"Ice"

I looked at my ice cubes yesterday and remembered drawing them not so long ago.  When I saw the word for the week, I looked them up because I thought "This is ridiculous!  I just did 'ice'!"  As it turns out, in March, 2015.  Oh my.  I think I'm getting old when time just starts sliding away really fast and we're decrepit and on a walker in no time.  My aunt warned me about this twisted reality.

Depending on the day I'm thinking about it, I either feel young or old.  Not young like a child or teenager or anything, just young enough that I can still do whatever I want to do.  I feel like there's still plenty of time to achieve things and really live.  On another day, I might feel like too many things ache and I'm inches from the grave and can't do anything spectacular anymore.

Both things are true, neither are true.  Life is what you make it, whatever your age.

I've been thinking of writing something for a while, in a vague kind of way.  I started a novel years ago.  I felt happy about what I had started too, and then it started descending into soppy and sloppy ideas that seemed like too much effort to clean up. I'm thinking of digging it out and looking at it again.

I know one of my self-sabotaging tendencies.  I'll look at it, it won't be great, and I'll think, "Why do it if it isn't earth-shaking?"  Well, why not?  Why stop myself from something just because it isn't the best?  I know lots of you have some variation of this even though we know that we have to put effort into things to gain the skill to do something well.  How much time did we put into learning to read and write in the first place?

I think it just depends on whether or not we enjoy an activity enough to perfect it, and "perfection" is an illusion anyway.  Sometimes I like to write.  Words flow out of me easily, and I enjoy that ease.  Sometimes it feels really, really hard and I have enough hard things to deal with.

When I make ice cubes, I don't worry about "perfect" cubes.  I just want cold tea.  If I'm feeling a bit whimsical, I might put a flower in the water first.  I made an apple cake, and supplemented my apples with over-ripe pears.  I wondered if it would work, but I didn't feel like my self identity hinged on creating the latest, greatest thing.

There's something about putting things out into the world that opens us up to fear of judgment.  I experienced those fears when I started blogging.  Now that I've been doing this a while, it feels like those fears were a million lifetimes ago.  I notice what other people prefer reading, but I'm not afraid anymore.  If you don't like this week's post, come back next week and see if you like that post better.  Hopefully I've gotten better at it with experimentation.

Yes, maybe it's time to dust off that book beginning?  Winter is coming and cold, dark days sound like the perfect time to try.

(And yes Sharon, you have inspired me with your own writing efforts on The Chorus of Crows!)

"Strong"

A boy I knew was on tv last night.  He stood in the middle of his flooded workshop and I wondered why I had never noticed how much he takes after his mother.  I was pleased by his acceptance and fatalism of spring floods and wondered how we got to be older than our parents.

I thought about the sound of his laughter as we fished and he ran down the slippery shale river bed, how he was rushed to the hospital when he got stung by a bee, the intensity of his blue eyes when we talked under the pine trees, warm memories of his artist dad's encouragements (whom I mentioned in my 2nd blog post ever here), his grandma, the fact that he was the only boy my dad actually encouraged me to play with...

He is undoubtedly unaware that I keep a warm spot in my heart for him.  I never said anything of this to him and we haven't talked for a long time.  We got on the school bus and sat with different kids.  He was oblivious to my teenaged pining as he looked at other girls.  Even so, I know there's part of him that keeps me in his heart too.  That's part of the thing about growing up in the sticks with very few kids around.  We are connected in the a way that's just a step away from siblings.  We know each other's beginnings.

When my dad died when I was a teenager, the importance of knowing someone who knew Dad mattered to me.  I got older, fewer and fewer people remembered him.  More important people in my life died, and even fewer people remembered them.  It felt like my life was flying away like dandelion fluff in the wind.

The friend of my youth lives in his parents' house.  They're gone now too.  Just down the road, my brother lives in our childhood home.  When the world changes and we miss the people who have died, there's security in knowing that some things stay the same.  Chris holds down a part of my reality by keeping his parents' house and wistfully looking at the mess in his workshop while shrugging his shoulders about the inevitability of spring floods.  Maybe I should tell him so?  But then I wonder if that's a lot more than he feels like shouldering when he's got a mess to clean up.  It just is.

The spring flood is something that connects us River Rats.  It's been a hard winter, and those of us who love the river have watched it and wondered when the moment would come.  We wondered how strong the water would roar past things we hold dear.  We all find a way to experience the flood in a soul-deep way. 

When people see the river in the summer, they say "it's such a pretty little creek".  They don't know the power that's hidden there until they see 15' of roaring water rushing past with huge slabs of ice and ancient trees caught in the torrent.  The ice jams the riverbed and the water oozes up.  The power of the silent water is even more alarming.  That's the stuff that really wrecks houses and sweeps things away.

The annual flood is catharsis.  It reminds us that Nature is stronger than anything human-made.  It sweeps things away, makes a mess, and the silt left behind is the fodder for new growth.  It's an end, but also a beginning.  Spring is around the corner with new opportunities!

"Space"

"I'm kinda bummed I missed the flood this year" I thought to myself while I drove down a twisting, scenic road next to the river.  I smiled to myself because I'm not sure if people would laugh at my dialect or feeling.

Take this dialect quiz to see where you're from (sorry, it's just the US).  I am clearly from Cleveland, but I could go to Toledo or Detroit without an interpreter.

At my first college party a boy said, "You're from one of those W cities by Cleveland, aren't you?"  ?!  That's a pretty specific 10 square miles in the world, and people on TV talk like me.  Mostly.  But even westsiders think I have an accent.  I don't see it since they're the ones who talk like farmers.  Sometimes people even ask if I'm British.  That's people from Cleveland, mind you.  No offense to my British friends, but I'm pretty sure you know you talk funny.  I know because I've watched all the Harry Potters.  Besides, everybody I've known since I was a kid talks my way.

As for missing the flood... well, I love the spring floods and we haven't had a good one in a long time.  Part of it's that people see my river in the summer and say ignorant things like "Aw, that's a pretty, little crick" without realizing that they're insulting and underestimating a force that I love.

Okay, it doesn't have a whole lot of water in it the summer, but it is the fastest river in Ohio -- which has to count for something.  When it freezes solid like it did this year, with many tons of snow on it, I expected a big event, but alas, I missed it.  It's a mere 6' deep now and the ice on the sides is nonremarkable and melting fast.

When I was about 10 or so, I was listening to the neighborhood men laying bets on when the ice would break.  We heard a low, moaning, creak in the dark night -- but nothing happened so they kept betting and drinking.  Creeeeak.  Hmmm... the men revised some bets.  CRACK!!!

The water oozed under the ice and we started walking slowly backwards.  The men laughed and popped open more beer.  The water kept coming, so we walked backwards a little faster.  Still coming, then really coming, and we turned around and ran as fast as we could and still barely managed to escape while the river ice folded on top of itself in a roaring blast before it broke free, smashing everything and everyone in its path.

The next day there was mud in some houses and other houses had been rearranged.  Above the river banks huge blocks of ice rose like staggering skyscrapers after the apocalypse.  Climbing those blocks was a terribly bad idea since they were super slick slides straight into the roaring river.  (Which doesn't mean I didn't try before ceding to some common sense.)  The National Weather Service says the record flood was 18' deep, but I could swear I've seen it higher.  Any way you look at it though, it's Nature's orgasm with a lot of water moving as fast as it can to Lake Erie.

Einstein used to stare at a flooding river too.  I don't think it's a coincidence he's the one who came up with E=MC².  I'm not sure how he factored space into this because the mass takes up a different amount of space depending on if it's frozen or fluid -- which was my original thought when I started writing about this, but even I've got to admit that's a really abstract thought even in my own head.

Photos are from a parking lot I was in earlier today.  Keep in mind that stuff has been rained on and melting for days!

"Freeze"

My grandpa stayed with me for a while once.  I had a waterbed, which he was absolutely sure he couldn’t sleep on until he woke up the next day and said he had the best night’s sleep in decades.  He strongly suggested that I iron the sheets with starch during his stay, but no matter how much I loved him, I wasn’t about to iron sheets, and I’m real sure I didn’t own starch.  Then he requested “dry apple pie”, which didn’t even make sense in my mind.  Why would someone put dried apples in a pie?  He couldn’t give me a recipe, and that was before instant internet recipes, so Grandpa didn’t get his pie either.  Don’t worry, he didn’t go hungry, but ironed sheets and pies?!  Grandma spoiled him.

Since I wasn’t burning my life ironing sheets and baking, Grandpa had a lot of time to tell me about drying apples.  He grew up in Tennessee, and the late summer days had a lot of sunshine to dry out apples laid out on the barn roof.  He talked about life before stores (?!), when they had to make everything from scratch or it didn’t exist.  Pillows were stuffed with the chest feathers of geese, Clothes were made at home, and his favorite toy was a stick whittled into a gun.  He told me about that gun twice, in way too much detail.  He talked about going into the mountains in winter with the menfolk to saw up frozen lake ice.  They packed the ice in straw and loaded it onto horse-drawn wagons which they drove home to store in underground pits lined with more straw.  Grandpa said the ice often lasted through most of the summer.  They needed the ice to keep food fresh because this was life before refrigerators.  Iced tea was a luxury for company.

Grandpa was born in 1896.  He served in WWI, but got the flu in the great epidemic so he didn’t go to Europe to fight.  He was disappointed about that when he was young because he liked traveling.  He was of a generation after the Civil War, and that war wiped out the family finances since they were on the losing side.  Grandpa said they were “land rich and money poor”, so he hopped on a train to Detroit for work.  The train stopped in Akron, Ohio and he and his brother stayed because they were told there was work in Akron.  He worked for Goodyear until his retirement, which all happened before I was born.  Grandpa was always old in my mind, but I suppose he was young once.  He talked about parties he attended in the neighboring county, drinking and carousing, and all sorts of stuff I couldn’t imagine of my completely sober Grandpa.

I thought he was handsome, and women seemed to think it too.  When I see pictures of Matthew McConaughey, I think Grandpa.  Well, maybe not quite as buff, but for all I know, Matthew has a place in my family tree, and Grandpa was buff in his day before Grandma was fattening him up with pies.  Or perhaps white people all look alike?  Or Southerners are all related?

I wanted Grandpa to tell me stories about the people he knew when he was young, but he just didn’t.  He talked about activities, like sawing the ice or watching his grandma plucking feathers from very mad geese.  I knew he loved his grandma, but I don’t have any details about why he loved her except that she made dried apple pies.  I don’t know if it matters.  The way he told stories, or didn’t tell them, was part of who he was.  The fact that he took pictures of steam engines, or the tv during the moon landing, was a reflection of the fact that he lived through a lifetime of miracles.  We talk about the wonders of the internet, but what about living in a life before electricity, cars, vaccines, tv… when ice in tea was precious?