Last week, browsing the aisles at the library, I picked up a great book called “Love, Loss and What I Wore”.  It’s a tiny, thin book, but it’s become a new favorite.  In it, the author recalls, in small stand-alone paragraphs, every memorable outfit she wore from childhood on, and each memory is illustrated with very simple color sketches.

Reading this book is making me think of all kinds of things that I have worn. Like the black patent shoes with the taffeta bows I got for Easter when I was ten.  Or the green and white flowered dress my grandmother gave me on a spring visit, and on the ferry trip home, when I climbed a stairwell, the wind caught the bottom of the dress and blew it right up over my head.  All the passengers sitting in seats along the window saw.  I was eight or so, and morbidly embarrassed.

Here’s another one:  In grade six, my mother insisted on buying me a pair of “decent shoes”, which meant that instead of the cheap but trendy white sneakers (sans laces of course) that were normally on my feet, I was forced to wear a pair of diarrhea-brown, thick-soled leather shoes with buckles.  When I say thick-soled, I mean an inch-and-a-half of honey-colored rubber at the bottom.  Hideous.  I told my mother that only nurses and old waitresses in scrungy diners wore those types of shoes, but she had just read some magazine article about helping your children grow up with good foot arches (or something), so she paid the lady at the counter and we walked out into the gray day with the shoes in a plastic bag.

Despite my dramatic sighing and complaining, every morning she’d stand at the door and make sure I put them on.  On the school bus, I hid my feet under the seat in front of me, and the minute I arrived in the classroom, I took them off, replacing them with my old, familiar, white sneakers.

After a few weeks of this, my mother finally caved, and I’m happy to say that the shoes were never seen, nor heard from again.

Reading What I Wore is also bringing back other random, unrelated memories.  And since it’s February (self-explanatory, I think) and since I have a few weeks stretching ahead of me of school work and photo shoots (yay!  But still, it’s not writing) I’ll try to pop in here every few days to post my random memories.

Stay tuned for:  Chicken Volleyball (I laughed out loud when I remembered this.)

After a full day of teaching a class followed by grocery shopping with my grouchy, hungry kids, I head to the video store to get them a movie. After a long wait in the line, I finally reach the counter and can barely talk to the clerk because Ella keeps interrupting me, asking for candy, asking what we’ll be having for dinner.  And because God did not put off buttons on children, I finally threaten to cancel movie night if she can’t keep quiet.  Then I look up at the sales clerk and sigh.

“Do you ever feel like you badly need a nap but there’s no chance in hell you’ll get one?” 
I say wearily.

“Yes,” he says in all seriousness, nodding passionately, like he TOTALLY gets it, totally gets ME, and for a split second I feel truly seen, truly sympathized with, before he adds: “We hardly ever get coffee breaks around here.”

January.
There’s a squirrel darting across the road.  Now he’s climbing up the Sycamore tree.
I’m at my window, looking out over a calm, grey day, tree branches swinging slightly in the cold air.  The furnace kicks on and off.

Have I mentioned I love it here?

It turns out there was a house to rent just down the block from our other place—at the end of the alley, in fact, the same alley where the girls scattered their nail-polish painted rocks and learned to ride their bicycles.  There I was feeling so melancholy about leaving it, but it turns out we didn’t have to leave it after all

For years, I’ve admired this house from a distance.  It’s big and old, white with green trim, has large windows and five big trees in the yard—mostly Maples and one enormous old Sycamore.  There’s also an apple tree in the back yard with strong, outstretched branches that are perfect for climbing.

All last spring and summer, I saw the owner out in his yard cutting the grass.  I couldn’t help but notice the ‘For Sale’ sign had been standing there for over a year.  Talking to him one afternoon, I learned that the house was sitting empty—the owner just came to cut the grass every week.  So after some thought, I wrote him a note letting him know that if he was looking for renters, we’d love to live in his house.  For some reason, I could see us there, the girls climbing the apple tree, me hanging laundry on the clothesline that stretches off the back stoop.

I saw him in his yard again in September, when we learned we needed to move.
“I have an offer on it, but it might fall through”, he said.  “If it does, I’ll rent it to you.”

It did fall through.

And so here we are.

The house is bigger than our old house.  My writing room is on the top floor, overlooking the street lined with the oldest Maple trees in the city.  To the left is the big Sycamore.  The branches come so close to the window that, sitting at my desk feels like being in a tree house.  In the fall when the wind came up, a flurry of leaves would swoosh past my window and click against the glass. Now the branches are just knobby little limbs, edged with snow.

I look out and think:  who knows how long we’ll be here.  With renting, there is a temporariness that I’ve come to appreciate.  Although it has its uncomfortable aspects, the feeling of impermanence is almost nice:  I can’t settle in and numb out.  It forces me to remember to enjoy every day I have here.  Which applies to….well, everything, obviously.

Drooping Christmas tree
Soon you will be tossed outside
Against the trash heap.

This past month or so has been a lovely blur of quarter-end exams, mailing out albums, planning final school projects and doing Christmas shows.

This morning our house is all lit up with lights, the sky is still holding onto its pinky morning glow, and I am packing for a few days of much needed silence and rest at a monastery a few hours out of town.  I’m going to read, scribble poems, snap some photos with my film camera, and walk between tall, creaky birch trees.

In the meantime, I’ve just been notified that Paper Sun is available to order in hard-copy from CD Baby HERE.

xox kim