A Pause, A View

It’s not a place to stand and ponder, not in a house full of children and dogs and cats and the occasional tortoise winging up and down the stairs, always in a hurry to get somewhere else.

It’s more of a pause. A breath in and out. A moment to recharge. 

The window is at its best in early morning, when the sun is not quite up and the Portland sky has not yet decided what kind of day it will be. Sunny? Cloudy? Stormy? A little of each probably, but for this moment, it's still an unknown. The tall arborvitae that edge our yard block out the neighbors house in the sparse light, but a break between our trees and theirs allow a wedge of morning sky. Streaky clouds tumble toward the mountain, which you cannot see from our window but which my inner compass knows is just off to the right of our view. Little wisps of pink and purple drop through as the sun rises and our neighbor’s twinkle lights, always on, become fainter as the daylight expands to outshines them. It happens so fast, in the space of the few minutes that it takes me to begin the day.

Pause.

Down the stairs to put the kettle on, up again for a sweater to fight off the chill of a house not yet awake.

Pause.

Down to make the coffee, up again to get dressed.

Pause.

Down to wake the almost-teen, up to wake his sister.

Pause

Down to start breakfast and backpack checks and bus runs. 

From dark to light, night to day, punctuated by the trips up and down the stairs that it takes to get everyone up and fed and out the door for the day.

And then pause, once more, when the house has settled into the stillness of only me and the day ahead has settled into that mix of cloudy and sunny with a chance of rain that defines most of Portland’s days.

Sticks in the window

I never really thought I would see beauty in a winter-bared tree trunk. But I suppose it is really a matter of how you frame it.

I learned about forests in the Northwest, where the definition of “tree” is something very tall, very green and very determined to stay that way in the coldest of winters.

When I first saw Missouri in the spring, I was amazed by the lush green canopy that stretched over me like an organic tent. You don’t really walk through the forest in the Northwest – you thrash through the low fir and spruce limbs hoping you won’t get a handful of needles down your shirt. But Missouri is on the edge of the Great American Hardwood Forest – that leafy cathedral through which movie Indians crept silently and under which the village smithy stood.

Of course, the movies seldom have winter editions. Hardwoods are lush in the spring and then spectacular in the fall when they burst out into color – just before losing everything. By November, that great leafy cathedral has become a bunch of naked sticks.

But I have come to love those sticks. This time of the year, I frequently find myself staring out my window in Zen-like silence, just watching the sticks.

We have five huge windows that look out on the forest. Between me and the trees is a deck, a heated birdbath and a couple of feeders. And umpteen-dozen squirrels, as many woodpeckers, and troops of nuthatches, wrens, jays and finches who enjoy my largess. Plus the odd raccoon or woodchuck come just to torment my dog.

My wintry oaks and maples are not just figures in a still life. The are the cast of a full-fledged matinee feature.

The view of those “dead” sticks through my windows is an ever-changing passion play. I’m constantly amazed at how tree trunks so bare can shelter an ark-ful. In the Northwest, I could hear that birds were up there, but seldom saw more than a flash of feathers.

Here the lack of cover means neighbors of any species have little choice but to politely nod to each other. So I stand at my window and raise my coffee cup to the creature of the moment.

It’s a Midwest kind of thing. Not a bad one, at that.

Clyde    

The time that John Steinbeck saved my bacon

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When people ask my why I no longer blog, I struggle to find an answer I’m willing to give. It’s a little like having someone ask how you are, when you are having a really crap time. Do you tell them that you’re on week three of a cold that won’t go away and your car window got broken in and everything that could go wrong lately has? Or do you shrug and say “oh, I’m fine, how are you?”  The second would be my answer. And so when I’m asked, I shrug and say “oh, I don’t have the time anymore.” Because that’s the easy answer. But the real answer is that I just…cant. I can’t write. I can’t even think about writing without a wave of panic rolling through my body. So I just…don’t.

But that’s not working either, for many reasons. So, if you will indulge me, I’m going to use this sad, neglected blog for a bit of a project, between my (far superior, as you’ll see) writer father and me, to try to push myself, however unwilling I may be, back into writing.

This was supposed to be an essay on writer’s block. But as I have writer’s block, I struggled to get much past the first sentence. Which was “I have writer’s block.”  After some really awful and painful drafts, I gave up and instead, I started reading, and I came across a list of advice famous authors have given on the subject. And much to my surprise, John Steinbeck saved me. I never really liked his books, which I know is sacrilege, and I doubt I ever would have looked to him for advice, but this story, about turning your writing into a letter, got me going.

And so…

Dear Dad,

I have writer’s block. Actually, I’m not sure that “block” is the right word for it. This is more along the lines of a giant wall of ice in my head, which paralyses me and takes my breath away and causes a constricting under my ribs, just to the right of my breastbone, every time I sit down and try to write anything beyond the things that I have to write. I know you understand what I mean when I tell you this affliction physically hurts. Not everyone would.

Because I can write. I’ve been writing papers for grad school and articles and letters and notes to teachers. But I can’t write. I can’t weave words together about a place or a time or a dream. I can write what I have to write, but I can’t write what I want to write. And it feels…hollow. I feel hollow. As if some very vital piece of my soul was left behind somewhere between Vermont and Oregon as we drove across the country to our new life here. As if I’ve had some traumatic injury that has caused me to forget an essential part of myself. Like the victim of a stroke who has to learn again the basics of walking.

I know very well that when I stop writing, I go a little mad. Small things that should not matter become heavy on my mind. Big things become overwhelming. And yet, I cannot make myself write. In fact, knowing that I cannot just sit down and write until my stress levels cease tossing and turning makes it worse. The stress builds on itself. The boat lists to this side and then to that. The waves come over the deck and lap at my toes. I tell myself I just need to jump in. Start again. Write…something. But by now it has become so large and looming that instead, I curl up into myself.

This began as an essay on Writer’s Block, the first in our project of a shared writing space. But even with a deadline and the knowledge that, at the other end, was you, understanding and gentle, I could not make it come. My brain seems to have atrophied, everything seemed halting and stilted.  Even this has been hard, although somehow, the form of a letter makes it slightly less intimidating. I dislike sharing the personal pieces of myself. No, not dislike, shrivel from. I suspect that most people who know me, or who have even met me, think of me as an extrovert.  I have spent my life playing the role of one. I’m the optimist, the chatty one, the non-boat rocker. But actually, I am terribly shy. I read recently about someone who described himself as an introvert disguised as an extrovert and I realized that is me. I act the part of an extrovert so that I don’t have to really, truly, share myself. And this is, perhaps, the very core of me, and therefore the hardest thing to share.

However, I’ve made it this far, through this letter and, if you are reading this, past the terror of clicking “post” and putting it out into the world. Instead of feeling frozen I feel, well, still frozen, but a bit less so. It is still a struggle. I am still unsatisfied that the words do not simply roll out. But chokingly, sputtering and wheezing and I’m sure inelegant, they did come.

Dad, professor, writer and ... uh, something

I’m a congenital writer.

Some people write because their third-grade teacher threatened to send them back to kindergarten if they didn’t finish their essay. For others, like me, the taskmaster is deep in their brain. We don’t write when we have to, we just have to write.

Which makes my predicament worse. I have writer’s block. For the past few months, I’ve dawdled, surfed the Web and pretended I had more important things to do rather than channeled my thoughts through the keyboard.

Oh, I’ve churned out the necessary reports, comments to students and emails that go along with being a college professor. I’ve even spent days agonizing through a research paper that should have taken a few hours. But the cathartic release that congenital writers long for wasn’t there.

I know writer’s block all to well. For 25 years, I made my living piping prose from my brain to my fingertips as a newspaper journalist. Writer’s block is common in newsrooms. You see it in the glazed eyes of the reporter who paces the office and refills his coffee cup before it is empty. It was so universal that we would commonly talk about it or even implore “I’m blocked!. Someone help me out here.”

When I was the editor, the someone was me. My prescription usually was to assign an emotion-fueling feature story. The best story is told by the person who lives it. The young woman who honors her mother by volunteering in the cancer ward. The youth with a deep passion for skateboarding. The old vet still haunted by memories.

As a reporter, you only have to repackage those stories. The “lede” jumps out at you somewhere during the interview and you find yourself rushing back to the keyboard to let the words flow.

Dam broken. Writer’s block cured – for now.

My daughter, Gillian, is also a professional writer and also suffering from writer’s block. Neither of us has now has a kindly editor to throw us a feature-story bone. But when we talked about it at Christmas, we devised our own plan.

Each of us will write a weekly essay on the same topic and post it on this blog. We will be forced to write, block or not.

This week’s topic was as simple as it was effective: Writers writing about writer’s block.

I think it is working. So I can say this with guarded optimism:

More to come…

(re)discovering our city

I forget, sometimes, that when we left Portland Briton was almost 5 and Evie just 1. Too young to remember much of anything. It's a funny thing to be introducing your kids to a place you know and love so well. Not that we know everything about Portland, or that the things we knew before are all the same, but it's been our city for so long, even when we were gone, that it's hard to remember that the kids don't know it at all. The perfect excuse, we decided, to re-discover the city.

Living here with two elementary school aged kids is different that it was being here with toddlers or babies or no kids. Less play-group and more go for a bike ride than it was last time. Less drinks at midnight and more lazy Sunday brunch than it was when we were first married. Fun, either way.

We've ridden bikes along the waterfront when the cherry trees bloomed and gone to visit the houses they lived in as babies. Wandered playgrounds they used to love and visited our favorite cafe - still small, still serving buttery scones as soon as you sit down at the table, still delicious. Between breaks in the rain we spent a Saturday morning at the Leach Botanical Garden, puttering down the trails and checkout out the difference between the "wet" coniferous forest and the "dry" coniferous forest and enjoying the sun.

We've got a whole list of places to go and things to show them.  Crabbing in Newport, Hoyt Arboretum, Forest Part, Grant Pool, Cannon Beach, Triangle Lake...all sorts of places that they don't remember, all sorts of adventures Will and I have had but not with them (yet). We're not in a hurry, this isn't New York with a one year deadline. We have time. But oh, it's so fun to share this with them.

penelope

The other morning, after dropping the kids off at school, I walked to a nearby grocery store parking lot to see a man about a bike and half an hour later, rode home on Penelope. Last weekend we made the rounds to several bike shops, not actually for me, Evie was in more desepate need of a bike since the pedals of hers kept falling off and even with the seat on it's highest position it was still a good six inches too small (she ended up with a Trek 220, the same bike Briton has, as an early birthday gift from Nana and Poppa, and can now make it up the hill to our house in a flash instead of having to walk part of the way. Gears! They are miraculous! Thanks  Nana and Poppa!) But since we were there I got a chance to try out several Dutch and Step-thru bikes. I was totally sold on the internal hub (Thanks Dee, for the info on that!) and the upright position and the low bar and the style, everything except the price tag. Turns out a $1300 bike is the norm here in BikeCity when it comes to new bikes. And like I said, I get it. A good bike is worth the money. It just wasn't in the cards at the moment for me.

And then I got stuck on hold one afternoon and started puttering on Craigslist. I'd been popping in now and then to see if I could find a Vintage Raleigh Lady Sport since they are pretty darn close to what I've been wanting, but with no luck. Until that day, when Penelope popped up on my screen.

She's not actually a Raleigh. She's an Elite which, according to the bike shop I took her to yesterday, is either a random small European company who made Raleigh/Peugeot like bikes or she was made by Raleigh for a different company. The man I bought her from is supposed to be bringing me her original Antwerp license plate from the late 1970's so somehow she started life in Europe and then emigrated to Portland. So far the only think I know for sure is that the hub is a 1979 Sturmey Archer She has almost all the bells and whistles I was looking for, right down to the bell, and rides like a dream. Now I can shoot up the hill to our house without pumping, feeling like I'm going to die or having to stop to put the chain back on (enclosed chain, btw, BRILLIANT! I love it!). I have to put new brake pads on her and at some point I will probably want to switch the steel rims for alloy ones for better stopping in the rain (ah, the things I've learned about bikes), but other than that, she's good to roll. The kids are particularly fascinated by the magic of dynamo lighting, which I have to admit is pretty cool.

So between Evie's new Trek and Penelope, we are officially a happy bike family. Who's ready for a nice long ride?

in which I have become obsessed with bikes

I don't mean to sound evangelistic, but I think biking may have changed my life. I realized last week, when the kids were on spring break and I wasn't biking to school and back again twice a day, that I wasn't sleeping well. I have (and have had for years) a terrible habit of waking up in the middle of the night, worrying about things that, in the light of day, aren't really a big deal. I've been dealing with that less lately but it wasn't until my Spring Break bike hiatus that I realized riding helped with this. I don't think it's just the exercise, although I'm sure that helps. I think it's being outside, in all sorts of weather. And that little kid freedom of having a bike to go wherever you want to. And coasting down a hill.

But I also realized that my bike really, really sucks. I thought it was just me, not really in shape, learning to ride again. And then Will had to borrow my bike for the day while his was in the shop (let's just pause for a moment to picture Will riding through the bike crowds on a purple retro ladies bike with a basket that's way too small for his long ass legs. Yeah, you're welcome for that smile.)  He could barely make it up the hill to our house. My much more in shape, much better biker husband couldn't believe that I had been riding it all over town.

I doubt, very much, that I'll ever be one of those biker who wears spandex and reflector shoes and aerodynamic helmets. I'm more of a London Tweed Run kind of girl (the Portland version is coming up!) Upright, step through bikes and leisurely pedaling rather than racing. But I still need a bike that I don't have to stop and fix every time I ride if I'm going to ride every day.

So I'm on the hunt for a new bike. A good bike. A girly-ass bike (because I like them. And also I wear skirts a lot, so it makes things easier). And I'm all kinds of bike obsessed. Reading up on hub gears vs. a derailleur (I like the sound of the hub style) and lugged frames and skirt guards and following bike blogs about family riding and city riding and riding in clothes that aren't made mostly of lycra.

If money were no object I would run, RUN out and buy this.



Oh how I love that bike. And actually, I have no doubt that it's worth every penny of it's $1300 price tag. I know a really well made bike is worth the cost and that it would last me for years. Maybe forever. Never the less, too expensive. Most of the parents at our school seem to be riding some version of these.

Which are much more expensive and since I no longer have toddlers to haul around, not really what I need. In the grand scheme of things, for Portland, the Pashley is not an expensive bike. But still. Yeeks. Maybe one day. It is beautiful....

On a slightly more affordable scale I'm digging the Bobbin Bikes. The Birdie is awesome


But it's only a 3-speed. Granted, I can only ride my current bike in one speed, even though it's supposed to have 21, so 3 would be pretty damn awesome. But it also comes in a 7 speed, just not in the fun yellow and without a full chain guard thingie (see, I'm learning all sorts of technical biking terms) Which probably makes more sense. If I could find one locally to test ride I think I'd be sold. It's kind of an expensive purchase to make without trying it out though.

Anyone have a Bobbin? Do you like it? I've looked at Public Bikes as well, and Gazelle too, but I'm not as inspired to love either of those.