Oak Park, Illinois

Last Thai morning somtahm

I used to live here in Oak Park, down the street, on Cuyler.  Back then, I looked like this:

Me, in 2000

This was my apartment:

A shelfie, before they were called such

I lived there with my cat, Rumor, in a studio apartment for $545 a month.

Rumor, on my beat-up chair

I worked at a magazine office in the city, and I took the train in.  It was impossibly romantic.

Now it is fourteen years later. I moved here in April of 2000.  Two days ago I flew back into Atlanta and family picked me up and we drove through Chicago to its western edge, to Oak Park, where my sister lives with her husband and four impossibly beautiful daughters.  She keeps chicken and grows peas.  She longs for Thailand, as already do I.

So far today I have eaten leftover fast-food chicken and pizza and salad.  And fresh snap peas and a backyard chicken egg.  Since coming back to this land of cheese and wheat, I have eaten whole-grain bread and yogurt and cold hard cantaloupe.  What I have not eaten:  curry, pad pahk luahm, fresh raw Thai basil, somtahm, rice, chicken grilled over charcoal in its own fat, mango-yogurt smoothies, coconut bread.  My diet here is completely different, as is my sun intake.  It’s like my world’s upended.

I didn’t notice the absence of smell on my arrival that much this time, but when my brother and sister and I talk about the smell of Bangkok, it’s like we’re talking about home.  The smell of the khlongs, of the markets, of the city.  The humid darkness.

The sun stays up till eight o’clock here.  It mystifies me.  How can it be eight o’clock and it still be light?  As does the sun itself and its mysterious chill, its pallor.  It’s 75 degrees here this week.  At Bluefin, in the last week I was there, it rarely got below 80 degrees at night.  My feet are cold.  It’s the warmest month of the year and I need socks.

I continue traveling through my own home country.  Is this my home country?  Is the other?  Asked Pontius Pilate:  what is truth?

I just remember the first Thai I heard at Narita Airport, in Japan.  It was the final leg of the flight, on January 1.  A new moon.  Thai tourists were returning from Japan on vacation.  When they talked, it sounded like home.  This time, on flying out, in Narita I heard almost none—maybe a whispered word among Thai tourists disembarking—and I listened as the language went silent. 

Vientiane, Laos

Lao bus station

In Vientiane, the streets are white hot.  In all of Laos the streets are white hot.  On the tuk-tuk going to the bus someone splashes me with a bucket of water—my first songkran blessing.

We find at least a couple of street food stands with sohm tam—which in Lao is tam sohm—and we cower against the sun.  The hotel room we settle on is on the third floor and rising upwards is like going into Dante’s innermost pit of hell.  They have free water refills on the ground floor, which, comparatively, was all garden and cool tile.  But I rise with the heat, up one floor, and then the next, and then to our little box with open windows facing the sun.

The market is along the Mekong, mainly Lao clothes vendors and Lao teenagers holding hands.  I find one shirt I almost buy and should have, in retrospect.  It says BOSTON MBSESTCHBTETSS or something like that.  I would have rocked that shirt.

The hotel room is intolerable so we only spend one night and take another tuk-tuk to another bus station and ride it back across the Thai border, thus squandering our thirty-day $35 Lao travel visa.  Thais came across for the day just to buy big bags of baguette.  Lao bakers know how to bake real French baguette, Thailand barely sells bread.  Another effortless border crossing, although my heart always does clench a little as I meet the officer’s eyes.

Come up and dance with me

River while fishing

Bound to

Today lightning storms and flash flood warnings and electricity out for most of the afternoon.  It's also the mid-point in July, which means any plants that go in the ground have to be for fall weather, capable of withstanding frost.  The joke, around here, is after the fair in August you bank the house, but I'm not making jokes about winter yet.  Not when it's still ninety degrees during the day.

Not when heat and humidity break with heavy rain, pounding down around the eaves like thunder, and lightning cracks over the next ridge.  It reminds me of home--how in Thailand, during the monsoon, we'd have heavy humidity all day and then a rush of rain like a dam bursting in the afternoon, and then a few blessed hours of coolness in the evening.  Here I relish every drop of sweat, hold it close to my heart, knowing how fleeting these days of warmth are.  How soon I'll have to put back on sweaters and socks.  How few months before the wood stove cranks up again.

What it says about our weather patterns that July in northern Maine now resemble tropical southeast Asia are something else entirely.  Something that perhaps I shouldn't go into now, although I'm sick of no one talking about it.  Sick of everyone discuss cavalier plans for building pipelines and fracking when we're not dealing with the larger problem.  All of us know that the ground is shifting under our feet, that there's an elephant in the room no one mentions.  Because it's too hard.  Because we know how much change will cost.

Is it bad, then, that I can be so gleeful on these tropically hot weeks in Aroostook County?  How I pray every day for the heat to hold?  I stand outside, under the bare inches of eave, and let the rain crash around me.  Listen to the thunder.  Thrill to the light.

I will sing to you of greater things

A baby skunk came to visit

He was about half the size of a kitten, and possibly the cutest thing I've ever seen. My sister's had an obsession with baby animals for a long time, and seeing a miniature skunk waddling around the front lawn, turning on us with the camera and spreading his front legs into an aggressive stance, although he had to have been too small for his stink glands to be active--it made me understand the obsession.

Loch raven

June sky

The sky today was low and lean, the shade of purple it only gets this time of June. I forget how lucky we are, in these long, long days. The sun only hits at this angle this far in the north. Only here do we get this quality of light. Praise be to God.

I’m gonna dance hall, dance hall every day

Hollyhock about to bloom, at my new friend the artist's house

The cat woke me this morning, kneading his claws against my lips, as he likes to do in the morning when he wants to be stroked. That, and the sun striping my calves, and I woke up early to coffee and an egg sandwich, and then straight to my desk. The list of things I write each morning is getting longer—a stream-of-consciousness journal entry, then my dream from the night before, a way to mine my subconscious for the real work—the book that gets closer to being finished every day. My self-imposed deadline is July 31, and I feel my breath catch in my throat every time I realize I may just make it.

I’m on my last chapter right now, and it’s one of these things, like my desk, like my garden, that I can hardly believe. How can I be this person who has almost finished such a beautiful thing? Even if I tie the manuscript up in a neat knot and put it in my bottom drawer and never again show it daylight, every time I remember its existence feels like a drug. I don’t know what happens next, what happens on August 1, and right now I don’t care.

Then I put down these words, and after these words I go into the garden to harvest radishes, snap peas, turnip greens, spinach, and basil for macaroni salad for a friend’s birthday. Then maybe a walk in the woods or yoga, before I walk up the hill for pork ribs on the barbecue. Tomorrow, I can chose between a bluegrass festival, an Afro-Cuban drum workshop, and a local township’s annual festival on a dirt road, camping in the Maine wilderness. I feel like I’m living someone else’s dream of my life, as if I was mysteriously transplanted into JK Rowling’s world, or something. And I’m broke.

But even there comes synchronicity. Late last night, celebrating with another set of friends their anniversary, the potato harvest was mentioned. The idea of pulling potatoes up out of the ground, working in the open air, breathing nothing but oxygen and herbicide, and making enough money to get halfway through the winter, seems like another gift. Every day I breathe in faith, breathe out faith.

Now here comes the preacher

Beets today in the garden. You can see rocky the soil is here, and also how I'm not such a good weeder.

It was 81 degrees out today—yay. I have such a hard time on these sunny days. I feel like I should be spending every waking hour outside, in as much sun as I can find, soaking up all of it, but that means not being inside my office, where the work that’s most important to me takes place. I always feel that cognitive dissonance, wanting to be indoors and outdoors at the same time. That's one of the things about writing—it’s an indoor sport.

The thing is to do it like the farmers say: early to bed and early to rise. As another adage goes: easier said than done. I’d love to be one of those people, like my Papou the writer, who woke at dawn. I once read that National Geographic only publishes photographs taken at dawn or dusk. So if you don’t wake up at dawn, you’re halving your chances.

But I don’t believe in that crap. I wake up when the sun slants across my ankles, or as close to it as my dreams will let me. And then I come to my little sun room and put some words into the computer. Sometimes they are good words. Sometimes they are bad words.

As now, when I have been to the top of the hill celebrating the midsummer full moon a day late, the first, and last, of the true summer. I’m told it just gets colder from here on out. I don’t believe it, not yet. But it’s possible. I’m no longer supposed to plant endive, according to my book.

I suppose I’m spending enough time outdoors. I spent an hour in the garden this afternoon, getting sun on my shoulders and waging war against the cucumber beetles and deer flies, weeding the pepper plants and putting in another row of radishes. The garden’s beautiful, and brings me more joy than almost anything on a sunny day. But it’s still hard not to feel this conflict. The mornings I spend inside, and as much bravery as I have for the rest of the day outside.

Is it worth it

I’m sitting on a blanket in the grass right now, sitting in the sun, but edging the shade. Today is free music in the park in Presque Isle, and it’s the first time I’ve been. Listening to some Brooklyn band pour out their hearts into their harmonicas while old people and young people and people with down’s syndrome sway in the shade give sme hope for the future of humanity. It’s summer, and summer means music in the park, and life is beautiful.

Although I don’t know why these crazy Mainiacs, who have canopies on their folding chairs, insist on crowing into the two patches of shade that exist. Seriously. It’s cold eleven months of the year—they can’t sit in the sun for the one month of the year that it’s warm? It’s like they’re allergic. Or crazy.

At least it’s 85 degrees out, and we have at least thirty more days of heat. Activities are piling up—the Potato Blossom Festival all this week, a street dance next weekend, the Land Speed Record Race at Loring Air Force Base, and then the County Fair beginning in August. Then summer’s done. Then snow starts falling.

Just joking, but it does make me want to spend as much time as possible outside in full sun, every minute that it’s shining. It does make me appreciate these beautiful days of music and heat. Even the band, Spirit Family Reunion, is good, as Brooklyn neo-folk tends to be.

God gave me style

Another unidentified flower

I distinctly remember the day I learned the meaning of the phrase “I like the cut of your jib.” Secret was anchored in Georgetown harbor, and we were hanging out with crew from two other boats—a duo of crazy western Australians and another couple, the female half of which was Native American and the male half of which was a treasure hunter. He bought a video camera to fasten to the front of his hull, and they were heading to the Ragged Islands, a chain of rugged coral outcroppings in a remote part of the Bahamas, famous because so many boats wrecked there. That’s the idea behind treasure hunting—you go to the places where the most boats have wrecked, which doesn’t seem like that brilliant of a strategy for one’s own boat. This same couple took a Boston Whaler across the Gulf Stream, so elements of their sanity may have been questionable.

She wove us a rainbow-bead dream-catcher to hang in our boat. It still hangs from the bulletin board of my Chattanooga office, and I remember them, and wonder if they ever made it past the Ragged Islands.

They had a Cal 33, designed by Gary Mull, the same dude who designed the Ranger 33s, which Secret was. Cals are slower boats, beamier, more for cruising than for racing, and I was jealous. Not only did their boat have standing head room for us tall people, but it had space. They had old-fashioned hanked-on foresails, which they bemoaned, but I was jealous of those, too. Our roller-furler was barely working at that point and hanked-on sails sounded so much easier.

Best yet, they had a blade jib. A sail shaped like a blade, 87 percent of their sail area—as sexy as it sounds. I said, almost without hearing myself, “I like the cut of your… jib.” I meant it, standing there, in front of someone’s jib, envying it.

I’ve been doing that with land lately, with weather. I love this little chunk of land carved out at the bottom of Snow Road. Bridgewater is the local town, with 700 residents, but the denizens of Snow Road like to claim that this city is a separate village altogether. Snow Settlement. Where people like to drink boxed wine and Mountain Dew, where you hear the neighbor shoot a couple of rounds of .22s on a Sunday afternoon, where free-range moose roam across the road, where you walk home using the fireflies to light y0ur way.

If there’s one thing that Snow Road has in spades, it’s snow. We had snow here about two weeks later than anyone else, and we get snow about two weeks earlier. Spending three days up at a lake made me feel like I was living in a separate micro-climate. There was actually sun. It shone. I got color in my face. My shoulders grew back their freckles.

Not only is this the road of snow, but the house is located at a little divot at the bottom of the road, where, even on these long summer days, shade begins at five pm. I have to go to the corner of the lawn to do a sunny sun salutation. The garden’s located at the edge of the beaver pond, so it gets the most light. It’d be the perfect situation for a house. If the house was in Alabama.

On nice days, like today, I trek uphill to R.’s place. He’s the neighbor that lives in a bus, and I sit out on the bus’s attached hardwood deck until the last glimmer of sun disappears from the top of the hill.

I’m not complaining. I refuse to complain about the weather. I’m just noting that a road on the wrong side of the only hill in 500 square miles, on the lowest ground on that road, in the county that I theorize has the worst weather in the continental United States (Perhaps barring parts of northern North Dakota—someone look it up for me? Please? Someone who has internet?), makes for some cloudy, dreary days, even in June.

So. Whoever you are, wherever you live (unless perhaps you live in North Dakota). I like the cut of your jib.

On the living room floor

These are the golden, dreamy days of summer, when light stretches until ten o'clock at night, when even the black flies are dazed for what passes as heat, when the loons call over the lake and the moon rises low and yellow. These are the days that make me realize why people live in Maine. Maybe. I just spent three days at a Little Madawaska Lake with friends, fishing, kayaking, reading, and sitting in the sun.

And now, so soon, the days are getting shorter again. If there's one thing Aroostook County forces me to realize, it's how fleeting are the days of summer. I spent as many minutes as possible outside today, even if it was just wandering around barefoot in the grass. Even weeding leeks is exquisite joy if I can have sun on my shoulders. Rain's forecast for all of this weekend, but I'm going to appreciate every seventy-degree day I get.

Bloomsday

I drove thirty miles to the big city today for an electric bug repellent device that I have no guarantee will work. I’m not sure about its environmental impact, either, but these things are driving me crazy. The joke in Maine is that there are four seasons: winter, winter, winter, and black fly season, and we’re hardcore into black fly season as of June. I’m not complaining, but I am declaring nuclear war.

There are all these techniques, like BTi, a kind of bacterial organic biocide that you dunk in the beaver creek. But it sounds awful. Better for me to breath in the electric biocides than all the poor little peepers. I’ve still been managing my two-mile walk every day, but I leave in a good mood and come back in a bad one, covered in bites, even with the Deep Woods Deet.

Illegitimi non carborundum. That’s all I can say about the suckers. I’ve seen some mosquitoes in my day: the Sierra Nevada after snowmelt, the Florida Everglades at the wrong time of year, Thailand. But Maine swamp may do me in.

Gotta find me a janitor to sweep me off my feet

Wildflower on another piece of land I will almost certainly not buy

The planet is turning away from the sun, slowly, even though it was still 100 degrees out this week. The humidity has lessened. I don’t feel a desperate need to carry my window fan from room to room. At night, I actually have to turn my fan off, which means it’s too cold.

I went to the park last Thursday, to get a dose of sunlight before Labor Day. My least favorite holiday. Labor day means summer is over. No more wearing white. No more Vitamin D. No more beaded sweat on my upper lip. If I don’t have my sun, thing start to fall apart.

This Chattanooga summer has been the hottest on record, and for me it’s not hot enough. Or it’s exactly hot enough—I just don’t want it to get any cooler, ever. I’m beginning to believe a move to Mexico might be advisable. Mexico, or Thailand.

The park was deserted. I had expected hordes. It was a beautiful, sunny day, only two days before the holiday weekend. I forget about things like school. Yet another example of treating myself as well as I would a child. What would I want to do instead of school, if I was in school all day? I’d want to be there, in the sun, gazing out at the river, hearing the calls of boaters across the water.

Only a month more of warmth, and I haven’t budgeted nearly enough time for basking in the sun this summer. I’ve spent the last several (non-blogging) weeks grabbing at any spare moment to drive around to more pieces of land. I am determined to buy a place before winter. Determined. That doesn’t mean, however, that a piece will reveal itself to me.

I continue to experience the challenge of deciding between mountain and valley. I don’t want to end up making the wrong decision. Soil can be enriched, yes, but every time I drive to look at another barren, rocky five acres, covered in bugs and scrub pines—I drive past acres and acres of fertile, verdant bottomland. I think, as I drive: this is what I want.

Wrapped around your finger

That day--sailing

“Cutter-rigged ketch bruising along at six knots under power, no sail out—beam wind of 5-10 kts.” --Melissa Jenks

A note I wrote in my little notebook as I was sailing through the Bahamas, from Paradise Island to the Exumas… My point, perhaps obscure to non-sailors, was very much the same as the point that Edifice Rex makes here, in an excellent post that I can’t recommend highly enough. It blew my mind that these people could have a boat, so beautiful—my dream boat, a cutter-rigged ketch, with boatloads (ha!) of sail—and be using it like a motorboat. Not even a sail out, with a beam wind, the best kind of wind God breathes.

Admittedly, we were sailing that day at around three knots. Not fast. (Actually, I can check my logbook! Our average that day, 6 May 2007, was 3.5 knots, and we achieved a maximum speed under sail of 4.1 knots. So not that slow after all!) A five-knot beam wind has a harder time moving a heavy boat. But still.

That boat was heading the opposite direction. The other way. Bruising back to the States, over the banks, probably trying to make it to Nassau in time for dinner. They were forcing their way forward, on the backs of the dinosaurs and the whales, burning up that diesel as fast as they could, instead of being willing to take the slow way, the difficult way, the harder and truer path.

I understand Edifice Rex’s reluctance to toot her own horn in her subsequent post. It’s difficult to say: I’m doing it right, and you all are doing it wrong. On the other hand: if we didn’t believe we were doing it right, we wouldn't be doing it this way.

When something breaks, the fast solution that most of us turn to is to go to Walmart and buy something new. The easy way is to buy something made of petroleum in China. The slow solution is learning to fix it. The slow way is learning to build something new that won’t break, that’ll be worth fixing. Americans take the easy way a lot. Because it’s easier. It’s more comfortable.

I haven’t used air-conditioning all summer. Here’s the forecast for Chattanooga:

Chattanooga, TN (37421) Weather Forecast

And I’m so comfortable. I spend most of the time in my basement, where it’s ten degrees colder anyway, but I wear almost no clothing all the time. I drape a sarong around myself first thing in the morning, and I live in it as much as possible. I have a fan that I cart around from room to room. Really, that’s all one needs to deal with hot weather: minimal clothing, and air flow. Something I learned, very well, from the Thais.

The point is that taking the difficult way generally isn’t all that hard. It requires swimming upstream, yes, or sailing in a beam wind—but it’s generally cheaper, better for the earth, better for my body, and better for my mind.

But I won’t be sticking around

Buds

The worst part about the poison oak debacle has been how it’s kept me from the bare skin of summer. Actually, that’s not the worst part at all, but it has been one bad part. I’ve been wearing long pants and long-sleeved shirts everywhere, even to yoga class, in 95-degree weather. At least I’m now healed enough to show my arms in public.

I’m one of those people who can’t manage to convince herself that there’s anything wrong with the sun. I know that everyone says it’s bad, it’ll give me cancer, but I don’t believe them. Or I don’t care. I love every inch of it I can get. I want to be in the sun all day, every day. July is my favorite time of year. Every minute of July is a heartbeat of joy. I wish it was July all year.

One of the things I inherited when I came to Chattanooga was a beat-up 1993 convertible in place of my sturdy Maine Subaru. It doesn’t have air conditioning, which is fine by me. Who needs air conditioning when you can take off your roof? So I’m driving back from downtown today, caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the black interior of my little car, the top down, semis roaring on either side, the sun beating down, the humidity oozing, the water in my bottle the temperature of tea… All of the people around me probably pitied me, thinking about how much of a bug under a magnifying glass I am.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking: I am so happy. This is perfect.

All I need is sun, I guess. Vast quantities of it. So I hope my skin heals soon so I can expose vast quantities of it to the sun again. I have December to spend worrying about cancer.