sarah winchester’s house

Sarah Winchester, a diminutive Victorian woman, moved to California to build a house in hopes of currying the favor of the spirits she believed to have haunted her. These unnamed spooks (victims of the rifle dynasty she was made heir to by marriage) she held responsible for her personal losses — the early deaths of her husband  and daughter. She held counsel daily counsel with her ghosts, in a well-guarded seance room, where they instructed the placement of her walls, her chimneys, her staircases to nowhere, her lightless Tiffany windows. Sarah Winchester’s well-tended demons built her a house with hundreds of doors and windows, yet with no point of egress — the true “Hotel California” where one can check out any time they like, but never leave. And, for $26, anyone can take a tour. 

The Winchester Mystery House is not a happy place. One enters via the gift shop amidst a crowd, led by a seemingly jolly tour guide, expecting a kooky “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” experience, fed by television specials and hotel pamphlets advertising such. Buffeted by unsuspectingly cheerful urban San Jose (a movie theatre marquee is visible through one of the barricaded landings — “He’s Just Not That Into You”), the house’s true nature is not at all palpable from the outside. Once inside, however, the immediate attic scent of must and the wet chill rising from the stone floors of the carriage house suggest that mirth is, in fact, not the feeling of the hour. The tour guide seems angrily resigned to his post and keeps insisting, through his gravity, that he is funny when he is, in fact, not. Nothing here is funny, or even curious.  The more one learns about the house, the why and wherefore of its labyrinthine halls and vault-like inner sanctums, the less one wants to know.  Every absurd expense seems grotesque and every quirk wrought by superstition demonic. Finally, at the end, one is deposited, relieved, into the gift shop, where no one wants to buy anything. What one leaves the mansion with, instead, is a sense of immense relief. 

Hours later, though, the mind holds fast to the experience. Sarah Winchester has a way of sticking in one’s thoughts into one realizes that the gravest aspect of her entire scenario is that it could be yours or anyone’s. Sarah Winchester built a house for her demons and held their counsel, but perhaps the only things separating her excesses from our own are time, money and the Victorian flair for the dramatic. We all hold counsel with our demons. It is then that one catches on to the fact that this is not a tourist exercise, but a cautionary tale. 

As a diminutive modern woman who has recently moved to California for reasons not entirely clear, I consider myself forewarned. I will hold myself responsible for my personal losses, and I will let them go, instead of building chambers in which to hoard them. I will build simply and with care a home for my desires and hopes and not for my fears and sadnesses, a home in which no windows are blocked and where no doors lead to walls. I shall listen to the one true voice and listen to my heart and not  to my demons. 

And if I do not remember these things — may I find myself back in San Jose for another tour of Sarah Winchester’s house.

comice pears

I have recently discovered the comice pear, a fruit  so unbelievably decadently yummy that every other sweet delicious thing I’ve eaten in my entire life pales in comparison to it — even cheesecake.

Seriously.

It’s so good that I’m not even bothered by the obvious un-localness of this fruit which has traveled all the way from the far northwest corners of this country to its final resting place in my belly. I don’t care if it came from Sri Lanka — it’s that good, damn it. And cheap, at 99 cents a pound (and considering the fact that each of these babies weighs about a pound, that’s a very good thing).

Anyway, my lust for pears lately has brought me to a line of thinking, which is that I really should be vegan again. If I can get that much pleasure from a pear (or asparagus, or cauliflower, or what-have-you), why do I need meat or dairy in the first place?

I certainly don’t, is my conclusion. But I’ve come to that conclusion before, and I always end up caving — for eggs, for Fage Yogurt, for some cheap and quick form of animal protein when I’m hungry and it’s convenient.

Anyway, before this gets off to be another grave discussion cleverly disguised as an epicurian rant, I should mention other things on my mind.

I finally was able to transfer with work and am really, truly, and finally going back Out West. To Santa Cruz, California.

My mom is helping me move out there, which promises to be an adventure in itself. I secured us lodging for a week here. I start work on the 24th and arrive in town on the 16th, which just happens to be the same day Lance arrives via Tour of California. Coincidence, or fate, I ask you? I think the fact that I am now blonde definitely makes me a Lance Armstrong girlfriend/baby mama candidate.

I’m anxious and excited (or, if you prefer to use my favorite neologism, anxcited) for the move, which has been a long time coming. I came back here, if you’ll recall, thinking that I would only be here for a week or so. More than  a year has elapsed. Granted, it was a year of much-needed growth and change, but nevertheless it’s done and I need to go.

What I’m looking forward to most is a long run in the sun.  I’ve deduced that the allowance for this activity takes higher priority over most other needs. I used to think I was a complex person with endlessly demanding needs and that the secret to happiness was finding a system by which to efficiently fulfill them simultaneously — a way to keep all of the balls in the air. Now I know that there are only a few things that I really need — love, sunshine, running, music, really hot showers, comice pears — and everything else, though comforting for fleeting moments, only serves to complicate.

 

http://bridgetispainting.blogspot.com/

last hurrah

Afternoon and I am tired, I didn’t sleep last night in this big old creaky place in the woods, when I came home at 11pm all the doors were open and Boogeymen galore hiding in the upstairs, so I barricaded myself in the den, Anthony Bourdain on the TV protecting me while de-boning a leg of lamb in an RV on a desert highway — now there’s a man. All you would-be suitors, pay attention.

As a result of my sleeplessness, I spent all day leaning on the counter at work, well-hidden behind the greeting cards and veneer of Snow White smile with voice to match. You have a wonderful day, I tell them, not insincerely. I don’t mind customers, not even the mean ones. They’re rather insignificant to me, as a whole, insofar as their ability to affect me. I have bigger fish to fry, bigger fish than the spoiled ones they return every so often, wrapped carelessly in crumpled paper. People are careless and selfish — this I know — and every time I get mad at people for being that way I realize — oh, wait. I am one.

But now I am home in the end of this afternoon enveloped in Louis Jordan and crinkly beer-colored light. I think this may be my last hurrah with Grandma and it feels but like a slurry of nostalgia related to more than just her — nostalgia for places, other people, feelings, times. If that’s how I feel at a perfectly healthy twenty-seven, then I can’t imagine how she must feel at (nearly) ninety-seven. After dinner she sits at the tile dining room table and caresse the spot on her chin where the cancer grows, with a look of near-fondness in her serenely clear eyes. I think she knows what it is and she is happy that it is there.

Take me away, she might say. She eats cookies from the package I brought home. “Hm,” she says thoughtfully.

I can’t eat dinner because the smell of mashed potatoes reminds me of retirement homes in Santa Fe and Jackson and turns my stomach, reminding me that this is a retirement home, albeit of one. I feel like I should sit there and keep her company.

“I’m tired,” I tell her.

“Hm.” she replies. “Hm hm hm.”

balmy friday afternoon stream of consciousness ya-ya

I am grandma-sitting and I’m afraid I’m doing a bad job though grandma wouldn’t let on if it were true, she’s so silent lately and seems so near the end though not sick at all, just quiet and still and contemplative. She hardly says my name anymore, I’m not sure she remembers, I’m not sure she remembers who anyone is or why there are anyway anymore.

It’s the first hot day of summer this june the sixth and I drove home from work in Rosa my convertible thinking about running or riding and wondering how long it would take me to be really good at either or both of those things and probably I will have gray hair before my body finally performs at the athletic level I desire from it, but that’s alright. Better that than a dumpy middle-aged lady. I thought about the race I entered in Idaho and how I raced with the Masters class and how some of the women had legs such as I’ve never seen before, incredible, I wonder if it’ll take me that long to get those kind of legs?

I want to do something tonight involving a patio and some wine (it’s a Cakebread chardonnay kind of evening, I think) and some friends but I’m stranded out here in this island of strips malls and blah and they’re tearing down the last beautiful farmhouse in Novi to build something they call office condos, whatever they are. I hate Northville, I hate that it’s gone completely over to the people with the big beige tacky monstrous houses and Hummers, the strip-mall dwellers, the chain restaurant scarfers, that sort of people. My parents’ neighborhood is one of the last beautiful ones, and down the corridor of seven mile upon which it lies they are already cutting down trees, building houses in what used to be backyards, all to fill the bulging bellies of the greedy people clamoring for more.

Northville used to be so lovely. (sigh).

Alright, I guess I should go run.

I finished writing the above, then went on to see what Kristin Armstrong had to say today —  how lovely.

“Our culture breeds such insecurity, it runs rampant across our femininty, taking hostages in its wake.  Let’s run counter to it, circle ’round the other way, surprise it, take our people back.”

 

noxious nostalgia and boots

Oh, nostalgia, it hits me like a curtain of paint-thinner fumes sometimes, filling my addled little noggin with visions of times past, entities unrecoverable, friendships faded, loves abandoned, opportunities supposedly wasted. Nostalgia is that soccer field where there now exists a subdivision and the old man in the dingy trucker hat counting his pennies and lamenting “back when they were worth somethin’…”

“Nostalgia is carcinogenic,” a friend of mine used to say.

I’m beginning to believe him. If not entirely toxic, I have found nostalgia of late to at least qualify as an allergen. I’m convinced that it’s not the pollen in the air that makes me sneezy and chest-cleary, it’s the musty green mildew that’s grown on all the damp relics of the past I’ve kept in my attic for so many years, “just in case I need them someday.” I’ve been up there purging junk for a while now, and with all the meaningless files, outgrown clothes, and detritus taken to the dump my mental stash has dwindled down to those items previously designated as heirlooms.

What exactly is of value and what isn’t? If I throw this out, will I live to regret it? Or does it simply hold me back from growing into the woman I want to be? Moreover, if I throw this out, what will go in its place?

I once had this pair of leather boots that I bought at my favorite thrift store in Driggs, Idaho (the See ‘n’ Save). They were knee-high, leather, slouchy tan calf hide and they made me feel like a cowgirl Superwoman. In the scurrying to clean out the ski bum wreck my friends and I resided in, I mistakenly sent them back to the thrift store along with a bunch of crap I never wore and moved to New Mexico a week later only to regret for the two years I lived there those boots I left in Idaho. I inhabited every thrift store from Santa Fe to Taos to Albuquerque looking for a replacement and came up with a lot of also-rans but not quite the real thing.

Well, the oscillating fan of fate found me back in Driggs, Idaho (a place where I never could seem to leave, really. I’m not fully convinced even now that I’ve left) and, one afternoon at the thrift shop, wouldn’t you know it, there were my boots. Unchanged, waiting for me all that time. (I still have them and I wear them as often as is humanly possible, though they are due for a resoling. I even wore them in a wedding recently when I lost my heels).

I’m hoping that life operates rather like the dynamics of old leather boots and thrift stores. I sinverely hope that the objects and people and experiences and loves of real value, if discarded accidentally or needfully, can be recovered at some date in the future at the See ‘n’ Save. That’s the faith I’m operating on right now.

Alright, enough of this metaphorical rambling. The shoe reference, by the way, is a bit of a shout-out. Thanks for the inspiration, you know who you are.

 

mama’s day

On Mother’s day we drove through old neighborhoods in Birmingham ogling Tudors and pink dogwoods and bought giant marigolds in a chilling drizzle (I had planned a sunny day) and ate lunch at Papa Joe’s (she had the mushroom bisque, it was marsala-laced, deeply mushroomy and probably not vegan in any way shape or form but I tasted it regardless) and brought home persimmon-colored roses for Grandma, and a cupcake.

For a long time I had forgotten what it was like to be my mother’s daughter and I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to remember.

 

It’s funny to read the New York Times’ stumbling to describe what’s “hip” and “indie” in their review of this year’s Coachella and coming up bewildered, though satisfactorily having “discovered” My Morning Jacket. I’m not being snotty when I say that, by the way. I really do think it’s funny in an endearing sort of way, like the older relative at Thanksgiving – “Hey, I really like the Nirvana. Have you heard the Nirvana?”

Yesterday — or no, I think it was the day before, (she said as if she actually has the ability to differentiate between the days of the week) I saw Dawn Wells on television talking about, of all places, Driggs, Idaho. She interviewed me once for a job as an administrative assistant at her strange little film school there. Her office, which occupies what used to be a used car dealership, is vast and occupied by overgrown settees and lifesize cardboard cutouts of herself as Mary Ann (or Ginger. I’ve never actually seen Gilligan’s Island, so I don’t know.) At the end of the interview she patted me on the knee and said,  ”I like you, ” in that raspy old show-biz manner which begged to be followed by, “….kid. You got real chutzpah,“  or, “you’re true blue,” or something.

But she didn’t. And I didn’t get the job, despite the fact that I am true blue and am possessing of real chutzpah.

I like Jim James, by the way, getting back in a roundabout manner to paragraph #1. I never was such a big My Morning Jacket fan (and I think that’s merely because I never owned much of their music until recently) but in that scene in I’m Not There when Jim James is in the band in the little town singing ‘Goin’ to Acapulco’, that just sort of broke my heart and enamored me of him forevermore.

“Rose Marie, she likes to go to big places…” that lyric always strikes me, because I am often overcome by the desire to go to the airport and just sit there, waiting, for nothing and no one.

 

 

That last post was perhaps a little melodramatic, yet immensely cathartic. I hope no one reads it.

I am beautiful, I am bountiful, I am blissful

Today marks the day that I have been vegan for exactly one week and I have celebrated this momentous occasion with none other than Vegan Chocolate Mousse, that square vessel of pure chocolate love for which my heart yearns. It is possible that I only became vegan in the first place so that I could eat Vegan Chocolate Mousse without feeling like a big poseur.

Veganness has brought me nothing but good fortune thus far. In the past week, I have experienced appreciably less anxiety, stress, and cravings for hunks of brick cheese and cigarettes. I also have a lot more energy, though I’ve needed to consume less caffeine. This has brought me to the conclusion that either a)veganism really does live up to all the hype or b)soy, in large doses, has an opiate effect on the brain.

It’s really difficult for me to write about my personal life. I find that I’d much rather indulge in pap discussions of gastronomica, but I didn’t start this blog to discuss pap gastronomica (well, at least not all the time.) I think there are enough of those out there (and they’re better written, or at least more thoroughly researched.)

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Tomorrow morning at 5:45 am will mark the six month anniversary of my arrival back home and the resultant upheaval, which has been the most ardent proof of grace I have yet experienced, yet the most gruelingly agonizing time period of my existence.

The song is right-on, grace is amazing stuff. And I don’t just mean that in the “I found God” way, because I never found God, God was always there in some way, shape, or form and I was always cogniscant (I know I spelled that wrong, damn it) of such , I just lived in some sort of orb of cognitive dissonance. Or maybe it wasn’t even that, maybe it was that I have always been doing the best I could, and that the ante was suddenly and drastically upped during the course of the plane ride from San Francisco to Detroit. I don’t believe that “I once was lost and now am found”. When I disembarked from that plane, when I found my father waiting in the humid and dingy baggage claim that morning, I knew that I was in the right place whether I wanted to be or not. I knew that I had a good bit to learn back here, lessons I’ve been avoiding (in lieu of other lessons) for six years, lessons I couldn’t go on without. Perhaps when I met the jerk who broke my heart I fell for him and his shtick because I knew that I needed my heart broken. I knew that I needed the smack upside the head that only heartbreak can bring, to snap me out of my selfishness and vanity.

I can say with a sigh now that I’ll never be that girl again. Maybe I’ve just gotten older and wiser real quick-like, maybe that’s all there is to it, but I’ll never go back and I can’t say I’m sad about that.

There’s a gray cat meowing outside my window and a square container with the residue of mousse next to the computer and the kitchen is a godawful mess, I was supposed to run tonight but I blew it off, it’s humid, no matter how hard I try I can’t make this place beautiful and I’m so tired but Holy Shit, I’m happy. I’ll fall in love again and it’ll be alright and it wasn’t the end, only the beginning, and the Dalai Lama and Rob Brezny and the messages on my tea bags are nearly always right and just like on an Idaho highway Bliss does come right after Tuttle.

 

how I will be do!

A good way to feel awful about yourself, especially if you are a person with absolutely no educational background, is to sign up for Facebook. Then, if you are especially fond of self-torture (of the emotional variety), look up your ex. Witness the picture he’s taken of himself in the sunroom of his mother’s house (why, the very same room in which the crux of your breakup occurred!), the neatly arranged collar of his shirt, the studious expression. Oh, but you’re not done, are you? No, of course not. You have to click on Friends, don’t you? And there you encounter just what you’ve been searching for. Need I go on? No, I shan’t, because we’ve all been in the depths of this sort of depraved wound reopening ceremony.

Earlier today I had a conversation with my sociology professor on the subject of social status and my relative naivete of such, up until recent events. If one ignores, wholesale, a social force, is it possible for said force to affect that person’s life? The answer is resoundingly yes. The answer makes me relieved to have escaped, however, spending the rest of my life being treated like the hired help by all of the ex’s acquaintances. Illustrious alumae of a cornucopia of universities held in high esteem, all of them.

The disappointing aspect remains that I’ve worked hard on overcoming my reverse snobbery (another ex was fond of calling me “the working class hero” once upon a time), and I won’t let this revive it. Furthermore (and, obviously, more importantly), I won’t let this teach me a cautionary tale about love. I refuse to let this harden me into a cold-hearted misanthrope.    I found a bad apple, is all there is to it. I fell in love with a rich asshole and it didn’t work out. It doesn’t mean that all people I fall in love with are assholes or that all rich people or assholes or any of these things. In fact, I don’t think that the events of the past mean a goddamn thing. They just are what they are. Really! That’s it, my friends. The end. The bottom line.

And, you know what else? I know that my social status is nil. Fuck Facebook. Ew.  I’m a cashier at a groceryr store with a GED. I never pretended to be anything else and I never will. I’m an alumae of absolutely nothing and I simply don’t care. I go to school for myself, and not for potential employers, friends, or suitors. Hm. Speaking of which,  school is coming to a tumultuous and demanding finale. Now I know precisely why I avoided it for ten years. Having fun is so much more, oh, how do you say it, fun?  But, armed with the worldly knowledge I have gleaned from this semester, I march on.

Tomorrow, my roommate and I are hosting a party & pub-crawl, thus marking my first attempt at having any vestige of a social life since God-knows-when, since my retirement from society as a whole, which I think was about three years ago when I moved to New Mexico and took up the hermitage. I’m excited. I baked a pie.

Ferndale is such a lovely place for people who use running as a means of ogling residential architecture. Ferndale proper and Pleasant Ridge comprise some of the nicest, tree-lined, post-war neighborhoods I’ve ever encountered. Right here! In Michigan! Can you imagine? With the warmth of the spring finally settling in and coaxing the flowers (daffodils! crocuses! star of bethlehem! oh my.) out of hiding, this place feels…not bad.

It’s a not-so bad. It’s a nice-a place. Ah, shut uppa yo face.