homestead

maryland, summer, nighttime: silent but for the sound of the crickets -- endless crickets. the windows open, the house warm and sticky and still.

the yard is populated primarily by weeds, which must always have been the case. there's an enormous amount of wild strawberry. the backyard is overgrown, or rather, overgrowing, but in a sweet, homey, unkempt way. the front yard, flat and easy to mow, is tame. business in the front, party in the back.

the smells are all different. I can't put my finger on how, exactly. when I was a kid growing up in that house, I used to think of the smell of the front yard (as I spent hours mowing it) as "buttery." now, better accustomed to it, I can recognize it as a kind of hay smell, though buttery still comes to mind: warm, yellow. as a teen on the mower in late summer, grasshoppers would shoot in all directions from the dried stalks of grass as I passed up and down the yard. six acres. it took a long time.

my brother is taller than me -- taller than me!! this was a great novelty to both of us -- but still the kid I know, just surrounded by a new, slightly surlier teenage exterior. we play frisbee in the yard. we're both pretty bad at it but we have a good time. one night while my mom and sister are at 4-H camp, we watch a bunch of episodes of "deadliest warrior" on spike TV. we eat pizza, which he heats in the oven and brings out for us. he's finally hooked on doctor who (I've been telling him for years) and we watch something like 15 episodes while I'm home.

the cornfields are everywhere. the houses are old, with older barns, the silos crumbling into the earth. in general, everything feels older on the east coast. I might just be imagining it.

I eat snowballs. I actually declared to my mom when I landed at BWI that I wanted a snowball at least every other day, since it's such a regional food that there's no chance in hell of ever having one here. I didn't get my first one for four days, which continues to feel like a great travesty. then, instead of getting a bunch of kiddie cups of every flavor I like (fireball, spearmint, chocolate, egg custard, birthday cake, sour cherry), I got chocolate every time. I did get crazy and ask for a chocolate/fireball combo for my last one, the day before I left. it was delicious.

actually, I ordered chocolate cherry a few times. with marshmallow. so probably you shouldn't pay attention to my complaining.

my sister showed two lambs at the 4-H county fair. do you know how you trim a lamb's hooves? it's hilarious.



they flip the lambs over (an athletic maneuver in itself) and plop them on their butts. for whatever reason the lambs go totally docile the minute they're put like that. I don't know whether there's something akin to twitching a horse in it (where maybe the position releases some sort of calming endorphin?) but more likely the lamb is like, "fuck it. I'm stuck." I took like a hundred pictures of this because I could not get over how hilarious it was. also my sister clipped those hooves like a boss. I'm glad I don't have to do this to Cookie.






(practice-showing her southdown)

I showed my sheep earlier in the week.

that's ethel. lucy was in the other room. in the background you can see my brother racing out the door. this is because my sister was about to recite, apparently for the 900th time, the FFA creed. I was holding the lamb as a tribute.

we drove to the beach. I already told you about that. on the drive, I told my sister wicked stories about my troublemaking as a kid. I didn't think I was a particularly bad kid but in comparison to her, I was. she was pretty horrified. I hope I didn't give her any ideas, or blackmail fodder.

my mom and I visited my brother at his internship at the national aquarium. they still have the bubble columns from when I was a kid. I was pretty nervous about them because they used to be right at the entrance and they weren't there when we walked in, but it turns out that's because they built a whole other wing that you have to walk through to get to the old entrance. I was so happy about the columns that I hugged them.


yeah, I don't know either. that's a shark fin on my head, in case you're wondering. my brother was, sadly, not embarrassed. he's pretty used to these shenanigans by now.

also at the aquarium there is the best sign ever. EVER.

I really wanted to.

this fucker is beautiful but he starts crowing at, I don't know, 4 AM? party foul, buddy.

his name is jimbob. that's not a joke.

we go to an O's game. not-quite-nosebleed seats that turn out to be pretty good, and in the foul zone, but no luck on catching any. we do get there in time for FREE JERSEY NIGHT which I am irrationally stoked about.





fuck yeah, natty boh.


yeah, nobody can ever see the family resemblance.

one day travis and I run one of my favorite old trails, whose turnaround point is a spot on the gunpowder where my track buddies used to sometimes jump from a bridge into the river. the water was too shallow to make the leap but I did wade in from the shore. it was utterly frigid. of course we skipped stones, because anybody who's ever been with me near a body of water knows I can't not skip stones. the trail was just as I had remembered it. but harder.

I unearthed some treasures from the basement, in the midst of searching for my yearbooks. all my old track ribbons, two pairs of track spikes, my powderpuff jersey, my kindergarten gym uniform (private school). my uniforms from the years I spent as a competitive jumproper. they still fit. sort of.


jacket model, jumprope model

a great deal of nostalgia, in general, but when it was time to go, there was none of the homesickness of last year. in truth, part of me was glad to be coming back here. the country doesn't get any smaller, and it doesn't get any easier to be so far from them, but in oregon, there's more to look forward to these days. which I am grateful for.

sunset beach at sunset \\ kite flying on a windy day \\ impending storm \\ kid sister & me \\ jack \\ hole digging, day 2 \\ prohibited words & related offenders \\ ashley learns to juggle \\ evening walk \\ dusk

north carolina. all things are the same as always, except that we grow older. the house is, as usual, crowded. beth (34) and her daughter kaitlin (14); amy (33) and her boys (3 and 6); me and my sister ashley (just weeks shy of 15); my aunt and uncle. my other cousin, stephanie (30), is too pregnant and doesn't make the trip. beth and I share a bed, which is somehow hilarious and comfortable and fine. it reminds me of when we were girls, when amy and beth and I would all sleep in the same bed and I would hate waking in the middle of the night to use the bathroom because I'd have to crawl over them, afraid to rouse them in the process.

it's the same boring wonderful routine: breakfast, coffee, sunscreen, beach. I bring a book down every day but hardly read at all. we talk idly, for hours. the teenagers swim. every day I dig a giant, elaborate hole for the boys, who seem to remain unimpressed but continue to ask me for another one every day anyway. jack, the youngest, can't remember my name so I tell him he can call me whatever he wants. he names me 'hermit crab.'

the girls catch a guy from a neighboring family repeatedly checking me out as I walk past and we take to calling him 'boyfriend.' boyfriend becomes a week-long joke. 'you can't eat any more today if you want to impress boyfriend,' beth says. 'we just figured out which house boyfriend lives in,' kaitlin declares one day, triumphant.

this is literally all we do. sleep, eat, beach, trashy TV. one night we steam 4 dozen crabs. there is always shrimp, cooked in the maryland fashion, boiled in a ton of seasoning. we mix ketchup and horseradish into a seafood sauce and then we make pained faces with every bite, as the horseradish hits our noses. this is part of the endless traditions. the others: we sit on the porch in the rocking chairs, painting our nails. we play cutthroat rounds of double solitaire, a game which, incidentally, I've never encountered outside my own family. there are beers.

we stay for five days, then late one afternoon, it's time for my sister and me to hit the road. just off the island, we stop at alice's produce stand, where I buy butter beans and enormous, heavy tomatoes and one peach for the road. alice rings us up, and thanks us. "y'all come back now," she calls, and we are in the car again, the windows down, the radio up.

#5

#5: juggling.

some recent observations:

• when you haven't packed your breeches and boots because you think you're not going to ride your horse (and you've just done all the laundry and haven't put them back in the car), but then you get to the barn and you really want to ride your horse, you can ride in old athletic shorts and knee high socks and borrowed paddock boots. without breeches your shorts will ride up to the point of being scandalous and you will stick to the saddle in ways you never thought possible. it will be hard to keep your toes in the stirrups because you're so stuck to the saddle leather you can't lengthen your legs any farther, so you can either shorten them a ridiculous amount or, better, drop them altogether. strangely, riding with basically no pants works your muscles totally differently than riding in breeches.

• it's ten degrees colder in the music library than anywhere else in the opera building and unfortunately drinking copious amounts of powdered cocoa from the break room will temporarily make you warmer. somehow this seems marginally better than cookies but actually I doubt it.

• running in a track meet when you are 31 and have been injured almost consistently for 2 years is an extreme lesson in humility, particularly when you're competing against 14-year-olds. (notably, however, in the 100m you still have them all beat).

- related: my memories of competing in high school track -- being a lithe, unbreakable 16-year-old; snapping around the turn in the 200m; breaking the school records in three events; passing the baton to our relay anchor while yelling STICK! as loud as possible -- conveniently fail to include the debilitating shin splints I suffered part of sophomore and all of junior year, which were severe enough that I was allowed by my doctor to run one last meet (the state meet, where my 800m relay team took 4th place) and was then instructed to take an extended leave from running, because I was a hair's breadth away from fracturing my fibula.



- also related: my mile time is at least 30 seconds slower than last year, which is not even remotely a surprise, considering that I am topping out at six miles a week and basically haven't run with any consistency since november. that said, I still feel disappointed in my lack of superhero powers. hence: lesson in humility.

• procrastination is hilarious. doing a complete inventory of the music library has been on my to-do list for all seven seasons I've worked here, but it felt too monumental to take on mid-production and there have always seemed to be more important things to do. but then I had to pull five or six sets of parts out to prep for next fall's gala and I thought, why not? and in the end the full inventory of everything we own took just two and a half days. that is ridiculous.

(the elegant way of remembering which classes you entered)




horse show yesterday. our first time off the property in two years. as usual, on Friday night Cookie was a nervous wreck, terrified of all the new sights and sounds. my heart clenched; I remember being a little kid, scared at my first sleepover. she was well-behaved, for the most part, on Saturday, with a few explosions in some of our later classes. but I didn't scratch any of them and we won four riding ribbons and a halter ribbon, marking the first time I've won more ribbons than she has. "he really liked you," I said to her after placing fourth in one of the big equitation classes, as we walked back and forth outside the arena, waiting for our next one. "or actually, come to think of it, I guess he liked me."

I came home at 8 after 13 hours at the show. I was light-headed from fatigue and dropped to bed at 10. today I am not terribly sore (miraculously) but so tired I can't even make myself drive to the garden to pick lettuce. thank god for sundays.

31.

outside, in a beautiful place, with a favorite person, on a day that turned spectacular. a hike, a picnic, a giant beer; a slab of cake at the top of the world. what else could I have wanted?

an unsent letter

april 26, 2012, a better day than this one.



on my first morning in the desert, I sleep fitfully, as usual, and wake early, also as usual. the hotel is very quiet. I put on a swimsuit and creep down the steps to the pool, where I slip into the water and trace circles around the perimeter in lieu of laps. maybe half an hour passes. a woman and her little boy come in. he says hi to me in that way small children have, somehow both gregarious and shy. I'm tired, or maybe just tired of circles, so I pick up my book and a towel and I move to the hot tub. as I read, a man walks through the gate, a little toddler boy in tow. the man is in a jean jacket. the little boy has huge eyes and dark brown hair. as the man fiddles with his cell phone, the boy, probably no older than 2, cries "piscine! piscine!" over and over again, which is how I come to realize that they are french.

I towel off and leave the pool, change into a new set of clothes, walk to the front desk and ask for a bike. the one they give me is silver, the seat adjusted all the way down. it isn't a quick-release, so I just leave it. when I pedal, my knees come comically close to my chest. it has coaster brakes. I take a test spin through the parking lot and then shrug my shoulders and pull out onto the road. being on this beach cruiser on a four lane road is so absurd and funny, but I just pedal to the light and signal and turn, and the traffic mostly falls away, and then there is just me and the low-slung houses, all the plants a mystery, pebbles in the yards in lieu of grass. it's overcast, and surprisingly humid for the desert. the air smells like so many flowers. except for my knees, I could pedal down these streets all day. something about the houses and the yards and the rooftops feels intensely familiar to me, almost nostalgic, and I don't have the faintest idea why. the mountains are pressing down from all sides, looming in gravelly silence.

a hummingbird flits from a nearby plant. I pedal very slowly, rapt, and it hovers in the air, just feet from my bike, its bright purple head flashing in and out of view.

I go a mile or so and then come to a screeching halt when I realize I've passed a sign for stables. I backtrack and get off my bike, walk into the parking lot, lock the bike to a post. there's a sign that says "stable office," so I follow it, feeling ridiculously dressed, like an impostor, in a red tank top and running shorts, carrying, of all things, a coach purse. there's nobody in the office, which is covered in dust, but there's a dog lying just outside the door. a heeler, maybe, caked in dirt, friendly but uninterested. I reach down and he sniffs my hand once, then goes back to whatever he's watching for. I stand in the door frame and look around, waiting for anyone to notice me. tied nearby are about a dozen horses, all of them saddled, wearing rope halters. they're well-fed, bordering on chunky. their tails are swishing the flies away.

the dog suddenly gets up and trots towards the mountain, alert, tracking something. into view come three horses and their riders: two women and a man, their guide. the women wear tall boots and breeches -- english riders, like me. at the same moment, a man in a golf cart rounds the corner, another dog in tow. we talk; I ask if they'll take me out by myself, and what it will cost. we talk about my horse, about the summer heat, how they take the horses into the mountains once it gets too hot.

back at the hotel, I lock up the bike and change into a swimsuit, then go back down to the pool, which is still largely unoccupied. I read a magazine. I read my book. I flip onto my stomach, then onto my back, then onto my stomach again. this goes on for six hours.

then, night. I'm in this huge bed, a bed so large I can sleep totally sideways without my limbs falling off. I feel tired and a little restless, wondering if I should go back for a late swim, but not wanting to wash the saline out of my hair again. I want to go for a late walk, but don't know where, and mainly I just wish I had a porch to sit on, a rocking chair to rock in. I'm not lonely, but in the morning and at night I find myself missing the quiet comfort of sitting next to someone on a porch, mostly not talking, looking down the road or out to the beach or off into the woods, wherever the view leads. I think often of my family, of the late july beachhouse, of the afternoon lull when we sit on porches, rocking, sunbaked and tired; when we ride our bikes to one end of the island, admiring the houses; when we walk to the other end of the island, looking for shells.

for me, summer never comes fast enough or stays long enough. I think I would be content to live my life barefoot, barely-clad, sweating lightly, swimming in rivers, listening to the locusts in the trees.

on my second and last morning, I still can't sleep. I loathe air conditioning, and wish I could just prop open the door, let in the breeze, fall back into bed. I get up and pack my bags and rent a bike again, pedal furiously to the barn. the sun bursts free of the gloom. the sky is a deep, impossible blue. I get there too early and scratch the neck of a buckskin gelding who keeps threatening to kick the horse next to him, whose name, I will learn later, is pete.

my guide's name is amy. hair bleached blonde, jeans, boots, spurs. next to her I feel like a fake, dressed in the closest approximation I can muster to riding clothes, which is just bermuda shorts (my longest) and tennis shoes. but when we get onto the trail she says, "want to lope?" and I nod -- this is why I paid for a solo ride -- and we let our horses loose down the sandy path. later, we walk through the mountains and talk about tahoe, where she used to work, and what it's like to live in the desert. our horses walk among the rocks, picking off rogue bites of what looks like inedible brush. when we descend again, she says, "there's a long patch here where we can gallop if you want," and I grin, even though I have actually never galloped a horse in my life. she urges her horse forward, and rocks are flying off his hooves and back at us, and my horse, mouse, is heaving over the sand, and I drop a stirrup but just leave it, let it dangle. her horse spooks at something on the trail and she pulls up, checking behind her. "you okay?" she says, and I'm fine, and off we go again. it was the best part of the ride.

when I came back to the hotel, I packed my bags and put them behind a pool chair, then I checked out and snuck back to the pool, where I stayed, illegally, for four more hours.

maybe this whole ridiculously long letter is my way of telling the story of how suddenly, the world feels almost unbearably beautiful. last weekend, biking until the sun had crisped my edges, until I was covered in bugs; the radiant sunshine, the collective euphoria of everyone who was outside -- I thought to myself, 'this might well be the best day of my life.' this morning, leaning back against a pool chair, staring up at the flowers in the trees overhead, I thought the same thing. there is cotton candy! there are beautiful dogs, and people with their arms draped out of car windows, banners that flutter in the wind. cool bedsheets. there are friends who you don't talk to for ages, and then there they are, giving you back to yourself. puddles and moss and lilacs, dancing and jokes and hot pink nail polish, loved ones who stay up until 2 AM with you because you are sad. I cannot get over it -- I cannot.

I read a book of short stories in my hours by the pool, and in the middle of them it struck me that we live our lives so casually, without urgency. why do we do that? lately, I find myself constantly wondering, is there such a thing as a right time and a wrong time for something? or is there only now?

love,
j

my secret vacation (#12)

took a mini-vacation to the desert this week, for two and a half days.









just me and the desert and the sun. and the pool. I read books and slept the wrong way in the king bed and paid a guide to let me gallop a horse (mouse) through the sand. I hardly told anyone I was going, and the only talking I did during the trip was while ordering drinks and riding horses. traveling alone provides such unspeakable freedom. nobody's needs to fill but your own. only when I got home and walked into my dark apartment did I feel lonely. it's always better when somebody's happy you're home.

tomorrow: candide rehearsal. just one more opera, then we can breathe until the fall. thank the heavens. we might love what we do, but several months without last minute crises sounds pretty divine, thanks.

a weekend

yes, my mom still makes and sends me an easter basket every year. I keep the box sealed until easter morning and then I pad out and open it and yell "THE EASTER BUNNY CAME!"
you can go ahead and tease me about it but I know you're just jealous.






this foam bunny kit was in the bottom of my easter basket. apparently my kid sister saw it in the store and said, "I think jess needs a craft." she was right. I totally did.


I feel pretty awesome about him.





a weekend: got a sunburn, finished my book, rode 20 miles on my bike, weeded the garden, went barefoot, ate a lot of kale. drunk on sunshine, I got home from my bike ride, hobbled into the house (the last mile is all excruciatingly uphill), took off my bike clothes, changed into light shorts, and sat on the back of my car in the parking lot, my feet propped on the bike rack, to read for half an hour. it was warm back there, and protected from the breeze.

saturday night we closed galileo. the footswitch on the synthesizer decided at the eleventh hour to work sporadically, sometimes skipping two patches, then none at all. that synth was just the gift that keeps on giving, right? our frantic keyboardist paced around the back hallway as I tried to sort it out. when I couldn't get it to stop misbehaving, I had a moment of miraculous clarity, unplugged the sustain pedal (which he wasn't using) and plugged it into the footswitch hub. bingo.

in the production office, anne, our conductor, found me. "you've done such a wonderful job," she said, "I left you a little gift at your desk." we sat and looked at each other shyly. "well," I said finally, "have a good show?" "you too," she answered. when the show started I felt such a profound sense of loss about her leaving that it took me two full scenes to get into the swing of it. I started crying in scene 6 (pictured above) and cried clear through the end of the opera. afterwards, I ran frantically down the steps to catch her before she left. "I just had to give you a hug," I said. "oh, good," she replied.

when we had packed up the production office, five of us went down the street for a drink. we sat around our table in near silence, too tired to talk. "sad to see it go," one of us said. and another: "wow -- when is the last time we felt that way?" even when we love the shows, it's a relief to be done. and yet there we sat, momentarily bereft.

I awoke saturday morning, feeling deliciously, fully rested. I thought idly, "I bet it's 10:30," only to discover that it was 7:53. that rates among the best tiny gifts of the universe.