198: Friday is Plaid + Stripes

I could fill my rooms with these simple designs--the twiggy browns, the long lines of sky and horizon.

Currently:
- Last night I stayed up late finishing an advance reader's copy of The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey, a novel in which the protagonist descends into Alzheimer's. I found my heart thickening, my eyes stinging in those last forty pages, when the character's speech and patterns mimic so much of my grandfather's in his last days--the unfounded accusations, the absurd comments.
- Our shower pipes froze. Again. Rumor has it Minnesota is breaking some records with those negative temperatures, and I believe it. Outdoors is painful these days. We're attempting to fix it ourselves this go-round, so yesterday and this morning I took a bath, which is utterly calming (especially if you have the right bath suds) and made me feel like a little kid again. I don't think I've taken a bath for the actual cleaning in a great long while. Unfortunately, our attempts failed and the plumbers are quite busy today, but come tomorrow, showers will be the norm again.
- The pipes freezing, the dumping of snow, the negative temperatures, this is all very helpful in my anticipation of next week's Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Classes begin again at the university, and I have to clean up my syllabus, collect textbooks for my own coursework and whatnot, but that nervousness at missing out on this week will fade rather rapidly when my days are filled with t-shirts, sandy beaches, and the horizon divided by a thin blue line (instead of that thin white line).
- This song, introduced to us by Shari.


Thanks for color week! It was good to celebrate the colors in winter, especially when outdoors is so cold and gray.

Stay warm this weekend. xo

197: Thursday is Pink

Past pink: the nose of a cat, the flush of a peony, the hydrangea bush, the sunny spinners in New Orleans, the offering of a peach, the surreal city sunset. And winter pink: the meat of a grapefruit, the pressed skin beneath fingernails, the blush on his cheeks after shoveling snow, the tangle of lips.

I promise not to curse you again, pink. I might not adorn my world with your cotton candy fluff, I may balk at princess costumes and icing on cakes, but I do so love the way you give a subtle glow to strawberries, the way you pave the way to passion, perhaps more like a first crush, the way you burst from the ground in a season I miss so much it hurts.

196: Wednesday is Yellow

Yellow is always bananas, a constant fruit. Yellow is the sun coming in through the slats, nudging us awake and into the snow. Yellow is a cocooning color, something to wrap yourself up in, wait as the day changes.

Two things I've noticed and would like to point out to you:
- The Milkweed Project. (Serendipity: I was just trying to figure out what to do with this fluffy white yarn I have.)
- Last month to order Port2Port custom stationary. It's so sad to see that, along with her shop, ending, but I just know she's got some great creative ventures to pursue. Order while you still can!

195: Tuesday is Purple

Over on Curious Bird, the color week continues, and today is purple. My home is full of browns and beiges, reds and greens and blues and grays, earthy tones. If it were summer, I would immediately fill you with wildflowers: here, here, here. Shades of violet are in no short supply. But in my winter home, purple is not to be found.

With one very strange exception: a wooden salad server, given to us at our wedding by the Kings, former colleagues, the wife of which was head of the department at the first school at which I taught, the husband of which runs Red Dragonfly Press. Purple, lonely amongst the bamboo spoons, the grays of winter seeping in, the beige and brick walls.

I wonder how homes find their colors. I know it is the occupants, that special style, the ways our own eyes catch and light upon things. We're lucky when our partners match the decor, or when you know one day you will live together, so shopping for a sofa for his apartment isn't such a harrowing ordeal. I love our home with its heavy woods, its gray-green furniture, the wooden slat shades.

But purple, you allude me. And please, please, never pink. (Pink is Thursday.) I don't know where it would be hiding in this place. Warm, sunny colors like orange and yellow will be tricky too, but pink, but purple. What I lack. Give me blue, give me green, give me brown. Give me the earth.

194: Monday is Blue

Sometimes in winter you need a little color comfort. Over on Curious Bird, it's color week, and today is blue. Steam rising from the Mississippi, the cold re-emerging as ice shifts from top to bottom, the trees across the way vague and uniform, the ocean only a week away.

193

Currently:

- Not called for jury duty today after all. Trials were all canceled.
- School was too. Early release, anyway.
- Snow. Yesterday's blizzard watch has turned into a steady snowfall: thick, fluffy, the kind the dogs make trails in, spin into and snow dust flies.
- Getting ready for Eric tomorrow. Ryan's brother is flying in from Tahoe and staying the night before moving on to Green Bay. Cleaning sheets, clearing away school-things long neglected from last semester, little knitting projects and the like. Baking bread, filling the beer fridge.
- Reading Amy and Isabelle, a novel about a mother and daughter in small town Massachusetts, some mysterious coming of age issues, struggles regarding sexuality and on. I'm relieved to put escape reading behind me; I think I overdid it at the beginning of the month. A bit of a book reading binge, so to speak, and now my stomach feels sour for it.
- Making a baby blanket for my friend Kim, whose son is due next month, I believe. Hoping to at least drop it off this weekend (though hoping to actually see her even more).


- Wondering at what point I should begin snow shoveling. It's still coming down, but the sun is nearly gone too.
- Reading about worm composting. Generally the order is: research, then do, but rarely do I do things in the right order. In fact, after five summers of vegetable gardening, I'm taking a beginner class with Angie at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.
- Enjoying the last week of winter break. Next week classes start; next week, I will be in Florida at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. I'm so looking forward to seeing the ocean.

192: for chris

It's important to note these sorts of passing days: today is my friend Chris's birthday. She now enters that tenuous last year of twenty, the one I just stumbled into a few months ago, though I'm certain she's doing so with much more grace.

I simply wanted to pause today to celebrate today here, to explain exactly why it is that I'm so grateful for my friend Chris. She's probably not-so-thrilled with this sort of spotlight thrust upon her, though maybe deep down she's secretly please.

Chris came into my life in a middle school French class, and we did not exactly get along. We were thirteen; sometimes girls are more prone to raising hackles and whatnot, jealous and annoyed simultaneously. No matter what the cause, by the time we graduated from high school, we were linked, visiting each other in college, writing each other letters, and two summers ago, we even journeyed together to the Carolinas to visit our beloved friend Nikki who was working there for quite some time.

I love Chris because she is courageous, because she does not accept crap but finds her way into better situations, because she's got spirit and spunk, because she loves to dance, because she is so good with the soil that she found herself a community garden plot rather than just deal with apartment restraints, because she's an entomologist and can fill me up with facts I absolutely love to know (and can later use in poems), because she's gorgeous, because she reads a ton, because she's endlessly supportive, because she's inspiring, because she's brave enough to backpack through Europe (alone!) for a month, because she's smart with money, because she grows these gorgeous tomatoes and turns them into delicious tomato soup, because she bakes great bread, because her plants make me happy, because she lived without TV for years and was perfectly content, because she keeps good company, because she gets excited, because she's curious, because she's passionate, because she's got this giant heart that fills me up and makes me feel so happy to be around her, because she is exactly who she is, take her or leave her, and that's exactly how she should be.

Happy birthday, Chris.

And finally, that beekeeping persona poem I wrote based on your Texas trip? It's up on the website.