Salty Dogs

For the third year since José moved to Boston in 2013, we have treated ourselves once a year to an airbnb rental on Cape Cod, which happens to be a converted barn in the woods like a a mini house with gorgeous beams on its ceiling, and a charming row of starfish overlooking the driveway.  The first year we spent one night here, the second year, two nights, and this year, we booked three nights, but the owner kindly offered a free fourth night as a Christmas surprise.

We have especially fond memories in this barn because the first time we were here, we were on standby to hear about Buster's arrival from Virginia and not sure if he could make it for Christmas or for New Year's (he flew in on Dec 30, 2013).  When we adopted him, his name was "Price" which he didn't respond to. Although Lucy loved having the beaches to herself that year, she would have loved even more having a playmate.

Buster was delivered via a volunteer pilot (who happened to live on Cape Cod) through Pilots n' Paws, an organization that we, and thousands of families each year are eternally grateful for!  If you post in their free forum that you have an animal needing transport from one airport to another airport, pilots will respond and offer (at no charge) to fly and/or drive your animal to you.  The pilots won't even take a tip. Talk about a rescue pup!  This is one of my favorite organizations and I can't say enough about how life-changing it was for all of us.

This year, we decided to load up the car with groceries and for two weeks I have been looking forward to the meals we wanted to cook in the apartment.  I made kielbasa with orzo and homemade sauce, and some gingerbread cookies; José made celeriac and leek soup, and pancakes with pecan butter and blueberry rhubarb jelly earlier today. We've also been pigging out on speculaas and pepernoten (gingerbread buttons dipped in chocolate) sent from our friend Jessica in Holland. Tomorrow José is roasting a pork shoulder that we picked up at a local farm right here on Route 6A and some friends are joining us from Boston.

The mutts have been utterly spoiled with canned food like sardines and salmon all weekend and are starting to stink-- although we like the smell of ocean in their fur for the first couple days. I call 'em salty dogs.  I can't wait to give them a minty bath.  We like to pick them up a tuffy shark, lobster or squirrel from the Cape Cod dog for Christmas and we crack up at how crazy they go for it.

I am always enamored with the wreaths on the pretty wooden doors on the Cape.  We often wish out loud that we could live out here year round and I think if we wish it enough times, it will work itself out.  

We were blessed to have a pre-holidays trip to California on December 11th to see both of our families there, and I spent some time on memoir research as well as visiting everyone.  My writing class is wrapping up January 15th, and my classmates all will miss the amazing support and discipline we have found in our group of 10 or 12.  I hope that we will continue meeting as 'veterans' of the first memoir generator class offered at Grub Street.  

Next year's plan (for me) is to read a ton of memoirs I can learn from, at least one book a month, and to take notes on techniques.  The first one on my list is Boy Kings of Texas. My hero in memoir writing is Mary Karr and it was a treat to hear her speak in Cambridge on her book tour last Fall.  Another author I look up to is Alysia Abbott whose memoir Fairyland is currently being adapted for the screen by Sofia Coppola.  I was thrilled to take a few classes from A.A. at Grub this year.  José is considering entering graduate school in the Fall of 2017 in microbiology but hasn't decided which school(s) he's interested in yet.  There was no time for a mixmas this Winter, but I have plans to make one in 2016! 

In case I missed sending it to you, this squee heard round the world posted by Monterey Bay Aquarium was the internet highlight at the end of the year.

Cheers, and Merry New Year.

free verse

I wandered into Forest Hills Cemetery today just before sunset, and man, it's glorious on a Fall day.  I thought I would write some free verse about the experience.

e e

in the heart of boston

protected on all sides by tougher boroughs

lives an unexpected tall wooded forest
with gravestones and chapels;

a sanctuary of souls.

i entered at ten til dusk

on all soul’s day,

astonished to see no other wandering guests,

and not a single bouquet or calavera.

must be some respectable rules about that.

still, lots of movement.

squirrels scattered and birds darted

each time i glanced down another path,

poppy

columbine

bellflower

willow

juniper hibiscus aspen

lupine lilac verbena

i didn’t see althea path where it should be.

i was just beginning to remark what a remarkably
tender and quiet place for reflection

when a security car came flying

around the corner,

chartreuse light spinning with frenzy on its forehead

and an all-business officer asked,
“How did you get up here?

we closed at four-thirty.”

it was four-thirty-three,

i had, i guess, slid in the iron gates at four-twenty-two.

the october sky was starting to drip neon pink and orange onto a pale blue canvas of clouds.

the graves here need evening peace to themselves, i thought.

something is unsettling to know e e cummings’
gravestone spells out his name in all caps.

I am stuck in a wonder:

was such a choice the harsh intention of disrespect, or simply inadvertent?

a speedy adios and abrazos

my romantic bostonian and lover of all things lowercase,

e e.

The answer to the question "How's It Going?"

Writing a memoir is the opposite of slapping the snooze on the alarm, pulling up the covers and tucking myself back into sleep in the morning.  Writing my story means rolling out of bed, facing the mirror and confronting every last one of the freckles on my cheeks.  It’s acknowledging them, naming each freckle, it’s humbly asking them more about how they got there, and what they mean.  I often pause between commas or periods and in the pause, I notice the reflection on the screen of my computer.  In the pause, my left hand always rests my chin, or its backwards fist smooshes my cheek as an automatic resting pose.  There’s something tangibly comforting in smooshing my cheeks.  My mom says I used to pose like this as a baby from my high chair while waiting for food or toys, and my family called it my “bored student” look.

It is very difficult to confront the mirror some mornings.  There are bottomless questions and true things I’m afraid to say out loud, even if only me and my typewriter* will hear it. Sometimes I have to lock myself in a quiet room in order to face the mirror (the freckles, if you will).  I've been haunting the Watertown Public Library for quiet space a lot this summer.

I've found a good way to keep this confrontation going instead of hiding from it, is to make some writing friends and make some dates that you are committed to sharing something with them -- even if it’s something you already wrote years ago and you’re improving it or even just grappling with where to put it.  My memoir class at Grub Street has thankfully given me an opportunity to have a number of these small groups of writers to keep in touch with and report in progress to when we're not regularly meeting for class.

Back to work now.

*I'm not really using a Royal typewriter although I have one. I just call my chromebook my typewriter.

Staycation Summer

We (and Waterbell) have been enjoying visits from friends and family almost every weekend since Memorial Day, and I'm so grateful! It makes me feel like I'm on vacation without having to go anywhere (and the dogs are waggingly delighted, too!)  My dad came last weekend, Jose's brother Luis and his family all came the following weekend, Jose's niece Adriana came just before my Dad... in mid-July Karen came for a visit from Monterey, at Fourth of July, Nick came up from Baltimore, the week and a half before that we saw him in Baltimore. Next week Luba's stopping in Western Mass to meet me for a day and then Mom and Dad will be back again the rest of August.

it was also a big frickin' deal that I got to hold hands with
Wall-E 

at the science museum Pixar exhibit last month.

inkwell: here's what's new

First, a confession - I'm trying to quit saying "super". I still say "super" all the time instead of "very" and maybe now that I'm over the third-of-your-life milestone, I should hang up "super" along with the "totally" on my wall of retired sayings. Ya think?

This spring has been especially beautiful in Boston and also extra high in nasal allergies for me, but no complaints.  This peony was blooming in our yard when I came home from work today.  Speechless.

My new memoir class at Grub Street has been a true blessing. I am writing down a lot, I am editing a lot, I am thinking about my stories in the car, I am dreaming about them at night. I am reading other memoirs of women who were my age when they wrote.  And I love my classmates' work.  I am so excited to be part of this group of writers.  Each Thursday I also get to visit the Public Garden en route to class which is glorious with tulips and swans this time of year.

My first workshopped story yesterday was a mixed essay of going on and on about how much I love Duckie and Iona from Pretty in Pink among other 80's movies, combined with a short story about my kinship with Jose in high school, and how severely in denial I was that we should "like" each other back then.

Jose and I pooled our funds to buy him a Martin guitar for his birthday, and he has been testing out a lot of eric clapton unplugged and jack johnsonny tunes which fill the house with the most beautiful sound every morning while I'm making coffee and shuffling dogs around.  My favorite is he sometimes plays "Jane Says" (I'm done with Sergio ♪).  I don't have great music ambitions, but I've offered to learn harmonica and tamborine someday.


I am tooling around with quitting facebook for good.

I have never spent an hour on it that I didn't want to take back, and I especially am angry at the thumb-scrolling phone habit that it started for me.

Instagram I'll keep 'cause it seems to be positive messages and a safe addiction of gorgeous travel photography or cute dogs like Maymo and Maddie.

As far as our Memorial Day weekend, I am proud to say we did a heck of a lot of nothing whatsoever (I did a lot of writing, though), including finally building our fantastic wedding gift of an outdoor fits-two hammock in the yard.  It wasn't long before the dogs wanted "in".

No point in fighting it.

A week ago, Kate came to visit and since she's seen a lot of Boston before, we took her to her first Red Sox game, to the island where preppy was invented, Nantucket, and then we took a Beacon Hill secret gardens tour on her last day which was the perfect sunny day excursion.

It was overcast and warm. We look so Nantucketty.

Lastly...since I forgot to share this last summer!

Jose and I thought it would be fun to recreate a photo of my mom and dad (Judy and Charlie) on their third date approx. 50 years ago (yikes!) when they were sitting by the Harvard boathouse on Memorial Drive.  His camera was on a timer then.  I had always loved this photo of them. My mom took it very seriously, recreating their clothing and everything.

1964-ish

2014-ish

Announcement: I'm a writer.

In an adult ed class I once took after work, my professor had urged the students to embrace saying out loud to others in your life, "I'm a writer". She reminded us, it doesn't matter whether you have published or not, whether you have another day job, whether you only write in diaries in pencil. If you are writing, if you are even wanting to write and you are starting to try, well, you are a writer.

I had less of a hard time with that as I had with telling people that I want to write a memoir about my life experiences (the follow up question "What is it going to be about?" is always hard to answer succinctly) .  

I'm still sometimes unclear on exactly how to say it comfortably, but there there is a heartbeat inside of me that knows I'm on the right path.  I have a favorite Rufus Wainwright song, "I don't know where it is, but I've got to be there. I don't know what it is, but I've got to do it."

I feel incredibly blessed this year because (along with many things that have come my way since moving to Boston) I was accepted in March into a small class called Memoir Generator at Grub Street, a nonprofit writing center near Boston Common, which encourages writers of all ages and experience levels. Most people attend writing classes not just for guidance but because it keeps you accountable: it makes you go through with it.  

Memoir Generator is a big jump in that commitment for me -- from 2 month courses I had tried out before to a now 9 month course with tons of writing homework every week.  

The time will probably fly, but the hope is that in November, I will have gone from having seeds, scraps, ideas, notes tucked into a million journals to having real stories with titles, draft numbers and page lengths.  I already have added so much to a Google Drive since I started thinking about this course in January.  And the first two classes were epiphany catalysts! -- I've surprisingly been able to articulate why I'm writing, what I want to achieve, how it will relate to the reader, and in the second week, I had an a-ha moment of structuring my memoir into chapters or sections, and ways I want to link the sections.

Since I have been shy about admitting my compulsion to write before, I thought I should be brave and just state it here now.  

I want to write a book that is either memoir or creative non-fiction about the pivotal experiences in my life, the places I was, or wanted to be, the people (characters) who influenced me in these moments, the internal conflicts I faced, and of course the music that I was listening to at that time.  The music (ipod, walkman, car radio) is in fact probably my narrator's main supporting character.  

Going through with this is very important to me and I'm simply elated that I got accepted for this class.  Jose is incredibly supportive and pushing me to keep going.  I will keep this blog posted as the epiphanies keep on pouring in. Wish me luck!

A Granola Saturday Morning Journal

Embarassing!  I just realized I haven't blogged in six months.
I have been writing and musing and journaling often instead. Since December, I am trying to nurture some memoir short stories that are trapped in my mind and I hope to take writing classes in the summer or fall to give these stories real assignments that are due.  I vividly remember when I was 22, 26 and 31, I thought maybe someday in my mid-thirties I'd finally write more.  So I'm turning 37 in March, and yes, it feels just right now.  Finally ready to make it a priority and I hope I can shut off other distractions (facebook and twitter, I'm looking at you).

I get a lot of how's married life? still at 6 months, and my genuine response is something I don't say out loud that often... wonderful: we are in fact full of wonder and laughter.  I still look around and pinch myself about how much my house and our little "furmaly" complement each other. José and I have a competitive-like habit of making childish jokes to crack each other up. I love hearing the semi-soap opera report of his daily grind with the postdocs at his Harvard microbiology lab. José has a rare gift for being unconditionally kind, and he always reminds me to write more.

With our pups Lucy and Buster tucked under an arm or foot in bed in the mornings, and often needing to layer-up with swishy snow pants and parkas this month, we feel like a sack of rolly polly teddy bears in my cottagey house that I like to call Waterbell.

Last month we turned my dining room table (above) into a little fort for the dogs to sleep under, so they have a little sense of their own space and place, and they surprised us and have completely bonded since then.  Buster sometimes doesn't even want to come out and join the world - well, understandably.

Since Boston has had one of the worst winters it can remember and frequent blizzard days of shoveling snow and scraping ice, I have had a good share of crabby moods about walking the dogs or feeling cabin feverish. I constantly wish out loud that we lived in our honeymoon village, Tofino on Vancouver Island, although I try to tell myself thou shalt not whine because the truth is, Greater Boston has lucked out to have no problems with power outages, really, and unlike José who relies on the bus and the T daily, my office has thankfully let me work from home for most of February.  I don't know how much of a national news story it is but the MBTA subway sytem in Boston has gotten to the point where the daily update is like a multiple choice menu of bad news: Slow, Even Slower, or Slowest.

We try to make the best of the cold season with comfort food dinners and the sweet indulgence of snoozing, reading and watching TV from the velvety dark gray couch, which is magnetlike - hard to get up again, once you're on it. For the dogs, we take a lot of "Oh Boy!" playtime breaks in the yard or give them breakfast in a kong.  They really miss having more walks.

This morning my comfort food was granola.  I am a super non-Martha Stewart personality but my one Martha gift that I was once granted (in other words, given the recipe from my godmother in Lexington) is homemade granola.  I still have trouble balancing the amount of oil and the amount of time in the oven (it goes from brown to burnt so quickly)! But today's batch is pretty excellent.

And there's nothing I love more any time of day, any time of year (which I must admit Tofino will never have!) than a bowl of yogurt from my neighbor Sophia's mixed with Trader Joe's creamed honey, a spicy Chinese, Vietnamese or Indonesian cinnamon, dried or fresh blueberries, and my own granola.

I'll enclose here some photos and my adapted recipe which I know a few friends have already taken to making regularly!  The drops of vanilla extract make the house smell so good, too.  Yum.