Winter winds

Every year, it's the same thing. November and December in the northern hemisphere feel so cold and dark. The pressure is on to celebrate the holidays with all of the festiveness we can muster. Everyone complains, but we all need it. Otherwise we'd spend the days with the covers pulled over our heads, hiding beneath wool and turtlenecks and down. Even if the weather isn't so bad, the expectation of a white Christmas makes this time feel like the winds are whipping around outside and the warm hearth calls to us. As a cruel joke nature plays, the shortest day of the year comes not in the middle of winter but at the beginning. The days begin to get lighter as the new year rings in, but there is still more cold and snow to come, for many months in some places. We're ready to get moving, start planning spring break, emerge from the blanketed beds and throw open the windows, and instead blows in a struggle to overcome expectations of spring when winter is in full force.

Whoever planned the holidays at this time knew what they were doing. They knew that without the cozy festiveness, dread of winter would drive us further into hiding, and without the promise of new things to come after an arbitrarily set day to mark a new year, we would all succumb to the reality of winter. As the days get lighter, we transition from stews to salads with the hope that when the wools and downs are finally shaken off, a newer person will be revealed. What is this experience like for those in the southern hemisphere, where summer abounds right now, and where their winter will be met not with festivities and yearly milestones but just a stretch of months in the middle of the year? How do they get through their cold, dark months without something to look forward to? We are lucky here, where the clouds roll in and the gales whip the snow and rain. We have much to anticipate as time marches on toward the long warm and sunny days.

Now it's real

I have a real home now. With the assembly and set-up of the desk and chair in the spare bedroom, I have a home office for the first time in my adult life. All of the indoor furniture has been purchased and moved in. Some pictures have been hung on the walls, with more to come. Curtains with tie-backs grace the windows. I live in a house, and it is home.

Last summer, I started a new journal, after filling the previous one with all kinds of thoughts. It helped me process a lot of things that happened in my life, those three short years in DC. Every time I start a new journal, I make a list on the first page with hopes for the coming years. This new journal included a promise to find a place, make it home, and stay there for a while. I need to break the pattern of setting up shop and immediately looking for a new adventure somewhere else. Why do I start running again as soon as I arrive wherever I was heading? It's time to stop doing that. Resist the urge to seek out greener pastures elsewhere, and instead make my home pasture as green as can be.

Fox in the garden

Last night, dear kitty wanted desperately to look out the bedroom window. The blinds were closed, but there was something out there she just had to see. So I turned out the lights, pulled the blinds up just a bit, and together we peered into the darkness. With her night vision, dear kitty saw them before I did, her eyes reflecting in the window: foxes roaming the yards in the cul de sac beneath the glowing streetlights, the moon not yet risen. It looked like four foxes, though there could have been just two, one with a white-tipped puffy tail, the other with a long snout and curled tail, more dog-like than fox. They sniffed under the junipers, poked through the wood pile, and investigated the low rock wall in my yard. Finding no tasty morsels there, they wandered off, noses to the ground, avoiding being illuminated by the headlights of an approaching car. Soon after they left, dear kitty lost interest and curled up on the bed.

How did dear kitty know they were there? Could she smell them through the plaster and wood of the sturdy house? Did she hear them silently sniffing for food, their small paws crunching on the pine needles and dried leaves? And why did their presence matter to her, a small house cat who goes outside only when supervised, and only during the day? Perhaps her wildness is not yet bred out completely. Perhaps her homeless days still hold a place somewhere in her tiny mind. Or perhaps she just wants to know about the world outside her home, even if she never ventures far from it.

Why we do it

Whether or not it becomes your career, you don't decide to be a writer. It chooses you. Drawn to words from a young age, you seek out any opportunity to read what someone else has written - on cereal boxes, in any magazine or brochure or book that lands in front of you, even the closed captioning on a television program. When you see a word, you can own it. Parse out the sounds each letter makes, roll it off your brain and then your tongue to make it real. Put it together with other words. Try different combinations to see what gets the feeling and the meaning across. Compose a symphony, each word a musical note, each sentence a different instrument. When you wake up or go around a corner and words or phrases repeat themselves over and again in your mind, you know you are a writer, even if you do nothing with those words except let them float around in the ether.
---
I don't remember learning how to read. I was just always able to put letters together, sound out the words, get a sense of their meanings. Everyone has a thing, something that they just know. Words, I just know. But what can you do with words? You can inform people. You can move them. You can haunt them. The best writers do this so well, and the rest of us just fumble in the dark for a way to tell others what we know. Despite this language that consumes us, we will never be like those whose words are held up high for all to read. It's this art that grips us 'til the end but which we can never seem to elevate beyond scribblings in journals and now musings in whatever public spaces we can manage. There's too much out there that's of too little value, but some of the really good, meaty non-fiction can be found here. With any luck, it could be any of us there someday, although given what some of those writers have been through or who they met to get the story, perhaps it's better them than us sometimes.

Call from the wild

On Saturday afternoon, New Year's Eve, we heard a rap-tap-tapping on the house. It was loud, right outside the window, too many in a row and too random a rhythm to be made by a human. A peek out through the window revealed nothing immediately, but the image reflecting off the windshield of the car in the driveway below showed two birds clinging to the red clapboard of the house, just below the roof. I quietly snuck down through the open garage and peered up at the house. One bird flew away immediately, and the other, a Northern flicker, paused and peered at me for a moment, caught in the act of delivering a message, before it too flew away. This was no accident. My house cannot be mistaken for a tree. There is no rotting wood hiding grubs for hungry woodpeckers. The birds wanted us to know that change was coming. That the days ahead would be different. That we should keep our eyes to the sky.

Time to get back on the wagon

Last year, 2011, was the year of not caring. The year of saying yes, of doing things I shouldn't have done or shouldn't have been able to get away with. Given the musical themes often present, last year felt like my joyous high school days, when life was easier but we thought it was hard, because we don't know any better when we are 17. Last year, and the late parts of the year before, were filled with what-the-heck fashion choices, like getting that third ear piercing and wearing aqua-colored fishnet tights with my black dress on New Year's Eve and a short school-girl skirt to dance away the night to music from the '90s sometime in April. Last year was I'm Going to Do Whatever I Want year - birthday at the aquarium, lots of concerts (like The Beach Boys at Wolftrap), a last-minute trip to Dallas to celebrate a milestone year with a best friend, kayaking and eating crabs in Annapolis, a solo camping trip with wild ponies on the Eastern Shore, way too many happy hours, a shirking of duties, birding in the park, and finally, the big move out West.

See, I needed last year to blow off adulthood. 2009 and 2010 were so full of caring about everything: the beginning, middle, and end of an intense relationship, a yearning to go somewhere, anywhere, just not where I was; an overwhelming sense of being utterly lost. By the time 2010 wound down, I was ready for something completely different. I was ready to just not care anymore. I said too much, sometimes inappropriately, and I let it all hang out, metaphorically. The heavy cloak fell from my shoulders, and I floated through 2011 with that whatever attitude that gets one into trouble - mostly the good kind though. I carried that with me to Idaho, where I figured that if no one knew me here, I could be whatever I wanted, and that's just how they would know me. I rode a mechanical bull on Halloween, for pete's sake. I chopped some wood and told people my secrets. I bought some real furniture.

The year ended on a different note, signaling that it's time to pull myself together, to get a little more serious again. I found myself really caring again, for someone special who lives in the mountains but isn't from the mountains. As the new year has rolled in and the lovely but fleeting relationship has slipped away, it seems like time to focus again. There's still room for fun - so many of the friends I've made here already have stepped in to distract me when I really need it, and I can't just stop having fun after getting so much better at it - but I have to put more thought into my life again. I have to decide where this is heading and start wandering that direction. The past few years were desperately spent getting to this point. This is no time to waste all that effort or squander the opportunity that is now presenting itself. Adulthood shouldn't mean boring, but it definitely can't be spent trying to escape by going back to our formative years. Age 29 was intense; 30 was rough, and 31 was just plain fun. May 32 be good. Not good as in good-but-not-great, but good as in satisfactory. Agreeable. Fit. And yes, virtuous.

Winter in Idaho

Last year, I wrote about the vanilla sky and egg yolk sun of a winter in the Mid-Atlantic, a place so lush and green nearly year-round that the stark paleness of the winter light seems incongruous. But here in southwest Idaho, a place that is mostly pale during all except the wetness of spring, the light is bright and clear, the sky cerulean blue, the sunrises and sunsets juicy with strawberries, peaches and tangerines as the sun traverses across the sky from one mountain range to another. We are on the western edge of the Mountain time zone, and thus, the sun takes its time rising. It is still dark at 7am, with still just a hint of light in the distance at 7:30am. But once it is here, it is warm, even when the air is cold. And even during the shortest days of the year, the sun is still wandering slowly down the slopes at 5:30pm, heading toward the Pacific Ocean and the lands beyond this country to start a day anew half a world away.

Shoes. SHOES! Shooooooooooes....

This is not a deep post about the complexities of life, nor is it symbolic of anything. This is a joyous celebration of a lifestyle in which I get to wear shoes. This might be the very first time in my life in which I can wear the fabulous but sometimes impractical shoes that my heart aches for when I walk through the department stores or along the rows and rows of displays at DSW. I have always loved shoes, mostly because my father works in the shoe business and my mother always loved shoes too. Foot fashion is a family affair. Oh, how I long to don a pair of high high heels or a tall boot to click-clack on tile floors and cement sidewalks for a night on the town; to wrap the ribbons of an espadrille wedge around my ankles or slide on a pair of mules for a summer excursion.

Alas, I was blessed with both an adoration of foot attire and the wrong-shaped foot for most of it. My size 6, narrow-heel/wide-toe, high-instep feet have proven prohibitive in this area. As a kid, I mostly wore fashion athletic shoes but had a few pairs of something fancier lurking in the closet. In college and grad school, I mostly wore what was comfortable because trudging around campus all day in uncomfortable shoes is a bad idea and mostly unnecessary. Why dress up for class when you're just going to head to the gym or computer lab afterward? While living in Chicago and DC, where fashionable feet are everywhere and there are plenty of excuses to strut your stuff, commuting is mostly done by walking, biking, and riding the train and bus, where you will likely have to stand a large portion of the time. Some people wear comfort shoes to commute, then change into their cute shoes upon arrival at their destination. I worked in offices where no one cared and I would have been out of place in pumps, so I opted for comfortable shoes that looked decent enough in the business-casual environs. Oddly enough, Casual Fridays were the only times that the cute shoes came out, because can be worn with jeans, and because as Stacy and Clinton say, just because it's casual doesn't mean you have to look like a slob.

In my new job, in this new state, every day is Casual Friday. I could get away with wearing jeans and a t-shirt and hiking boots all the time. But why? I drive to and from work, I sit at a desk all day, I don't have to run up and down a lot of stairs, and some of the young women in my office do dress more nicely. This is the ideal environment for all of those shoes that lay largely unused in my closet, plus some others that call to me from the store shelves. So, out come the teal suede Mary Jane heels with the  cut-outs on the toes. Out come the black patent booties with the square toes and the tan suede booties with the buckle that rattles. In the past two months here, I have also acquired some brown boots with a chunky heel and grey suede wedges. These tootsies will have to relearn how to walk in heels, because it's time to get stylin' again. Of course, there will be some stylish flats to add to the collection as well, since matching the boring black slacks is no longer a concern.

Shoes may be a small, trivial thing in the grand scheme of life, but we all need our vices. How can we bring joy to others if we don't feel joy ourselves? And, after all, I'm stimulating the economy.

These are the things we tell ourselves to justify our selfishness. Please forgive me, and then compliment my shoes.

Another notch on the proverbial post

Yesterday, I went to the home improvement store and bought a log splitter. Today, I split all of the shorter logs in the pile underneath my porch. It came a month after I replaced my car's side view mirror on my own. Both tasks make me feel like beating my chest and grunting like Tim 'The Toolman' Taylor. Maybe it's more like when Tom Hanks rejoiced in Castaway after starting a fire on his own. I can do this myself, without anyone's help! Well, Google showed me how to replace the mirror, but I did it for real.

I don't recall ever having swung an ax before, but it looked difficult. The heavy iron head tapers to a sharp edge, balanced on a long, thin handle, which makes it hard to lift and too easy to bring down quickly. One false move and a foot or ankle is sliced to the bone. So I begin with caution. Find a crack in the phloem, the brittle bark, that goes all the way down to the xylem, the meaty wood. Lay the log on a flat surface, the crack exposed to all the world. Grasp the handle firmly. Line the blade up with the crack, lift it up over the shoulder, bring it down halfway, deliberately, then let gravity and momentum take over. Feel the wood resist the blade with a smack, or, if you actually hit the crack as planned, a satisfying creak as it splinters. Place a foot on the log for leverage to pry the blade from the cut. A couple (or many) more just like that and the log halves fall satisfyingly away from each other, exposing the fresh wood inside.

Most of the logs didn't take that long. My aim was decent, my strength enough to deliver sufficient power to the swing. Without a large enough crack, though, the wood would splinter but mostly remain intact. I like the physicality of the task, the breaking of something to use later, and the knowledge that I can do this myself. But I'm generally not good at exploiting cracks or weaknesses. I'd rather throw the log on the fire whole and let it burn down on its own, or else find something more powerful to cut it apart quickly, no whittling away needed. I might be better off with a wedge and a mallet - easier to wield, and less dangerous - but the stove is small and all I have is a log splitter, so I swing the ax with care and keep at it until the work is done.

There are more logs in a different pile, some without visible cracks and some too narrow to split and too long for the stove. For those, I will need a chainsaw...

The November of my youth

In case it's not totally obvious from the previous post, today isn't exactly the cheeriest of days. Not depressing or anything, just grey. Boise has been grey for what seems like forever but is probably only a few days here and there. This must be what they call the inversion, when thin clouds settle over the valley and just hang out. Forever. Blue sky is visible in the distance, over the tops of the foothills somewhere, but the clouds hold it back just out of reach. Just enough to reassure us that the world hasn't ended and the entire planet isn't smothered. November in Chicago is cold and grey. It rains. It's windy. But at least it's doing something. Here, the temperature isn't too cold, and it's not particularly windy or rainy. Just grey. Sometimes the clouds thin out and the wan sunlight filters through, like looking at a lightbulb from beneath a bedsheet. It seems like everyone here skis, and now I know why. The ski resorts reside just above the cloud line, right where that unattainable blue sky hangs out. Up there, it's bright and sunny and the snow sparkles festively. Grey sky alone is one thing, but the looming mountains really make the valley feel closed-in, capped, sealed. As if we could climb up and poke a hole in the clouds and a whoosh of fresh air would come rushing in. Or better yet, sweep away the clouds with a broom like we do with the cobwebs in rooms that have gone stale.

Giving Thanks

A few days past the official Thanksgiving holiday, I am especially appreciative of what I am fortunate enough to have. Last night on 60 Minutes, the first story was about families in Florida who are now living out of their cars because they lost their homes when the jobs left and the economy crashed. There have been many stories like this in the media lately; for example, Diane Sawyer hosted a one-hour special last month on an American Indian tribe in North Dakota that is among the poorest communities in the country.  Poverty exists all over the world and is much more rampant in many places outside of the United States. It's one of the core reasons for violence in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and in other war-torn areas. From our comfy couches, it's easier to ignore them. Send some money to an international aid organization and hope it doesn't get accidentally used to pay off corrupt politicians or fund projects that are doomed from the start. Sponsor a child, Sally Struthers-style. Some people take up the cause and fly across the world to try to help people whose circumstances are mostly beyond the control of those who live outside that nation and have no political power. Sometimes it works - some microloans and education and infrastructure initiatives, for example - but without support of the government, it's much more difficult to raise a country as a whole out of poverty. So we throw up our hands and turn the heat up in our cozy homes.

But the United States is now on a slippery slope. Our people can't find work, which leads to tighter budgeting, which leads to feeding their families two meals a day instead of three, because they can't afford more food. Food pantries are struggling right now to provide enough food for the growing number of people who rely on them to put food on the table. This isn't just a problem of eating fast food because it's cheaper than fresh food. It's a problem of no food at all. One family in the 60 Minutes piece said that after cutting back from three meals to two meals a day, they still had no extra money, and they ended up living in their car until a woman who runs a local program helped get the family a hotel room to live in. But a family of five can't live in a hotel room forever. It's a temporary fix.

This is sad. We as a country are no longer taking care of our own. Our government is fighting about stupid stupid things, mostly about how to split the money. Raising taxes may or may not help. Cutting spending may or may not help. This problem isn't about just throwing money at people and hoping it doesn't get wasted. Government doesn't exist simply for its own good and it isn't about making rules for rules sake. It's about providing what our society needs to function and thrive. Private business is about providing goods and services for members of our society. During a time of increased need, not just from those in communities where poverty is perpetuated, but also in once-comfortable communities that looked just like ours, why are we fighting over words and ideas? Why are we not doing something, even if it's small, to help even one family move out of their car and into a real home? This isn't a bleeding-heart liberal thing. It's a human thing. Our country might be in debt for years to come, but our neighbors are faltering right now. It could happen to any of us. One medical emergency or a lost job, and we could be next.

On this day, I am especially thankful for all that I am fortunate enough to have. My furnace broke on Thanksgiving, and I had to rely on a space heater and a wood stove for warmth, although I was lucky enough to be able to stay with a friend for the weekend. What it must be like to have nothing but a wood stove for warmth all the time, or to have no one else to stay with in an emergency, or to have no home at all, I just can't imagine. My heart goes out to all of those people who need so much more. I wish that I could give it.

Adjusting

I knew it would be different here. That was the point. I needed a reset. I needed to start over in a place where no one knows me, where they have no preconceived notions of who I am or where I came from, so I can be whatever I want. I needed a different view, to see things from another angle. But like my cat, I discovered that I long for freedom but am afraid of what's actually out there.

Life in the city is easy. Go to the same few bars and restaurants, shop in the few stores that have what you want, listen to your iPod as you go about your merry way. Keep up the same routines: go to the gym after work or during lunch. Run errands on the weekends. Meet up with friends in between. Meet new people. Cook dinner with the usual ingredients. Listen to the same radio shows, watch the same tv shows, read the same newspapers and magazines. These things are easily transferrable among lives.

It's life outside the city that's scary. Get up into the mountains, among the tall pines and gushing streams, and it's a different world. So quiet. No people around, no airplanes overhead, no birds chirping or leaves rustling. My attempts at hiking have been cut short as I was consumed with a fear of being eaten by a wolf. Or worse yet, partially eaten, with no cell service and no passers-by to help. Leisurely drives along roads in higher elevations feel like death traps, an icy patch or a sneeze all that's necessary to take one wrong turn off the road and plummet into the valley below. Venturing into the wild here is an exercise in stuffing fear into a compartment deep in the belly and trying to enjoy the incredible scenery instead. Coming from a land where people worry more about getting a flat tire on the highway than breaking an ankle while traversing a high mountain trail, this place feels utterly dangerous at times. Is this how other people feel when they move to the West after living in Mamby-Pamby Town for so long? Or are these fears totally unfounded, revealing themselves in this form but being rooted in some deeper, unconscious fear? This is the first time I've done something so different in my life, and being scared is an important part of the process. Maybe it's just that: it's new, and new is scary. Exciting too, but until you learn its secrets and crack its code, new means stumbling in the dark, the world only illuminated as far as your little flashlight beam can reach. Once you know what's just beyond the beam of light, you don't have to guess what's out there, and that's a more comforting place to be. Having someone to hold your hand helps too.

Urban Wildlife, Boise Style

One of the first few days I was here for good, I looked out my window and saw a doe and two young deer standing in my yard. It was opening day for deer hunting, and I wanted to shout at them, "RUN!!!" But no one here in the foothills would shoot at a deer among the houses, especially not with two young. Right? There have been numerous skunks as roadkill, and I've heard rumors of foxes or coyotes running off with the neighborhood cats at night. My sweet kitty doesn't get to go outside at night at all. Not that I have a reason to be worried - she snuck out the open door one evening and came running back a few minutes later. Yearning for freedom, afraid of what's actually out there.

There are also the usual suspects - red and gray squirrels, Canada geese, various song birds, a few small raptors in the open areas. They remind me that I have to get to know a whole new selection of birds out here, because many species don't live out east. My favorite are the California quail that hang out in packs among the bushes, shrubs, and dense clusters of conifers out here. They sound like guinea pigs, squeaking and grunting in the foliage. It's pretty rare to see them - they go running from any disturbance. This evening, I looked out my bedroom window to see maybe 30 quail picking through the fallen willow leaves and pine needles in my backyard, followed by a nosy squirrel whom they didn't seem to notice. Quail are so funny, with their colorful patches of feathers and their one curled feather on their forehead that quivers as they bob for seeds and berries and bugs. Even the females have a little tuft of feather on their heads. It's so regal.

Identity

"Stay in the North End," they said. "The North End is where everything is that you'll need. There's no reason to leave the North End." I've been fighting against this mindset that other educated, progressive Boiseans (Boiseites?) have regarding the old-home, kid-safe, coffee-shop-and-food-co-op neighborhood where apparently most of the liberals in Boise live. I grew up in a pretty diverse area in Chicago. My parents are working-middle class folks, and I always liked to think of myself as part of the proletariat in a way. I'm an educated professional, intellectually curious and well-rounded, but I never assumed badly of someone who works in retail or industry or who doesn't have a college degree. I worked in retail for many years with people who didn't go to college, and they mostly didn't seem like people I needed to avoid. Then again, I have always spent the majority of my time (outside of retail work) with people like me, by default, because after college, I have worked in all white-collar jobs. I never really noticed the difference between those who take a more nuanced approach to life and those who don't give much thought to intellectual pursuit until I moved to Washington, DC, a city rife with people ready to pick apart the world.

Anyway, this Boise Liberal attitude really left a bit of a distaste in my mouth. All of the other Boiseans I have run across have seemed really quite nice and normal, and we liberals can be a tad elitist at times.

Then I dived into the dating scene here, via a free online dating site. And now I understand why my cohorts here in Boise stick to the North End. There is a wider gulf here between those who are liberal and highly educated (often beyond a bachelor's degree) and those who are something else. Still lovely people all, but in a liberal-ish small city like Boise in a staunchly conservative state like Idaho, you just stick with what you know. Because it's easier than explaining yourself to those who don't get it, no matter what your political persuasion, level of education, religion, or job. It's live-and-let-live out here, and everyone stays on their side of the line.