february photo-a-day challenge

My eleventh month of photo-a-day-ing. Here are the challenges:

And here are my photos from the month:

january photo-a-day challenge

Happy New Year! Here is the challenge list for January:

And here are my photos from this past month:

a crack in everything

I was not always the enthusiastic, vocal advocate of Metamucil that I am now. Years ago, the things I liked to eat were largely also the dishes most likely to stop you up. That changed when I was in my twenties.

It was the summer of 1997, six months after my sister had died. We were at the KOA in Flagstaff, Arizona. I had been beset with recurrent butt problems for over a year at that point. Because of a lack of fiber in my diet, I suffered from something technically called a "fissure," which is a small muscle tear that is difficult to recover from once it originally happens because—no way to put this delicately—the sphincter tends to spasm continually and involuntarily, causing it to bleed and preventing the muscle from healing. That June, my parents had loaded my brother and me and my spasming anus into our rigged-up conversion van (which my mom had nicknamed Vincent, as in "Van Go") and traveled out west. I went willingly, but Jeff, who had a very active social life that had just cranked up for the summer, dragged his heels. By the time we got to Arizona, Mom and Dad were desperate to wean my eighteen-year-old brother from his cigarettes, so, as I wrote in my journal, "they kept plying him with beers instead," to keep him in a good mood. One afternoon, Jeff and I sat at the picnic table at our campsite in the blessed cool of northern Arizona, drinking Coronas and playing gin rummy. I lost to him several times in a row and finally muttered to no one in particular, "Damn it! I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground today." Without missing a beat or looking up from reshuffling the deck, Jeff deadpanned, "Yours is the one with the tear in it."

december photo-a-day challenge

Time for festive December pics! Here are this month's assignments:

the mess was delicious

A few years ago, when my girlfriends and I went on our annual beach trip, we ended up having dinner at the house of a friend of my Florida pal Stacy's. The friend was newly divorced man with a small toddler. At one point someone spilled a glass of red wine on the floor, and the adults began cleaning it up. The little boy, meanwhile, stood a couple of feet away, riveted by the dark splotch on the carpet, repeating as if mesmerized, "It's a mess. It's a mess. IT'S A MESS." Watching his rapt incantation, all of us shot a wide-eyed look at each other: Dang. A mess really upsets that kid. Bless his heart, and Lord help the person he marries. 

I really shouldn't make fun, though, because messes make me nervous, too. Recently, I brought in one of my recent dreams to talk over with my analyst. In the dream, I had assigned my first-year writing students to prepare homemade mushroom soup. Each student had to make his or her own version and turn it in. I would taste it, evaluate it, and give it a grade. On the due date, the students showed up, each with a pot containing his or her batch. Some of the soups had whole mushroom caps in them, and others had been completely pureed, but it was clear that each of them had gotten the broth base right, because they were all various shades of dark, rich brown. I walked down the line of pots, ladling a scoop of soup from each into my bowl. Then I realized that I was putting all the students' versions in the same bowl, and I felt foolish and a little panicked: there was no way I was ever going to be able to distinguish among the batches in order to assign a grade to each one.

six hundred dollars' worth

Poems I keep thinking about lately: Kay Ryan's "That Will to Divest" and Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art." That section in Robert Hass's "Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer" where he talks about his divorce from his first wife, how during the whole process he imagined the moment when he would finally, deliberately, and ceremonially declare it finished. He visits a Buddhist shrine in Korea and considers leaving his wedding ring there but then decides not to.

In the months we were apart, I had endless fantasies
about when I'd finally take it off and how. And then one day,
I was moving, lugging cardboard boxes, I looked down
and it wasn't there. I looked in the grass of the driveway strip.
Sowbugs, an earwig. So strange.
............................................................
I was searching in the rosebed of a rented house
inch by inch, looking under the carseat where the paper clips
and Roosevelt dimes and unresolved scum-shapes of once
vegetal stuff accumulate in abject little villages
where matter hides while it transforms itself. Nothing there.
I never found it.

He ends with a statement of baffled resignation: "Apparently I was supposed to wait / until it disappeared." In her poem, Bishop is similarly breezy, but of course she's whistling through the graveyard as she names things she's lost, from little to big: "And look! my last, or / next-to-last, of three loved houses went."

Well, Elizabeth, by summer, I too will have lost three loved houses.

november photo-a-day challenge

I was amazed to realize that November marks my eighth month doing photo-a-day. This has been so good for me, particularly the way it's forced me to view the world less in terms of words and more in terms of images. I'm a fan of words. Too much of a fan, sometimes.

Here is the list of this month's challenges:

   

And here are my photos from the month: