That’s what it is, for sure

About two weeks after I first moved to Chicago (did you know I used to live in Chicago? I loved it.), at the grand age of 21, I was walking home from the busy train stop at Belmont.

A filthy-looking  man in a khaki suit jacket (sleeves rolled up), dress shirt, flowered shorts, and bare feet was standing in the doorway of a building, peeing into a transparent plastic cup.

I did what any sheltered young thang would do in such a situation: I stopped dead in my tracks and stared with my mouth hanging open.

When the cup was so full that it was about to spill, the man glanced up at me.

He yelled, “Ma’am, don’t look! That’s my penis.”

Boy howdy.

Take-home lesson: if you must pee in a cup while standing in a doorway, try to ensure that the cup is opaque. Or, you know, don’t face the street.

Another sale

I sold my story “The Unkindness of Raven” to the anthology <i>Cover of Darkness</i> by Sam’s Dot Publishing.

Hooray!

That story was years in the making and took a very long time to find a home. Fly free, little tale! May you cause many readers to flinch and stare nervously at the sky.

(x-post)

SOS (Save our sweaters)

Last weekend was warm, so it was sweater-washing time.

Those labels in your sweaters that say “dry clean only”? They LIE.  Dry cleaning hurts the Urfs, yo, and it’s terrible for your sweaters.

Cotton and linen sweaters should be washed and dried in the dryer: the dryer’s heat will pull the sweater back into shape.

Silk sweaters will stink to high heaven when they’re wet: wash them in the sink in cold water and a little lingerie wash, then rinse really well.

Wool and cashmere are hair – the best way to wash them is in a sink of cold water with a little gentle shampoo. Cold water will prevent felting. What you want to avoid is agitation: stick them in the sink and squeeze to get them really wet, then leave alone for at least 20 minutes (they won’t be hurt if you forget and leave them). Rinse well.

Take your wool or silk sweater out of the sink, squeeze out some water, then roll it up in a towel. At this point I stand on the towel a little to squeeze out more water.

Stick it on a dry towel and lay flat to dry. On a sunny day, I lay mine outside (inside out, so the sun won’t fade them), and at the end they smell lovely.

The process is more of a pain than flinging a sweater at the dry cleaner, but your sweaters will smell better, last longer, and pill less.

Adventures in the kitchen

(Please note: this is not a very adventuresome adventure.)

There is a teeny-tiny piece of a plastic bag that has been floating around my kitchen for about 2 years, because it has a recipe printed on it for barley-apple pudding. I thought this sounded like (a) a virtuous breakfast food and (b) a good way to use up some of the 9 metric tons of barley I bought. Even I cannot eat Scotch broth that often.

I finally got around to making the recipe last weekend. My usual rule is to follow the recipe the first time I make it, but this called for raisins, which I dislike, and the whole thing had half a teaspoon of cinnamon in it. For a heap o’ barley cooked in a 2-qt casserole dish, that is just not enough spice.

So I sauteed the apples with plenty of cinnamon, added a bunch more, substituted currants for the raisins, and just to be saucy added chopped crystallized ginger too.

BORING.

It smells divine, but the best thing about eating it is really the apples (of which I used twice the amount called for [the apples were about to go]). It’s virtuous all right – to the point of narcolepsy. It’s as if the barley sucked the flavor right out of everything and won’t give it back.

I’m still deciding whether to keep it for tinkering or finally throw that little scrap of plastic away.

I really do have a LOT of barley.

More knittin’

The more I write, the less I have to talk about, because all the interesting stuff is going on inside.

We’re off to Denver in a couple of weeks, so I keep knitting things to give out as gifts to our friends there. Add to that several skeins of a yarn that I thought would be lovely but turned out to be Troublesome in person, and one gets the following:

Cute, right? I love how the ends came out in the same colors.

Same pattern, the “Virginia is opposed to color” version:

Whew, I tell you. After two scarves in a row, I might need a little break from knitting. They do go on and on.

In other news, I made muhammara last night – Mom, Lissa, and I have been talking about it ever since our Thanksgiving trip. Mine is not as good (the garlic is too sharp), but that hasn’t stopped me from eating it like crazy ever since. I figure – it’s vegetables, right? So it’s nutritious. (But I probably need some protein at some point today.)

Next time I make it, I’ll roast the garlic first. That will double the work of the recipe, but I think it’ll be worth it. Next food assignment: find more uses for pomegranate molasses. You know, besides eating it with a spoon.

In which I demonstrate a glimmer of wisdom

I keep seeing seeing commercials for a TV show (a. in my language, that’s TEEvee; b. I think it’s MTV’s The Buried Life) in which a bunch of guys decide what they “want to do before they die” and vow to help other people achieve their “omg mortality!” goals.

My first reaction was to be really, really annoyed – a sadly frequent reaction. But I kept thinking about it, mostly because I kept seeing the commercial over and over.

I came to this: there are plenty of things I want to do with my  life. But if I found out that I had 6 weeks to live, it would not be doing that would be important to me but letting the people I love know that I love them. I would want to make a tour, if I could, to see their faces again and let them know what they mean to me.

If I had only 10 minutes, I would be sad. I would probably be frightened.  But I would know that I have already let those people know  what they mean. They already know, because I tell them. I haven’t done everything I want to do: who does? But I’ve lived awake in this life. I’ve lived. I do not hide my affection. If I only had 10 minutes, I would be sad, but I wouldn’t regret.

I’m grateful to feel that way.

Don’t work: read a short story!

Lookit me, here I am.

I’m super-proud of that story. It was inspired by an exhibit of photographs by artist Miwa Yanagi.

Toot toot

My poem “Frau Drosselmeyer Loves the Summer” is up in the newest edition of Goblin Fruit.

A good day

One of the best things I ever did was go with Dad to cut wood.

It was a church thing. If I remember correctly, someone had “donated” the trees on a back corner of their property. Dad and I met up with a bunch of men from church: gloves, chainsaws. I was … 19? 17? Something like that. Home from school, I’m pretty sure.

I was not allowed to mess with chainsaws. In those days, I could hardly walk from here to there without grievous injury, so I was in charge of hauling and stacking.

When the trees were cut, we stacked them onto the back of a pallet truck and drove into a shabby little neighborhood, full of tiny houses set up on cinderblocks, and we passed out the wood to the people living there. They were mostly old, with a few young women surrounded by very small children.

One old man made a long speech about how we were true Christians, doing God’s work by making sure they could stay warm in the cold winter. We were a bunch of Episcopalians and mostly white dudes, not given to effusiveness. We shuffled our feet and stared at the ground. Dad shook the man’s hand.

“That’s why we do this,” Dad said to me as he climbed back up into the back of the truck with me. “Things you think are small can make a big difference in someone’s life.”

One of the doctors said to  us, “You know he doesn’t have the best heart.”

Except he did. He had the very best heart.

Doorways

We went with my family to Scotland in September 2007. (Is it really so long already? Time to go again.)

I could go on and on about that trip. But mostly I remember how settled into myself I felt from the minute we stepped off the plane. I knew how to find my way around Edinburgh immediately, which was weird because I still regularly get lost in Houston though I’ve been here for 8 years. But I felt solid there, as if I had a firm spot on the planet in the middle of all that grey sky and deep green grass.

And our photos are full of doorways. This is less a testament to Scotland than to Dingo’s eye, I know.

I have these photos all over the place.

I think about going through those doors.

Climbing to the other side. Into green.