Julie R. Enszer's Blog, page 8

Precious

When we first moved to our home, there were two donkeys nearby. One directly up the road at the business that sells plants and mulch; the other round the bend in a corner lot on the way into town. I pulled over for both donkeys at different times bringing them apples which they seemed to enjoy. The one up the road is named Precious, according to the owner of the business. He told me all about her last year when I bought mulch. She is the pet of his daughter, who was then eleven years old. After that conversation, I always knew to call Precious by name when I passed her in the car. For the past eight or ten months though, Precious has not been in the pasture. I worried about her.

On Friday night, after the sun had set, when the dogs were really just taking a final amble about the property, they started barking frantically. It was the delivery from up the road of two pallets of mulch. That is one hundred bags of mulch for the trees and flower beds. They came in and unloaded. As the finished up, I asked about Precious. Turns out, she has just been moved from the pasture at the business to the pasture at their home over in Plant City. She is doing well. No more babies for her, just love from her owner and attention from everyone in the household. Because as the fellow told me, those donkeys are always so curious, they are up in whatever you are doing, nuzzling up against you, pulling at your clothes with their teeth to get a better view of what is going on, looking for just a bit more food.

I am so happy for Precious, that she is happy and living in a pasture nearby. He told me how to get there if I want to drive by with an apple, but I can focus my attention on the one around the bend, who is also I think an older girl and obvious very loved. She lives with four or five goats and tends to them as her pack. Though she never shares her apple; she keeps that for herself.

Yesterday, as the sun was setting for the longest night of the year, I met with the board of Sinister Wisdom, which is always energizing. Today, though, I have been entranced by rain. It has rained or misted or stormed all day long. I sat on the glider on the balcony outside the bedroom and read a book and snoozed. It was delicious. I sat underneath a blanket because there was a cool breeze, and I wore my uggs. It is wonderful to do nothing, to be responsible for nothing, to simply be.

I imagine that today is like what most of the days are like for Precious. She wakes up, noses about, naps, and enjoys what the day has to offer.

It would be easy to write, I want more days like that: simple and uncomplicated. Days without goals and desired outcomes; days that do not gaze to some future achievement or milestone; days that are languorous; days punctuated not by meetings or appointments but by naps. It sounds appealing certainly, especially as we all collectively roll into the end of one year, one decade, and all seem to slow down to look around and assess. Yes, it is easy to write, I want more days like this.

I want days like this for Tibe, Samantha, and Sadie. Sadie in particular is letting go of some of her anxieties, sleeping more soundly, less on alert about what might happen to her, less interested in hunting for her own food, more trusting in the two meals a day we provide her. She still has her hound dog moments barking, but now even Tibe often just raises his head ass though to say, chill Sadie, everything is fine. Then does not join in the barking just lies back down. I want more days like this for the pack.

And yes, it is easy to write, I want more days like this and intimate for myself. It is also not entirely true. The book I am reading, it is nudging me along about an essay I am going to write over the next few weeks. I was not expecting it to prompt this essay, but it is. I’m reading and napping but dreaming about this essay and what it might be. I am making lists, imagining new things that I might do.

On one hand, I want the life of Precious nosing about the pasture and happy with each day. On the other hand, I want the master plan, the goals and objectives, the reflections back on a year on a decade, the bodacious goals of what might be accomplished in twelve months, in one hundred and twenty months. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know about happiness. How satisfied and happy Precious must be in her one wild life. How I want to create that for Tibe and Sadie and Samantha (how it seems less achievable for Vita the cat). How the magic of a summer day, or a rainy day, invites us to contemplate how we might use the one wild and precious life.

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Place

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Many of the writers that I love have particularly intimate relationships with place. Donald Hall on Eagle Pond. May Sarton in Maine. Bishop with Brazil, Key West, Nova Scotia. I grew up hating the place I lived. I did not want to be there and I was unsure why I was exiled to this shitty small town in Michigan, though I knew my parents had something to do with it and I was angry with them for it. I dreamed not of having the place define me. I dreamed of escaping.

For queers in the seventies and eighties, place was what you escaped. You escaped the small town, mid-size city, rural locale, or hamlet where you had the misfortune of being born. Escape. Escape to urban areas. Cities, gay ghettoes, were magical places, with fairy dust and chosen families and love and sex and queerness. San Francisco, the west village, boys town in Chicago. Palmer Park in Detroit. Provincetown. Russian River. Palm Springs. There were many places with pockets of queerness that made life bearable. Then place could become important when migration happened from the place of birth to the place of freedom, of queerness.

Even amid all of these issues about place, even as I rejected Michigan as my place and then later as Maryland ejected me from my place, I wanted to be tied to a place that lived deeply in my veins and my psyche. I wanted my own Eagle Pond, my own Maine, my own Key West. While I cynically recognized that the place was as constructed by the work of the writer as it occupied a place in their lives, in their minds, and in their beings, I still wanted it, wanted to construct my own place of significance.

When I was younger, Detroit was my place. The place that I chose to live, until I did not. The place that I wanted to mark my soul and my psyche with it’s grit, it’s determination, it’s resilience. In some ways Detroit is a place for me, as Nova Scotia was for Bishop, a place of origin. It was not a place that held me.

Northern Michigan is another place of mine. The smell in August of the pine trees. Of summer days waning, of the approaching long, dark nights. All of those smells envelope you in August in northern Michigan. It is also not a place that held me. It is now a place of memory for me more than a place of habitation.

Some days I think that Dover may be my place. The dragonflies, the ibises, the osprey. In the winter, three or four times a day I hear the train that passes by our house on the tracks one mile up the road. I can tell the difference between the Amtrak and the freight trains by speed and by the sound the train makes passing. Each time I hear them, I chuckle thinking about living on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. There is another set of tracks south of us about three miles. Some days in winter, I can hear those trains as well. The trains are more audible in winter when the humidity is low and sound can travel through the air more easily. Also our windows are open.

Is place something we chose? Or do places chose us? What does it mean to be of a place, to settle in, to recognize all of the rest of my days will be spent here, in this place? Or is place the location to which we want to return, the place we desire, the place we remember, the place for which we yearn?

Place as choice as choosing as chosen. Place as affection as rooted as transcendent. Place is all of these things. And more. I want the story of living in one place for fifty years. I want the pond, the landscape, the place where one lives and returns and writes. I recognize the sanctity of it even as I recognize the truth a friend once told me twenty-five years ago as I bemoaned one place. He said, If you want to know where you want to be, look at your feet. I am looking down. Affectionate. Choosing. This place.

10 Things that Interest Me but for which I Currently Lack Commitment

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As a younger woman, I boldly made lists, hatching plans of things that I might do in one year, five years, or ten. The mantra, write it down, make it happen, shaped my life, my planning process. Now, older, I am more circumspect. Writing something down feels like a commitment, even a conjuring, of how I will use my time, my attention, my mind, my energy. I am more cautious, aware as though for the first time of limits, choices to be made. Hence, this list. Things that interest me, but to which I have no particular commitment. It is a list like a Sunday afternoon open house: come in and have a look-see but no need to make any commitments, follow up, or seriously contemplate. No contract required, just an opportunity to imagine how one might live in this house.

Make Feminist Runes (This plan was hatched with a friend from college in response to all of the forms of cultural appropriation associated with feminist divination and other forms of earth- and goddess-based spirituality. We never pursued it beyond buying a few books. I still have the books. I still think about this project.)
Read all of Proust
Read all of Gide (these two seem like perhaps they are one, though they are two very different writers)
Raise goats to make cheese and goat’s milk soap
Learn pottery making skills and make handcrafted pottery of my own design with my own signature beautiful glaze
Write a book about Elizabeth Bishop (like Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson. [If you have not read it, you should. Immediately. Especially if you are a poet.] Because the Bishop poems are so beautiful, the work to which I return again and again. But no because so much about Bishop and there are so many other poets. Because she is so crucial as a lesbian and to keep reading her with that lens. But no because so much. Because. And so it goes.)
Write everything for a year on handmade paper, that is paper I made by hand (I love making paper, but have only one 8″ x 5″ form, so I would need others. It is time intensive, labor intensive, water intensive. But so appealing.)
Do another 30 day Bikram yoga challenge, or better yet a 365 day challenge
Learn Yiddish (so cool to learn language, and I know I really suck at said activity)
Finish writing my way through the 613 mitzvot, a project I started over a decade ago and abandoned some where around 170 or so

These are of course simply wishes at this point. I have no plans. I am not sure I want plans. Part of what I am thinking about is: is it too late to simply have wishes? Am I reaching an age that forecloses irrational desires, dreams, and random wants? How do we hold on to the possible as the horizon becomes more visible, less expansive?

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10 Things I Do Not Understand

How does the utensil tray inside the drawer get dirty? I only put clean silverware in there.
Why do the stacks of books continue to grow even as I have a regular practice of giving books away, donating them, limiting what comes in to the house? Are they mating? Growing new books in the shelves?
How come there is always so much work to do, and how come so little of the work makes a difference to the world?
Why does one of my finger nails seem to have a weak spot where it regularly breaks?
If our greatest desire is for human connection, why is kindness between people so difficult?
Why does travel, particularly airline trips but also car, train, and bus travel, stimulate the growth of the hair on my upper lip?
Why is what matters most so hard to determine? If I am to do what matters most first in the day, would it not make the most sense for it to be easy to determine what matters most?
What is the nature of the human psyche? How can we map it, chart it, understand it more fully? Even if we were to do that, would it still be inexplicable?
What has more value: the experience or the memory of the experience?
If community is the space in which humans discover their best selves, why is community so hard to build, so difficult to sustain, and so painful at various moments?

N.B. This post may become part of a series of list reflections as I approach a milestone birthday. It also may not.

Frogs and a Wild Boar

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This is an older photograph of the frogs gathered outside of he lanai screen door at night. I hate the metal fish wall hanging but cannot bring myself to take it down and render the family of frogs, who live under there petty much year ’round, homeless. So there it hangs. I’ve counted at least six maybe seven species of frogs on the land. They have tadpoles in the pond, from on the land, and sing many nights outside our door. Leaving the light on for them gives this particular family plenty of insects to eat when they gather around the light.

As exciting as it is to see the tadpoles and the regular army of frogs that leave by the back door, to revel in the birth of new ones also means we must embrace the full lifecycle. Currently, the garage has two frog carcasses. One is from the middle of the summer and I let it sit, waiting until fall, now winter, when it would be a reasonable temperature to clean the garage. I am not sure how that one died; it has been sitting in the middle of the garage where we park one of the cars. The other one is a newer addition, underneath a bag of potting soil. Like everything in Florida, they decay quickly. There is little frog flesh but lots of bone which lasts and must be picked up and discarded into a bush or over the fence. As I said, I do not know how these frogs died. Not dogs, not Vita the cat, and not an accidental human-facilitated death (these happen too often with the cars on evenings when the land is fecund with frogs). Yet there they are in our garage, waiting for me to clean them up. Though that phrase feels wrong, clean them up. It is too late to say bury them, and honestly with so many frogs on the land, I could not bury all the frogs that die. I do not know how to explain it, just to say, the dead frogs have been on my mind today.

On my mind, because up the road a piece there is a dead wild boar. I do not know how it died, but I saw it this morning driving to hot yoga. It is large, at least four hundred or five hundred pounds. It was lying a bit mangled at the side of the road. It is hard to imagine that a car hit it; so large, and no wrecked car near it. People hunt wild boar here in Florida, though not often in our semi-residential neighborhood. All this is to say, I do not know how the boar died, like I do not know how the frogs died. All day though, this palpable presence of death.

The nights are long and dark in December, even in Florida. A chill descends when the sun is down. The dogs sleep soundly. I have not yet heard the owls as we have in winters past nor have I heard the grunts or squeals of a boar. Nearby, cows moo and even howl. We all wait for morning to break. Each sound reminds us we are alive, all of us, together bound by the land, the sky, the sun, the stars. All of us waiting for daybreak, trying to avoid the fate of the two frogs in the garage, the boar up the road, so many friends. All our lives, this palpable presence of death.

What did you make? Who are you becoming?

I stole these questions from the inimitable Tara Shea Burke as a way to reflect on the year coming to an end. I invite you to respond as well and link to me.

What did you make this year?

Four issues of Sinister Wisdom
A calendar
A blank book
A new chapbook
A manuscript draft of a book project
A full bathroom from a half bathroom
A new vanity in the master bathroom
My office painted dark purple
An integrated pack of three dogs from a more fragmented pack last year
A few new friends

What did you learn?

The happiest place I have ever been in the world is on the old metal glider on the balcony overlooking the strawberry fields. I could spend the rest of my days there.

What big, loud idea took hold of you?

There are a few, but I am holding them close to the heart for right now, letting them fill me with their sound, their laughter, their boldness.

What tiny note of truth found its way to your lips?

If I tell you, it will kill you. My bathroom floor is tiled.

What is on your 2019 “ta-da!” list?

See the first question, though this has not been a year of big reveals. It was not a fallow year either, but I realize reading the question, I miss the big ta-da, the sense of a transformation completed.

What brought you the most joy this year?

There have been these few moments during the past months, when I go outside on our land to round up the dogs, particularly in the morning after I have done some warm up work, organizing, a bit of writing, a few emails, and I call the dogs in and sometimes, not always, perhaps even rarely, the three dogs all respond to me together, they run or saunter toward me, and they follow me into the casita. Obedient, happy, ready to spend the morning sleeping, like they are my pack and I am their leader. It brings me joy.

What did you read?

This and that. I log all of the books at Goodreads. You can see the here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/691161

Best book was Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love. I adored the book. It is about fifteen years old, and was a new discovery for me. Sharon Olds’s Arias is as good as the previous two books by her; she is writing some amazing poetry that thrills me. I also loved Kiese Laymon’s book Heavy and Nancy K. Miller’s wonderous book about friendship, My Brilliant Friends.

Bonus question: what will you read in 2020?

I have stacks of books. A photo below indicates how out of control my reading stack is. Next year I want to read more collected correspondence. I am still meandering through letters by Jane Rule and Mary McCarthy (two separate volume, not writing to one another). Always more poetry, more fiction.

What did you write?

This and that. More percolating than completed. A few reviews and essays coming out in the next month or two. Always room to write more.

What did you watch?

I love so many television programs: The Crown, Grace & Frankie, Mrs. Maisel, Shtisel, the end of Orange is the New Black, Dead to Me, the amazing series about the Central Park Five, and more. The best listen has been Dolly Patton’s America, which is still unfolding.

What has made you feel most alive?

The metal glider, the dog pack and Vita, Bikram yoga, not the actual doing of Bikram for the 69 or 75 or 90 minutes, but the hour after waking up later in the afternoon, energized, stretched, alive.

Bonus question: who are you becoming?

I am becoming the woman, the crone, your mother feared, the one she warned you about. The angry one, the harpy, the battle axe. The woman who purses her lips with disappointment. The one who cuts her eyes with disdain, derision, disavowal. The woman who says, yes, that is interesting and seems new, but what about these eighteen other items? The woman who is bitter and worn; the woman who is tired and skeptical; the woman who is particular and peevish. That is who I am becoming. Who are you becoming?

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What are you growing?

[image error]August brought its usual rain, heat, and unrelenting humidity. The plants around the perimeter of the lanai drooped first, then became waterlogged. A few died. I feel terrible as plants struggle then die. Like a bad guardian of this life that relies on me for some modest protection from the elements. The Pepperoni plant, I do not know either its formal Latin name nor any other names beside that colloquial one, had root rot after my lack of attention in August, which then dragged on in September and October. Work, travel, heat, I have many excuses, all inadequate. When the rain broke in November, the pot dried and then lo and behold, one root began to sprout again. I cleaned out the plant last week and repotted it. I hope it might live. Every day as I pass it by, I promise I will take it out of the rain next summer. I marvel at how I can still make promises that I do not know if I am equipped to keep. Every day, I murmur, I will take care of you, knowing the odds are against me, against the plant. Still, it persists with my lies.

The lavender has all died. For the moment, I have given up my fantasy of a house filled with mature blooming lavender. I have planted perhaps eight packets of seeds. Some grows, I have had a few pots that I thought might bloom. Then they died. I have thrown out the soil, cleaned the pots, tried again. Nothing. Right now I have four pots with brown sprigs of dead lavender in them. I should clean them, but I like that reminder of failure. Those pots nip at my consciousness daily reminding me, plan as you will, all will die in the end. Or less generously, you cannot keep anything alive. You are an abject failure at nurturing the world around you. I like being reminded of my shortcomings, of my failings.

Fellow writer Sandra Beasley asked the question, What are you growing?, on Facebook, I think. I cannot seem to find the original post, but she wrote about growing things on her blog. I take the title of this post from her. I imagine it in her voice and remember clearly her exuberance at a cactus that had grown large over time while she had looked away. She wrote something inspiring, something like we are all growing things even when we do not realize it. I have been rolling that question around in my mind since I read it. What am I growing? What am I growing? I am killing more than I am growing. Plants are dying, slipping through my fingers, all around me. I sprinkle seeds, they grow, then wither and die. For me the question is not, what am I growing, but what am I killing?

In my office, some scattered seeds of cacti are growing slowly and tentatively in the windows. They have long prickers (there is probably a formal name for these: spines? thorns? needles? I do not know; see, even language, which I aspire to master or at least exist with peacefully and productively, fails in my hands). They are still very small. I am trying not to over- or under-water them. So far, I have not, but their lives are still new. My cacti only small little nubs. Give me time. I feel certain I can fail them too.

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Heron

[image error]Heron is eating the fish. Every morning as the sun is rising, Tibe and his girl pack and I walk out onto the lanai toward the screen door and he sees heron. Standing in the pond. She flies away as he barks. I have not seen the fish in her maw, but I can imagine them. Goldfish are not all gold or orange. They blend to their environment. Most of ours are gray or brown. They have gotten big, about four or five inches long. Their size like their color adapts to their living environment. Many mornings as I walk by them, I think of the joke. One fish says to another, How’s the water today? The other fish replies, What water? Have you heard the news about the end of the apostrophe protection society. It makes me want to start a society for the protection of the adverb. We are losing them. How many times has someone waved as you departed and said, Drive safe! It is not only colloquial speech; the other day I heard a lost adverb on National Public Radio. We are losing the adverb, and too few people care. I care, but other things are demanding my time and attention. The fish and heron eating them. In truth, it has been a massacre here lately. In addition to heron eating the fish, the dogs are hunting squirrels together and being successful. I have had to “bury” two squirrel carcasses over the fence and one day just found a tail; I chucked it over the fence as well. In fairness to the dogs, one squirrel looked like a bird had eaten it first. Our pups just play with the squirrel for sport it seems. They are less interested in rending their carcasses to expose the innards; that is bird behavior. My pack gets fed twice a day; they simply want to play with the squirrels. Then earlier in the year there was the rabbit. I’d rather not talk about it, though it too was buried over the fence. We have our own little graveyard there, snake, squirrel, rabbit. The rat, which was on the pool, I pitched over the fence in the same place, but I feel certain it survived. It was breathing and moving and squealing in the pool net as I pitched it over our stockade. It has been a year of death on our land. Death of small creatures, each mighty in her own way. Today twenty-four years ago, my phone rang and I learned of my sister’s death. I have now been alive longer without her than I lived with her. Tomorrow morning, I expect to see heron, drinking from the pond, eating the fish. Some days I wonder, am I heron? Fish? Squirrel? Rabbit? Rat? Hunter or prey? Who are you? What are you hunting? Where is your graveyard? What phone call will change your life?

Everywoman Her Own Theology

A project that I have been working on for a number of years is nearing its entry into the world. I hear that it can be downloaded on Kindle now. Soon the embodied book will be in the world. I cannot wait to hold it! It’s been a great pleasure to work on this book with Martha Nell Smith.

Here is the book cover as a preview–I’ll post a photo when it arrives in Florida!

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Want to order a copy of the book? It is available on Amazon here or you can order directly from the publisher.

Summer Achievements and Future Promises

I had two summer goals for cleaning up around the office: empty out a file cabinet, shredding the paperwork that did not need to be retained and filing the rest away, and put the extra set of Sinister Wisdom issues into storage.

As of today, both have been accomplished, though I am still waiting for someone to come and snag the file cabinet based on my compelling post of it in the Facebook Marketplace.

Yesterday was the last day with my fabulous Sinister Wisdom intern Sara and as one of her last projects, I made her pack up the books in a plastic crate. Together we carried them upstairs. At the moment, I do not have a good storage place for them, but as issues of Sinister Wisdom continue to fly off the shelf, we will eventually get it stored on the storage shelves and I will fill the plastic crate with the new issues published.

I have no immediate plans to stop editing and publishing Sinister Wisdom, but I do know that I will not do it forever–and I hope that I do not do it so long that I am the only living previous editor! Putting together the full set of back issues – and having a young woman help me put them in storage – was an intention for a promised future when there is a young woman at the ready to take over the editorship of Sinister Wisdom. On one hand, the future makes no promises; I am well aware of that. On the other hand, the future is something to envision and plan for. I am planning for the future of Sinister Wisdom at least through her fiftieth anniversary in 2026. At some point after that, I plan to pass her on to another writer, editor, publisher, and activist. The back issues now are ready for her to take them.

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Photos of the issues lining my shelves. Two more shelves were secured in this bookcase–always a necessity for avid readers like me!