la femme follette

still nat'l poetry month

I have run in the same poetry circles with this woman, another found-text-smithing poet whose work is always remarked upon for presenting as funny before revealing itself as sad.  This has the effect of leaving a reading audience stricken, but in a good way.  I think I have heard her say she is a midwesterner, too.  (All these midwesterners!  Running loose over Manhattan & writing poems!)  I was thinking of this one because today is my wedding anniversary.

Why Marriage Works
Michelle Scheidel

Antique lace, demure details, golden eggs, the
cocktail. A virgin, the quince, sobriety, writing
checks blindly, a rock-hard stomach. The third
unwanted child, youth and plain arrogance, what

caused the swelling. A dozen armed physicians,
a complimentary round of ammo, hubris, the
progress of the natural gas pipe. A willingness
to be wounded, an espresso machine, acres and

acres of pecans. Longtime interest, a return for
an equity stake, fear that lingers in tunnels. The
learning of patience, searching for something,
hard-boiled assessments, sagging but stately.

Blood sugar, blood pressure, a future testimony,
hazarded guesses, a certain hue of the sky, putting
on armor, environmental abuse. Passion, fire-
places, impulsivity, despair, rent-regulated apart-

ments. Dead silence, watercolor florals, compulsion,
anesthesia. Memories, insurance settlements, home-
lessness, a heat wave. Heavy doses of fatalism, old-
time romance, nervous breakdowns, the alternatives.

tulip birthdays

Garçon's birthday has come and gone and now my sweet little baby is nine.  I remember when they handed him to me in the hospital, all ten and one-half pounds of him, and he was like a little ham with a face and a cartoon hairdo.  I looked him over and handed him back.  As with everyone I have ever loved madly, in our first meeting I was not entirely impressed.  He is my favorite, in so many ways; of the 2 children, he is most familiar to me.  Mothering him is what I was born to do, the purpose for everything leading up to him. Fillette requires that I grow with her, which is a formidable challenge for the rest of my life, but makes me tired and peevish, even as she has wooed me into the ranks of her considerable fan base over the last 7 years.                              

Both children had an ugly cake.  I know that I have a very lazy attitude about baking and birthday cakes, but jesus christ these cakes were ugly.  Also, not delicious, though the rest of my family liked them, proving that there is no accounting for taste.  I did not make the same ugly cake twice.  I baked for each child an ugly & terrible-tasting cake.  Nigella!  You!!

Mari got the child a brace and bit for his gift.  I did not know what this was.  It sounded like something of which I might have availed myself in my girlhood, for a Saturday-into-Sunday kind of lark with the right fellow, a latex dress, and a lot of good liquor.  In reality it is a kind of manual drill for Garçon to use in his next woodworking efforts.  Garçon has already hammered together an excellent workbench down in our basement.

(Our basement is centenarian-plus and is totally grody.  It is dry, at least, but I swear someone is buried down there.)

When I was a little girl, my (s)mother's idea to wake me for school was to bang my door open and switch on the light.  I have all my life been photophobic so that this was like the torture of the martyrs as far I was concerned.  Never again has anyone been so cruel.  There was one guy who would sit on the edge of our bed in the mornings and sort of pin me while coaxing me with about a million tiny kisses.  This reveille was my favorite and best, not to mention the method by which I now in this life have always awakened my children.  Anyhow, today is the day he was born and I would bet he had a cartoon hairdo, too.

Happy birthday, guy.  Many happy returns to you. 

1969

Happy birthday to my pal Alex.  I did not knit you a pair of socks, but neither have you ever broken the law to get an infrared eyeful of my slumbering girlishness, so you know how it goes.  Besides, I know my strengths.

At last, this is the account of Pigs in a Twinkie. 

Many months and months ago, I gave Algren a book called The Twinkies Cookbook.  There I was, minding my business in a store, and I saw it.  One exchange of text messaging later ("am holding something called The Twinkies Cookbook, you want?"  "YES") and it was on its way.  I read it before I chucked it in the mails, knowing the email would come, and it did.  It read:

From: Algren
Date: Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 3:22 PM
To: Femme

Chapter Nine, Twinkies And Meat.

thank you.

In the ninth Chapter, there was a ridiculously appealing abomination of a recipe -- Pigs in a Twinkie.  It went like this:

Serves 6.

6 pork sausage links
6 Twinkies
Maple syrup, for serving

Thinly slice one end off each Twinkie. Stuff a cooked sausage into each Twinkie. Place the Twinkies in a shallow baking dish and bake [at 350 F] for 10 minutes, or until the Twinkies are warm. Serve warm, with syrup.

The first thing that I spied in need of tweaking about that recipe is the allegation that it would serve 6 as written.  How could it serve 6?  Who could eat just one?  (I would eat none, because of my allergies, obviously, but outside of my condition, I would probably eat 3, I think.  More if with child, fewer if hungover.)

Then Algren came for Christmas.  This was easy now.  In fact, this could not be avoided.  I cannot remember if it was a surprise or not, that Mari and I were up to Pigs in Twinkies.  Oh, yes, Mari, the silent partner in all things perversely foody.  He is a man who recently refused to eat a cheeseburger with a fried egg on top, but he was game enough to trick a girl raised in the culinary Eden of Chicago to marry him, so there is that.  I'm not some choose-your-own adventure eater, however.  I am squeamish.  Tentacles, no.  Pigs in Twinkies, I can handle that.  Chicago.

While Mari and I were at the grocery store, shopping for the Christmas table, we could not find any Twinkies.  This started with the fact that I had never bought a box of Twinkies in my life and was not even certain where in the store they would be.  Mari poked around, we got restless, and then on an endcap display we stumbled over the regional answer to the Twinkie, the Tastykake Krimpet, made just across the river from us, a cake with an expiration date.

I was taken in by the Jelly Krimpets for this recipe.  It seemed like the way to go -- breakfast sausage (which I also could not find in the damn store), jelly, krimpet ... yum -- and Mari agreed to the experiment, but insisted on going out to find Twinkies before the event.   Fine.

So, December 26th came and we were all three prowling around with coffee and tea and oj while the kids ate oatmeal and then I remembered I was the one who was supposed to be making this.  For breakfast.  Because we roll like that.  Oh, yeah.

Shortly after Algren got the cookbook, we were on the phone discussing the Freudian implications of stuffing link sausages into a cream-filled cake.  I was trying to insist that it was not so terrible, that maybe there were ways around it, like if one were to slice the little snack cake open and then fit the sausage link inside, but the more I talked about it the smuttier it got and I finally dissolved into giggles while Algren stood on his usual ground and said, "See?!?" 

He was right.  I threw everyone out while I was stuffing the cakes (!!) because it was smutty.  Even as I tried to adopt the ultra-ironic kind of "har-har, look how Freudian this is!" it just did not work.  It was kind of troubling, this stuffing, because you have to hold the Twinkie in one hand, and in the other the sausage link and then there has to be this delicate kind of wriggling effort.  I just made everyone leave because I was blushing too much.  Then when I found out the Jelly Krimpets were too small to take the whole sausage, OH GOD.  So, I had to cut the links in half.  So, you know, they could take it.

The Twinkie is a size queen and I had no problems getting her all ready to go.

 

(I buttered the pan because we were a room full of midwesterners and there is no such thing as too much butter.  Other people should use parchment.)

It was really, ridiculously filthy, the whole thing with the violating the snack cakes.  I mean, a person can try, and let me know how it goes.  Maybe they are not so suggestible and delicate as I.  In the end, some of them are mangled, you can see.  By the time I became the velvet-glove of Twinkie-stuffing, it was all over.

Again, I did not eat these, I cannot.  But Mari was very outspoken in reporting the sausage-stuffed Jelly Krimpets to be the clear winner.  The cake was toastier, he said.  Also, the smaller size of the cake made for a better meat/cake ratio in the mouth, even with the halved link. 

But the Jelly Krimpets did not give me the satifying money shot I got from the Twinkies.  Dirty! 

Happy Birthday, Alex.  Get your cholesterol checked. 

entrapment, entreaty, entrechat, entropy

I finally finished "the baby's" birthday legwarmers.  The "baby" who will be 7 years old this week.  Mari corrects me when I call her this, but for Garçon & I, she will always be the baby.  When she is not with us, we call her this, as in "It's almost time to go get the baby from her ballet class, so let's hurry."  This of course begs the question of who it was doing the babying of her and when.

I do not even have time to be emotional about her being seven (7!), for I am totally lost in a wave of homesickness I did not see coming.  Kowalski and I were talking about his socks and he reported them to be super, etc, but still quite warm and so past the season.  I countered that it was 36 degrees only there and he said, "Yes.  But you know people are in shorts."

I said nothing for a long time, and then he asked me, cautiously, quietly, "Have you forgotten this?"  I admitted I had -- 40 degrees back home is warm -- and burst not into tears, but some pretty heavy-duty sniffling.  Add to this that my baby is still -- in late March and in the same 40-degree temperatures -- wanting to cozy herself in wool and mohair practically up to her heiney, plus that when we asked both children if they would want to go to Chicago for summer vacation this year, they pronounced it unacceptable as a destination (no ocean, no mountains) and here it all is still days later, the relentlessness of displacement.  I find as I go on that it is of course impossible to imagine how it feel to lose a thing that I always just took for granted, but also every time I am surprised by how painful it is to realize an absence when it comes.  Anyhow.   

These legwarmers are the improvement upon the last.  At that time, Fillette expressed wanting for a pair of legwarmers to wear in the weather, saying nothing about ballet.  As soon as I made them, she wanted to wear them everywhere, including ballet class, which was fine with me but for that the girls are not allowed to wear them the whole class (just during warm-up) and so when she removed them, her palest-pink, regulation tights were covered in black mohair lint.  I have issues and could not let this go on.  Additionally, she subsequently expressed a secret wish for a pair that was thigh-high, "Like the big girls wear."  Done and done.

Just as the last, these are from the pattern in Hoverson Last-Minute Knitted Gifts book using Araucania Nature Wool and Madil Kid Seta, both from stash.  Again, they are in the 2- to 4-hour chapter and each one took me 6 hours (three movies per leg!), and I did not even knit these as long as the pattern is written!  These are 20 inches long, which is one movie short of her project's length as published, but just the right size for our baby ballerina.  Birthday knitting soldiers on.  There are too many spring birthdays for all this knitting.  My hands are tired!  I will try to get a work-in-progress photo of the next. 

apostates, apostles

I am a big fan of hiding things right in plain view.  It is diabolical.

Because the children are accustomed to my nefarious ways, it only took them an hour of flitting back & forth to notice.  Now they are hopped up on fine swiss chocolatier's bunnies.  I am sure they would be terribly excited about Easter, if only we would have Easter, since it is so near and around their birthdays.  I can recall being pregnant with both of them and being very nervous that I would have a child born on the Easter Sunday and then of course feel obliged to name him or her Pascal/e.  It was really, terrifyingly close with Garçon.  But, phew, and now they just have a couple of regular & biblical high-minded, pretty-in-the-mouth names.      

A couple of years ago, a Playground Mom was getting really welcoming and inviting and almost-bossy about her church's congregation and my family.  I held her very politely at arm's length -- although truthfully I was horrified, who the fuck hounds people about religion? -- and even once informed her rather gaily that I could never never attend the church of my former-faith's most naughty heretic.  As Easter approached, she became more and more of a pain in my ass, until finally I asked her if her church had snakes. 

What?,  she said.  Snakes, I said.  "Does your church have snakes?  Because I already have a religion I don't really totally buy, and you know it is pretty much more aesthetically pleasing than any other on the regular, but if you had snakes in yours ... well, a snake church would be something." 

Yeah, so she refuses to talk to me still.  Good.  I have enough problems with Fillette trying to drag me into the Mass every Sunday without some stranger trying to get me to swallow Calvin.  Fillette asked to go to Mass last Sunday and despite my policy on saying yes to religion, I had to refuse.  Palm Sunday is not a good day to be a visitor.  It occurs to me belatedly that I should have taken her to take in some pretty intense Maundy Thursday glory, but Garçon would have been surly, since Jesus is not his best friend.  Although thinking about it still ... probably he would have been into the footwashing excitement.  Next year. 

salty dog

Happy birthday to Kowalski, who fell for me very the minute I proclaimed him to be trouble, and for each of us, these were brilliant instantaneous assessments.  In spite of my tremendous opposition to any involvement, he was the very study of perseverance and glacial pressure.  I would eventually realize that I did not want to live in a world where the candid ex-con sailor from the north woods could not get the sulky co-ed from the louche city to the south and so I relented. 

You are a vast landscape of simplicity that is stark without being stupid or dull, and your love for me has always been something current, open, and eternal.  There have been no seasons, and very little weather, just the same unceasing devotion in perpetuity.  I am unfathomably grateful for your friendship, more than ever in these last three years.  The ways in which you have loved your sisters and sisters-in-law while they raised small children have left you with immeasurable third-party expertise.  I know that I protest and cringe, because it is like a light that is blinding, or has the incursion of an x-ray, or the scorching constancy of a ring of fire, but after all these years of simply relenting, I have finally stopped resisting.  It is maybe the finest present for which you have ever hoped, 15 years too late. 

I made you another pair of socks to make up.  You did not even have to ask.  Happy birthday.

The socks are, as the last,  from the Eesti Trail Hiking Socks Pattern in Interweave's Favorite Socks book.  I used 4 balls of Elann's private-label yarn called Incense, a worsted-weight wool, silk & bamboo blend, in color #03, Birch Bark.  The socks are about 10 inches tall* and considerably lighter than the last pair, weighing in at just about 3 ounces each.  Even back home it has warmed up too much for handspun merino to be a guy's only handknit sock.  The reinforcing thread for heels and toes is a silk thread in a matchy-ish color I got at the JoAnn while being harassed by the children to hurry.  I used the magic loop method to knit these socks and the whole affair was less slidy off the needles.  I wanted to keep these, too, and I think the next pair of socks will be for me, as soon as I get out of the birthday knitting mines.

*I accidentally made one sock about 10.75 tall due to the slick knitting excitement of an Addi circular in the magic loop.

ceaseless chatter. run-on sentences. poetry.

This is a rather festive image of our "before" living room, but suffice it to say, in regular times, there was nothing in there.  An late 19thc settee and 2 chairs of the same era.  A mirror-less Empire vanity doing duty as a console, a television set shoved out of the way in a corner.  Mari and I finally decided we were ready to commit to our house after more than four years and maybe do something within. 

The problem is that a 100yo victorian imposes its own style, a style which is not really at all including of our aesthetic (an aesthetic which I believe could be accurately described as "if Jeannie and Tony Nelson moved all their stuff to a farmhouse that held dead people's furniture, then turned it into a brothel."  Just exactly like that), but if we wanted to live in this town, we did not have very many choices.

Because of my fabulous friend who writes small hands, I already had a copy of Apartment Therapy(the eight-step home cure), and after we visited the lovely home of Jen, as previously mentioned, I came home and looked through it with new determination.  I was surprised but not shocked when one of the exercises revealed that I am afraid of our home.  Fuck this, I said.  So, we spent long days poring over the IKEA catalog and then sucked it up and made the drive and brought some bookcases home with all of their available accessories. 

Mari spent a couple of days with his jigsaw doing customization, and now they are pretty much all set except for the thing where I finish putting on the books.  Ha.

One of the things hanging me up is that all of these books need to go out, because I do not need to keep a copy of every book I have ever read, like some wall of trophies, for the love of God.

But there is not room in the car because of these.

I just scored them and I thought that if I left them in the trunk I would not have to reveal to Mari that I went around buying pairs of pretty red slipper chairs without his input.  That was pretty much over when he went out with the car and tried to put something in the trunk.  Ha-ha & oops.  But they are too wee for him to sit in anyway so he gets no vote.  Besides my pretend Lucy Affectation of sneaking around buying antiques, they could not come in quite yet because they need to go to our furniture repair guy for a teensy repair and I have to go to the shop anyhow, during which time I intend to sign off on our wingback getting some excellent chocolate mohair action, for which I bought a quilted pillow from the lovely & careful artisan doing business as glittergoods in anticipation of the chair's arrival, all chocolatey and permanently-clad for a lifetime of wear.

I jotted this down one morning 2.5 years ago, while I was otherwise immersed in a project involving dozens of tiny postcards which were not closely-read.  Inexplicably, I woke up yesterday morning thinking of it so hard that I could not rest until I dug it up.  As with most of my work, it has no title.

I dreamt of you. I was hungover from your homeland,
where we met, in this dream, and we talked.  You
were charming and nifty, useful and solid, our
occasion went on for hours, so long that at the end
I couldn't remember the beginning,

Days went by in my dream before you died. Still I
was dreaming. So, in the dream, I shyly showed
your lovely wife and beautiful, brilliant baby girl
an essay I wrote about our time together. They loved
you ever more, this new window opened to them,
to look out where you were on the horizon, shown
now on a backdrop of snowdrifts, steel mills, rivers
that run backwards, seething with blood. You

were so tall and true on those plains, rugged and
undaunted. Still in this dream, I asked to write an
elegy, and then your girls, they teared up and I
thought, in my dream, oh! how sad this all is!! In
the beginning it seemed only as a long picnic. You
were funny, you told me that everyone should only
remember your life, so you told me just everything.

You found out that as a girl I wrote news so you kept
leaning over, across the orange table set with our
endless buffet lunch, improbably outdoors, among
these magical beanstalks of dandelions and those
legendary japanese vines and saying, "Did you
get that? Make sure you write this all down."

costume balls

Mari and the children got it together somehow yesterday and got the jack-o-lanterns carved.  No lives or digits were lost & no feelings were hurt.

If I had been a girl and someone told me that when I grew up & got married & had babies, Hallowe'en would be the busiest holiday of the year, the go-go-go-iest, I would not have believed.  I may have scoffed.  Yet, it is true, and for everyone I know with kids, Hallowe'en is the hand-wringiest, as-many-grownups-on-deckiest, barn-raisiest holiday of all.  Maybe because it is the least-supported mainstream, gentile-calendar holiday?  Because it is not really a family holiday and so it bands playmates with neighbors with stay-at-home moms who can do the school pick-up ahead of time?   Fillette's friend Ella's mom was telling me that she was looking at her week, scheduling meetings, the whole while in her head thinking -- OK, Wednesday is not good, I have to leave the office by two.  Halloween!  Crazy stuff.

But, for example, we have a Hallowe'en procession that not only closes off five streets in the neighborhood, but jams up traffic for an hour while we all cross the street into the start of the route.  It is kind of an excessive embarrassment.  Somewhere in the line of cars backed up going east and west for a mile is a young woman who has no idea that someday Hallowe'en will be the busiest day of the year.  But she will learn.

There is always something trafficky and redirectional happening around here, because of the university, so I never feel too bad about it.  But I do wonder what happens when one is a student,  no idea that Hallowe'en is the most important day of the year, minding their business in a nice rental house and then finds out that their house is on the route.  They are always really into it.  Mostly because I think that the student body does realize that they spent a fair amount of time taking of more than their fair share of resources, so now it is someone else's turn. 

I know that when I was at that age & stage, I would have been into it.  Unless I were trapped underneath something.  But, all the neighbors give out candy, and decorate, and carve excellent pumpkins.   

One of the reasons that we live here instead of a thousand other neighborhoods and a million isolated suburbs is because besides this parent-initiated road closing and traffic-cop appointing, at the end, we have snacks.  An honest-to-god refreshment table.  Because 10 pounds of fun-sized candy bars are not  enough.  This is where the people-watching is and all of we playground parents are all around, chattering, some people we never really get to talk to until Hallowe'en, unless it is at a birthday party.  Children are always sedated in the early phases of high sugar dosing, so there was nice catching up accomplished. 

Fillette got a lot of attention in her costume, I think because it was so evocative of a time known in some measure by all the parents who were out last night.  Garçon got a lot of attention in his, too.  Some because, well, he was dressed as a whoopie cushion.  But also, he had a remote-control, battery-operated, fart noisemaker strapped to his back.  Mari held the remote and every time it sounded, Garçon giggled.  Oh, but after the fart machine is put away and the fishnet tights have the knees torn out, there is only time to sell the candy to the dentist and move on to the next project.  Which is not, thank god, Thanksgiving, but something far more enjoyable.       

 

puerto rican girls. dying to meetcha.

This trick-or-treating dress-up kidstuff is so boring to me this year.  I just want them to be old enough to hang out and have a witchy little new year with me.  We found a dentist who will buy their candy for $1 per pound.  Thank god they are into money this year, because they are on it.  I confiscate half of it every year anyway, then they can't eat most of the rest.  Allergies! 

I am not one to scrapbook other people's material, but Meli put this out where I could see it today and it made me laugh until I cried. 

I am perfectly aware of the implicit sexiness of Fillette's Halloween costume -- dressing her like a grown-up goth --  but I refuse to get involved in some kind of prissery over how she wants to costume.  I can't really do anything about its perceived bullshit sexiness, since the fact is since so many supermodels and other icons of glamour have the bodies of 6-year-olds. so it doesn't matter what she wears.

She is frequently sexy in grubby old clothes, because she is a beautiful girl with a culturally-idolized, pre-pubescent body in an America that sexualizes children in a way we will never ever be able to come back from.  So, I am trying to keep her covered & not stigmatize her by having a lot to say about it with pursed lips.  I am having a hard time finding the right kind of scary face makeup, the too-light foundation, I mean. 

I am concerned about the tulle skirt, because last year (two years ago?) she almost set herself on fire on someone's jack-o-lantern.  It was more spectacular than that, as I recall.  There was a kind of tripping over her skirt and tumbling down the stairs and knocking over the jack-o-lantern as she fell so that the whole thing was a big open flame next to which she was sprawled.  I think that I am going to have Mari carry a bucket of water.  Honestly.  For a ballerina, she is a little klutzy.  She doesn't get it from me, because my klutziness is rooted in too-flexiness and she is not overly bendy. 

Garçon is dressing as a Whoopee Cushion.  Because he is that kind of boy.  The good thing, I think, is that when he is about 12 years old?  We are going to be very best friends.  Now he is too fisty and oppositional, but I think there will be a sweet spot in there where he still will love Weird Al & whoopee cushions, and model his countenance as Fozzie the Bear + Quentin Tarantino, and we will lay on the sofa together watching the Three Stooges and talking about comics.  I can hardly wait.      

spooky starts now

I am committed to the process of a 100-word limit, but due to my outlook and its default at "bleak," the whole endeavor in a daily fashion turns out more Carveresque than I would like.  I love Carver, but I wouldn't read his diaries if they looked like his fiction.  Wait.  Maybe I would.  Oh, shit, I would. 

Hallowe'en is happening this year, but not with a party & cupcakes.  Something about last year's party rubbed me the wrong way.  It could well have been the poor quality of light in the sky.  It could have been Garçon's friend Nora's mother who wrecked the whole thing for me by a. not dropping off and b. insisting on bringing along her stupid wrecky toddler.  (who is a wrecker!)  I don't know.  All I know is when I think of Hallowe'en party, I have negative associations.  I shiver, because it is scary, which is good for Hallowe'en, I guess, but too late!  No party!  We will be observing the holiday by introducing the children to the finest monster movies of all time.  We will start tonight with The Blob.  I am so ready! 

Fillette told me in the summer that she wanted to be a princess for Hallowe'en.  I said, "Not scary, try again."  She said, "I'll be a zombie princess."  OK, kid, you're on.  A month or so ago, she was reading the Vogue Fall Fashion Issue's Supplement over my shoulder.  There was a photo layout of fashion representing major music/fashion intersections of the last 40 years.  I turned to the pages representing "Goth" and she said, "Oh, Mommy!  Like that!  Zombie Princess!"

How funny that a little girl thinks goth=zombie princess.  It could be better for her and she could have a mother who does not confuse goth with punk with Ren Faire (and SCA.  it always comes back to the SCA around here!  Gah!  WHY?!), but I more or less knew what I was dealing with and she is happy with the first spooky try-on.  She needs a vegetable dye job on her hair.  She was very clear about wanting to try being a dark-dark brunette for real, not with a wig.  Everyone gasps and offers me the possiblity of spray-on color, but what about color on a little girl?  It is not anything like showing her heiney in 6yo hot pants.

She is so big & beautiful that it breaks my heart.   I found an old Hallowe'en photograph of her when I was sorting some stuff last week.  She was 3, we were all at Kaylie's.  It seems like yesterday, how can this be?  So much wrenching over time, things I can never remember knowing but indeed forgot.  I want to keep my whole heart to 100 words so I can keep everything where I can know all of it at once.