Last August, farewells

On a foggy late-summer day, farewell to a house I lived in for a long time but hadn't lived in for a long time. It looked more beautiful than usual that day, nearly empty, filled with diffuse light, recently repainted with the floors refinished (and more) to get ready for sale.

A farewell that didn't turn out to have been a farewell after all, after my father changed his mind and moved back into the only house we ever all lived in.

A farewell to my mother, moving several states away after 40+ years in San Francisco. 

This was the evening after the moving truck came and went, the evening before my mother and her sweet kitty left with my big sister. Zinnia was a bit at loose ends in the nearly unfurnished space, trying to understand it all, I expect.

The movers hadn't been willing to pack some spillable items (cooking oils, hair products, etc.). My mother was fretting slightly about what to do with them. I said I could use some of them. I still laugh remembering my sister pressing the whole box of them into my hands, saying with a smile but a heavy emphasis, "Just. Make them. Go away." We have that mega bottle of vanilla extract in our kitchen still. 

I stood at the back window and remembered the many, many, many times I had looked out at the ocean here, or in the ocean's direction on these foggy days. The five-story building that went up when I was in elementary school, painted a glaring coral color, that filled one of our western windows instead. How we grieved the old view. The breeze coming off the Pacific into my bunk bed on warm nights, the traffic noise that one could almost, with a great deal of effort, mistake for the noise of waves breaking.

When it's clear, you can see the tiny bumps of the the Farallon Islands on the western horizon. On the clearest days of all, not just the southern but the northern Farallones, and Point Reyes to the northwest. The spray of the surf visible from more than a mile away, on wild days.What a wide sash of blue, blue, blue that we climbed the hill behind our house to see better on sunny days.  How it turned a glancing silver in certain lights, or the mysterious streaks of darker gray-green on its surface that I found so enchanting. I think now perhaps it was the shadows of clouds too distant for me to notice. 

Collection

Recently I bid farewell to most of my collection of thrifted purple dresses. It's been a long time since the days when I wore dresses and skirts seven days out of the week, and in some ways I miss them. Those days, I mean.

Returns

A return to ballet classes means also: a return to hand-washing. Muscle memories and plain old memories.

When I was fourteen I took my first ballet intensive, which meant not enough leotards to make it through to the weekend load of laundry, especially with the sweating of a second-story ballet studio on the sunny side of town, with minimal ventilation, at mid-day, in mid-summer...

 My mom showed me how to plug our little porcelain bathroom sink, drizzle a little Woolite in, fill it with warm water and swirl my leotard and tights around. Swirl, swirl, let them sit. Rinse, wring, and she'd tell me about hand-washing in Greece when she was a student abroad without a washing machine, how she and her roommate would fill every available vessel in the apartment on their designated day, including the otherwise useless-to-them bidet; how hard it was to wring their jeans out, how the lines of drying clothes filled the apartment (or did I imagine the last part?). Lay the garments out flat on a towel, roll it up lengthwise, twist and coil it up to wring out even more moisture, and let it sit for five minutes before hanging them up to dry overnight.

I acquired more leotards, and class decreased from six to four days a week during the school year. Hand-washing remained the summer evening ritual, and is locked away in the same part of my brain as the late sunsets, hot afternoons on public transit home fading into western San Francisco fog, and the Brahms CD I carried around in my Discman.

Three stories about moonlight

ONE.
My father's father and mother were young and newly married. He was still a med student; she was working to support him and they didn't have much money, but they needed a car and so had just bought their first. It was some shade of not-quite-pink (coral?) and had a glass top. They decided quite spontaneously to visit her parents for dinner that night, a few hours away. After dinner, they packed up all the leftovers to take with them so they wouldn't have to buy groceries for another week or so, and on their way back they watched the full moon rise through the roof of their car.

TWO.
The grandmother of the boy who told this story to an auditorium of us his peers. She, like him, was born deaf, and in her time that meant you got taken away to a boarding school where you were forbidden to use sign language. But when the moon was bright enough, the girls in the dormitory would creep from their beds at night and sit in a circle by the windows signing to each other by its light. Once they were caught. She made it back to her bed in time, but a friend of hers didn't. She watched a school administrator strike her friend so hard that she fell and hit her head, and they took her away with her head bleeding. She didn't see her again.

THREE.
When my sisters and I were little, our parents' fail-safe way to soothe us if we got upset too close to bedtime was to fold us up into a ball and wrap a down blanket around us, and then fold that up in their arms and carry us on a slow walk around the block in the dark. I remember the feeling of night air on my face when my cheeks had been hot and sticky from crying. My dad says he'd point to the moon to distract us and we'd talk about where it was in its phases. Sometimes my older sister needed to come too, and I could look up ahead through the quiet and see her in the other parent's arms in the next streetlight.

Air

Today was warm enough to open my window for a while. I sat down in a pile of clean sheets at the sunny end of my bed to read a Weberian analysis of French Catholicism and to feel the fresh air and light on my face and arms. I cannot wait until it is warm enough to leave the window open through the night.

One of my favorite memories from my childhood: night, in bed, reading on my stomach by a small light. I slept on the lower bunk and our bed faced the window which faced westward, with the ocean in sight during the day. Many evenings it would be open a few inches letting in the dark sky's wind and the noise of traffic, and I could feel the sweet cool west-coming air on my face but the rest of me would be wrapped up in a blanket. I told my mother then how much I loved this, and she said, I think, perhaps because when I was a baby and awake at night she would hold me bundled up by the open window like that.

missing. missing. missing.

Ellie.

parting was: almost one year ago.

I still don't know how long missing lasts.

Nothing post

Glebe. (Sydney, October 2009.) My roommates and I went walking after midnight, I barefoot and in pajamas. A smaller bridge, the harbor. Two of them were from Germany and one from France. They were going to be here much longer than I was. I walked ahead of them, or behind? I didn't keep pace with them, because I wasn't interested in what they were talking about.

Earlier we had been up on the roof and I remembered I don't like beer and was dead tired anyways. As I am now.

I have always been enamored of the shadows that streetlights cast through trees any time of the year but winter. In Glebe. In Wheaton. I found an unlocked bike and no one noticed the honey stain on the carpet, and I made off with it. But there was another night when it was foggy? Or? And rode through the shadows of still-clad trees. Winter wasn't even a scent yet.

Almost everything I remember from that semester was night. How did that happen?

This was not recent

Starting in February, there were these nights when I couldn't sleep because I got mad depressed as soon as the lights were off and I was alone with my thoughts. The first time it was because I had had too much espresso too late, so I just sat there heaving sobs until my roomie woke up. She was the best. She would distract me, tell stories or read aloud or pull me out to walk to the neighboring elementary school's playground. Or not distract me. Whichever helped. We came back at four in the morning and burned incense and boiled water for tea to spell away the demons. By then I'd be tired enough to fall asleep, tired enough that I'd almost fall asleep on the floor while my tea steeped. It was some kind of rose flavor, stolen from our cafeteria, which I later found out was artificially flavored. Raspberry rose. Anyways that was kind of a shame. And the next day we'd both be dead on our feet, sleep as soon as we got out of class, as much as we could afford before starting homework, and wait until we had to do it all again. Night depression is the worst thing I've ever been through and I'm grateful I didn't deal with it often after that semester. She was the best, though.

Answers

...to the question-box questions.

In homage to the most mind-blowing of all the Formspring-like questions, I find myself compelled to ask...

Who do u lyk? LOL

Sorry. I'll never do that to you again.

xoxo

Oh, you're funny. That gave me such a flashback to middle school! (And no romantic interests at present.)

When and why did you start writing—what sparked your interest?

In school! You know, assigned stories and picture books and stuff. Then we got a poetry teacher for a little while in fifth grade, which I loved. When I started journaling steadily for the first time, when I was thirteen, that was the door opening. Sometimes rather than a regular journal entry, I wanted to write about an experience in a more polished, creative way...I still tend to write mainly from my own experiences.

How old are you? (I'm sorry, isn't that one of those rude and taboo questions? In that case feel free to ignore! I just wondered...)

No worries, I make free with that piece of information. I turned twenty-one in April.

How closely do you follow onepartgypsy.wordpress.com? (I've seen you comment at least once.)

I subscribe to its feed. :) Gabi sent me a link to one of its post once that I really liked.

On stuffed animals and other lovies

When I was really little, I had a pink pig. He got lost at Disneyland and we never found him.




Then I got a teddy bear whom I called Snowy Bear and carried everywhere with me. He had a silky ribbon around his neck that I would wind through my fingers while I sucked the fingers on the other hand. People would always be tying his ribbon in a bow, which made me mad.




When he lost a ribbon, my mom and I had to look carefully for a replacement that was silky on both sides. When I had to go to school without him, at first I carried his ribbon in my pocket for secret courage.

At school, I sleep with a ratty speech bubble pillow. [nerd pillows here]

And at home, I have Nyago, my sleeping-faced Sanrio cat from middle school.




I just don't sleep as well without something for my arms to hold. If I don't have a stuffed animal, I'll hug the edge of the comforter. Otherwise I toss and turn and my arms feel too long and empty.

What about you? What was your lovie when you were little? Do you still have a cuddle-thing?