Sunday (five-day) update

The book reading and signing went fine. I worked myself up into a tizzy, and prepped in all kinds of ways, but Josh, the talented interlocutor, was lovely and very conversational and I was able to be myself and tell stories. I might even let family come to the next one! We sold a bunch of books and I signed all the remaining copies at the store (apparently signed copies sell better). Also, Nicole tipped me off that the old discount code didn't work for her. The publisher has given me a new one, it is FORM20.

I took the next day off. Like really off. If I owed anyone a text or a phone call or an email it just wasn't happening.

I've been spending all my time on summer reading... Finished the new Elizabeth Strout, then finished the new Ann Patchett. Both were lovely. I'd love to read The Things We Never Say with one of my bookclubs where so many are teachers. I'm currently almost through Maggie O'Farrell's Land. I get the charm the comfortable familiarity of stories like those of Strout and Patchett exercise. But give me the excitement of something like Land any day. I'm loving the anti-colonial intrigue, the imaginative recreation of bog people, the random snippet that pirates wore gold earrings so they could be used to pay for their funerals...

I spent a lot of time at the garden center. Also a lot of cash. But it's ok--I shop exclusively in my closet, and have no expensive habits or memberships--I can indulge myself. It was mostly flowers, but if the veggies take off, we/the deer will be grateful. 

I had a long and lovely dream about my Amma, sis, and me. We were visiting a fabulous desert palace. (we were supposed to go to Turkey together this year.) We were sitting on a bench holding hands and I was playing a new-to-me song (Niall Horan “Heaven” I bet the title is not a coincidence) because it has some surprising melodic changes in the chorus I thought my mom would like (she did). Then I offered to get my sister ice cream, and my mom said the most her thing possible! "What, Kanna? You’re going to eat ice cream without me?" That's when I woke up.

Pic: I found this hasty scribble from my mom I'd saved. It had been on something she'd sent me via someone who was visiting. A box of sweets, I think. I took it as a good sign for the week. 

this dystopia

I dreamed that I had a cache of  diamond nose-pins I needed to sneak past customs for the revolution and also that I had come by all those diamonds illicitly.

So I took a second look. 

I'm watching The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale sequel) on TV, reading Julia (based on 1984), and just finished The Secret Agent (not the Conrad novel--it's last year's intentionally disjointed film about incidents under Brazilian dictatorship in the 70s)... 

Aaaaand I live in the right now, so it's not surprising, I guess, that my dreams would take a dark turn.
_________
Pic: Max and Huck explore their new "boarding school." 

the afterlife of silence

you imagined yourself a mother

as you leaned into the future

then you wake up dreaming

and walking toward yourself

at dusk, stars start like beacons

to show us a new underworld

at emergent touch, birds rise 

in the dawn like smoke signals 

one sadness sparks another 

as devotion returns slowly 

in careful curls like a seared

page... tell me I won't forget

how I know something now

 & hold it secret in my belly 

________

Pic: Summer anemones. Radiology Gardens with L.

our ways

you  have a right  to know everything

I promise you--in  this  dream where 

no one has died yet--one more precise 

than light, picture, or any kind of fire

it's the one where we are wading into

the grasses in the deeps of the prairie

following only the swell of the song

tracing failing light and falling night

which is the same night as last week's--

a future passes from one week to the next

and we meet up now and then, the living

and the lost... before we carry on and away

____________________

Pic: We've had a few trees come down last week... I don't even recall any big storms or high winds, but I may have been in my own head and not paying attention. I snapped right back to attention when I heard estimates on how EXPENSIVE it is to have trees removed. At the end of the first day, there was this Stonehenge-y installation Max was delighted to pee on. 

medium to intense

DV had given me a gift certificate to Moriah the Medium in September... I felt ready to use it today.  

I set up for our Zoom appointment in the same place where mom and I had taken our last photos together and showed up alone, because I didn't want anyone else's overly rational energy around. I'm not sure I could completely turn off my own rational mind either. As it was, I wondered if I was being told what I wanted to hear--that she was at peace, is always proud of me, and always loves me. 

But then, she said also that my mom is worried that I haven't been as social as I used to be and why haven't I been doing the things I love--like walking by the water by myself and writing. That took me by surprise, because those last two things seemed fairly specific to me, and also true.

I took myself off on a long walk as soon as we got off the call. I was told swans would be a sign from my mother. Mom frequently mistook geese for swans, and we now have geese year-round, so I guess I'm in luck. She said nothing about Scout whose third anniversary was yesterday.

Pic: Redbuds in bloom by The Red Cedar; the floods have receded.

like a ghost in my throat

once again I tell my mom to hurry
synonyms swarm in my belly 
rushing, quickly, soon

                             hug me, hug me

other hours restlessly lie waiting 

an urgent clock is ticking

and marking history

                             hug me, hug me 

in sleep, an endless future patiently

cradles every chance not absence

I'll have to wake soon, mom

                             hug me, hug me now

_______________

Note: One of those dreams where I was telling my mom to hug me quickly... the urgency made no sense. Except on some level, I was aware I was dreaming.

Pic: Red Cedar from the Hagadorn Bridge with Big A after a long walk downtown for his Boss Day dinner. (Reminder: In a college town, the weekend starts on Thursday evening.)

an echo without a wall

here, speak  to  Amma

my sister offers, holding 

out  the hair dryer to me

I gently receive the device

lift aside the strands of hair

caught in its grill, delicately

I set the roaring  machine

to my ear  where it  begins 

to angrily melt my earrings

at first I can't hear my mother

--speak a little louder--I beg

even as I feel bad for asking

as  she  sounds so, so  tired 

and  now she's  complaining

about how she forgot to bring 

any money with her

dream politics

There's schadenfreude to those two horrible people having a snitty shouting match in public. But the horrors and the cruelty don't stop with them so I must keep on protesting. 

The story of the young man who died because his maintenance inhaler became too expensive is nightmarish. The wholesale, wide-ranging cruelty of the people in power gives me elaborate revenge fantasies where they experience everything they're causing for other people. The "Big, Beautiful Bill" has got to go. The people they've removed from their families have got to be returned. Federal agencies have to be restaffed, re-standardized, re-funded... it may take years to reverse the uncaring viciousness of the last six months. Not that where we were six months ago was ideal.

In my dreams there are pickets and marches and wars every day. Yesterday, I was bossily moving someone closer to a TV camera so their poster would get more attention. The closest I came to that in real life yesterday was when I moved a planter closer to a spot of sun.

Pic: Black squirrel nibbling. Despite having lived in Michigan for well over a decade, black squirrels still delight me. This one's delighting in a tidbit they found in the grass. 

nice/surprise

 It's April 1st tomorrow and who knows what the day will bring--here are a few things that took me by surprise on this last day of March.

I woke up from a dream in which I marveled how in a crowd of strangers we unhesitatingly call ourselves "we." It's true, isn't it? There's something beautiful and magic about that.

I was on a walk and 30 mins from home when a neighbor called to say she'd found Max wandering around her yard and had put him in her screen porch. Obviously, I panicked and called Nu to go over and get Max. Nu went downstairs and then called to tell me Max and Huck were downstairs cuddling on the sofa. Ha. The other puppy was reunited with their family soon after.

For the first time ever, a book I put on hold at the library (Claire Lombardo's The Most Fun We've Ever Had) came in before I caved and got it myself.

Yesterday, while sheltering from the tornado, I realized that Nu and Big A had ordered an arcade Ms. Pac-Man game for the basement. I thought we were in our frugal era! I'm mad. Also that thing is going to be 5-ft tall when it's put together.

Pic: I commented to Suzanne that I planned to make sushi cups from an insta reel I'd seen. I did! I did not expect them to be as as easy as they looked or come out so well (esp. as I ad lib a fair amount). They look a bit color deficient to me as I want all five colors at every meal, but a blueberry-mango-raspberry compote completed the gap at dinner. 

Bending Meaning: Haiku, P.F.Chang, and "Peelings"

I'll never get used to hearing Big A talking on the phone to his colleagues and casually asking them to send him a haiku. Haiku is merely the hospital's internal secure messaging system, but it nevertheless sounds so charming. Although at other times I'm a bit stern and feel like if they're going to appropriate poetic terminology, they better be structuring their medical notes 5/7/5, you know?

*

Last year, Big A had a recurrent dream where Scout was accompanying him to a bunch of classes at Kalamazoo, his old undergraduate campus. In one dream, it was a poetry class where the instructor had displayed some of their published works on the desk at the front of the class. A can't remember the titles, but the poet's name was P.F. Chang--like the Asian restaurant chain. I wonder if Big A was thinking of Victoria Chang but was also a bit hungry?

*

I've been hearing this catchy Telugu film song on a number of reels and wanted to download it for my playlist. The song is about how the heroine is plagued by carnal feelings for the hero--"vochundai feelings-su" (I get these feelings). So I searched "Feelings" on I-Tunes, and nope, nothing. Turns out it's spelled "Peelings"--all the better to express the way it might be pronounced with emphasis in Telugu, I guess? Not really a word with a sultry vibe for me, however--it makes me think of dinner prep... or a skin condition.

Pic: The Red Cedar right behind L's house. From another walk this week. 

connections

I hear my mother calling

--calling on the phone

(not from the porch)

then she asks for my name
her voice a green flame
of sudden language 

my eyes round as our earth 

I tell her my name 

play her game 

memory, fantasy, truth...

have all gone missing

but aren't missed

_____________________________

Pic: A turtle and some hatchlings sunning themselves on a rock in the Red Cedar. Another long walk by myself

it's going down at the (book) club

Pic: Today my bookclub people were so delighted with the verdict finding Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts--JS brought a grocery store cake whose icing read "34 Convictions" and CD had a bottle of wine whose label had been altered to say "34 Crimes."

(We were discussing The Bee Sting--I could have talked about it for another 24 hours. Our next book is Percival Everett's James--the Huck Finn re-vision.)

Bonus: My WTF dream in which I was upset because in addition to my real life kids, I had twins who were killed in a bus accident. I didn't seem to be grieving them, I was upset because (a) I hadn't put their names on the Father's Day T-shirt I had made for A (IRL, I've put Scout's name on it, of course) and (b) I couldn't remember the name of the second twin. In the dream, I went round and round wondering if it was "Collin" or "Mike" or "Asa--" all real life twins I know. I was so relieved to wake up and remember I never did have twins.

Leap day: local, lowkey leisure

I woke up from a dream in which the kids and I were traveling with bestie KB... but then I got separated from them while lining up for an airport shuttle. I couldn't see them anymore, but I remember shouting over the crowd, "K, do you have my kids?" And she shouted back "yeah!" And then I felt calmer in the dream and as I woke up. I felt even calmer after I texted KB and asked her to check in on my kids if anything should happen to me. And she promised she would but added in characteristic KB fashion: "And FFS, Maya, please don’t die!!!" I'm not planning to!

I did a ton of work all morning from the moment Nu left for school. In the afternoon, I felt like a lady of leisure from a long time ago, or perhaps a lady of leisure in my future retirement. 

It was cold but sunshiny today, so I walked over to our local public radio station to help pack reading-literacy kits. It was repetitive assembly-line work and nicely freed up my head from extraneous thoughts--because you had to stay focused to get it right.

Then I walked home again with a nice long detour to finish the album I was listening to. 

I stopped by L's for a chat and to pick up the lemons I had asked to borrow from her... and then headed home for dinner with the fam.  

Sounds boring, but it was kind of blissful. 

Pic: Reading kit assembly station.

dreams and hopes

Another day of sunshine! 

At breakfast, I asked Nu what they were going to do for Dr. Martin Luther King Day. They didn't even hesitate: "I'm going to eat my breakfast, then I'm going back to sleep, and I'll probably have a dream."

It was so irreverent, but it came so pat, I had to laugh. When the kids were younger, I'd take them out to some service project or other on MLK Day--but I'm happy for them to make their own choices now. 

Of all people, my mom--universally known by every person who knows her as overprotective--was reminding me the other day that Nu might soon be at college, so I was going to have to let them make their own way. (Where was all this permissiveness when I was growing up?! She's absolutely right though.)

Pic: Max and Huck mistrust the robot vacuum. "Rambo" comes out so rarely. My back still hurts, so I've been outsourcing work (and reducing my standards).
 

hiding in plain sight

At the lovely dinner party this evening, no one spoke of Gaza although I know that every single person at the table is agonizing about it, whether because we've been talking about it (Big A, Nu, LB, and TB) or because I know from their socials how upset they are (AH, KG, LV). It's like we have a disease and everyone knows about it, but we have to bravely carry on without discussing it at the dinner table. I played along beautifully.

I was all full of effing holiday cheer in my Rudoph the reindeer overalls with the jingly red nose. And every time someone remarked on it, I was hard pressed not to sing this song. 

Because that would also be inappropriate for this group--some of whom I know from work. Something very much on my mind, because after years at this point, last night I dreamt about the person I brought a Title IX case against. No current students remember him probably--he was asked to leave on the cusp of the pandemic--but in my dream an alumnus visiting the department was curious as to why there was no picture of the abuser in the faculty "gallery." I let it go on for a while, and when the alumnus asked again, I burst out: "Because he was a serial abuser. We don't have his picture up because he abused people." 

And then my dream veered off into a seaplane ride and since the only time I've been on one was near Seattle, that's how it looked. And the only point of the ride was to ooh and aah over some baroque Christmas decorations visible from the air. 

Speaking of which, I am almost ready for Christmas! In fact, I was almost ready last week, but I wasn't happy with the way I'd wrapped some presents, so I went in and did them all over again. No one will notice except for me. But it kinda makes sense to me. I'm so excited to give people their presents.

Pic: A blue tit (I think?) hides among the red winterberries along the Red Cedar. Walk with L. 

an unfolding

I have been dreaming of people
invisible mountains I exhaled 

into existing

twisting, quickening and though 

short-lived as grass, are seeds 

spiraling in space

are tendrils--of time and desire

opening and expanding

nodding, knowing

a  presence  here to make up for

an absence there, everywhere

the whims of distance 

I... wonder at the un-being before, 

after--the gasp of busy-ness now

marks how life slips by 

---------------------------------------

Note: I did not expect when I started writing that in writing about the space we occupy, I would slip into--and invoke--ideas of galaxies. I think some of this came from dreaming last night--vividly--of people who were important for a season but I may never see again. And I miss Scout so much... my irrational search for him certainly spans every interpretation of "heavens."

Pic: I found this perfect and early autumnal tree in the grocery store parking lot!

but I haven't told all the stories yet

It has been a month.

I'm sorry to sound like a broken record, but I can't say it out loud to other people (except Big A)... I miss Scout. I miss Scout. I miss Scout. 

I do keep telling stories about him to everyone... and sometimes if the person I'm telling the story to is a stranger I might never see again, I tell the stories in present tense as though he were alive. 

I have so many stories. How we called him the 'writing wolf', because he'd wake up and hang out with me to write. Or how we called him 'wolf puppy' when he'd writhe on his back and bare his teeth. and how--we don't have a name for this--but how he'd get upset at raised voices and bark at the person who was being mean. 

Pic: Scout running to meet me--just about two years ago. This may be my favorite (grainy, fuzzy) picture of Scout.

springing

I got an hour of sleep last night. There are inscrutable little comments and emails from me with time stamps ranging from 1:30 am (when I headed up to bed) to 4:30 am (when I fell asleep) all over the place. 

Then I had a dream where Nicole and StephLove visited me--I lived in a flooding basement apartment, the leak from the street-level windows springing up like tears. Happy times. But I remember smiling because Nicole asked, with gentle curiosity if "the seal would hold"--and I remember thinking how like her to address an issue without alarming everyone.

EM and I did a 40-minute version of our "Hope as a Cognitive Process" workshop for the WGS Consortium out of the U of Wisconsin this morning. It feels like we have enough to turn our spiel into an article. For the first time, editors have been sending us queries for an (as yet) unwritten article. That feels kinda fast track; kinda high pressure. 

My breathless delivery of all this news = my high because Scout is having a good day after the okayest day yesterday. 

Pic: It's spring everywhere and seemingly all at once--on my walk with Big A this morning, both the forsythia and the willow were in rival shades of yellow along the Red Cedar.
 

complex bedtime procrastination: am I up early or up late?

I'm putting it out into the universe that I need to get better at sleep hygiene. Is it even revenge bedtime procrastination if what I'm doing obsessively at 3:00 am is work-related? (I was Spring Term visioning last night.) 

I make a lot of excuses: I need to spend time downstairs with Scout and Huck (Scout cannot do stairs anymore and does not like to be carried); Big A works nights and has a messed up sleep schedule and I'm sympathy messing up my sleep schedule (but he can sleep during the day and I can't); I seem to be getting by fine with 3-4 hours in bed (but surely this cannot be good for me?); when Big A is at work, I'm a bit too anxious to sleep (and then we text a lot in the middle of the night and I like doing that); the afore-mentioned revenge bedtime procrastination after long work days (when I'm reading or scrolling with heavy eyes and fingers).

Stuff's complex, but I'm sure there are hacks to deal with each element of this. 

Pic: In other news, I didn't leave the house at all today--a combination of exhaustion, midday work meeting, rainy day, eyebrow zit, weekend, Nu on Spring break, etc. So this picture is from last week's solo walk on the MSU campus. I love the simplicity, vagueness, and the enthusiasm. And I heart exclamation points!

translation

I've been dreaming:
of three mosquitoes 
bouncing on a page

Oh sad, sleepy brain!
Did you just envision
"musketeers" wrong?

-----------------------------

Pic: Dreamy visual courtesy Ziibiwing Center trip with my capstone students. 

Note: Did my brain not want to use "MUSKeteers" because of the Twitter implosion?