Start of Porch Season

At last, ma cherie, it is time for the languid and curried hours of porch love---oh, how we have missed you, fickle mistress, during your endless stay in your sister Persephone's guest cottage in Hades, finally over until October.

Yet you taunt us in February, a lozenge of warmth from two until five on a Wednesday afternoon, only to flit off again with the giggle of a teenage girl--so cruel, yet so delicious. It helped me remember the winter sun in the tropics, also gold and cool, burnishing the world with an amber glow before suddenly slipping away behind a man-o-war cloud.

In March there were a few false starts, one splendid stretch on a Saturday afternoon that tanned the tops of my feet, and I succumbed to the decadence completely by dozing off for an hour or so. My anxiety was gently treated by these brief embraces and promises of an extended stay soon, perhaps with your next visit. My role as the porch priestess was to keep the watch for the first hint of clear blue skies after one pm, have some urgent reading material ready, some cold and refreshing liquid tribute accessible, and position the solar seating at the correct angle to the position of the sun. I take my duties seriously.

Finally, Enchanted April, as you began to venture away from your winter digs more frequently, dragging out those last damp goodbyes with the Hades', with some hail and sideways freezing rainy days tossed in just because you can, because your games always turn out so beautifully in May, because you know we can't help ourselves that we love you, tolerate the infidelity each fall, and will always make ready the best chambers in our hearts for you. That first day-long picnic with you in May, those endless warm days in June reading poetry from the inside of my eyelids to you while I hover in the still blue air---I live for this, and you know it.

Why do I fight you? So silly of me, but there is work for me to do, tasks of living with my feet on the ground that must be done, reading and cleaning and working for that coin and paper that mean so much down here. But you don't understand, you are the ultimate source of energy, of light, what makes everything else go.

I know it. And left the tropics in spite of it, and there are rare times when I remember that day of my first summer there, in early July, when the humidity was so high, and I had no shadow standing by that giant fuschia bouganvilla. I looked around and the sky was bleached white, there was no blue, yet no clouds at all, the light was coming from right over my head and pressed down like a white-hot anvil, the only shadows were lying deep under a giant banyan grove across the white coral dirt alley. There wasn't even a breath of air or breeze, the palm fronds hung heavy and slack like sweaty hands. Nothing moved, the white heat shimmered and I could feel my bones melting. Complete seduction, I was now forever a servant to the rays of the sun and follower of the changing light.

Cultural Misunderstanding

Ahhhhhhh----the supreme delight and satisfaction of finishing a paper assignment. And it only took me about three hours, is a bit too long and will be tightened up tomorrow, and is absolutely true and rather funny, if I do say so myself.

My young prof asked us to write of a personal experience of having a cultural misunderstanding. My personal experience of this assignment is that it's kinda voyeristic of him to require this, but when reflecting over the last few days, I realized that most of the 18-20 yr olds in my class (and I) would have a difficult time writing of an abstract cultural misunderstanding in 3 pages. Can't really do justice to the Israelis and Palestinians in 3 pages. Or the situation with Ellis Island or First Nations. So let's keep it breezy and first hand, right? So against the advice of my pal who worked with me through this certain period of time in the 1980s, I plunged into my story of Midwest Gamine moves to South Florida and emerges from her naive realism into the diverse and much louder Southern Branch of the Gotham City Culture.

I think my pal was afraid I'd come off sounding too bitter, or bigoted, or bitchy, but I think that it's possible to write about how overwhelmed a person can feel being immersed in a totally new cultural environment, being completely ignorant of how it all works, feeling very young and inexperienced about life in general, and be honest in describing it without being any of those b-things. Plus, since it's all true, and I remember parts of it so well, there is a bit of actual recreated dialogue. The part in the bagel place changed my whole attitude about living in South Florida.

Okay, so seeing as I was the one in the minority in the BocaWorld, I get to be the one who lost her naive realistic innocence and joined the greater Gotham Culture. Naive Realism is the anthropology term for when people think that the entire world is the way that they see their own particular piece of it. That got smacked right out of me the first month I worked there. I learned a lot of things, including some bad Yiddish words I used to be able to use but have now forgotten, I learned how to give shit and got better at taking it when I had a name tag on. I also learned how to hold my own, and wished I'd have been able to learn that better in my teens instead of in my 20s and 30s.
And now I get to write about it for college credit. So so cool. And what's really funny, is that if I were even bolder and still had more of my East Coast on, I'd have included how living in Gotham Culture for so long is sometimes why the Snark Episode happened with this young prof in the first place, and also why he reacted as he did, being so West Coast as he is. But I am not so bold, at least for this graded writing assignment. Maybe sometime, since I'm staying in this department for my degree, he and I will laugh about it all.

He'll laugh reading my paper, and that's my strategy.

Serious Deja-vu

These moments keep happening to me, but I have learned to just roll with it, and not try to explain it anymore, the weird looks from people started to get to me.

Again today, standing talking to someone, great conversation, making meaningful connections with new people, and that almost-creepy wave came over me from behind my head and washed out past us to sweep up the entire roomful of people, to splash up along the walls then out the doorway. This has so already happened to me, right here right now, with this person, with that feeble light from the grown-over window, the mid-century furniture, I know what that person is going to say next---bang, there it is, the other person has to go, I say my line, we laugh...

When I get home, I write my best friend that a current of low resistance is happening right now, that a step in this certain direction is the right step for me, there's no fighting against anything, whatever "the Flow" is for an individual, I seem to be in mine. My friend has always been great at surfing that momentum in her own life, willing to work hard, but knowing when to ride a high tide. For many years, I was not knowing how to do that, although she's been a great friend who's always leading by example. And she's humble about it, too. The magnitude of the pure relief I experience when looking at today versus last year or last decade, flabbergasts me. She laughs when I tell her; "That's the pay-off for all that thrashing around back then girlfriend!" she cackles. Like a spooky reflection, I remember hanging out together by her fireplace at her old place in Florida, a few beers gone and more in the fridge, and we wove out our visions for the Good Life in our futures. She was going back West, New Mexico or Colorado, and she wanted horses and two kids, Sam Elliott in the saddle and the mountains on the edge of her acres. She was going to let her hair fly in the dry wind and get all that South Florida humidity out of her system and her books. Plant a million bulbs and some trees, and grow herbs on her front porch, and have about three dogs.

We were all so much more Florida then, though we fought against it. Not in the right element.

I wanted to have a funky artsy place in an old farmhouse or bungalow with a big porch, some cats, room for all my books yet walls for the artwork, ground to get some tomatoes, herbs and flowers going, windchimes and suncatchers, music and light, writing and school, no suburban ambitions or homeowners' associations, cool neighbors and be either in Provence or Northern California probably, somewhere with ocean, mountains, woods, and decent coffeehouses and art film theaters.

Our enchantments must have flown up that chimney and started the winds of change to blow. Other than the Sam Elliott part, she's pretty much right where she saw herself back then, including her nephew being her other kid in the house. Slick maneuvering, there. And it didn't even take her ten years to do it all. Or me, either, and I can still afford Portland.

So the Deja-vu thing is not too scary to me. It's usually always a good re-run. Foreshadowing or looking back, it's the same loop, I get it now.