The evening is humid – in times like this air conditioners come in handy – but our only air conditioner sleeps silent and dusty up in the attic after being lugged from Ohio in haste last summer.However there are perks to open window life. Waking in the early morning, the cool air drifts in from the window right beside my bed and I am revived. The cool of the morning is a beautiful thing.
I haven’t blogged in some time – long enough that I feel warped and jumbled inside – too many things have gone in, too few have come out. I’ve been busy with photography projects and a yard sale.
The yard sale: a black woman in a sun yellow dress leaves money for a lamp she will pick up tomorrow. She returns two days later and chats it up, leaving sunshine all around and leaving with a lamp. A Hispanic man laughs at us as we speak broken Spanish, we give him a homemade chocolate chip cookie on the house and he buys lots of things including our SaladShooter which works great but takes up too much space in our kitchen. A lonely white man buys a Monopoly game and stays around to chat – we talk about camping and board games that we like to play. Lyric sells lemonade and makes up songs about selling her ware. She greets people with “Customers!” and they smile. A single mom picks through baby clothes and Olivia decides that yard sales are a form of charity that most people are willing to accept. Regardless, we are filled with happiness to see things from our attic in the hands of people who look happy to have them and capable of putting them to good use. I am also exhausted from two days of carrying stuff in and out as well as 5 days of undiagnosed strep throat.
Thanks to Darren’s generosity, I am blessed by the thoughts of Ben Fountain today:
“To leave the place where you grew up, and that you love very much – I expect there’s some sort of avoidance strategy working there, ambivalence expressed as a compulsion, but along the way a strange inversion occurred: although I didn’t stay home, home stayed with me, and in many respects that’s the only place it still exists.”
There’s so much to say about finding Place in this world. I hope I find the words soon.
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Olivia's Porch Garden
our place for now
2 comments:
Great porch garden, Olivia. We need to see your face too!
Not at all, Matthew, I figure that if I buy you books maybe sometime you will loan them to me and then I can read them too.
keeping to the ambiguous theme, here are two poem fragments from Rilke:
Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms/ into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds/ will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.
Whoever has no house now, will never have one./ Whoever is alone will stay alone,/ will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,/ and wander on the boulevards, up and down,/ restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.
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