Molly Fisk's Blog, page 9

Eminent Domain is Such a Drag When It's Your Domain

Just when you think life might settle down, the universe decides it's not finished with you yet. This time it was a letter from my neighborhood association announcing the widening of our road to accommodate bike lanes.

The good news is: construction won't start for another year and bike lanes are a fine idea. The bad news is how much of my front yard is slated to disappear. When I looked at the graphic depiction, I burst into tears. Then I recovered and called the County to have someone come show me exactly what would be taken out.

Thirteen years ago I bought this house, uninhabitable at the time, with a windfall arts grant and a loan from my dying mother. In the course of shoring up the southeast corner we accumulated a certain amount of dirt, with which I made an ersatz berm between me and the road. There's a six foot drop off there, down to the drainage ditch Then I planted a hedge to block out the sound and view of speeding cars. There was already a 60-foot pine and two old plums. I planted a paper-bark maple, a crabapple, random shrubs people gave me, and lots of lavender. A few years later we put up the cat fence. My front door is 34 feet from the road.

The proposed changes will take down trees, hedge, and shrubs, and it's likely I'll have to move the lavender so they can bring in their equipment. If I want to save the crabapple and maple, I can get them moved, but the crabapple may not survive, and has a life-span of 15 years, so I'm being advised to plant a new one instead.

I've heard the County will offer me some money in exchange for this headache, but I don't know how much. That tall pine gives my house morning shade, and I'm betting the six feet or so of vertical ground they're removing from in front of my door blocks a huge amount of noise, so it will be a lot louder here. As a person who keeps her doors open all the time, I can't see how this is going to be anything but bad news. I already hear what the bike-riders say when they whiz past, now it will feel as though they're going to ride right into my lap.

I haven't explored all my options yet. Maybe I can dispute what the County wants to pay for this land grab, or cajole the designers to push all the changes across the street, where there's only a vacant lot and no pines. I don't want to move, I love it here!

I'm frustrated and pissed. But it is a great education. The right of eminent domain seems like a sad but reasonable thing when you read about it in the news, applied to some out-of-state engineering project.

Not so much fun when it's taking away your own front yard.

Interview with Molly Fisk

New Interview up at Poet's Quarterly, by Millicent Accardi who does some of the prompting for our Poem-a-Day adventures.

http://www.poetsquarterly.com/2013/04...

Michael Moore's Kindness & Walking Fitness Program

I used to be something of an athlete. Not a natural athlete, though I'm coordinated. I made myself do athletic things because I thought it was good for me. I might have become a natural athlete if I hadn't been put on a diet at age 8, or told to go outside and play all the time, instead of staying indoors and reading a book. My natural instinct to rebel got very well-developed resisting my family's efforts to help me not get fat.

Bullying and coaxing a child to go on diets at an early age is the best way to ruin their organic responses and ensure they lead a life of yoyo weight loss and gain. Left alone, most of us will eat to satisfaction and move around because it's fun. Maybe there's some overeating when you're a kid, a certain kind of kid, in response to the world around you, but a lot of that goes away on its own as you slog through puberty.

I don't need to go into more detail about the culture we live in, do I? The way fear of not being desirable is instilled in girls and women so we hate our bodies and without regular effort will doubt ourselves all our lives? You know the diet and beauty industries are billion dollar concerns, right? And keeping women unsure of ourselves effectively negates our power to do useful things like run for public office, discover galaxies, and invent electric cars? I thought so.

Studies of motor development show it takes 300 repetitions to get something into muscle memory so it's habitual. That's for something new, like learning a yoga movement. To stop doing one thing and start another, i.e. to change a habit, it takes many more: around 3000. So if you wanted to stop smoking a cigarette the minute you wake up in the morning, and drink a glass of water instead, it would take you 3000 mornings to incorporate the shift into your life. (That's bout 8 years.)

Even though I'm not a “natural” athlete, I like moving around, and I haven't been doing enough of it lately. But this week I've been inspired by that famous exercise guru, film-maker Michael Moore. About a year ago he jumped up and went for a brisk 30-minute walk, prompted by something on Twitter. He has a lot of followers on Twitter, and quite a few people went with him, but in their own towns. He's been doing this every day for almost a year, now with thousands of virtual companions, and is feeling pretty great, but resists thinking about it as something he “ought” to be doing. “Walk to walk and nothing else...,” he says. “We do it because it feels good. We do it because we can. We do it because it's free and takes no time.”

It's just started hailing but I'm putting on my raincoat and sneakers. 15 minutes away from the house, and 15 minutes back.

Want to come?

Balloon Up Your Nose!

It began with a cold, the kind most of us get every winter: headache, congestion, coughing, sneezing, post-nasal drip, and it's gone in seven days no matter what you take to make it end sooner. In our town, a few of us also got nose bleeds. I got six small ones, and then as my symptoms subsided, I got one that lasted an hour and a half. My EMT-trained friends taught me you don't lie on the floor with an ice pack under your neck the way we did as kids. You sit on the couch upright, or lean forward, possibly over the sink, and hold the bridge of your nose tightly for 20 minutes.

I hadn't had a bad nosebleed in years. I'd forgotten how the human head likes to bleed, and how red the blood is. The verbs “gush,” and “spray,” come to mind, as well as the adjective “ginormous” and the noun “clot.” I used up two boxes of tissues.

But then it was over, my cold got better, and I went about my business: bringing in firewood for the stove, not drinking enough water, eating very little kale, and so forth. Two nights later, I woke to a blood-drenched pillow. That was a dreadful mess to clean, but I stopped it myself. The next day, however, the bleeding started again and never ceased. I drove one-handed to the ER, where a nice doc who couldn't have been older than 12 cauterized my nose and then “packed” it, which is what they call the balloon trick.

These balloons look perfectly innocent, although twice as long as a human nose. This is because there are caves in our heads, with room to stuff things in. I should have been forewarned by the doctor's wince as he pushed this item all the way into my orifice. That was bad, but tolerable. Then, as is typical of balloons, there was inflation. A syringe. A tube drooping out of my nostril. And they tape the tube to the side of your face, so you can't pretend something isn't terribly wrong.

I hope you're drinking a glass of water now, and wondering where in the attic your humidifier is stored.

I had a few anxiety attacks, but after 48 hours was allowed to take the thing out myself, had a blissful day, and then, in a public restaurant with a friend, bled all over my dinner salad. Back to the ER. Five days this time. Despair, desperation, homicidal thoughts, abject self-pity.. Extremely kind people took care of me, which was amazing and completely undeserved.

But we think it worked. I haven't seen a drop of blood in a week. The dull all-consuming ache in my sinuses is gone. I'm so grateful I want to cry. The ER bill is going make me actually cry, but I hope I can still be grateful as I pay it down a few dollars a month for the rest of my natural life.

An Apiary Has Nothing to Do with Apes

One of the things I'm good at is linking people together. Not match-making, although two couples have married who fell in love during my poetry class. Usually it's more practical: This person needs a plumber and that person is a plumber. Or an electrician, a chef, a child-care provider, a psychiatrist, a u-pick blueberry farm entrepreneur. I cannot tell you anything about Chinese history or the fallacies of logic. If you want to know what Fibonacci numbers are, you're on your own. But if you need someone to trade you a massage for homemade sauerkraut, get out a pen and I'll give you her number.

Which is why, sitting here in my favorite cafe, I'm staring at an enormous jar of honey. A few months ago a friend of a friend was asking around about where he might put some of his beehives. I volunteered my back yard, wanting to support the troubled bee population, but he had someone else near enough to me that the hives would get mixed together, something a bee-keeper doesn't want. So I looked at the map in my head and suggested three other places that might work. He called those people, and indeed, all of them will be hosting his hives this spring. Sometime later I saw him on the street and we talked for a minute. He was looking for a spot in a particular area, and I knew someone who lived there. Voila! We think that one's going to work, too.

You know how it is when something is easy for us to do, we kind of assume it's easy for everyone else, too? That turns out to be false. Not everyone has a map in their head, or remembers that Dave's growing blueberries, Mike's got 20 acres, and Talei, the herbal- gardening guru, just moved to a new place off McCourtney Rd. Not everyone listens when people ask questions, either, or remembers them two weeks later.

I admit these skills may come from a long life of butting my nose into everyone's business. But just to practice some self-compassion, let's say there's another reason. Abstractions just don't hold my attention. I don't care about logic, fallacious or valid. I care about people. Their stories, where they live, who they love, what they're up to. I'm fascinated by how different we all are and at the same time, how similar. Plus, as a kid I was really good at Concentration, the game where you scatter a deck of cards face down all over the floor and see who's best at picking up two of a kind.

In another life I might have been buying spices in Mumbai to sell to the King of Spain's head baker. But in this one I'm a poet, perched on a stool at a coffee shop counter. I use my skills for fun, and to grease the wheels of community. I get paid back in smiles.

And sometimes, in great big jars of thick, gold, late-season, local honey.

A Birthday Card for My Brother Sam

-->
Tomorrow my younger brother Sam turns 50.

I still don't believe it.

From my vantage point of eldest kid in the family, Sam still seems about eight years old. Even at his wedding. Even at our mother's memorial service. The jaunty eight-year-old grin and blond hair flopping over his forehead are clearly visible to me behind the surface of this bearded adult.

I have plenty of friends who are 50 and 40 and 30, and I don't feel much older than they are. We trade wisdom and understanding back and forth regardless of our years, the same way I do with my friends who are 60 and 70 and 80. But I didn't take any of them to see Fred Astaire movies at the Surf Theater when I was in high school. They didn't tap-dance up the aisle singing “Shall We Dance?” to the applause of a motley San Francisco audience in 1971. None of them came out with legendary pronouncements while running to be first into the car on a family outing. For 44 years we've repeated what Sam said, as a way to fend off reality at various moments: “Anyone ahead of me is not in the race!” A Zen koan, out of the mouths of babes, if only we'd known what the heck that was. It's a very smart mantra for the youngest in a competitive and sarcastic family.[image error]

Sam is famous for his Christmas-present wrapping ingenuity. One year he gave me a pair of earrings “wrapped,” quote unquote, in a banana. He cut two little plugs out of the side, maybe half an inch deep, put one earring into each hole, and then put the plugs back in on top. No paper. No ribbon. Just a browning banana under the tree with a little card taped to it. Not everyone's brother can find something around the house to wrap a present in that is this funny and this effective at the same time. I definitely had no idea what the present was, which is the point of wrapping in the first place.

Last month we got a generalized hate letter here at the station, directed at broadcasters and staff alike. The disparaging remark about me was the name “Molly I-Have-More-Friends-Than-You-Do Fisk.” When I heard this, my second thought was, “what's wrong with having a lot of friends?!” But my first thought was, “Hey, you haven't met my brother Sam!”

Sam sees friends from our old neighborhood once a month, and a circle called The 8th Graders meets for drinks several times a year. He and his closest pals are in and out of each others' houses daily. I met these people when they were four feet high, most memorable for making too much noise and each drinking half a gallon of milk at one meal. I'm sure they'll gather around for Sam's birthday tomorrow. They may even drive themselves to his party, though I can't imagine how their feet will reach the pedals.

Contrails & Happiness

 -->
Don't tell anyone, but I have a secret. I've been keeping it quiet — this is mid-January, people are cold and cranky and everyone I know seems to be arguing, either in person or on Facebook — I haven't wanted to irritate anyone further.

Most of the arguments — incredibly heated, the kind that wreck friendships in the blink of an eye — are about things like whether contrails are a natural result of airplane flight or a government plan to change our atmosphere. Or how long we have until global warming kills us off: six years? 25 years? Can we reverse the effects? Is global warming a liberal fantasy in the first place?

I know how an argument like this — big question, impossible to answer — can jeopardize an otherwise thriving relationship. My favorite ex-boyfriend Tad and I only had one subject we truly, passionately, disagreed on: whether O.J. Simpson was innocent. From here it seems ridiculous, but we almost came to blows. Once a year this would come up and ruin a day for us. We never resolved it: neither capitulated to the other's view. We either got tired of fighting or something else struck us as funny and once we got laughing together again, we were fine. Tad is dead now, so I've won the argument by default, which is no consolation.

In my humble opinion, arguments over O.J., contrails, and global warming are part of a basic issue that everyone faces: are we in control of our lives, or are we powerless? And if we're powerless, how can we learn to bear it?

Not being in control is a primal human fear. Without agency, how will we survive? We try to protect ourselves with knowledge, skills, understanding, or surrender. Yet even those who've turned themselves over to one of the gods and said “Thy will be done.” still get plenty attached to the placement of a backyard fence.

Powerlessness is something we run into all the time. Sudden death from disease or car crash. Betrayal, adultery, divorce, the roulette wheel landing on red instead of black. Genetics. Admitting this — carrying it around in your breast pocket every day, is hard. But not admitting it keeps you constantly battle-ready, likely to join every argument-du-jour just to prove to yourself and others that you're in charge.

You're not in charge. Neither am I. That's no secret.

My secret is that ever since October 9th, the day I suddenly accepted that I had been powerless when I was being hurt as a kid — which happened in a fancy restaurant in Portland, Oregon of all places, and felt entirely physical, like being doused with ice water — I've been slowly growing happier and happier.

It's January. I'm still single. Wrinkles still crowd onto my face like shipwreck-survivors into a lifeboat. My bank account, as usual, nestles comfortably in the low three figures. The weather's unseasonably warm and white lines criss-cross the winter sky. Nothing in my life has changed.

Except I'm happy. And everything's changed.

Wild & Scenic Film Festival trailer

Here's my voice over for SYRCL's (the South Yuba River Citizen's League) introduction to the film fest.

Wealth Measured in Persimmons

Despite my best efforts, I'm a pioneer-woman-manque: I want to be Laura Ingalls Wilder, but I don't have the stamina for it. I let kale and beet greens get fuzzy in the icebox and have to compost them. I have no interest in hard-core farming practices like killing chickens. What I want is to careen around the kitchen in a cute apron making delicious things to give away, and getting praised.

This summer I learned to can, coached by my friend Janet, and made tomato sauce, tomato soup, and stewed tomatoes. The sight of all those jars gives me inordinate pleasure.

Then pears began falling off my tree. For two weeks they littered my counters, some intact and ripening, some bruised from falling, some with holes where birds pecked them. I don't mind the smell of ripe fruit, but fruit flies drive me around the bend, so at a certain point I had to buckle down. I sliced the still-beautiful pears and preserved them in brandy. Everything else I chopped up and made into Naked Lady Pear Sauce. This is done with cut-up pears, red wine for them to poach in, and cardamom. You boil it for a long time and then run it through a food processor. It's called “Naked Lady” because I first did this with friends in a hot kitchen and we took our shirts off while cooking. Also, adding wine gives it a fleshy-rosy color.

My fruit trees have an every-other-year cycle, so I don't have to do this all the time, thank heavens. We also get a lot of late spring snowstorms, which knock the blossoms off and we don't get any fruit at all. I'm prepared in a vague way to deal with harvesting, but I don't think about it until the last minute.

This fall, my 12-year-old Fuyu persimmon tree, which has borne fruit only twice since I planted it, went wild right under my nose. The leaves turned a glorious dark orange and then all fell off during a storm, revealing what I thought were 40 little orange globes. I love the way they hang on the denuded trees like Xmas ornaments.

I picked a few and ate them in salads. My sister Sarah got out the ladder on Thanksgiving and gathered as many as she could reach. Forty turned out to be a hallucination: there were more than 300. They filled baskets and covered counter-tops. Sarah took a bag home with her, and I gave about 60 to friends. That left me with about 200 persimmons. Some I've packed into jars with brandy. Some I'm drying, to eat with my morning oatmeal. Naked Lady Persimmon Sauce might be good, or persimmon chutney.

But we've discovered they're fabulous roasted with pepper and sea salt for 20 minutes in a 350 degree oven. Really. Crumble some bacon and feta over this for any holiday meal. You can't go wrong. It's perfect pot luck fare: gluten-free, cow's-milk-free, unapologetically organic. If you've got persimmons coming out your ears, I recommend it. Bon appetit!

Life is a Hurricane

-->
We're expecting a big storm. It's already dropped 20 degrees since midnight, and was windy enough that the glorious leaves dropped off their trees. Millions of pine needles blowing around have formed strange lumps on the streets: they look like roadkill porcupines — but we don't have porcupines here. Something in the make-up of the storm gets everyone excited, but I'm not enough of a meteorologist to know what it is. Negative ions, the sound of the wind, or just the power implicit in thrashing branches and how fast clouds scud across the sky.

This is an ordinary California winter storm. Nothing like the hurricane last month that washed parked cars down Wall St. and destroyed New Jersey boardwalks. People back east are still without electricity, and they're getting snow today. If they're lucky, they're huddled at home with blankets and generators. If their houses were wrecked, they're crammed into friends' apartments or staying in shelters.

Sitting in my chilly house thinking about this, it seems unbelievable, in that way we have a hard time comprehending anything not currently happening to us. I can recall being without power for a week, but it's more of a thought than a visceral feeling. I remember how boring it was after the third day, and that I was never ready for darkness: I ran around searching for candles at dusk with great irritation.

The good thing about prepping for a storm is you've got something practical to do. This has been a month of such high emotion, what with San Francisco in the World Series, Hurricane Sandy, and then the election. But for most of us it was all abstract: events we watched on computers or televisions, and weren't able to do much about. Sending a last $5 donation to Obama didn't take a lot of effort, and even if you were rabid for the Giants, you couldn't do much more than jump up and down. They don't let the fans actually play any baseball. But now! Firewood and kindling need to be closer to the front door. I washed my lone red leather glove, the one I use to poke at the wood stove's embers. I lowered the summer umbrella and put away the lawn mower.

This is going to sound funny coming from someone who makes her living with her head, but I think we're all going crazy from too much abstraction. Nothing more need be said in my lifetime about the damage watching TV can do to your soul, or how addictive Facebook is. But the follow-up ideas seem to get lost. The reason those pursuits are problematic is that they don't involve the body, and it's our bodies that constitute reality. They're what needs sleep, and lunch, and touch. They feel better when they're moving: walking precincts, pitching a soft ball, or cleaning flooded houses. It's time to start living inside them again.

That's the message I think Hurricane Sandy delivered, and today's storm will reinforce. Abstractions are all very well, but it's our arms and legs and hearts that need to be ready for what's next.