Announcement!

I read voraciously. I read at least a book a week. I steal from sleep to read. I get antsy and desperate and unhappy when I don’t have a good book to read. Therefore, I’ve decided, now that it’s summer and I’m relieved of my teaching duties, that every week (or so) I’m going to recommend a good book on my blog. Mostly the books will be contemporary and American, but not always. Mostly they’ll be fiction and creative nonfiction, but not always. So many times people tell me they really want to read but when they go into a bookstore, they feel lost. They don’t know what’s a good book and what isn’t. I often recommend books to my friends, and have a sort of personal “lending library,” but I thought my blog would be a good place to share with the public lots of good books out there just waiting to be read.

•Each entry will be titled, Read This Book!

•I’m not going to use any sort of star rating system since I'll only recommend books that I think are wonderful and definitely worth reading.

•I’m going to give a quick review plus a non-spoiler summary, as well as three mini features for each book:

1. Favorite Line

2. Idiosyncrasies

3. Bottom Line

Look for the first one very soon!

Four (Healthy) Food Products I Love

1. Chobani Greek Yogurt, Lemon Flavor. This is easily the best yogurt I've ever had. It's nonfat, only 140 calories and as thick and rich as a custard. What I particularly appreciate about it is the slightly tart taste, as well as the delicate lemon pulp mixed throughout. This has become my new favorite snack, although I must warn you that all their other flavors feature fruit on the bottom, something that creeps me out.




2. Chip'ins Popcorn Chips, Sea Salt Flavor. Made by a company called Popcorn Indiana, these chips have just three simple ingredients: corn, sunflower oil and sea salt. They contain no saturated fat and only 4% regular fat, plus they even have a little bit of fiber. I've tried the white cheddar flavor, but found the sea salt to be more subtle and satisfying. They also come in Hot Buffalo Wing and Jalepeno Ranch, but eww. Really. Did I mention they're only 120 calories for a very generous serving? I love their robust crunch and interesting texture. These make Doritos seem pretty gross actually.








3. Kashi GoLean Crunch cereal. First of all, be careful not to grab the GoLean Crunch Honey Almond Flax. We made that mistake once and it was horrible. Instead, this plain version is made from seven whole grains and sesame with just a tiny bit of honey and cinnamon (I frankly can't taste either). It'll give you a whopping 32% of your daily fiber, but not in a way that feels bulky or cardboardy. It's also low-calorie and low fat, and the clusters stay crunchy. Every morning I put frozen blueberries on it with skim milk, which I love because the blueberries turn the milk ice cold and a beautiful purple color. We go through probably two boxes of this a week.






4. Masa's Miso Sesame Dressing & Sauce. I feel as if I've been on a lifelong search for the perfect utopian salad dressing. This one comes pretty close. It's got the wonderful salty tang of miso and rice vinegar but it's tempered by just a touch of brown sugar and sesame oil. Made by Rikki Rikki in Redmond, Washington, it's not exactly cheap at $4.59 a bottle, but a little goes a long way. I often use it as a dip for baby carrots and celery sticks, as well as a dressing for coleslaw. Real sesame seeds create great texture and body. It's a little higher in fat than I'd like (7% daily value/serving), but in this case it's worth it. Live large!

The Most Tender Holiday

Dear Mom,

Happy Mother's Day. Though it's been almost four years without you, it still feels as fresh and painful sometimes as a new cut. What I find hardest is how the grief ages—not like a fine wine or a good cheese but like our little maple tree in the back yard that grows and grows and keeps getting bigger and more solid with the passing of time. I want to arrest it, stop the way the sound of your voice ever so slightly fades, how when the phone rings now on Sunday afternoon I know it won't be you, how, no matter how badly I wish for it, you will not know your grandchildren, Hudson and Lily, who are playing a loud and very boisterous game of freeze tag downstairs as I write this. Though they have seen my tears and remember tiny bits about you, they will never know what a big heart you had, what a quick and warm smile, what a cozy grandma you would have to been them all these years.

How would you love them.


Here's Lily. She goes to sleep like this every night with her blankie (aka "ear pillow") wrapped tightly around her face. She sleeps under the beautiful appliqued kitty quilt you'd started for her but never got the chance to finish (thanks to your dear friends, Marcia and Gloria, for doing so).

She really likes to run and just told Mark that she'd like to train for a triathlon when she's old enough. Her 7th birthday is in two weeks and she wants me to try and make a monkey birthday cake for her party. I'm sure you can imagine how good I'll be at that.





And here's Hudson. We made homemade butter a few weeks ago and he was totally into it. Like you, he enjoys complicated projects that require attention to detail. In this photo he had just carved his initials into his little tub of homemade butter. I like to imagine all the things you would do with him—teach him to sew, to make homemade caramels, show him your antique Santa collection, which is now god only knows where.

He does remember you, but I can tell he remembers you mostly through me. We got out to Minnesota so seldom when you were still alive. If only we had another chance, just one more day. I like to think of what we'd do together, just the simplest things really: sit on your front porch and drink iced tea and watch all the cars go by, walk up to Dueber's and shop for fabric and coloring books, cook up some hot dogs and baked beans and eat them at the picnic table. The kids could sit in your lap afterwards while you read them books after warm baths in the big claw foot upstairs. I'd hug you as we said good-bye, see you soon.


Little and big things have happened for me since you've been gone. I ran my first half-marathon last week. 13.1 miles, and when I was done, all I wanted to do was call you and say, "Mom, I did it!" But instead I hugged the kids and Mark and went out to breakfast with friends I love like family. But all day I kept wanting to tell you.

I get migraines now; I have to be careful with stress. Mark and I are planning a trip to Italy next summer for our 20th anniversary. This July we're meeting Amy and her family in Michigan for a week because we now have to find new ways without you. Minnesota just isn't the same without you and Dad.


Also, I'm writing a book about you. It's called Dragonfly Notes: A Memoir of Motherhood and Loss. I'm digging through your old scrapbooks, letters, photos. Sometimes it's so hard I have to leave the house and not come back until I'm able. But also, it brings me closer to you and it makes me understand you in a whole new way. I found an old light blue diary of yours from when you were 12. I found a scrapbook from when you were newly married filled with dream kitchens and matching living room furniture that you one day wished to own but never did. I found a gratitude journal that you kept, and read one entry over and over: "I'm grateful for my two daughters—they make me so happy."

I miss you.

love,

Annie

Life Off Planet Facebook

It’s different out here—quieter. I don’t know what my friends are doing, what movies they’re watching, what’s irritating them or delighting them, what their children are doing or saying. Even contact with my only belovéd sister has been reduced by at least 80% now that I’m off the planet. That’s a loss I mourn.

But the quiet out here can be peaceful. And when you suffer from depression, and therefore suffer a lack of perspective or balance, ignorance can be beneficial. It’s a self-protective measure really, this not knowing. It’s not noble. It’s not altruistic. It’s actually a bit lonely, though necessary, too, for a safe heart.

I went on a silent retreat for four days in March: no Internet, no TV, no television, no phone. The first day, after I was shown to my tiny room with bed, desk, window, chair, I sat and looked out at the trees: what now? My fingers fidgeted. My head spun, concocting lists of all that I wanted to “get done.” But to-do lists and silent retreats don’t mix well. I read randomly from the books provided in my room. I read St. Augustine’s Confessions and was surprised by his struggles with lust. I wrote a short essay about grief called “Dr. Blue.” I walked in the woods at night and encountered a silvery deer drinking from a pond. It looked up at me, and I at it, and we stayed that way for a very long time.

The caretaker sounded a gong for mealtimes. The food was served in a dim room with a trickling fountain in the corner. We spoke while eating, but kept the greater world at bay. The Japanese earthquake and tsunami had just hit, and I’d been left wondering how people were faring. But it was not discussed.

Back home, the world had continued on without me. Stresses and triggers arose at every turn, and when migraines came knocking, I knocked them out with medicine that made my tongue thick and my forehead heavy. I removed Facebook from my toolbar, just to see.

I’m floating out here in the dark. I’m waving. Worrying. Wondering.

The Panning Museum of Antiquated Technology

As I sit here writing this on my sleek new Macbook Pro, my six year old daughter, Lily, is sitting on the living room floor banging away at the Smith-Corona Coronet electric typewriter I purchased yesterday. It was an incredible find: $6.99 at the Brockport Goodwill, in pristine condition, with the original case. The ribbon is fuzzy and faint, but after a quick search on ebay, we discovered that fresh, brand new ribbons are still available. I ordered several.

I wrote many of the stories in my first book, The Price of Eggs, on an electric typewriter. I was living in Minneapolis at the time, newly returned from Peace Corps, had no car and no meaningful employment. I took the bus one day to Montgomery Ward's in St. Paul, and bought the pumpkin-colored machine, riding home with the heavy case warm on my lap like a small child. I loved that typewriter, and spent hours in the attic of my rental house pounding out stories while I looked out into the treetops.

Years later, I joke that I now have a "museum" in my attic here in Brockport, but it's actually true. On an old table up there, I am the keeper of old telephones, landmark newspapers such as 9/11 and Obama's inauguration, Fisher Price toys, metal hair dryers, floppy disks—anything that I feel is either already defunct or soon on its way.



I realize this photo might suggest that I should possibly be tapped for an A & E "Hoarders" intervention, but in my defense let me say that the last time I brought my kids up to the "museum," my nine year old son, Hudson, asked if he could take the 9/11 newspaper to his room and read it. I said yes. His whole world changed that day. For years we'd been telling him how he was just a baby when it happened, and how we remember him lying on a blanket that morning in front of the TV. Now it has become real to him, and has shifted his taste in reading towards historical nonfiction—the power of history you can hold in your hand.

But back to the newly acquired electric typewriter.



Lily said to me this morning, "I like how it dings." I said yeah, me too. She continued: "Doesn't it sound like I'm slapping it? But I'm not. I'm just pressing." I smiled, and remembered how physical writing used to feel to me. There was great thunderous noise associated with writing: the deep rumble and vibration of the engine, the punch of the keys, the ding of the bell, the zip of the carriage, the definitive echo of the final period.

The first story I ever published, "Pigs," was revised 13 times. Each draft had to be re-typed in full every time. There was a fine Braille texture to those pages; sometimes punctuation would even break through the page and create black holes. I remember rocking slightly when I was in a good writing groove. Writing felt more deliberate then. You had to commit or go back and completely redo a page. Not so now, where you can futz around with font, cut & paste, pretend you're revising when really you're just editing and tinkering. Revising, after all, means "re-vision":
to see again newly and clearly.


This is the machine to do it. It beckons me: come back, come back.

Magnetic Color

This may be one of my favorite purchases ever. I bought these magnetic color strips in Washington D.C. at the National Gallery of Art gift store. I was with my sister, Amy, and both our heads were practically spinning with all the wonderful things to buy—little packets of origami paper, Wayne Thiebaud cake note cards, Andy Warhol posters, Modigliani art cubes—what a gold mine.





But it's the magnetic color strips that got me. And they were on sale: only $10.98 for colors such as Cranberry/Canneberge/Arandano and Leaf/Feuille/Hoja and Petal/Petale/Petalo.





Of course these are highly impractical. Right now they are stuck to the side of a filing cabinet in my study. But quality of life is important, and these magnetic colors make me happy.

My Crafty Affair

Something is happening to me in this, the dawning of my middle age: I have become "crafty" as my mid-life crisis.

It used to be that a trip to Joann Fabrics or Michael’s would bore the shit out of me. I remember dawdling behind my mother while she took light years searching through bolts of calico and packets of zippers and cards of buttons. Y-a-w-n. But now, I have projects. I come with a list. Just last week I bought three plastic doll heads, Stretch Magic bead and jewelry cord, a #4 X-Acto knife, and Prym Creative upholstery needles.

This is not really me, I think to myself and even say to my husband. I don’t “craft.” In fact, the very verb, “crafting,” sends waves of discomfort over me, sounds too “country charm” and unfashionable and dowdy.

I'm a professional working woman, after all, who has struggled and sacrificed to get where I am today. Prior to my mid-life “crafting” crisis, I thought these things were mutually exclusive: to be a career-driven woman and to be someone who made things such as dolls or bracelets. Where did this idea, this snobbery, come from? My mother never had a professional “career,” so to speak. She worked one odd job after another: drug store clerk, cleaning lady, factory worker, but during all of these stints she was always creating in high gear. She hand-stitched quilts for everyone she knew; she knit hats, socks, tiny doll sweaters, mittens, slippers; she sewed her own—as well as my—wedding dress. Then there was the constant flow of flannel pajamas, curtains, tatting, table runners, teddy bears: all handmade.

It wasn’t until the very end of her life (halted abruptly) that she became a “professional” quilter for profit, buying a high-tech, long-arm quilting machine with a small inheritance from her parents and setting up shop in her very own den. She was finally in business! Doing something she loved while also getting paid for it. I was so incredibly proud of her.

After she died, I sold her quilting machine on Craigslist to a woman who promised me she would treasure it and use it well. Incomplete quilts still hung off hangers in my mother’s den. I admired them, wondered if I might one day learn the skills to finish them, but then thought: no. How could I? I didn’t do well working with my hands. I lived a life of black and white, words on paper, words on screen. As a college professor and a writer, the majority of my time was spent dealing with text—writing it, revising it, analyzing it, grading it, reading it, consuming it, fretting over it.

My mid-life “craft” crisis, I realized, was me reaching out to my mother’s rich talent and trying to absorb any bit of her I could. As I made hand-sewn valentines this year, I liked to think she could see me and smile—and maybe smirk, too. She'd no doubt find it amusing and somewhat ironic to see me laboring over my "crafts" when I'd spent the majority of my life completely uninterested in such things.

It’s true that with papers to grade and classes to teach and a reading series to run, my craft projects often end up by the wayside. But, for comfort, I keep my mother’s antique metal picnic baskets filled with fabric and tins and, let’s face it, junk, right beside the desk where I work. Every now and then when my neck gets sore or I grow overwhelmed by all the text I have consumed, I take a break and open one and dig around. There’s so much beauty and chaos inside.

I remember my mother as I try to create something of beauty in this world.