Out of my mind

There's a lot on my mind but not much I can shape into words. And even less I can say on the public platform of this blog. 

I've been wallowing in snot and self pity this weekend. The flu's onset happened swiftly on Friday afternoon. I went from scarfing down an entire box of sushi as a late lunch to sneezing and filling my trash can with Kleenex. I went home from work early and spent the next 36 hours in bed. 

Too much time in bed in my case is the fastest trigger of an emotional decline. I woke up this morning feeling sorry for myself. My head still felt like a watermelon, but the thought of another day in bed just about made me cry. And just like that, my friend Harum called. 

We talked about all the things that matter in the lives of single 20-somethings — the high- and lowlights of dates, the stresses of work, plans for future trips, riding bikes, being outside. And suddenly I was outside in the sunlight walking barefoot up and down the sidewalk in front of my house, still in my pajamas. The sun felt good. It felt good to laugh. 

I got off the phone and got in the shower. I dressed and went to the coffee shop around the corner to answer emails and write this blog. My head still feels heavy but my mind is a lot lighter. 

Creative burst

I've got a head full of schemes and a blistered right hand — both the result of the weekend's tiny house building workshop.

In three days, I learned the basics of framing a tiny house from floor to roof.

The result of three days' work.

I got home late last night (from dinner with the people who hosted the workshop) totally inspired and also painfully aware of my lacking skill and the limitations of my strength. Hammering floor joists, wall studs and plywood was hard for me. It took me five swings of the hammer to everyone else's single swing.  But I stuck with it.

What I found inspiring was the process of turning drawings into an actual structure. I returned home each night of the workshop exhausted and still spent an hour looking at pictures and reading about what other people have done. The model that most appeals to me is that of Dee Williams (see video below).

I left the workshop with a half dozen phone numbers of people I could call to bounce ideas and perhaps to drive a few nails for me. 

Last week brought another creative highlight. I got to do some writing for the newspaper. Best of all, the topic was one I liked. I wrote about poet Galway Kinnell. For the reporting process, I attended a reading to celebrate Kinnell's contribution and life and spoke with his cohort of poet friends.

Galway Kinnell, 87, at the reading honoring his life work
at Vermont's Statehouse

The poetry and the conversations have stayed with me. They affirm that a life in pursuit of creativity is one well lived.

Living ‘The Little House’

Growing up, my mother read aloud to us every night. This continued well past the time that I could have easily read to myself. 

Mama warmed up with picture books chosen by the younger kids and then dove into the chapter books. The younger ones listened to those too. We covered considerable literary ground. We read “The Chronicles of Narnia,” “The Arabian Knights,” “Brother’s Grimm” and much more. We read “The Little House” series at least twice. 

Much of what I knew about the United States, as a child in Austria, was based on the lives of the Ingalls and Wilder families. My sisters and I were obsessed with hoop skirts and bonnets. We played at churning butter with buckets of mud in the backyard. 

Above all, the journey west in a covered wagon captured my imagination. We built covered wagons out of chairs and sheets and filled them with everything we could think of — a tea set, blankets, pillows, the chest of dress up clothes. My destination was always Montana, where my make-believe husband grew up. 

When we finally moved to the United States, I learned that no one actually lived and travelled in a covered wagon anymore. That life was limited to historical reenactment museums. But the idea of a small mobile dwelling has never left me. 

In my early 20s, I learned about eco-minded people living in tiny houses on wheels, and I have dreamed of building my own tiny house ever since. I like the idea of living in a home where each object is considered. A home that doesn’t tether me to a mortgage and promotes a lifestyle of limited environmental impact.

I feel ready to do more than just think about tiny houses. Next week, I’ll take my first concrete step. I’m registered for a tiny house building workshop. I hope to track my progress here.

Picture stories

I'm enrolled in a five-week data-visualization class. The idea is to learn the mechanics of telling stories with numbers and pictures, which happens to be quite tricky.

I woke up in the middle of last night, restless and thinking about my latest assignment. I tinkered for hours with a map component. This evening, I finished. I'm damn proud of these visualizations that explore the top baby names in Vermont.

Learn About Tableau

Time to take flight

June and now half of July have rushed past. I’m afraid that summer will be a distant whistle before I get the chance to acknowledge her presence.

Still, I’ve enjoyed all the things that have kept me from those long, do-nothing summer days. The weekends have been packed with family, friends and weddings. The days filled with work, coffees, drinks, dinners and travel — all at a pace out of sync with the slowness of my writing. I need an expanse of time to form complete thoughts from words. For me it cannot be done during the 30-minute ferry ride across Lake Champlain or the 45 minutes between yoga class and my workday.

I’ve thought about slower and too-slow times in my life and wondered where the balance lies with my current constant state of motion.

I think of summers in Massena, N.Y., during my adolescence. The town had very little to offer me at 14. There were trips to the library and the beach on the shores of the Saint Lawrence River. But I didn’t care much for reading then and the river was far too cold for more than a dip. In the evenings I crossed the road and the park to my grandparents’ house to watch “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy” and on Saturday nights, “The Lawrence Welk Show.”

I remember being moderately depressed in the mornings by the expanse of time that lay before me. I tried to make the most of it. I read “Gone with the Wind” one of those summers and knit half an intricately patterned gray wool sweater. I also obsessed about irrational fears. After seeing “The Exorcist” at a friend’s house, I grew terrified of being possessed. And despite having a healthy dose of sex education, I worried that by pressing my bellybutton in just the right (or wrong) way I’d become miraculously pregnant. Without more engagement and structure, my mind roamed to dark places.

Bread Loaf blooms

It wasn’t until my mid-20s that I found the happy balance of purpose, structure and time. I started Vermont’s Bread Loaf School of English after a year of scattered work and unfocused writing. I got to the mountaintop campus in June as the fields bloomed with color. I took classes and worked as a server in the dining hall. The coursework nudged my mind away from obsession. Serving breakfast, lunch and dinner separated my days into workable bocks of free time. My writing took flight in the sunny, Adirondack-chair hours between lunch and dinner service.

My writing has come to a standstill in the past months, but thanks to those Bread Loaf summers I understand what I’m missing. Although I don’t regret the activity, I need more Adirondack-chair hours. I need to remove some structures from my day. I need to clear a runway for takeoff.

Bread Loaf path

Dragon Mama

My mother nursed all six of her children. She spent twelve years breastfeeding, sometimes two babies at once. 

In my early memories, Mama always has one of my siblings latched on for “baa baa” (like the sound of a bleating sheep). This was a name my oldest sister came up with and it stuck.

Mama was efficient and managed many things simultaneously, which was necessary with so many children and no shortcuts. She homeschooled, baked bread, sewed clothes, entertained friends. There was baa baa and spelling lessons. Baa baa and bedtime stories. Baa baa and adult conversations while her friends griped about work trouble and took comfort in beer and cigerettes. Mama listened. She never smoked and hardly ever drank.

Mama’s friends regarded her as an incarnation of the Madonna. And she could certainly be painted as the Holy Mother in broad strokes. But having been her child, I know that depiction to be too simple. While it shows Mama’s nurturing, it disregards her wrath.

Her anger came on swiftly and was over as soon as she made her point. Mama nursed us all through our teething phases and beyond. Inevitably, each of us tried out our newly cut teeth by biting Mama. 

Her reaction was always the same. She pulled away and unleashed the roar of a waking dragon. I witness the startled expressions on my younger siblings faces that gave way to scared cries. In a matter of seconds the dragon disappeared and the babies were comforted with the offer to nurse once again. They went back gently.

We were smart babies; we learned quickly and early how not to use our teeth.

Mama was a natural mother but not a saint. When I went to college, I studied Spanish in northern Chile. I learned about Incan culture and their mother goddess who reminded me of my own Mama. For the Incas, the aptly named Pachamama often appears in the form of a dragon. She invokes fertility, oversees planting and harvesting — and causes earthquakes when she feels disrespected

On fear

I dreamed last night that some one was spying on me while I lay in bed. They were peaking in my mailbox and then directly at me through a gap in my curtains. 

Upon waking, I wondered why that scenario arose. It's not one I expend much anxiety on anymore. As a child, I was much more fearful of people lurking just out of view. I spent a good bit of mental energy worrying about kidnappers. After my parents went to bed, I would sneak downstairs to make sure that the doors were locked. 

My mind could be particularly cruel. It created the Toilet Witch. She looked much like any other witch — long nose, green skin and warts — but was unusual in one regard. She lived just below the toilet bowl. The flush was her doorbell. When summoned, she would emerge and pull children down into her underworld. I got in the habit of opening the door before I flushed, and then sprinting from the bathroom like a hunted animal. 

I now tell stories about the kidnappers and the Toilet Witch. I laugh about them like they were silly juvenile preoccupations.  And they were. But those feelings of terror and anxiety have never left me. They've simply reattached to threats that seem more real to my adult mind. Current fears are always more difficult to discuss than the ones I've pondered, calculated the likeliness of and then moved to their rightful place in my hierarchy of things to fear. For example, the Toilet Witch no longer figures into my schema at all — she's not real, I've learned. And kidnappers appear near the bottom of my list. I'm well past the age of their target group. 

What's more difficult for me to discuss are the fears that have replaced those earlier ones. At 29, I'm afraid of discovering that my mind is in fact vacuous and of dying from suffocation. Both are tied to real experiences. As an asthmatic, I've had horrible, sleepless nights where I simply could not get enough air. The vice grip around my chest would not ease. I know that sweaty terror, but have always rebounded. I'm afraid that one day, especially when my body is old and weak, I  won't.

But my greatest fear lies in the suspicion that my mind is dull. This figures into the trouble I have starting big writing projects. I worry that I'll get halfway into the project and find out that I actually have nothing interesting or original to say. This anxiety drives me to avoid writing. It sends me in search of distractions like Facebook. It's the voice that tells me when I get home from work to be satisfied with just watching a movie and going to bed. 

I realize that fear will find me no matter what. It finds me in adulthood and in the world of my dreams. I think it finds everyone. It's customized. For me, it takes great courage to pick up a pen. I confront fear with every sentence I start that I don't know how to finish.