the things they gave me

As we walk, Big A says he would give anything to be wrong... unlearn everything... wishes he could promise me that there was heaven and I would of course be with Scout again someday. Then we got home after grabbing my Boss Day to-go order from the sushi place and then I had all my babies--Max and Huck and Nu and At around me. It wasn't quite heaven, but contentment enough. 

Later in the evening, as I gathered the mint growing in wild abandon, I remembered Medo Halimy telling the world that he plants as a form of resistance. "They take away life... I bring life to earth," he said as he planted around his tent in Gaza and celebrated each sprig and sprout. This beautiful, lovable person dead at just 19, is yet another young person who has taught me so much. Whether or not I dedicate anything to him formally, his spirit and optimism will echo in my head whenever I tend to my plants. 

Pic: Late evening light at the garden gate. 

C.U.N.T.s

One of my (many) family names is the Telugu title "Dorakanti," and when Big A and I got married, we took the "Dora" part and linked it to part of his Lithuanian Jewish name to make our hyphenated family name. 

Flashforward to a few years later when after years of audience participation in The Vagina Monologues and joyfully yelling "Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!" in reclamation, I wished we'd taken the second half of my family's name. It would have been so cool to have been Prof. Kanti (pronounced "Cunty")--I would have borne that name with extra pride. (Not sure about the rest of the fam though--they're prone to bristle if someone so much as calls them "Dora the Explorer.")

But I got my chance while hanging out with the girlfriends after work this evening. We were making plans to hang out again next Tuesday, and I suggested that if we were going to keep doing this on Tuesdays, perhaps we should just make it official and call ourselves the C.U.N.T.s. (You know--as in the euphemistic acronym for cunt--C U Next Tuesday?) I think our group chat just got renamed "CUNTs." Baby steps.

Pic: On my way to work this morning, a sliver of sunrise over the Maple River. (A bit splotchy through the car window and a bit oblong  from cropping the car out of the frame.)

my calendar is a landscape

my feet are rooted in the ground

my face is in tears 

up at your second-story window 

in the harsh delight of half-light 

my gaze falls halfway 

dry like my breath on your neck 

eager as flame flirting with a book 

inside which everyone 

you thought you loved might live

tell me when it's time to begin 

the burning of July 

so we can take August with us too

________________________

Pic: Recuperating in the hammock (I'm feeling so much better). Someday I want to get a picture of geese heading out in a "V." (Just putting it out there to the universe.)

picking myself up

This morning, I was supposed to go across the street to L's to participate in a local TV interview about the Peace Pole quest she puts on every September. But I woke up feeling poorly, feeling sad Big A wasn't around to care for me.

In the hour before I snapped this picture, I was crying into my bathwater because I felt so feeble. My throat had started to feel tight and painful last night. I'd thought it was just me getting used to using my "lecture voice" again. But Big A had wondered while we were saying goodnight on the phone if I "had the back-to-school 'rona." 

I tested negative for Covid, but I felt awful anyway. But after a good cry, I felt okay enough to get dressed and show up for L. The rest of the day was blankets and books and bed. And buttered toast and scalding hot lemon water. I will survive.

Pic: The reporter setting up cameras. It was a crew of... one

redefining work

I was going to say I didn't do a lick of work today... but that wouldn't be true. 

I just did work that was different from what I'd been doing all week. 

I took care of my zillion indoor plants, cleaned the house, baked some pretty focaccia with herbs and veggies harvested from the garden, cleared the storm debris from the driveway, planned BL's baby shower with them (end of September), celebrated AS's birthday in style, and tended to my three babies--Maxie, Huckie, and Nunie. (Have I mentioned that Nu sometimes calls Max "Maxi Pad?" Rude.) 

And although my grandmother has been gone for many years, I always remember that today used to be her birthday...

Pic: The Red Cedar from the eastward bridge.

birthdays, bookstores...

I got to bed before midnight most days this week--progress! 

I did stay up well past midnight by accident last night, but it was just as well because I got to wish my dad in India a Happy Birthday bright and early. (It's also Chairman Fred Hampton's birthday and Mary Shelley's birthday, so he's in a very special club.) He didn't put his hearing aids in, so we didn't talk for very long though.

At the end of the first week of classes, things are going well (I think). I already know everyone's names--that's kinda my superpower so far. And the older I get, the more adorable I find my students... it was so cute when one of them made up a song to remember how to spell my name. 

It's also EM's birthday and the birthday of the independent bookstore in town so I stopped to pick up some book gifts and was gifted in turn with a lovely heart-to-heart with D.D. who still ministers to my soul although she no longer works as a pastor. 

Pic: My sister (with whom my parents live) sent me this pic of dad at breakfast and it made me miss my dad extra: our old hours-long conversations, his smiley face the way it was.

not giving up

L invited a bunch of us over to her place yesterday to write postcards to people in Georgia urging them to check their voter registration and vote early as "our freedoms are on the ballot on November 5th." We copied addresses out, stuck stamps on, decorated to our hearts' content, and wrote encouraging messages till our hands were cramped. L is not taking things for granted or giving up on American democracy.

Students are not giving up either. They're back on campus and beginning to hold informational meetings and protests. There have already been arrests at Columbia and closer to home at the University of Michigan. In this country, student protests have always been on the right side of history from Vietnam to apartheid South Africa. There are several weeks to the election, and arresting students protesting the shredding of hapless civilians in Gaza by U.S. bombs is... a bad look. Harris-Walz will need to address that swiftly. 

Pic: A couple of my co-writers and the Red Cedar through L's living room windows yesterday...