Seeds

 

My sister in law eats sunflower seeds to feel like she's back home. She talks to her parents in a foreign tongue, in high pitched tones and her voice chirps most nights via Skype, while I'm trying to sleep before opening shifts at a coffee shop I work these days. I feel my blood boiling when I can't comprehend why she has a particular place for everything, why I don't seem to clean a dish quite well enough, why my brother ever wanted to get married in the first place, why the word grateful doesn't always reverberate in my mind. I watch them come home from their weekend errands to Ikea or Whole Foods or an Asian market and I watch the filling of their house with a delivery from Amazon daily, a new TV, curtain rods, a rice cooker, a sweater for their cat.  And I watch her cook, what seems to be the same three ingredients every night: meat, something green, and gallons of oil and I watch my brother do the pile of dishes afterward, and her scuttle around in her inside shoes as I stare at my bare feet, too stubborn to respect her tradition of covering them and I don't understand what I feel is pulling at my own heels, telling me to let my toes roam free. I simply step back outside to settle somewhere else for the evening. And I think about this making of a home and how I've watched it before and it's not about the TV or the start of a garden growing out back or the food in the fridge or the meal itself but what's created by simply doing these things.  The TV will break, the garden will freeze, and the meal will be gone, the dishes done. Upon returning and watching her crack those shells I feel something, stopped in my tracks as I remove my shoes at the door, and ask, "Do you feel like you're in China today?" and she nods. I ask if she'd like to try a blood orange I picked up at the corner fruit stand and she does and I watch her peel it quickly.  I don't know what it means to feel closer. Perhaps this is it, the closest I can come for now, seeing her with her cats and that orange and a pile of seed shells by her side, home settling somewhere in her belly.

Homage to the unknown??

I found myself walking through a cemetery this evening, faintly reminiscent of a time my Dad and I visited one some summer night when I was 12. I don't recall why we were there, perhaps to pay homage to someone or just to roam.  I do remember the eerie comfort of being in a place that recognized and somehow magnified that death was real or so it seemed as I stared at plot after plot.  I thought about death then as this realm that floated around us, almost tangible, like a constant tango.  I recall standing over my parent's bed staring them awake many nights as a child hoping they could assuage my angst about that moment when life ceases. They could not.  So, many nights I'd let it linger in the air after vivid dreams of a burning earth or dark alleyways in which Death itself or some "thing" seemed to accompany me. These days are no different.  I still dream of death and it still lingers in my waking life.  But it seems to hit harder when I'm going slow, in the polarity, in the juxtapositions. The tiger lily resting on an old wooden fence, the pruned up cheek of my elderly neighbor pressed against her 2 year old grandson's, the ripples from Geese skidding atop the Willamette, the first sight of the Pacific after many months away, the liftoff of a 747,  a smile from a homeless man who doesn't ask for a thing.  I see death in a stack of books yet to be read, I see it in light.  I see it in the planning of a camping trip to the coast.  I see death in all the things I won't be able to do.  I see it in the excitement of possibilities,  in all the places I will never visit and all the places I already have, in the two places I cannot be at once.  I see it in the sunset a friend sends me.  I see it in all the people I could love, if I'd let myself, and all the people I have.  I see it in the humor of the world. I see it when I send snail mail. I see it swaying in an empty hammock.  I see it in my chai tea steeping in a Christmas mug at a café on SE 23rd.  I see it sometimes in a single word. I see it in a good one liner. Simply, it hits me when I'm exited about life.  And maybe this is when death isn't so eerie, it just is, coming closer and closer.  I wanted to snap a photo of the sun falling on the headstone reading the last name "Failing" but couldn't muster up sharing the irony via snapshots. So I walked on, past Florence, Wade, English, Deardorrf, Harlow and many others, some with flags in recognition of the holiday, one I've never found myself celebrating, either with fancy Americanized weekend trips or acknowledging anyone who served, sadly, but true.  Instead I wandered the headstones imagining friend's parents  and my own relatives who have passed, what they were like, what kind of jokes they would tell, whether they put cream or sugar in their coffee, if they drank coffee at all, if they had healthy sex lives, if they worried about money or the state of the world or what the reason for living was all about, what my great grandfather's quirks were, if he made similar silly faces, if we would have been close or even liked each other's company. I didn't kneel down and speak out loud above decaying bones or ashes, I didn't know anyone in that cemetery on Holgate.  I only knew that the sun was going down slowly behind gathering clouds and there was a crow near an old oak, picking at haphazardly tossed leftovers and an abandoned house next door, an orange and green coffee mug resting on stacked furniture, a hole in the window screen, and an Oregonian mailbox in tact, waiting, for the news.

.......

jetsam-
an apple core
thrown overboard.
I miss you,
since you've gone.


lagan-
a starfish
blown ashore,
tethered to
the Milky Way.


flotsam-
debris-filled wake
of wanderlust.
Where do we go
when we die?

...

even the rain
has its secrets,
puddles collect in the sidewalk cracks,
droplets cling to the windowpanes,
azures bloom out back




seeking clarity
the Buddha wraps his worry
in the noose's neck

Writing Haiku

Flowers on the side table,
rosewater tea,
an empty vase.

The tongue of a fly
on the surface of the sea-
kismet.

yellow petal
on a black bike lock-
bumblebee.

Lily whispers blooming ah hah

By the waterfront
a man searches for a vein,
the geese leave ripples across the Willamette.

Japanese maples
bloom all over the city
I unfurl inside.

The shadow still
inside a composition book-
a light nap.

The snail slinks along

The rain falls heavier

On his house.

                    This isn't a revelation.

This place isn't just this:

The best brunch spot on a Sunday, where to get your downward dog on and become utterly enlightened, the myriad of coffeehouses to lose yourself in, how organically "unique" the next recipe can be or how much money one can throw at a person's sign on Burnside in hopes of bridging the gap between poverty and perseverance of the 9 to 5. That hostile sentence stops me in my tracks. My destination is some place on Hawthorne I frequent for tea because I too am a consumer. I do not throw pennies but smiles in the direction of strangers in hopes someone might hear me thinking "I understand", to feel as though we have shared the same definition of connection, full of remorse at my fortune, at my own dealt hand, my own dominoed decisions. In the same breathe I don't carry the burden of 10,000 things or the world on my shoulders. I'm one being. I desire to snap photos of these moments that feel substantially bleak and real at once, to tell myself this is why I'm living, of the man on his bike with bungee cords around his house, or the young girl nodding off in weekly group, the sun slanting in a little too sharply, the murmurings of an elderly woman in an alleyway, the buildings lined with flowering vines, but theres no way to capture that, so I slip inside a coffeeshop to consume, plan, contradict, scheme for happiness, ask for more hot water.

Portland, while you are the City of Roses and rain and eclectic upbringings, and flourishing creativity, you are also this, caught not in still frame but hindsight:

Sharing dark chocolate outside of New Seasons with Elsa who says she's 20 and looking for a place to stay, and you share simply because it's your favorite and it might be hers too but maybe she doesn't know it and her sign and eyes and bruised face says she's homeless but maybe she's not really and you don't ask her life story, just where she's from, a question that leaves you yourself unsettled, and you're both sitting there cross-legged on the pavement watching the people come and go with their grocery bags full of food and hopping on their bikes with their babies and big grins, and the wind stands still somehow, and she says "Portland", and it all becomes too much to be uncomfortable and not know what to say, like you're somehow better than someone who threw money into her jar and so you leave and feel sickened and saddened all over again and get on the 14 back home.

The woman who says she just got her teeth fixed and she's sending her picture to a friend because it's been over 20 years since she's had teeth and she's telling you because she's nervous and spilling her life story and that she'll try to wait to get home to cry, and you simply say "do it when you gotta do it" and she tells you that's the nicest thing and you wonder and know the answer at once at how many people are holding that hurt in.

A homeless man

The sea

Inside his eyes.

To take a picture would be too consumeresque.

Even writing these words feels too cheaply easy.

Somebody said recently, "Don't forget to hug yo mama once in a while".

http://www.npr.org/2013/05/11/182898557/mini-memoirs-6-word-stories-to-honor-mom

I stumbled upon this article the other day and wondered what I too might say.

I tried to come up with six words, something catchy, humorous, a gut-wrenchingly memorable moment that forever changed who I am in relation to you or vice versa or both. "You're  my Mom, I love you". No, too cliche. "Short, photographer, goofy, serious, helpful." Too vague and void of meaning. So here I sit..... blank space.... NOT because those moments don't exist, but because they constantly are, WE are ever changing and because those moments exist as the mundane, not the grandiose. Six words wouldn't be enough, and still too many. I love who you are in any form standing next to me. Raw, exposed, vulnerable, be that always. Perhaps, those are my six words: 

Raw: I ate sushi with you at the age of 15 for the first time, slurped down sea urchin, and while I can't recall the taste, you instilled fresh perspective, the California coastline, how to paddle a kayak across a landscape, renewal.
Exposed: there's this photo of you when you were in your early teens, posing with a tether ball, twiggy arms, pigtails, sinewy legs, innocent grin. I wonder what it would be to know you then, in the sepia tones of your youth.
Vulnerable: what I think it might mean to become a parent, an open vessel for the skinned knees, the tears and trials, the laughter, the stillness when they've flown the coop, the calamity when they come crashing back in, speaking in tongues, to fill up and either sink or learn to interpret the feeling of floating. 
Be: cause breathing is enough, and maybe it's what you drummed on your belly right before birth began, and you're still tapping into the California wind sent my way, playing patty cake with my hands on the other side, "just be, just be".
That: do you feel what words cannot name? 
Always: loving you. 

Happy Mama Day 
Love, your Boobutt