Monthly Archives: July 2015

When I moved into this house in May, my first act of residence was to put in a small garden. I had heard about a local garden center and before the first box was unpacked I had brought home a load of baby plants: tomatoes, peppers, cilantro, basil, zucchini, sugar snap peas, sunflowers and black-eyed susans. There was so much hope in moving to Saint Paul, to being established in a graduate school program, to being further north and closer to true wilderness, to getting out of Iowa and away from the dark cloud of malaise that has followed me for the last three years. Planting seemed the thing to do and tomatoes were the most likely culprit. I only came home with two zucchini, four peppers and a handful of spices, but the tomato plant count, to my chagrin, wound up at ten.

I have watched the tomato plants go from little seedlings to wild bushes over the course of the short summer, and their fruit has started to ripen this week, first one, then two, and now more than I can count and keep track of. I have found myself scrambling for tomato-heavy recipes and passing around containers of cherry tomatoes at clinicals to try and lighten my load.

Last week, one of the dogs went after a rabbit in the yard. He ended up in the middle of my small garden with her in his mouth, spinning with the pleasure of the hunt, mowing down all of my careful plantings, now nearing fruition of their own. For all the destruction wrecked, not a single tomato plant was touched, and they continue to shower me with new ripe fruit every day.

In addition to my enthusiastic embracing of the garden, I signed up for a CSA in early spring. Even though we have always had trouble eating all of our CSA shares the few times we’ve experimented with getting them, and even though I am here alone for most of the weeks these days, the hope and goodwill I felt in finding a likely local prospect and depositing my money for a summer’s worth of fresh produce felt like a positive step towards being here, being in this place which I have endowed with so much hope.

The CSA has proven, as that little voice deep down warned me, to be far, far too much. There is no way, even on my best weeks with salads at nearly every meal and veggies roasting in bulk in the oven (in this steamy, unairconditioned house!) that I can consume all I have committed to. I have had a whole cabbage go bad for want of using it, and the weight of failure to eat so much green has been heavy and growing these last weeks. It is assuaged somewhat by the presence of a fantastic organics composting program in the city, so at least these slowly rotting veggies aren’t contributing to a landfill, but the truth remains. I overstepped my own capabilities as a consumer by signing up for the bounty of this particular harvest.

And yet I don’t regret either of these things. I have tomatoes coming out my ears, but I am relishing every delicious home-grown bite. And the overburden of vegetables from the CSA has forced me to attempt things in the kitchen that are far beyond my comfort zone. With, generally, good success. For all the moments I feel overwhelmed by the amount of fresh things in my kitchen, I am as grateful that I’m in a place where such bounty is both possible and welcome.

A Starbucks is a generic enough space, but a Starbucks nestled into the dead-space just inside the automatic doors of Target is far worse. Even the most cookie-cutter free-standing Starbucks is still pretending to be a neighborhood coffee shop with comfy chairs, maybe a fake fireplace, people studying and chatting. Inside Target, the illusion is gone. There is a case of pre-sliced cheese and ham and rotating lines of giant red plastic carts next to the coffee line. The pastry cabinet is mostly empty and those left are dry and crumbled, the cake-pops sagging on their little sticks. The only people sitting at the too-crowded tables are harried moms feeding cranky toddlers an emergency snack to get them through the groceries, or dads on awkward dates with their pre-teen daughters, munching away on cardboard pizza from the little microwave cafe a few feet away.

On Monday, I shouldn’t have been getting coffee anyway. I’ve been trying to give up mochas, but on days with exams and papers due (of which there have been far too many lately) I give into the temptation for some caffeinated chocolaty comfort far too easily. And with a midterm looming that evening, I found myself in line with the harried moms and gaggles of teenage girls asserting their independence through commerce. As I waited for my order to come up, motion in my peripheral vision caught my attention. In the middle of the empty seating area was an elderly woman, dressed all in black with slim silver bangles. Her hair was perfectly done, and her demeanor was that of a socialite, well and duly out of place in low-end corporate box store like this. Polite, but wary of engaging strangers as always, I sidled over within hearing distance and leaned towards her.

“I’m a psychic, you know!” she exclaimed in a half-whisper. I forced my face into neutral.

“Oh, really?”

“I’m a psychic, and I could see you standing in line there! You are different! I had to talk to you.”

I waited, not sure what you say to someone who calls you over with that declaration, much less a woman in her late seventies who looks as if she could out do your own socialite mother at a dinner party full of strangers.

“You remind me of my Jennie. She’s like you. I’ve never seen anyone who reminds me of her like you do. You look nothing alike, of course, but you … you are just the same as her. You … you are smarter than you are giving yourself credit for. You need to quit with that.”

“Um, thanks?”

“And you are a traveler, are you not? You are a traveler, I can see it! Africa is in your future. Be ready for it.”

“Yes, I do travel as much as I can.” But Africa? It’s not even on my bucket list. Galapagos, Mongolia, Goa … but Africa? Well, sure. Why not?

“Do you have children? I’m sorry I’m asking personal questions. But I’m a psychic, did I tell you? Are you going to have children?”

“No.”

“Well, anyway. You need to start writing every day. Every Day, do you hear me? Quit trying to write that book, and just write every day. The thing you need to write will come out of that. And you owe it to us all to get it out of you.”

The entirety of the interaction was, of course, much longer and more convoluted than I have represented it here. There were questions about the astrological signs of my parents “A Taurus and Aquarius … but who cooks dinner?!?” And my own “Oh, dear. Dear, dear.  A Gemini? That *is* problematic …” as well as repetition of several questions due to the onset of age related short-term memory loss. But the insistence on writing every day continued, as did the assertion of my status as a traveler.

From my early days in the conservative church, I was taught that psychics had real power, but that it was from a dark consort with demons or the devil himself. They were dangerous and looking to woo unsuspecting, weak individuals with their charms to bring them into the dark. On the flip side of that coin, a friend of mine, still deeply religious, has taken up tarot card reading under the auspices of religious prophecy. Now, as a rationalist, I have believed self-proclaimed psychics to be intuitives at best and tricksters at worst who manipulate the hopeless and gullible by spinning half-truths into webs of deception with no substance behind them at all.

Does that make me a hopeless and a gullible? I have never interacted with anyone claiming such direct supernatural insight, and have never looked to. Yet this strange old women, as riddled with dementia as she appeared to be, spoke things to me that I badly needed, or at least wanted, to hear. All unsolicited, all without any prior insight except whatever she managed to glean from my own half-patient standing in a generic line at a generic coffee shop in a generic box store with a bag full of avocados and cilantro.

And so I shall endeavor to write every day, even if it means this space becomes less polished for a time. Because if I’m opening up my soul to the devil, after all, it might be about damn time.

Ever since moving to the cities, the Mississippi has left me entranced. It snakes through parkland and cityscape here with equal measure, and every time I cross a bridge I have a hard time keeping my eyes on the road. I have been nervous to take my boat out on her, though. Familiar as I am with kayaking over ocean waves, navigating tides and beach landings, I have no experience at all with currents, eddies, barge traffic or reading river maps. I took a night paddle with a group through a local outfitter back in June and was pleasantly surprised that the river didn’t seem as daunting as I’d chalked it up to be in my mind, but even then there was still safety in numbers and with guides close at hand. But still that siren song wafted through the back of my mind, stronger when the blue water stretched away far below a highway bridge or at my feet while I threw a ball for Ersta along her banks at the dog park.

Two weeks ago, with Pete in town to shuttle cars, I launched a plan for a solo river trip. I had been waffling for weeks, weighing the danger of going my myself against the likelihood of recruiting willing subjects for this navigational experiment. In the end, I decided that if I waited around for company, I would never go. Arguing against his strong reservations and swallowing hard to silence mine, I convinced Pete to shuttle my car down river to a little boat launch near a huge highway bridge outside of Saint Paul – I figured I couldn’t miss such a landmark and my take-out point, despite it’s inauspicious nature. He left me back at the upriver put-in with my boat, sunscreen, a bottle of water and two Clif bars.  I clambered into my long ocean boat and spun downstream, trying to get my bearings in the current. I crossed the river and started paddling, passing the dog park along the banks and startled by how small it seemed as I skittered by, pulled inexorably south. Within minutes, the launch was out of sight and I was committed to this course. A course whose timing and navigational details I was only partially sure of.

I had a melt-down hours before we shuttled the cars and kayak for my launch. All the old demons of insecurity and self-doubt raised their heads, shadowing the perfect, sun drenched summer day and leaving me crying and shuddering in the car in a parking lot near our house. What was I doing? Who am I, with all my failures and shortcomings, to think I could undertake such an ill-advised and potentially dangerous paddle down a huge river, alone, dodging industrial boat traffic and stern wheelers, in a boat designed for the ocean? All my own doubts screamed in my ears and it took everything I had to silence them and go through with the launch.

On the river, I paddled hesitantly at first, getting used to the way the current fishtailed my boat, riding the rocking wakes of passing speed boats. There was a lot of traffic out, between touristy paddle boats full of sight-seers to fellow kayakers making their slow way up the eddy on the far shore. There were families fishing along the beaches, egrets in the weeds and eagles overhead. The current was swift but manageable. I paddled along, more and more confidant, until the first tugboat passed and nearly flipped me in its rolling wake. Subdued, I paddled on past the rough confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, and the current slowed. Downtown Saint Paul appeared on the horizon of the river, growing with each stroke, and I was paddling hard now to make headway in the seemingly dead water. As I made my way through the cityscape, boat traffic thinned and giant barges began to appear, tethered to the shore on either side. The lush parkland that had rimmed the river so far gave way to scrub and gravel pits, and the river widened and slowed even more. Wildlife disappeared. I was alone in the expanse of water under a screaming early afternoon sun. Passing under a huge railroad bridge, I nearly jumped out of my boat as another tug passed me, coming up nearly silent from behind. I had no time to adjust to its wake, and was soaked as wave after wave broke over my boat and I struggled to stay upright. Crisis averted, although now sitting in a puddle of river water, I turned my bow back downstream and paddled on. Three hours in, three and a half, and no highway bridge in sight. My arms began to shake, and I slowed my strokes down to a more manageable expedition pace – one I should have been channeling from the beginning.

In the end, the highway bridge appeared, along with her busy boat launch. I managed to slip in between motor boats and get out without falling and making a fool of myself in front of all the weekend traffic. I was shaking, but elated. I had done it. I had managed to paddle twenty miles down a historic river, and finished strong. The demons were banished for a little while longer, and hopefully I’m a little stronger to beat them back the next time they rear their ugly heads.

Last night in my dreams, there were sled dogs, three teams of fourteen or sixteen each, gearing up to go for a run in three long lines at the trailhead. The dogs were screaming and lunging to go, slamming their harnesses and yipping in anticipation. There was a flurry of booties, harnesses, clips and lines. As I watched, first one team and the next and the next pulled hooks and sped off in silence, intent on the path before them. I was left at the trailhead alone, wearing the wrong kind of parka and hat, with my heart in my throat.

I spend a lot of time second guessing my own dreams, these days. Not the ones that haunt me at night, because I’m beginning to think those are the ones to be trusted. But in daylight, what fills my head are all the ways the logistics, the finances, the practical, day to day mess of having a kennel and running sled dogs full time isn’t going to work out. That it can’t possibly be the thing, that one thing, that is finally going to be it for me. And if I try to make it work, it will end in disaster and disappointment.

The thing. That weird idea that somehow one thing is going to solve it. And maybe that’s part of the problem. There is no one thing that will right all wrongs and heal all ills. And there are plenty to be had that a few dogs and mountains of equipment to fix and dog shit to scoop won’t help. But I know that I dream about running dogs at least once a week, and that my down time is spent daydreaming down trails, my notebooks just as full of sketches of kennel layouts and dog barn designs as they are of the pathophysiology that’s supposed to be filling those pages.

And yet the doubt remains, making me even more discontent with my current situation, stuck here in civilization and unable to pursue what I love, the lifestyle that I know works best for me. I am still by most accounts five years away from being able to go back up north, to start establishing the life I want to have. I know I need to lay this groundwork here, now, but watching these years slip away is like stripping off a layer of skin, some days. I am left raw from it, and vulnerable to the breeze.

So comes the realization that I need to create more contentment, not around what I am doing now, but in what I am going after. For the last three years, I have told myself to hold it loosely. Everything changes. Nothing stays the same. You are only setting yourself up to be heartbroken. But now I am beginning to see that I need to hold it close, plan for it, live in it, so that when I am finally able to go home I will get there with the right parka, the right hat, to be able to jump on the dream I’ve held so carefully and ride it out.