First, I am wondering if the large white thing behind me in this photo is a beached whale or a fallen tree. Perhaps it is a bleached wall? I won’t know for certain until the snow disappears.

If it IS a tree, I am curious what Ms. Manners would say if I shove it back into the neighbor’s yard. Isn’t it enough that their tree knocked my fence down? Must insult be added to injury in requiring me to remove it?

I’m happy to say I’ve written fourteen poems in fourteen days. I have sixteen more to go for the 30 Days of Poetry Challenge.

What else, you ask? What more could you want from this blog post?

Well, if you insist.

I shoveled 150-250 lbs of snow from my property. I am taking seventeen ibuprofen and eating a house.

The weather had been cold, warm and then cold again in a short period of time. I’d changed my purse a number of times. Some items were left behind in the transfer.

I mentioned the “purse change” issue to the man I was with and received a blank look. I met with a woman the next day and relayed this story as a funny Mars meets Venus situation. She said, “oh, you changed your purse because of the weather, right? It’s so hard to keep track of things with this changing weather.”

She got it.

Flash forward and I meet with a different woman. She brings out her pad of paper to write down some things I’m talking about, but she doesn’t bring out a pen. I think it’s a bit odd, but I don’t say anything. Then, she asks me for a pen.

I ask, “did you change purses recently?”

Why, yes, she had.

I’ve flown to Florida so many times in the past three months that I know the gate folks. I even know the security folks at the Melbourne, Florida airport, and they are far nicer than any other security folks I’ve met.

At BWI, I was somehow seen as a threat and flagged by the airline to be screened.

They placed me and O in a pen where O said, “this is fun, mama!” She liked the swinging glass doors. We played pat-a-cake and sang songs while waiting for the guard to get around to screening us.

I got a pat down.

Then, the male guard had to swipe all of my luggage with a dirty looking cloth.

He said, “which pieces are yours?”

I said, “this, this, this, this, this and this.”

He said, “who else is traveling with you?”

I pointed to O, who smiled broadly.

He said, “wow.”

I said, “that’s traveling with a toddler for ya.”

This is how I did it. I wore the toddler on my back. I carried a 35-lb car seat in one arm. I held a rolling suitcase with a small gym bag on top of it in the other.

We did fine until I had to take off our shoes (O’s and mine), remove the laptop from the suitcase, extract baggies of liquids for inspection — the $6 suntain lotion deemed a threat and thrown away — remove toddler from back, remove baby carrier from back and keep toddler from running through the checkpoint without me.

Someone gave me a cart to use. In all the commotion, I forgot it and hauled the 100 lbs worth of stuff down to the gate.

Miracles! The flight attendant picked up my car seat and put it into the window seat. I got it strapped in and we got all of our bags settled.

Then came a voice: “I think you’re in my seat.”

The flight attendant put O’s car seat in the wrong seat.

The woman whose seat we’d taken by accident said, “aren’t you the one that got the extra screening and now this?”

Yes, yes, that was me.

When I got on the flight to come home, the flight attendants said, “nice to have you back.” Did I detect any sarcasm? I don’t know.

What I felt was a touch of envy.

I was envious of anything of magnitude happening in Florida without my being present for it. The state of Florida is supposed to wait for me to return. In the meantime, the deal goes, nothing of circumstance should occur.

What I do is get lost in the beauty of words…

The passage below is from “The Santa Ana” by Joan Didion:

“There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point.”

She goes on to write about winds around the world that are known to make people sad.

“A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy.”

I had to share this breath-taking quote:

“On nights like that,” Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, “every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

We met San Diego for dim sum again. Back then, only one child existed among the six of us. Now, there are five children, and they all have opinions.

—-

It’s time to get back to poems for me. The trauma of August and September are behind me now (well, I await the result of one item). April and May and a part of August were delightful and full of poem writing and reading, and I want to get back to that mental space and clarity.

I enjoyed reading this:

I wholly believe that when we die, our energies reawaken in the memories of all those we’ve touched during our physical lives. The better a person we’ve been to as many souls as possible, the wider our heaven. The more we’ve hurt, the deeper the regret we’ll have to relive. Be kind to each other. Influence change. This is our purpose here and after.

I elected to attend a school in the DC area that did not provide funding to everyone. My friend went to that school a year of ahead of me, so I knew there was some animosity between the haves and the “nots.” Even though I did not receive funding to that school, I went ahead and attended for a few days.

What I noticed was that the classes seem disorganized and the classes were huge for grad school. My poetry workshop had 21 people in it.

I left after a few days and never felt bad about it. I won’t say the name of the school — it’ll be hard for you to guess — because they have new faculty and the program is completely different now.

I applied again the following year. In that year, I worked at a theatre and met a rather colorful and dramatic person. He told me about the University of Florida. If I’d not waited and applied a second time to MFA programs, I would not have learned about the one at Florida.

The University of Florida ended up being the perfect place for me. First, the geography is right up my alley. I like to be warm. I like how Florida smells. I like the tropics and green trees year round. I lived only a few hours from my grandmother and got to know her better. I like little interesting creatures such as lizards. Second, the classes were small. My entire year of poets contained only 4-5 people. The entire poetry workshop was only 10-12 people, which seemed much better than 21 to me. One other benefit is that Gainesville is an inexpensive place to live. That’s important when you have to live on very little money.

I moved into a tidy apartment complex with a swimming pool and spent my mornings writing. It was heaven. I taught, had funding and part of my tuition was paid. If I’d known I was allowed to have a part-time job at the time, I would have left with no debt. My second year, I worked part-time as a copywriter and ended up taking no loans. I was able to live on a small amount of money and end up “free” of the loans I took during my first year within a few years.

I met some of my favorite people at UF: Bill Beverly, John Poch, Dale Young, Geri Doran, Sidney Wade and William Logan. With a few of these people, I started 32 Poems.

For a lot of reasons, Florida offers a good program. I can’t say it’s good for you, yet I can say it’s worth researching if you want an MFA in creative writing.

Sometimes, it seems the people just left. We open their drawers and look at their Christmas linens, we raid their children’s abandoned Creative Playthings wooden toys, and consider the 1950s era tea cannisters or, in rare cases, a Heywood-Wakefield dining room table.

What we found at this most recent sale included pencils in cases that actually gave directions — “push” — on how to open them. That is how new the concept of a pencil box was in the 50s or 60s, I suppose. DH found a Wilkins Coffee cannister (see the ad from youtube below).

When we got home, he opened the cannister. A fine dusting of black powder escaped and covered the floor, covered our Heywood-Wakefield buffet, covered his feet, got on the baby’s hands, my feet, the baby’s feet. The black substance spread and spread. Was it coffee? Ink? Nuclear waste? (Maybe that last guess sounds odd, but I HAVE seen warheads waiting to be shipped to Iraq in someone’s basement. Ah, Washington!) DH wiped the substance up, and it seemed to spread more.

DH figured out was it was.

Graphite.

The man who originally owned the cannister had been a locksmith, and the cannister was filled with graphite. I can still taste the black powder in my mouth.

Drink Wilkins Coffee or Die Indeed!