Sometimes, it is enough

 

 

My kitchen windowsill in Canterbury, England, early in 2009.

Last night, I was reading Malena Morling's poem "Simply Lit" (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2011/11/13) in which she asks, "Isn't it enough to be a person buying/ a carton of milk?"  My answer is, "Yes."  Sometimes, it is enough just to be alive, just to able to put one foot in front of the other to take a walk, to slice a piece of cheese, to peel an orange. 

A couple of weeks ago, browsing among the photos on my laptop, I came across this one taken during my semester in Canterbury, England.  I often ate breakfast standing at that kitchen counter, looking at the flowers that took me through the grey days into the unusually sunny spring.  I bought the flowers at the Wednesday market, where I also bought Brussels sprouts and tomatoes.  My life in Canterbury was simple.  I had arrived for fifteen weeks with two suitcases.  My clothes took up only a small section of the narrow wooden wardrobe and barely filled the drawers in the dresser.  I shopped often because the grocery stores were only a short walk away, and I bought little because I carried my groceries home.  And because I needed little.

The simplicity was freeing and comforting.  It allowed me to clear my head.  Living in a medieval city with a famous cathedral outside the kitchen window--I had only to look up above the brick wall--was both exhilarating and overwhelming.  Sometimes  I focused on the flowers on the windowsill instead, and on the breadbox.  And I felt that it was enough just to be a person drinking her cup of tea on a February morning. 

Falling in Love with a Place

Recently, going through some files on my computer, I came across this fragment of a blog entry that I had written last summer, when I first started toying with the idea of blogging.  I’m posting it for Valentine’s Day, a day dedicated to love.

 

August 5, 2011

Last night, when I said “Iowa City,” I found myself smiling in that involuntary way I used to when I was first in love and had an opportunity to say my partner’s name: Marilyn.  Just saying her name was a joy, a delightful reminder of the new thrill in my life.  I would feel shy and happy and self conscious all at once.  It was as though in saying her name, my love, our love became visible.  Simultaneously, I felt myself enjoying a secret thrill, a physical sensation that no one else knew was occurring.  I’m realizing that one can fall in love with a place in the same way: with the same thrill at the newness, the same slow discovery of loveable quirks, the same pleasure at talking with someone else about the new love.  That this new “love” of mine is Iowa City is unexpected and even a little amusing.  I live in Champaign, a Midwestern, Big-Ten university town, so Iowa City, home to the University of Iowa, should not have been novel.  And I arrived there at the beginning of the heat wave of 2011, so I did not explore it as much as I had thought I would.  But here it is: a shy smile when I name the city in casual conversation.

Part of what made this experience unusual was driving west by myself to a place I had never been before.  I am not used to driving long distances alone, so I was both excited and nervous.  However, after I drove around Peoria, which was prettier and more urban than I’d remembered, I grew excited.  Approaching the Mississippi and then crossing it felt momentous.  I saw a sign for the official Iowa Welcome Center just on the other side of the river, so I got off Route 80 to take a break—and to make sure that I was headed the right way.  As I walked around the Welcome Center—a large, unremarkable, pale yellow building that could have been a medical practice in another life—I delighted in the art gallery and the free coffee and even updated my Facebook status to describe these amenities.  The art gallery was simply a section of the Center set aside for a current exhibit, and the oil paintings of the Midwestern landscape were filled with bold colors and large brushstrokes.  The rest of the Center was a store that had some merchandise specific to Iowa, while the rest was a blend of museum-store-type treats and Cracker-Barrel-like knickknacks. 

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That’s as far as the fragment went in my first attempt at blogging.  I no longer feel a thrill when I say “Iowa City,” but I have fond memories of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival (http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/iswfest/), where I enjoyed a week immersed in words and surrounded by writers.  I hope to return some day.  I’ll end this post with a few photos from Iowa City at the height of the heat wave of 2011, when it was often 101 degrees Fahrenheit at seven in the evening.

At the Iowa City Public Library

This little girl knew how to handle the heat during an evening concert.  Me, I savored an ice cream cone from Whitey's and listened to the music.

I enjoyed an Italian lunch while reviewing the work of a fellow workshop participant.

On Thursday evening, the clouds foreshadowed a break in the heat, which came on Saturday, my last day in Iowa City.

A souvenir of the week.

It was too hot for dinner, so I ate dessert instead.

I loved coming across quotes from literature on sidewalks all over the city.  This was one of my favorites.

The art museum, located on the river, was closed after the floods of 2008.

Words in the most unexpected places.

I had to get a couple of these for my eight-year-old nephews, who are big Harry Potter fans.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

Fog and Clarity

           On Monday morning, I woke to a “freezing fog”; that’s what the weather report on the radio called it.  It was a perfect description for the air that was suddenly visible and for the delicate ice crystals that had settled on every branch and twig, and even on the prairie grass around the lamppost in our front yard.  The cold I have had all week had just begun its stay in my body, and I felt a kinship to the haze outside: my mind felt foggy, and my insides were freezing. 

            The next morning, I was rereading Adrienne Rich’s poem “To the Days” (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2001/02/09), one of my favorite poems of all time.  I was preparing for my Women in Literature class that afternoon.  The first line of the second stanza, “Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity” is lovely, as is the image in the next, “coffee and bread with sour plum jam.”   I felt fortunate that this was my work, is my work, to help students appreciate and analyze such sensory, evocative language.  That morning, I was also grateful for my copious notes on the poem; my mind was still foggy, and the day ahead was going to be long and full.

            At one o’clock that afternoon, I met my students in our classroom, where the sun streams in from the south, a luxury on a campus where some classrooms have no windows at all, and those that do are not always a source of light.  We spent over an hour on that one poem, discussing each line and all it evoked.  As always, I gained new insights, too.  When the class ended, the last student to leave chatted with me as she packed up her books.  She had been telling her advisor about this class, she said, and her advisor had remarked, “But I thought you didn’t like poetry.”  “I didn’t,” she had replied, “but I understand it now, and I love it.” 

At the end of class the previous week, after we had discussed poetry by Elizabeth Bishop and Anne Sexton, another student said to me, almost as an aside, “I didn’t like these poems before we discussed them.  I didn’t know what they were about.  Now I really like them.  I understand them.”  She had contributed to the discussion that day, and I hadn’t noticed that she was confused, so her comment came as a surprise to me.  A surprise and a gift. 

            This Tuesday morning, discussing the line about “Fog in the mornings,” the students talked about the weather the day before and all the metaphorical meanings of fog.  Apparently they felt a “hunger for clarity,” too, and it was satisfied.

The Cakes my Mother Made

           My recent enthusiasm for baking has brought back memories of the cakes my mother used to make.  I’m not sure whether they would be considered pound cakes or sponge cakes.  They were just “mummy’s cakes.”  Or, to others, “Duru Aunty’s cakes.” 

In our extended family in India, for a long time, we were the only ones with an oven.  The house we lived in, provided by the company my father worked for, had a western-style stove that had an oven below, unlike the counter-top stoves at my relatives’ homes.  So my mother was the source of all the homemade cakes our family enjoyed.

            I remember squatting on the kitchen floor once, next to newspapers that were spread out under bowls of flour and other ingredients.  I was too young to help, I was told.  I could only watch.  I remember the sweet smell of vanilla as the cake came out of the oven.  I remember wanting to eat it right away, when it was hot and sweet, but having to wait.  Some of the batter had been put into small, aluminum cups in pretty shapes with scalloped edges.  The mini cakes were like madeleines.  I had to wait until they cooled before I could eat one. 

By the time I was a teenager, my mother wanted to teach me how to cook.  But, by then, I wasn’t interested.  I was willing to chop vegetables—I enjoyed it, even—and I was always willing to eat what my mother cooked.  In fact, she asked me to taste everything she made.  “Is there enough salt?” she’d ask.  When she tried to teach me how to cook, though, I’d get bored and walk away. 

This changed when I was in grad school.  I no longer had access to college cafeteria food and needed to learn how to cook.  In the process of asking my mother about the meals I grew up eating, I asked for her cake recipe.

I still laugh about that recipe.  She told me how many eggs and how much flour and how much butter, but when it came to the milk, she said, “Keep adding milk until the batter flows easily off the spoon.”  So I wrote down exactly that.  Thinking of that recipe helps me to understand why I have rarely baked before: I don’t have much practice with precise measurements and sometimes feel confined by them. Until recently, I would look at recipes with their lists of numbers and feel overwhelmed and restricted.  So I didn’t bake much. 

Cooking on the stove is different.  I can add ingredients as I taste the food, and since I often cook food I am familiar with, food I grew up eating, I know how it should taste and know how I want to alter it (usually I add more chilies in it than my mother would).  And on the stove, I can work with the quirky recipes my mother gives me (her recent instructions on gaajar in methi will be material for another blog; I will tell you though the end result was absolutely delicious).

Recently, though, perhaps in part because of the blissful Thanksgiving morning I spent making stuffing from a recipe (http://transplantedontheprairie.blogspot.com/2011/11/i-would-rather-be-here-now.html), I am drawn to the process of baking.  I don’t mind measuring precisely, working on a counter covered in cups and spoons to help me.  I take out the wonderful wooden spoon I reserve for mixing cake and muffin batter and feel pleasure as I stir the ingredients in the big, green Pyrex bowl that my partner, Marilyn, has had forever.  I follow recipes and make notes on them about what I notice.  Mixing the ingredients in the bowl makes me happy. 

My new enthusiasm for baking makes me think that we get to move on, to grow.  I still alter recipes, as I did recently when I added strawberries to blueberry lemon muffins, but I no longer feel overwhelmed as I flip through recipes with unfamiliar ingredients and lists of measurements.

One day soon, I’ll pull out the recipe for the cake my mother made, one I haven’t tried in about twenty years, and I’ll bake it again.  Maybe this time I’ll measure how much milk it takes to get the batter to flow off the spoon just right.  And maybe I’ll even tell my mum.

Happy birthday, Virginia Woolf!

I have missed writing the past few days.  I have been teaching, and preparing to teach, and thinking about teaching, and I have also been reading applications for the search committee on which I am serving.  

But today is Virginia Woolf’s birthday.  Today, I must write.  

I love Woolf’s writing: its elegance and verve and humor.  When I spent a semester in England three years ago, I went on what I considered a Virginia Woolf pilgrimage.  Included in my visits were Monk’s House (http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/monks-house/) and Sissinghurst (http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/sissinghurst-castle/).  Below, I include  photos I took there of Virginia Woolf’s and Vita Sackville-West’s desks.  May they inspire us all. 

Woolf's desk in the shed at Monk's House, Sussex

Woolf's photo on Vita Sackville-West's desk at Sissinghurst, Kent

 

Since it’s her birthday, we must hear Woolf’s own voice.  It somehow comforts me to know, that like most of us, Woolf also worried whether her writing was good enough.  And she loved being at home with her books.  She wrote this in a letter to Violet Dickinson  in early January 1905.  She was nearing her twenty-third birthday. (I am leaving her quirky punctuation intact): “I shall be rather—in fact very—glad to be home, in my own room, with my books, and I want to work like a steam engine, though editors wont take what I write.  I must show you what I have done, when it is typed, and please be very kind…and please don’t say you want to alter heaps of things or I shall give up writing altogether and take up drink or society.”