“Snow” by Ann Beattie
This little story breaks my heart.
“Snow” by Ann Beattie
I remember the cold night you brought in a pile of logs and a chipmunk jumped off as you lowered your arms. “What do you think you’re doing in here?” you said, as it ran through the living room. It went through the library and stopped at the front door as though it had knew the house well. This would be difficult for anyone to believe, except perhaps as the subject of a poem. Our first week in the house was spent scraping, finding some of the house’s secrets, like wallpaper under wallpaper. In the kitchen, a pattern of white-gold trellises supported purple grapes as big and round as ping-pong balls. When we painted the walls yellow, I thought of the bits of grape that remained underneath and imagined the vine popping though, the way some plants can tenaciously push though anything. The day of the big snow , when you had to shovel the walk and couldn’t find your cap and asked me how to wind a towel so that it would stay on your head-you, in the white towel turban, like a crazy king of snow. People liked the idea of our being together, leaving the city for the country. So many people visited, and the fireplacemade all ofthem wabt to tell amazing stories; the child who happened to be standing on the right corner when the door of the ice cream truck came open and hundreds of popsicles crashed out; the man standing on the beach, sand sparkling in the sun, one bit glinting more than the rest, stooping to find a diamond ring. Did they talk about amazing things because they thought we’d turn into one of them? Now I think they probably guessed it wouldn’t work. It was as hopeless as giving a child a matched cup and saucer. Remember the night out on the lawn, knee deep in snow, chins pointed at the sky as the wind whirled down all that whiteness? It seemed that the world had been turned upside down, and we were looking into an enormous feild of Queen Anne’s lace. Later, headlights off, our car was the first to ride through the newly fallen snow. The world outside the car looked solarized.
You remember it differently. You remember that the cold settled in stages, that small curve of light was shaved from the moon night after night, until you were no longer surprised the sky was black, that the chipmunk ran to hide in the dark, not simply to a door that ledto its escape. Our visitors told the same stories people always tell. One night, giving me a lesson in story telling, you said, “Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.”
This, then, for drama: I drove back to that house not long ago. It was April, and Allen had died. In spite of all the visitors, Allen, next door, had been the good friend in bad times. I sat with his wife in their living room, looking out the glass doors to the backyard, and there was Allen’s pool, still covered with black plastic that had been stretched across it for winter. It had rained, and as the rain fell, the cover collected more and more water until it finally spilled onto the concrete. When I left that day, I drove past what had been our house. Three or four crocuses were blooming in the front – just a few dots of white, no field of snow. I felt embarassed for them. They couldn’t compete.
This is a story, told the way you say stories should be told: Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country. This, of course, is the barest outline, and futile to discuss. It’s as pointless as throwing birdseed on the ground while snow still falls fast. Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up: the black shroud over the pool. Love, in its shortest form, becomes a word. What I remember about all that time is one winter. The snow. Even now, saying “snow,” my lips move so that they kiss the air.
No mention has been made of the snowplow that seemed always to be there, scraping snow off our narrow road- an artery cleared, though neither of us could have said where the heart was.
There and Back Again Pt. 1
As usual, I’m a crappy blogger. And I’m an even crappier blogger because I had actual stuff to blog this summer – not just the usual dribble I post about pens and music and other nonsense. I did things this summer – exciting things!
So since I can’t go back in time and update my blog in real time, I’ll give you all the details of my summer experiences over the course of a few blog posts. I’ll try to include some snapshots and hopefully it will convey what an incredible summer it was.
On May 1st, I left the tornado-terrorized streets of Memphis and headed north to the Dirty Jersey where I spent three weeks with my family before setting out on May 20th for the great road trip.
I am not entirely sure what inspired this road trip. It was partially done in the name of research for my thesis, although that was a very small part of it, and mostly done in the name of why-the-hell-not? I had the summer off, a bit of cash saved, and a healthy dose of wanderlust. And so.
On May 21st I left NJ with my SUV packed to the ceiling full of clothes and books and sleeping bags and a tent and a sundry of other items.
Packed up!
Odometer at the start of the trip
My Copilot
I drove to Selinsgrove, PA where I met up with my old college professor, Tom Bailey, who is a wonderful writer and has been a mentor of mine for over ten years. He and his lovely wife and three rather adorable children live on a mountain overlooking the rolling green farmlands of Central Pennsylvania just a few minutes from my alma mater, Susquehanna University. It was very inspiring and exciting to see him again and “talk shop” – not just student to teacher, but almost as peers. I stayed in his “writer’s cabin” and even though it was almost three months ago, I remember quite vividly the feeling of excitement tugging at me as Piper (my pup) and I went to sleep that night listening to the crickets outside and knowing it was only day one of our journey.
View from the Baileys’ back deck – gorgeous!
The next day we awoke early and took a hike with Tom and his son, Samuel. I could have stayed and hiked all day, but I had, well, no promises to keep, but many miles to go before I sleep…slept.
Driving on 45 W
We set out and headed west toward Pittsburgh, PA where we made a far-too-brief stop to visit with a classmate of mine from grad school and get a mini-tour of Pittsburgh. My friend and I have a constant battle going over Philly vs. Pittsburgh (which is just silly since Philly is OBVIOUSLY far more awesome), but I have to admit Pittsburgh was not quite as lame as some cities. Philly it was not, but I could see having a pretty good time there.
Pittsburgh was a pretty cool town… if you could get past all the filthy Steelers fans crawling around.
Unfortunately, my ambitious travel schedule left me little time to do Pittsburgh proper and after only two hours I was back out on the road, this time driving through West Virginia, Ohio, and eventually through the rolling hills of Indiana. And by hills, I mean that’s the flattest damn state in the union. Seriously, Kansas and Missouri have nothing on that stretch of endless horizon.
Where would I be without my iPhone to track my progress?
As I look through these photos, I am reminded of just how damn enjoyable the drive was. I was all by myself (okay, that’s not fair – Piper was wonderful company) and the sights were perhaps not as picturesque as other parts of the trip, but it was just really peaceful and exciting. We have this incredible country here with such diverse landscapes and cities and so much more to see and experience than can even be done in the course of a few months and the thrill of being out on the road seeing it is something that really cannot be described. We are very lucky to have this country and to have our highways and I was especially lucky to have the time and resources to be able to take this trip.
Anyway, back to the drive.
So I pushed on through Indiana, the goal being to get to Indianapolis by that night. This was one of the longest stretches of the trip, made longer by my stop-off in Pittsburgh, but around 11 pm, I finally pulled into my hotel.
You can’t really see it, but that sign says Indianapolis, and boy was it a sight for sore eyes!
I think I was staying in a Red Roof or some other fairly dreadful budget hotel, but upon arrival, I dealt with a huge number of issues The first room was occupied (now that was awkward). I went back and collected a new key – this time unfortunately the second floor – so Piper and I trudged up there, suitcase in tow, only to discover that the key did not work. So we trudged back downstairs for a new one. We did this THREE times before finally someone with four working brain cells was able to come to my assistance, get me a key to a room that worked, and allow me to finally get in the damn motel. I was none-too-pleased, especially upon learning that the various restaurants of Indianapolis to which I was close were all closed and I would need to eat some form of fast food if I wanted dinner.
I opted instead for the bar at the La Quinta across the street where I drank my dinner in the form a few Fat Tires as I chatted with the bartender (the only other person in the bar). It was great. He was a friendly, laid-back midwesterner (is there any other kind?) who told me all about the wild spring weather they’d been having, how Indianapolis was growing and sprawling out each year, and how his favorite place on Earth, Brown County State Park, was just down the road a couple of hours near a town called Nashville, IN. We chatted for about an hour and before I left, he handed me a couple of unopened Coronas and told me to enjoy my trip.
And I was.
Stay tuned. At this pace, I can blog all year about this trip.
I’m a bad blogger.
I have off today and could very well be blogging, but instead I am in bed drinking coffee, listening to Patty Griffin, and reading Oliver Sacks.
Here’s a song for you to enjoy instead:
Oh, and that.
Yeah, so I guess I can’t really hold up Pitchers & Catchers Day and not acknowledge that it’s also Valentine’s Day. For us single folks, this day means very little. Well, it’s not really a day that means much to me when I’m in a relationship either. I’m plenty romantic; I just like to choose when to be romantic and don’t like being told TODAY you will be in LOVE!
That said, for you people with a love for this, the most romantic day of the year, here’s a beautiful song from one of my favorite films of all time, Once. The YouTube video had embedding disabled, so this is from some other site that might not work.
Happy Valentine’s, folks.
Once – Falling Slowly
Uploaded by MiguelFS. – See the latest featured music videos.
The first day of Spring…
…has arrived.
I’m talking, of course, about pitchers and catchers. They have reported to spring training around the league. For my Phils, that means sunny Clearwater, Florida.
In a month and a half, they will make the trip up North to open their season at Citizen’s Bank Park. For many, this first game, the first glimpse of the green field, the first crowds of fans gathered in the parking lot grilling hot dogs and drinking beers marks the start of spring. But, to me, there’s something about knowing the process of getting to that day – that first game – that warms me.
It might still be cold, it might even snow, but Spring has officially arrived.
Happy pitchers & catchers day, everyone.
Oh!
And I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t report that my black flat has been returned! Yep, in a package on my doorstep Wednesday afternoon. And with it my faith in humanity.
(Okay, I admit it: this all might have been an excuse to post this song)
in a year
Well, if anyone is loyally following my site (ha), you noticed it was down for a few days.
This is because I failed to realize the registration was expiring and therefore did not renew it. My apologies to those left in a state of panic over the past four days wondering if it was gone for good.
It is not. I’m just an irresponsible blogger.
The good (?) news is that I have been blogging for a year now. Yay! Happy birthday to 1TS.
I began this blog musing about my future in writing, whether I would be accepted to any MFA programs, and doing temp telemarketing work when there was truly no other work to be found. What a difference a year makes.
Now I am in an MFA program, committed to my future in writing (even toying with the idea of starting a book – more on that in a later post), and no longer selling space for the Philadelphia Women’s Wellness Expo (more on THAT in a later post, too).
I’m not really feeling the urge to blog today, but I do want to say thanks for reading, happy birthday to 1ts, and sorry for my delinquencies.
I leave you with this, the best thing ever.
damn if this don’t knock the wind out of you.
“Joyas Voladoras, ” by Brian Doyle
Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.
Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant’s fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.
Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles — anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.
The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.
Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.
So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end — not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.
today is brought to you by the letter Awesome
Hell yeah.
Maybe it’s the flax seeds talking, but I feel good. I’ve been eschewing booze and meat, working out, eating healthy, and just generally loving life. I spent Friday and Saturday getting unpacked and getting my life in order – and Sunday and Monday drinking coffee and reading books in bed. Not too shabby for Devo.
Tonight I had class and it was fun – fun! I was kind of sad when it was over.
Right now I’m taking a break from reading for class and the best part is that I am reading an assigned book that I almost bought over break. You know, voluntarily. Ha! That just makes me laugh. Doing what you love turns out not to be that hard.
Okay, now I just sound obnoxious.
I just feel really fortunate that my life has found me here. Piper is sleeping with her head on my leg, which she does every night, but it just kills me every single time. Delta Spirit is humming in the speakers behind me – and how can you not feel good when Delta Spirit is playing? You just can’t. And I’m all hopped up on endorphins and milk thistle.
Rock on, 2011.
(Does Don Draper require any explanation?)
Pro: Not arguing about ridiculous crap.
Okay, I admit, I’m recycling this. I posted it about a year ago on my now-dormant blog, At the Bottom of Everything. Today I stumbled upon the link and found that, a year later, this is still exactly how I feel. So, I figured I’d repost it for you guys. Enjoy.
*****
Recently a friend passed along a website to me called “Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.” (http://www.mil-millington.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/things.html). It is one of those websites that you find yourself consumed with for hours, wondering how you have lived your life up until that moment without having discovered it earlier. In a word, it’s brilliant.
While I strongly encourage you to visit it, I will sum it up as, well, a list of things this man and his girlfriend have argued about. He is a wry, sardonic English man (is there any other kind?) and she an eccentric German female with a penchant for collecting plants and asking inane questions. It is high, high comedy.
While the website manages to somehow paint an endearing picture of the two of them and their endless spats, it was somewhere around the second hour of reading recants of the ridiculous arguments this couple has had that I began to appreciate my condition. What condition? As my Grandma would put it, that of being “still single” – as in “Are you still single?”
My Grandma attributes my singlehood with my inability to “keep a house” (and, judging by my mountains of laundry and fridge filled with condiments and beer, she might be onto something); however, I prefer to think that it is because I’ve grown increasingly selective as I’ve gotten older. And, well, I just don’t want to argue about ridiculous crap.
People always say that, after a break-up, they only remember the good times. And I guess for me it’s the same way… for a couple of weeks. However, after a month or so and whatever love potion I was drinking is out of my system, I begin to look back on the relationship with a mix of astonishment and bewilderment, remembering the ridiculous things we’ve argued about.
Now, anyone that knows me knows that I am no picnic. I remember everything, I think debating is “fun,” and my sarcasm could bring down entire empires. I’m the girl that, in the midst of a shouting match, feels inclined to correct her boyfriend’s grammar (Yes, I did this, but only once – countless times I sat silent as he hurled grammatically incorrect insults at me. And once even accused me of being a “lyer” over text message… A lyer!)
It is most likely because of my stunning combination of sarcasm, stubbornness, and ability to wield logic like a weapon that I tend to attract equally strong-willed men. At first I love that they can keep me on my toes and challenge me. I enjoy when they point things out that I hadn’t noticed. I like the sexy sparring. But then when we’re standing in aisle 6 of the Super Fresh arguing – actually arguing – about the benefits of a 2-for-1 sale on tomato sauce and throwing around terms like “price per unit” and “economic efficiency” I begin to wish that I was dating someone a bit more easy-going.
Or no one at all.
I’ll never forget the moment I decided it was over with my long-term college boyfriend. We had gotten into an argument about something – I really can’t even remember what – and it had escalated to the point where he’d lost his cool and begun to flat-out insult me. “Don’t call me names,” I’d said to him, to which he’d responded – brilliantly – “I’m not saying you are a bitch; I’m saying you’re acting like one.” Hard to argue with that logic, huh?
Well, since this was the umpteenth time he’d reverted to hitting below the belt in the heat of battle – an issue we’d previously discussed and agreed to avoid – I took a stand. I would not speak to him until he apologized. Usually it was I that tried to smooth things over because I could not stand the stomach-twisted-in-knots feeling of an unresolved conflict. However, I stuck to my guns this time.
Finally, after four days of waiting him out, he showed up, tail between his legs. He hugged me, he kissed me, he told me he loved me. But, no, dammit he owed me an apology. I told him as much. So, he looked down sadly, shame in his eyes, and then my sweet and loving boyfriend said with all the remorse in the world, “I’m sorry you made me be mean to you.”
I’m sorry. You MADE me. Be mean to you.
In the words of Liz Lemon, this, ladies, is a deal breaker.
And while my relationships have certainly grown more mature and harmonious since that fine moment, there are still times, as in every relationship, when I have found myself in the throes of what can only be described as a fight about ridiculous crap. You forgot to do this, you shouldn’t have said that, you never do this, bluh bluh bluh. They can consume hours, days. The heartache, the drama, the soul-searching. Who’s right? Are you right? Is he right? Were you right before but now you’re not? Are we even arguing about the same thing anymore?
It’s exhausting.
And when you’ve lived alone for a certain amount of time and you’re used to just doing things a certain way without anyone else having an opinion, sometimes it just seems a hell of a lot easier to keep it that way. Throw your crap on the floor. Run the dishwasher half-empty. Sleep in the middle of the bed. Whatever.
Sure, okay, there are pros to a relationship. And maybe not dying alone is one of them. Maybe that even overshadows the pain of a few fights every now and then. And I do have fantasies of reading the morning paper over hot mugs of coffee or jet-setting off to Paris or Rome for a long weekend with my Prince Charming. It would be nice to have a companion with which to share life’s adventures.
But being single means never having to make someone be mean to you.
