The close and holy darkness

Right, were'd we leave off? End of October?

In November H moved back home and we had Thanksgiving and H turned 20 and I had a bit of a moment over that what with her being my youngest and all. In December it snowed and we had Christmas and we didn't travel anywhere and it was nice.

And now you're all caught up.

Traditionally at the end of December I'd talk about all the books I'd read the previous year, but the truth is that in 2017 I didn't read a whole lot of new-to-me books. I DID re-read a whole lot of books I'd read before, I think because I needed the comfort of familiar words this year: all the Harry Potters, all of His Dark Materials, The Handmaid's Tale (not comforting, that last one, but I hadn't read it in decades and was due for a refresh).

I did manage to read a few new-ish ones, though, and these were my favorites in fiction: Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters, The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, News of the World by Paulette Jiles, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy by Rachel Joyce, Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, The Wonder by Emma Donoghue, Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix, and The Good People by Hannah Kent.

Excellent nonfiction I read this year: Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, Dark Money by Jane Meyer, Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, Washington's Nightmare by Scott B. Christmas, Lion by Saroo Brierley, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, and I'm Just a Person by Tig Notaro.

Huh. I guess when you throw in all the three- and four-star books I read (only fives for you people, ONLY FIVES FOR YOU) and the re-reads, that DOES add up to kind of a lot of books for 2017. Well, hell. Go me! (That last photo is of some recent purchases. So far 2018 is looking pretty good, book-wise.)

Honestly I feel like I spent most of this year knitting. I made a little green scarf, a much bigger scarf in fall colors, my first completed pair of socks, a pair of socks for H, another pair for me, a very fun-to-knit hat, a cowl for my mom, and half of a mosaic shawl that I had to frog due to it being part of a poorly curated kit. Currently on the needles: a second attempt at said mosaic shawl (but this time with MUCH more suitable yarn), the second of my first-ever pair of toes-up socks, and a cowl I'll probably never finish if I'm being honest because the pattern is kind of boring and I'm not loving the yarn, oof.

I'm not making resolutions for the new year, but I do have two hopes. Just two. First, I hope I can be a vessel for and an instrument of Grace, and by Grace I mean Love and Compassion and Kindness. (My concept of the Divine is pretty broad and as a result it's unlikely that I believe in and revere your specific god, but I do believe in and revere these things.) Second, I hope I can see and recognize Grace in other people. That's all. If I can do that, at least most of the time, I think I'll be doing okay.

Happy New Year to you, my friends! Here's to the resisters and the fighters, the peacekeepers and the healers, the carers and the thinkers and the dreamers and the hopers. Here's to the innovators and the implementers. Here's to us.

In Prague I knew I'd been a witch

Oh, hi. Remember back in May when I said I wasn't doing Facebook much anymore and I hoped it would lead to more writing over here? Those were more innocent times, weren't they?

Yeah. Hello. I have no idea what I've been doing for the past couple of months. But the photographic evidence suggests I've been hanging out in hospital emergency rooms (I wasn't the patient, and everything is fine, and that's all I'm gonna say about that), and I've been buying flowers at the farmer's market, and cooking some stuff, and buying a new chair for my office, and killing yet more plants, and knitting a whole hell of a lot.

AND ... planning another trip to Dublin, with additional stops on the Isle of Man and in Cheshire, UK. I know! Exciting! That's all happening at the end of August/beginning of September and I'm super freaking out over it.

See, my people aren't really travelers. Growing up, I think I got the idea that, much like sleep-away camp, it wasn't something on which working-class people spent their money. I didn't know a single kid growing up who went to sleep-away camp, not until we moved to Texas. The kids I knew all spent their summers the same way I did: running around our blue-collar suburban neighborhood engaging in casual misdemeanors. And I never knew anyone who traveled internationally unless it was across the border by car into Canada or Mexico, or unless it was a military thing.

It's so weird to me that this is a thing I get to do now, that my kids are adults and my parents are still in relatively good health and I can just do this, leave the country for a couple of weeks. Go to a completely other country. I know for some of you this is a typical Thursday or whatever, but for me it's just SO weird. I'm like a little kid with this. Wow! I get to go to Dublin AGAIN! And I get to go to the Isle of Man, who's done that?! (Wait, have any of you done that? Tell me everything!) I get to go to England, where I've never been, and stay in a little inn near Manchester and stomp up and down the canals and drink cider. CAN. NOT. WAIT!

So yeah. Wow. What a summer, eh? H moved into an apartment with friends and got a promotion at work and is doing so great with the adulting, I am SO SUPER PROUD of that kid. C is thisclose to getting his driver's license and did great in his summer class and has been making tons of new amazing music and has a new job, maybe? (I feel very first-trimester about the whole job thing right now, so please just keep your fingers crossed, okay?) So super proud of that kid, too. P is busy getting ready for the conference that is the whole reason we get to go to Dublin again in the first place. And I'm just obsessively googling "minimalist travel wardrobe" and drinking matcha lattes and stress-eating way too much guacamole. Oy.

Actually, that's a lie. I've been reading books! I know! I only have good books to recommend to you anymore, because if a book isn't good within the first couple of chapters I just delete it from my Kindle and move on with my life (and eat more guacamole). This may or may not have anything to do with the fact that I have upwards of 500 books loaded onto my Kindle and that I'll likely only live long enough to read 426 of them. You know, if I'm lucky. And don't get ritually sacrificed to Manannan for trying to use euro in Douglas in a couple of months.

But yeah! The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy: excellent. Required reading if you read and liked Harold Fry. Daniel O'Malley's Stiletto, the sequel to The Rook: excellent. Tig Notaro's I'm Just a Person: excellent. Code Name Verity: excellent! I liked Maria Semple's Today Will Be Different VERY much, apparently much more than a lot of other people did.

Right now I'm reading Captain William R. Anderson's The Ice Diaries, about the first nuclear submarine and its Cold War mission to explore the Arctic Ocean while completely submerged under polar ice (all covert-like). You wouldn't think that would be my kind of thing, but (a) I love true stories about Arctic and Antarctic exploration for some damn reason, and (b) my father-in-law was a career Navy officer and navigator and both of P's brothers served in the Navy aboard nuclear subs. Mostly this book is making me miss my father-in-law because I think he would have LOVED it and I'm sad that I can't buy him a copy.

Anyway. That's what's going on around here. We'll have to talk about TV another time (OMG GAME OF THRONES BROADCHURCH CLAWS WRECKED YAY).

It was 20 years ago today

This is a true story.

May 27, 1997. I am standing in my house with my dog, looking out the back window, watching the low, heavy clouds over my backyard coalesce into a swirl. A shaggy funnel dips down and back up, down and back up, over and over. My hand is on the dog's collar. We have no basement.

I stare out the window for a full five minutes after the last funnel sign, then I call my mother, who is watching my one-year-old son at her house ten miles away. We are moving to an interior room, she tells me. We'll get into the bathtub.

I walk out the front door of my house, locking it behind me with the dog inside. I worry whether she and it will be here when I get back. On my way to the car I meet a neighbor coming home who tells me I'm crazy. She tells me to get back inside. I tell her I can't. I tell her I have an appointment.

As I'm driving east, I look to the north and see a fully formed funnel cloud skipping over the horizon. I can't tell how far away it is. It doesn't look real. It looks like a cartoon. It's early afternoon but the sky is black as night. My hands tighten on the wheel.

I pull into the parking lot of a building that is made entirely of glass. Every wall is a black window, three stories up. Black windows against a black sky. The air is still as I get out of my car. There is no birdsong, but there's a distant howl. A sound of rushing.

I walk inside. I make my way down a glass-fronted hallway in this building made of glass and turn a handle, but the door is locked. I can see there are people inside, so I knock. A woman hurries over.

What are you doing here, she says. We're all going home, she says. Have you looked outside, she says.

I say No.
I say Listen.

I have been bleeding through my entire first trimester. I have hyperemesis so severe that I have to take Phenergan suppositories just to keep down water, much less food or prenatal vitamins. I have read the books and I'm pretty sure this is a molar pregnancy, an ectopic pregnancy, twins, dead twins. I have an appointment today, right now, to hear the heartbeat for the first time. I'm going to hear that heartbeat.

The truth is I only said some of those things. The truth is that being taken out in a shower of glass and rebar was the least of my concerns right then.

I say Please.

She takes me back to a room. The exterior wall is glass. I lay on the paper-lined table and turn my head to the right. I watch the still air outside give way to shrieking gusts as I pull my top up to my bra and slide my pants below my hipbones. She tucks paper into my waistband and squirts cold jelly just above my pubic bone. Stunted trees whip in a frenzy outside the wall-window as she slides the wand across my abdomen and after an eternity during which I'm sure my house and dog and son and mother are obliterated by an angry or worse apathetic god I hear it: lublublublublublub. Faster than fast. A herd of frothing horses.

That's a good, strong heartbeat, she says.
Be careful out there, she says.

I say Thank You.
I say You Too.

I rush to my car. I drive home in a downpour so thick I can't see beyond my windshield. If there are funnel clouds to my north, ich kenn ihnen nicht. If there are funnel clouds to my north, I can't worry about them now. I am carrying a baby with a good, strong heartbeat. I am carrying an alive baby.

The 3.4 miles between the hospital and my house take thirty minutes.
My house, which is still standing.
My house, with my alive dog inside.

I call my alive mother. Later, she will bring my alive son home. Later, I will insert a Phenergan suppository and take a prenatal vitamin and try very hard keep them both inside.

Six months and two days later, I will look into the face of my beautiful alive H for the very first time.

Now get in the pit and try to love someone

My Grandpa R would have been 97 years old today, and four years ago today I returned home from attending his funeral. I'm pretty sure that was the last time I saw all my cousins and aunts and uncles and snow, and maybe also my sister-in-law if you don't count Skype, and that was the first AND last time I ate for-real-honest-to-God Cincinnati chili IN CINCINNATI because we're from Canton, yo.

I don't know what else to say about today except that for most of the world it's St. Valentine's Day, but for me and mine today is, was and always will be Grandpa's Birthday.

Speaking of saints, did y'all watch The Young Pope and if so, did you like it? Because I did. I watched it and I liked it. Yep. I've enjoyed most of Jude Law's work (whatever with those Sherlock movies) since I saw him years ago in a weird little vampire flick called The Wisdom of Crocodiles and I don't care what anyone says, he killed it in this. So there.

Also liking, on the tee-vee: Victoria. Turns out I DON'T hate Jenna Coleman, I just hate Clara Oswald! So ... glad we got that worked out. I very much hope they're eventually going to cover all the attempts made on Queen Victoria's life because I have a whole book about that which I haven't yet read.

I'm still re-reading the Harry Potter books for pure escapism, and reading other stuff for the opposite of that. Like Jane Meyer's Dark Money (terrifying/infuriating), Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now (look, I was trying something, okay?), Christiane Northrup's The Wisdom of Menopause (stop making that face) and Mychal Denzel Smith's Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching (so far fantastic). Next up: Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy. And the rest of The Order of the Phoenix.

After taking half a year off of health coaching, trying to come up with a way to do that and get the work/life balance I originally wanted, giving up and considering myself retired, a deregulation-inspired light bulb finally went off and I have now shifted my focus from direct coaching back to advocacy/activism/education around food. Pretty excited about it. Still in the process of rolling it out via social media and whatnot.

So yeah. Life goes on. We endure. Resistance and persistence, y'all. Resistance and persistence. Now go hug your grandpa, if you've still got one. And your grandma, too.

We found the craic

They say it's the same sky the world over but it isn't, not really. I'd never been so far north and east of home before and my body was in shock for one full day of the seven that we spent in Ireland this summer, husband P and me, half a world away from everything we knew and everyone we loved.

Nearly seventeen hours of daylight per day but temperatures like our winter back home. The softest rain I've ever felt against my skin. Everything in Texas wants to kill you; the sun cracks you open and the rain leaves welts and the insects sting and the reptiles drip venom and the scrubby vegetation holds no sustenance or comfort. But Ireland seduces. It promises soft rain and succulent grasses, hot whisky and peat fires, a woolen blanket of heartstring-thrummed music. It catches your eye and then glances away, brushes against you then shows you its shoulder, caresses and then draws back with a sharp slap.

We arrived in Dublin on a Sunday morning, brilliant and crisp, church bells pealing, giddy with lack of sleep. P had told me we would fly over land almost the entire way, right up the Eastern Seaboard and across Canada to Greenland, up and over, hardly any water at all, but that was a lie. We flew up the Eastern Seaboard and Canada until we ran out of Canada and then we shot straight across the Atlantic. I have a phobia of heights and depths and the shock of having done that left me feeling completely reckless and outside of myself. I didn't even think about punching the cab driver at the airport when he called me "sweetheart".

I was left to my own devices in Dublin as P was attending a conference, the whole reason for our trip. The furthest I walked on any one day was from Christ Church Cathedral all the way back to our hotel near Upper Leeson with stops at Dublin Castle and St. Stephen's Green on the way. I sat in the Long Room in the Old Library at Trinity College for an hour with its soft light through the vellum-covered windows, perfume of old books and comfortable rustling of faded ghosts while French tourists whispered to one another over my shoulder and tried not to get in the way of my photos. Nice happened three days later.

I wandered across the stunning tilework at Christ Church Cathedral, gawping at the beauty of it all, and snorted down the ancient stone smell of the crypt like a line of coke, trying to draw every last particle of it into my body to keep it a part of me forever.

I wandered the grounds and gardens at Dublin Castle, home of Tana French's fictional Dublin Murder Squad. I inhaled my way through St. Stephen's Green, startling tiny ruffled birds in the undergrowth. I stomped my Keens up and down Grafton Street until tourists started asking me for directions.

I spent an entire day in bed in our hotel sure that I was dying, lifting the "Do Not Disturb" sign just long enough to accept cups of rooibos tea and bowls of beef and Guinness stew from room service.

I ate rashers of that odd hammy bacon that only exists outside the US, I ate black and white pudding and the most delicious little crisp-skinned  pork sausages, I ate salmon and hake and smoked mackerel at Farm and Hatch and Sons and The Sussex. I ate the most gorgeous flourless cakes with clouds of whipped cream. I forgave Ireland everything all over again -- the spitting rain and wind and sentient, malevolent gloom -- every single time I put a fork in my mouth.

And just like that, P's conference was over and we were on a train to Limerick.

We stayed in the Medieval Quarter on King's Island, within walking distance of St. Mary's Cathedral and King John's Castle and the Milk Market. All of which were absolutely spectacular.

And then one day we piled into a van with another American named Arthur, a lovely English lady named Carol and four nameless-to-us Italians while an Irishman named Frank drove us around County Clare, through The Burren, up to Black Head and around to the Cliffs of Moher and it was quite possibly the best day of my life.

I can't explain quite what it was about County Clare that burrowed deep inside me and has stayed there ever since. A good many of my ancestors came from Ireland and I have no idea whether any of them ever even set foot in County Clare, but walking through The Burren and wandering Caherconnell and Poulnabrone, driving through Ballyvaughan and Lisdoonvarna, seeing those karst domes razed down to bumps in the last ice age and the erratics left scattered around Galway Bay by the glaciers -- something about that felt familiar. Not in a past life sort of way or anything woo-woo like that. It felt like something I didn't even know was missing had been returned. It mended something in me that I hadn't realized was broken. I don't have any other words to describe it.

I don't sleep when I travel. It doesn't matter whether I'm in the same time zone as home or six time zones away. In Dublin the view out our hotel window looked like this:

And so in Dublin I spent long hours staring toward the ceiling in the pitch dark, listening to Hindu devotional music through my earbuds, conjugating German verbs and otherwise trying not to wake P before his long days of conferencing.

In Limerick, though, we were right on the River Abbey.

And so every morning when I inevitably woke before sunrise, I'd carefully insert myself between the curtains and the glass and just sit in the window for the hour or so before P woke up, watching the eastern sky for signs of light and the water for signs of life. And then the final morning we were there, just a few hours before we hopped a cab for Shannon Airport and home, this:

Two swans somehow made their way up the Shannon to the Abbey to just below my window in the paper-thin morning. And as corny as it sounds, it felt like Something. Like a gift. Like a promise.

Oh, and if you're looking for the craic? It's at the Locke. You're welcome.