I have been meaning to write, but I have felt stuck and so I have used my busyness, which is not unreal, as an excuse not to sit here. Tonight, loaded with intention, I cleaned up after dinner, and opened a new “post.”
I am in West Virginia right now, which I will explain in a minute, but for now, let me tell you about my after-dinner chorus. It’s about three-quarters singing birds and insects, with a less-pronounced but definitely noteworthy 25% gunfire. #WestVirginia I love it.
I’m on a raised deck, looking out over mountains, and it is hot but not too hot. At least for me. My stemless glass has condensation mapping the wine level, and when the shooter stops to reload, I pause too, eyes contemplating the foggy (or simply hot, sleepy?) horizon, mind wishing it could translate the languages of the cacophonous trill, heart hoping…well, for many things.
Before I started writing, I reread my most recent post. Recent. It was in late May. Nearly two months ago. Since then, two more friends have been diagnosed with cancer, both ushered into fairly immediate surgeries, the boys finished school and left for camp, political discord has worsened, climate change is more pronounced than ever, and T and I finally got to move stuff to the serene weekend place we’ve long wanted and finally found.
Hence West Virginia.
Before February, I had never stepped foot in West Virginia. Wild and Wonderful has a colorful past -it seceded from, wait for it, the Confederacy- and is but 80 miles from our home in Maryland, but, to be honest, nothing drew me here, not least its substantially Red present-day persona. I swear, y’all, it might beg to rejoin the Confederacy now. 😬 Which is absurd. And yet. #FoxNews #FakeNews #AlternateRealities
If you think about it though, 80 miles is like a bad afternoon of carpool on the Beltway, it’s beautiful out here and land is plentiful, Oliver has, for years, beseeched us to “Get Land!,” and during Covid, that has really come to make a serious amount of sense to me.
To my immediate left, a woodpecker is going gangbusters on the new high-energy suet block I put in one of the feeders. Two other birds are chasing each other or are happily in love or soon to be and are flitting about like aerialists. Squirrels are squirreling, and the number of acorns dropping from high oak to way-below deck really makes me wonder if they’re punking me with a giant stash up there. I mean, how many acorns does that tree have?? If you sit out here and are still, these creatures do not give one crap that you’re near. Even if I go broke buying birdseed and suet and continually righting and filling my birdbath, I do.not.care. This is the best.
My fingernails are a gross, productive mishmash of unfiled and studded with Sherwin Williams’ Peppercorn, high-hiding primer, and semi-gloss Pure White. As a very devoted, skilled-yet-amateur painter, I want to tell you that Sherwin Williams paint sucks. Benjamin Moore is infinitely better in all iterations and color ways, and it is most definitely worth the increase in price those characteristics demand.
The Martinsburg Lowe’s is great. I love it, and I tell you that because and in spite of having spent 4 of 7 days per week there since June 18. BUT in paint, your options are Sherwin Williams or Valspar and, try as I might, I only have peevish things to say about them. The highest-level “Infinity” semi-gloss paint is the stuff of nightmares. I may rather pull my own dirty fingernails out than persist with this nonsense.
Last weekend, I cheated and brought from Maryland, Ben Moore primer and Aura paint. Both are like gifts from the heavens.
In any case, I have had terrible anxiety lately and, by virtue of having written this thus-far-fairly-random bit, feel immeasurably better already. #Lessons #AlwaysWrite
In college, I had a boyfriend with whom I was madly in love. I thought we would marry. If he’d asked me, I’d have said yes. Immediately. Elatedly. We broke up-for the best-but from him I took much of value, including an abiding love for The Cure and his sincere, plagued query: “What if our brains were simpler?”
Yes. Life would be easier.
Anyway, I am now realizing how much I have to tell y’all, and my god, if you join me to the end, you’re saints. Surely this all cannot be riveting, but to me, it is! I mean, do you know the transformative wonder of Ben Moore Balboa Mist in eggshell? What about adopting three teenage barn cats? What about parking your liberal-bumper-sticker-plastered car next to one with a Confederate flag and a rosary, going into Lowe’s yet again, seeing an older, leathery-tan dude wearing shorts, no shirt, suspenders that may have had Confederate flags embroidered on them, and nonetheless happily buying some Coneflowers, more (fucking) SW paint, and some new floor registers, and leaving content?
I fucking hate JD Vance and all that salt-of-the-earth rural-lands-and-peoples-are-of-the-gods shit. And yet, I am decidedly happier, and/or more relaxed, out in rural WV than I am ensconced in the rat race of DC. And I love politics. I love people. I love education and opportunity and cool folks and my friends. I do NOT love the tick I found sucking on my abdomen two weeks ago or the damn yellow jacket nest I inadvertently mowed over today (my ear is still swollen and hurts like a mofo; arm is fine), and I sure as hell don’t like most of the politics out here. But the pace is so slow. And, my god, people are nice. I am white, so that’s probably it, but…it’s still worth thinking about.
In some parts of the Eastern Panhandle, there are more PRIDE flags and Black Lives Matter signs than Trump paraphernalia. There are really, really lovely humans who love their families and work so hard. I spoke with a young Black man who told me that “yes, there is racism here like everywhere, but it’s affordable, and people are nice” and a Chinese-American woman who moved to the US twenty years ago and ended up in Hedgesville, WV, and is happy and says people are really nice and here she can afford a home, and a woman who, honestly, seemed to be every white suburban older-middle-aged-Mom-jeans lady I’d ever seen but is actually half Puerto Rican and said that “because you’re from the city, you know that my Black foreman and Latino crew are the best you can ask for,” as if I was the rare exception for whom she didn’t have to preface and disclaim and prepare. And maybe I am. I hope not.
A butterfly just landed on my chair, and neighbor shooter has reloaded and is firing to beat sixty. Tom is on his way back to Maryland, Nutmeg looks both exhausted and aghast at the fact that he is still here, and Ruthie is gallivanting around as she does. When I brought the boys to Dulles for their flight to camp, I rode the train back to parking with a guy who, even masked, looked SO MUCH like that college boyfriend that I froze and started sweating a little bit in all my remembering, and the years gone by.
The boys were beyond thrilled to return to Pine Island this summer, and yet, per life, their expectations and actual experiences seem, via letter, dissonant. Covid has really fucked so much up, and camp is no exception: there are fewer boys, distancing, parameters. My heart hurts for the kids knowing that the build up of two years’ absence could almost certainly never match the reality on the we-are-still-in-a-pandemic ground. #GetVaccinated
As always I think there is a lesson in there, irritating or shitty as it may be. A letter received from Jack today contained a stunning amount of ALL CAPS for a fifteen-year-old boy. I’m thankful he can emote. #Blessed
The birds and squirrels are quieting now; the shooter seems to be out or between rounds. Did you know that male House Finches turn bright red during breeding season? They are magnificent little beings. The sun is setting, half-used strips of painters tape are blowing lazily from their newest way-station. SW Peppercorn is actually a very nice color, as are Pure White and Tricorn Black. It’s just the paint itself, damnit; not nearly the quality of Ben Moore. And since this entire place was the color of Calamine Lotion or Terracotta or TURQUOISE, you really need some coverage, FFS.
But seriously, tomorrow I will attempt to avoid the yellow jackets, write the boys, keep painting trim (I shake my fist to the sky against all-wood-very-dirty/dusty trim from the 80s!), meet with students, brush burrs from the barn cats, return my milk bottle to the general store, check on my friends, remember to eat well, try to both work and rest, and continue negotiating the profound fortune of two lived experiences.
How do I give and serve, but not deplete? How do I make peace with Sherwin Williams? How do I welcome and listen, but not suffer fools or respect lies? How do I listen to myself and also to others?
