registration forms that require a PhD that NOBODY has.

The REALLY South End

Fourth, there’s Lordship, which is basically Texas. Everyone (and I mean EVERYONE, including them) secretly wants them to secede and take the airport with them. Only problem is they are attached to our beach rights, which is the only reason any of us live in Stratford.

The REALLY North End

Fifth, Oronoque. OK, everyone has SOMEONE they know and love who lives a-way up there on Assisted Living Island, so it’s hard to say anything bad, right? Respect thine elders, right?

The best solution would be to distract them all with a really great reality television program featured there, because as we know, every vote in town is skewed by the Black Hole District–where voters have all the time to vote and complain, but no time to actually be involved in the town and do anything of use.

Sixth, the big Fat Middle.  These include all of the following:

1. There’s the guys on the couch. The armchair conservative quarterbacks who slam beers and bitch about everything but only vote when one or two issues chap their hides. Like gun control and pencil skirts.

2. High-horse liberals who are busy homeschooling their kids and feel the lousy government doesn’t include them. So they “drop out.”

3. And we all know the people who say “Politicians are all corrupt. I just don’t vote.”

You want to know what’s wrong with our town? We are the perfect image of America. We are plagued with apathy. We reject and disconnect from anyone of another race, culture, or socioeconomic class– even if their values and ideas are the same as ours. We are frozen, because we believe we are right.

We are Narcissus, staring at our lovely selves in the pool that is about to drown us.

We are living on our 1/4 to 3/4 acre islands of anger, frustration and oblivion, texting and messaging only the people who agree with us. And when we disagree, we say:

“People should never talk about politics or religion.”

We talk and we don’t act.  When we act, we are filling out forms for soccer, pouring asphalt in potholes, and driving our cars in traffic.

That’s what’s wrong.

And I know… this is a lot of talking and not acting. I know. But Bonnie asked.

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