20,000 leagues under the sun.

We are deep in the dog days now, with temperatures routinely in the triple digits. It's hard to explain to northerners what southern summers are like, and hard for this northern transplant to remember the season as I knew it growing up. My mother calls in July and asks if the boys are playing any sports, and I wonder for a minute if she has taken up drinking in the afternoons, until I adjust for the latitude and realize that my niece and nephew's soccer season has only just begun.

From a psychological standpoint, southern summers are a lot like northern winters, actually. You stay indoors, you hunker down, you endure. The air conditioning service department tells me if our thermostat reads below 78 F, we should shut up and consider ourselves lucky. The kids refuse to go to the pool during the day ("the water is too warm, Mom"), so we swim at night. They watch way too much tv and play way too many video games. I snap at them for being too loud, too rambunctious, too wild. Our mostly outdoor dog has been moved mostly indoors, for safety's sake, for which she repays us daily by peeing and pooping on the floor. We are all stir crazy. I wonder if drinking in the afternoons would be such a bad thing.

Desperation begets resourcefulness. The boys and I spend two days working on a thousand-piece puzzle, excavated from the back of a closet. A friend comes over and lets Patrick and I escape for a couple of hours, sharing a pint of ice cream on the playground swings after dark. Cardboard boxes are repurposed as turtle shells and time machines. My eleven-year-old takes lego-building to a post graduate level, assembling Rube Goldberg-like contraptions with moving parts -- gears, and levers, and rubber bands for drum belts. When our little civilization breaks down again, as it inevitably does, we retreat back to the tv, computers and video game players --virtual excursions that don't require entering a vehicle in which the dashboard thermostat reads 111. It's like living on a submarine. If only we had a pipe organ.

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Can you hear me NOW?

I guess I'm going to Memphis. Because of the 3X rule.

The 3X rule is this: if I get three unrelated nudges about something, I sit up and pay attention.

*

Nudge one: I caught a sale online the other day for restaurant gift certificates. It was such a great deal, I broadened my search beyond my own postal code, and wound up buying one for a sushi joint in Memphis.

"WHY?" said Patrick, when I boasted of my scoop. "We don't live in Memphis."

Well, I had noticed.

"We might," I ventured. Memphis is two and a half hours from Little Rock. We used to go all the time before kids, but the last time I drove across the Mississippi was two summers ago.

**

Nudge two: later that day, I had a message from a Facebook friend in Canada. She's going to be in Memphis for two weeks this month, and would love to see me.

I'd love to hang out with her, too, but we are going on vacation ourselves at the end of June, and my schedule is tight. I said I would try.

***

Nudge three: I wrote the previous post this morning, about the saga of trying to buy my new macbook. Two of you told me I should go to the Apple store in Memphis.

****
I came home and placed an order with apple.com instead. Called my bank to be sure the debit transaction would clear. I hit "send order."

A freakishly sudden storm came up and blew out our internet at that precise moment.

What part of GO TO MEMPHIS do you not understand, exactly? said the universe.

Alright. Okay. I get it.

Not really. But a full explanation up front isn't part of the 3X rule.

So I guess I'm going to Memphis sometime pretty soon. I'll let you know what I find there.

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Flies in the Annointment

For the first time in three presidential elections since I've been in the U.S., I accompanied Patrick to the polls as an "international observer" and watched him cast a ballot that his parents could never have imagined.

It was thrilling. We went home, turned on the television, and pretty much stayed glued to it until midnight. The kids, too, camped out on an air mattress on the family room floor. My nine-year-old called out the projections as they came in, state by state.

"All the blue is in the north," he observed early on.

And therein lies one of two flies in the annointment.

As jubilant as we are over Obama's win, I'm deeply disappointed in the South.

I know there are people all over this country who voted Republican for the right reasons, but I've been here too long to kid you or myself that the uniformly red overlay of the old confederacy is not largely about race.

It'd be like trying to tell you the Confederate cause was essentially about states' rights. There are people here who will tell you that with a straight face. And in the next breath, deny that they are affected by the racial baggage of this region's heritage.

All of us -- black and white -- are shackled together by that legacy of denial and shame. As long as we keep trying to get away from it, and each other, nobody is getting anywhere. It's like watching partners in a three legged race try to outrun each other.

I think I will have more to say about that in the days to come.

The other disappointment is in the various votes that rolled back civil rights for same-sex families, including a proposition in Arkansas that denies such families the opportunity to serve as foster parents.

I have such strong feelings on this topic because of the value I place on marriage as a legal and societal institution. People who love each other will find a way to be together, believe me. What possible justification is there for leaving them outside, no roof over their heads?

You want to know what weakens and violates the sanctity of my marriage? Denying it to people who love each other as much as we do.

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Hollywood Legend

Gary "Hollywood" Ray, 1950-2008. My "special" shoes, 1997-2007.

I'm pretty sure it's against all kinds of rules to post an excerpt from a work in progress on your blog, and I'll probably have to take it down tomorrow, but I want to show you something I wrote yesterday morning that gave me occasion to think about an old friend we haven't seen in years. I paused for a minute while writing it, debating whether or not to use his "real" name, Hollywood. I decided it would be okay, and that he would probably be tickled to wind up in a book. I tried to figure out how old he was when we were hanging out, and wondered how he was doing these days.

When I got up this morning, eleven years out from our wedding day, Patrick had placed the obituary section of the newspaper on my place at the table. Hollywood died yesterday.

If you've never had breakfast with a fully bearded man wearing a trucker cap and a ladies' silver lame blouse wholly unbuttoned, you've merely scraped the surface of life. If it weren't for him, at least one chapter of my story would be a whole lot less colorful:

...I put the word out among our drinking associates that I’m looking for something that pays cash, under the table. Our drummer friend, Hollywood, a weathered and whiskered reprobate in the mold of Levon Helm, sends me to a blues shack down by the tracks, the venerable Whitewater Tavern.

As far as anyone knows, the Whitewater has been in Little Rock longer than Jesus, and its “corner crew,” the shift of hardcore regulars who cling to the corner of the bar with the tenacity and devotion of old world Catholics at daily Mass, sprang out of the red dirt with it. Its hymnal is the blues. Hang around a while and you will hear “Stormy Monday” in more variations than Goldberg had on Bach.

The place cycles through phases of vogue. Every few years, a new generation of white college kids rediscovers it, and it becomes the fashionable place to demonstrate one’s authenticity and hipster cred. New management comes in with new ideas. Stormy Monday goes out, replaced by punk, or pop, or rap or whatever music the hot new band in town is playing. The corner crew hunkers down; smokes, drinks, waits. The band gets signed and goes on tour, the kids move on, the band breaks up, the place burns down. Someday plays Stormy Monday. Repeat. The Whitewater Tavern is the blues.

The trough between “kids move on” and “place burns down” is the place where I come in.

Thank you, Hollywood. Peace, baby.


Me and Hollywood, God knows where, 1997.

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Found.

This morning I went looking for a link to this local news story that is so arch-typically Arkansasan, that if it didn't involve real people being hurt, frightened, and nearly killed, would be a nearly complete breakfast of awesome. Let's just say there are only about three places on the planet where it could have happened, and they all touch the Mississippi delta.

Here's hoping everybody who was hurt gets well, and everyone who needs to be locked up, leashed or otherwise contained gets that too.

While I was looking for that, I found a link to the full text of a feature that ran in the state paper back in January, profiling me and the lovely Kristen Chase, briefly of Arkansas.

When it it came out, I couldn't find an online version that didn't cost something. This one's free!

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Uprooted: After the Storm

Two nights ago, my preschooler suddenly got busy rounding up shoes and toys.

"It's time to go!" he announced jubilantly.

"Go where, sweetie?" I asked with considerably less energy. It was nearly ten o'clock—lately it's been nearly impossible to get him to go to sleep much earlier.

"To our old house!"

He said it with such joy and eagerness, I can't tell you how hard it was to break it to him that, no, we couldn't go back to the old house.

Weeping, he said, "But I want my old room!" Here at the condo, he shuttles back and forth between the twin mattresses on the floor of the larger of the two bedrooms and our double bed in the smaller—close quarters compared to our sprawling king-size, now propped up in the storage pod.

We are so grateful to have this space. But we are so very ready to vacate it.

Patrick hit the wall the other day, announcing between tight lips that he was "restless, irritable and discontent," before storming outside to smoke about five cigarettes in a row. We have been working literally back to back in the dining room that we've converted to office space. An oddly-placed hearth is the only partion between this and the family room. Patrick's desk abutts the rear of the television, turned on more than usual with the bad weather and no yard to speak of.

Last night, I sent my eldest son to his room after being contradicted one too many times yesterday. He silently fumed at me with a rage I had nearly forgotten a child could feel for a parent. I gave him a minute or two to himself and then went up to talk to him. He kept his back turned and his arms crossed over his chest, palms grasping opposite shoulders, like he always does when he is hurting.

I talked to his back for a few minutes about parental respect, and cultivating a positive attitude, and the place of civil disobedience in a benign dictatorship such as our own. He was impenetrable.

I turned the lecture off. "C'mere," I said, and managed to coax his armadillo-rolled body next to mine.

"Look," I said. "I know it's hard right now to be living in-between. I know you are probably missing home..."

My armadillo uncoiled against me and began to sob, the heaving, rushing sobs that come from grief that's been gathering deep in the gut.

There was little I could say. It was as if we were huddled in the closet again, waiting for the storm to pass over.

I told him the things I missed about our house: watching he and his brothers climb the Japanese maple, the hidden places in the yard where they dug and played. I promised him that he would soon be climbing the trees in our new yard, digging new holes. I half-heartedly began the speech that "home is where the heart is," then abandoned it, because it's bullshit. I've been uprooted enough myself to know that sometimes home is a physical place you need desperately to get back to.

Tell a banked fish that home is where the heart is.

So I shut up, and held him and stroked his sandy brown hair until it was over. Then I told him to fill the tub and take a nice long bubble bath, bedtime be damned.

This morning, the sun was shining like it meant it, for the first time in days. And not to diminish the seriousness of flood conditions in our state after the weather of the past few weeks, but I felt like a kid on Snow Day when I heard that the soccer fields would likely be underwater this weekend.

The household tension had broken up and moved on. All clear. I took my camera and went for a walk around the block to take some more pictures of the tornado damage of last Thursday night.

Ten tornados in all were spawned by that storm. If I had to draw you a map showing the most direct route from our condo to our new home, it would look like the storm path printed in the next day's paper. We were unbelievably lucky. Belinda, Kristen, and their families too.

I don't know that there is any force of nature more random and non-sensical than a twister. Just steps from where a concrete light pole lies uprooted, lacelike wisteria and azaleas bloom unperturbed. Hundred and fifty year-old pines and oaks are strewn about like weeds plucked from a lawn. On the same block, a compact disc I noticed tossed from a car onto the sidewalk last week hadn't moved more than a foot.

Why here? Why not there? Why not now? Why me? Every one of us, from three years old to forty-four has had their turn at asking why this week, with grace and maturity probably in inverse proportion to chronological age.

I like to think God has been sitting with us the whole time we've had our backs curled and hearts covered, aching for us, loving us in all our ungrateful, impatient, ornery-ness. Doting on each marvelous strand of hair, adoring each miraculous, shimmering blossom.

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Trapped in the Closet: Chapter 2

I'd love to tell you that little severe weather warning in the bottom left corner of the screen shot is a photo from last Thursday night, but it's from tonight, so I'd better get busy and wrap up this two-parter before I have to write a third. So far, no tornado watch. Hopefully tonight's skies are just full of sound and fury, signifying diddly.

Rolling three groggy boys out of bed and stuffing them in the closet was like a fraternity stunt. What few gaps there might have been between twelve child and four adult limbs were stuffed with pillows.

"I guess if it comes to it, you're hiding in the bathroom," I said to Patrick, as he tucked us in and resumed his vigil between the television and front door. While the thunder rolled overhead I reminded my wide-eyed nine year old of other storms we've weathered in closets together. In between, I glanced at my blackberry.

At 9:54 Belinda texted from a hotel room in New Jersey:

Just hung up w/hubby in Arkansas, tornadoes not mentioned.

She and Alex live 30 minutes to the northeast of the city. Irrationally, I told myself if it wasn't newsworthy there, perhaps our urban weather team was over-dramatizing. Or maybe it was just an itty, bitty, very contained storm.

"It's moving very fast," I told my son. "It will all blow over in just a few minutes."

When the power went, I can't remember if there was an actual bang, or the sudden silence was like an explosion in negative. It was terrifyingly still.

"What does it mean when it gets quiet, Mom?"

What does it mean?

It means you fan your hands and feet out in the darkness in all directions until you feel them touching all three of your precious children and you begin to pray.

With no television, Patrick studied the wild sky outside. He kept his eyes on the open space to the southwest, between swaying tall pines. Then he saw the trees do something he'd never seen trees do. They stopped swaying, and began to twist. Behind the thunder, something growled.

I still can't figure out how he fit in the closet with us. But the door opened and he was there. "This is it," he said. I locked onto my son's gaze, as if dropping my eyes would mean dropping him.

I can't tell you what happened then, except moments later, Patrick said it was gone over, and that he was going out to take a look. The sirens were still going, and I didn't believe it was safe, but he insisted the worst was past. Moments after that, emergency vehicle sirens chimed in with the public warning system.

It was still thundering and flashing. Patrick came back and assured us it was safe to leave the closet, but that "something big" had happened on the street behind us. It was nearly an hour since the warning sirens had struck up. I checked my blackberry. Belinda was looking at doppler images on her laptop.

HOLY CRAP the tornadoes are nearly perfectly surrounding MY HOME.

Since New Jersey had power, and we had none, Belinda then became my own personal mobile storm warning center, alerting me that a second, and then a third, storm system were rolling in behind. Back to the closet. During the second trip down the stairs, my seven year old fell behind his older brother, who was carrying the flashlight, and panicked. He thought he would be left behind in the dark. The fear of the middle child. My heart broke. I pulled him into the closet with me and wrapped my whole body around him while he wept.

The second storm hit about an hour after the first. Waiting for it was the worst part, with only the car radio and Belinda's text updates to indicate its path and progress, and not knowing what it would spawn. Horrible thoughts tried to squeeze into the closet with me. I pushed them out. No vacancies here. Move on.

When it came, it came and it went. Swift and loud, but non-eventful for us.

The third lost enough steam by the time it got here for us to be able to call it a night. In between, I had gone out to the van to charge my dying blackberry and listen to the radio.

Reports of the extent of the destruction and the number of tornados were confused, but starting to come in. The intersection directly behind us was hit badly. Huge pine trees were lying across the road. Then they said another street name. Our new street. With our new house on it. "Some of the worst damage," the announcer was saying.

You've got to be kidding me, I thought.

Gratitude over mere survival is always short-lived.

---

The patch on the tv map that is our county has turned from orange back to grey, so I can go to bed and hopefully stay there until morning. Coming next: after the storm.

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K. Pittman's Trapped in the Closet, Chapter 1

"What does it mean when it gets quiet, Mom?"

"I don't know," I whispered. Up to that second, I'd been playing a rousing game of "let's pretend," as in let's pretend Daddy and I woke the three of you up in the middle of the night and piled you all in the hastily emptied under-stairs closet just for kicks. Thank god my three year-old hadn't woken up during the transfer from our bed to a pillow on the closet floor, and my seven year-old had gone back to sleep propped up on a box that we hadn't time to move. But my nine-year-old son was fully awake, his anxious eyes wide in the beam of the flashlight he held to his bare chest. I knew it was pounding like mine.

Now he had the spotlight on me and I'd lost my line. I was praying silently for the right words to come when Patrick dove in. In the eleven years I've lived in tornado alley, I've never known him to take cover with us. His own father was terrified of storms, and would evacuate the family from their home at the first clap of thunder. All those sleepy nights spent under an overpass in the family's 1969 Chevy Impala had made him blase about the storm warnings that terrify me. "When I see it or hear it, I'll take cover," has always been his policy.

He'd been with a friend that evening, and came home to the condo around 9:30, wet from the downpour that had started a few minutes before. He had barely shut the door when the sirens started, our cue to fire up our usual routine of me emptying a closet and him going skeptically back and forth between the tv and the front porch, a choreography approximating the mating dance of a manic badger and a grouchy bear. Yet another variation on the marriage of the unstoppable force and the immovable object.

"tornado sirens. shutting down. emptying a closet," I texted some friends, including Belinda who was at the Johnson & Johnson event for bloggers in New Jersey, while her husband and daughter were at home in a little town just to the northeast of us, and Kristen, at the same conference, with her loved ones just a few minutes down the road from Belinda's house.

The bear was studying the radar image on tv. "Okay," he said, to my surprise. "Let's get them down here." I took the stairs two at a time. Three sleeping children, four arms, and 50mph winds at our heels.

---

No, I didn't pause in the middle of the action to snap a photo of the kids for the blog! Patrick snapped these with his camera phone in the long lull between the two major storm systems that hit that night. We were amazed (and grateful) that the baby slept through it all.

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Melt Your Heart

It snowed! Twice! In March, in Little Rock. Unheard of. After telling the boys to abandon hope for this year, they got two days of actual inches of the stuff. They made snowballs and snowboulders and drank hot chocolate, and the next day, spring would pick up right where it left off. Forty-eight hours of winter, all told, with a three day rest in between and book-ended by days in the mid to high 50s. A winter that all winters should be modelled on, in my opinion.

I envy my sister many of the fruits of her choice to stay in my hometown of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, and raise her family there. Suiting up small kids in snow suits, hats, scarfs, mitten and boots every day for four months of the year is not one of them. Mornings are hard enough. Neither do I miss shoveling driveways, the cold weather equivalent of trying to bail water out of a hole dug in the sand at the water's edge. A hole big enough to fit your car in. With a plough driving by every few hours to help push all the water back in.

Okay, there's no equivalent. That's why I live here, with scant regret for the hassle of northern winters. But I admit, I had quite forgotten that in addition to delivering a children's amusement park to your yard, a good snowfall can do this:

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Turkey by Birth, Dressingby the Grace of God

My six year old's suggested Thanksgiving Menu. To the far left are colon marks, behind which are the names of the family members whose personal preferences he lists as follows:

For himself:	Cooclit Pie, Cooclit Milk, Moore Cooclit Things
For his little brother:	Botll of Milk (editor's note: I don't want to talk about it)
Mom:	Trcey with Stofing
For little brother:	Sanwich and Chips
For himself:	Ritz
For little brother:	Rice Kirspies

I don't know where everyone else was during his survey. My response was borne of wistful thinking. Turkey with a savory bread stuffing, as accompanied the roasted birds of my northeastern youth, is considered blasphemous, if not out-and-out traitorous, here in the South. Cornbread dressing, baked in a separate pan, is what the good lord intended for fowl. It says so in Leviticus. AND Southern Living magazine. Ask Belinda, if you don't believe me.

Every southern family has its own heirloom recipe for dressing. My husband's came down his maternal line, and it is unique from any other I'd ever heard of, until today, when Laurie and I were comparing notes and realized we are closely related by dressings. Which is awesome, because ever since I dined and wined with the sk-rt girls in Chicago this summer, I've had a secret fantasy in which we are all sister-wives.

Laurie and her people are in North Carolina. I recently read that human migration can be tracked by DNA mutation. The farther and longer a particular tribe travels, the more mutations are added to the original code. I think this could just as easily be applied to cornbread dressing. We don't know for sure when or why Patrick's kin started heading westward from the Virginias & Carolinas. But now we know that somewhere along the way somebody added eggs. Call it manifest destiny.

In recent years, Patrick has taken it upon himself to carry tradition forward. He got started yesterday evening. My contribution was to make broth and bake up a batch of cornbread in the cast iron skillet I took from my mother-in-law's kitchen after she died. She was a wonderful woman, a true steel magnolia. My children never knew her, but to their cousins and older brother, she was "Honey". And so it says on her headstone.

With my pies out of the oven, and my part in the dressing-making done, I stepped aside and left him to it. This year, he decided to bring our eight-year-old in on the action. I heard him reading aloud to our son the steps written in his mother's lovely hand, telling stories about Thanksgivings past, and then explaining the difference between cornbread dressing and bread stuffing. True religion.

"You were born in the South, son. Don't ever forget that." He said it loud enough to be sure I could hear, and when I looked up, I caught the teasing gleam in his eyes, daring me to make something of it. But I also caught the pride and joy that was being kindled in the kitchen amid the egg cracking and cornbread crumbling. Patrick's parents died within several years of each other. Their home was sold. The extended family drifted into diaspora. Unless you count photographs, a couple of pieces of furniture, there's nothing tangible at all left to connect Patrick or our children to his parents, to their history.

Until we make cornbread dressing.


Here is Millie's recipe. Her own mother made it with turkey meat, which Laurie says is how it's done in her home, but Millie made it with chicken. If you are familiar with a version like this, I'd love to hear it.

Cornbread Dressing

(you need 2 iron skillets of cornbread already baked)*

Simmer one cut up or whole chicken in salted water for broth. Strain broth and skin and debone chicken. Add 1 stick butter to hot broth.

Chop:
1 small onion
1 celery (1 cup, chopped)

Have broth hot. Break up hot corn bread, add about 4-6 cups broth and mix well in a large pot or bowl. add onion and celery mixture, and 1&1/2 tsp poultry seasoning - salt if needed by taste. Stir in 1 dozen raw eggs and deboned & skinned chicken. Toast up to 8 slices bread extra dry and break up into mixture. The mixture should be slightly soupy. If out of broth, boil water and add. Bake in two 9 X 13 dishes or pans at 400 for one to one and a half hours until set.

*this goes without saying for southerners, but others need to know that this means unsweetened cornbread. I make mine with stoneground cornmeal and it works beautifully in this recipe.

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A Tale of Two Cities, Part I

When my parents came to Little Rock for our wedding in 1997 (more on that very soon), one of the first things they wanted to do was visit Central High.

In 1957, fifty years ago this week, nine black teenagers attempted to enroll at Central, opposed by a hostile mob and the National Guard. Federal troops were sent by President Eisenhower to enforce integration. My parents were also teenagers at the time, living in small towns in New Brunswick and Newfoundland. I don't know that either of them ever met a black person before they reached adulthood. There was a literal and cultural ocean of distance between their experience and what was happening in Little Rock, and across the American south. But Central High was as meaningful a landmark of their growing-up years as John F. Kennedy and Sputnik.

And they wanted to see it.

"Okay," I said, dubiously, "but it's down in the 'hood."

Central High, a magnificent art deco building of yellow brick, is planted squarely on the south side of I-630, the freeway that neatly slices this city into black and white. Or rather, the freeway was thrust to the north side of it, in the seventies. I've heard that local rappers call the 630 "the wall". It's a good name for it. The Wall runs east-west, an artery to get white collar workers from downtown offices to gated communities and big box stores in the western suburbs. For a couple of blocks to the north, the racial divide is slightly blurred (police responding to a break-in at the home of friends in that area told them they lived in the "transition zone"). But beyond that, north is white. South is black. It doesn't take a sociology degree to extrapolate on which side property values fall and crime rates rise. Steeply.

In 1997 the National Park Service opened the Central High Museum and Visitor Center. The city was still grappling with a gang crisis that had been the subject of a 1994 HBO documentary, Gang War: Bangin' in Little Rock. I remember scoffing when an acquaintance warned me against driving in a certain neighborhood. He was a good white liberal, a socialist and an expatriate, and I assumed he was being faecetious. Because who better to pass judgement on racial attitudes in the south than we who had never had to dwell in proximity to a sizeable, marginalized, minority population?

"I'm deadly serious, sweetheart," Nick said, his lilting Scottish accent diluted only slightly by his years in America. He drove his point home with tales of his own close encounters with random gunfire on the streets. Streets that were a short, wrong turn away from Central High.

Nonetheless, my folks wanted to see Central, and I drove them to it. My Dad was content to look around the campus, but my mother wanted to stay and visit the museum, so we dropped her off and I picked her up later.

"Why do they call it the Hood?", she asked innocently, gazing through the passenger side window at the once-gracious, turn-of-the-century homes that surround the school. I think she thought it was the official name, like something you'd see emblazoned on banners attached to lampposts. Welcome to the Historic Hood District.

I explained that it was slang for "neighborhood", and that it was synomynous with "ghetto". As we drove past boarded up doors and broken out windows, I told her what happened after Ike's troops and the international media withdrew from Central High. After one of the nine, Ernest Green, became the first African-American to graduate from Central High, the city's public schools were shut down to prevent further integration from taking place the next academic year. One year from the day the nine entered Central, Little Rock citizens voted 19,470 to 7,561 against integration. The district's schools were closed until a newly constituted school board reopened them on August 12, 1959, a "dark day," in the words of then Governor Orval Faubus.

I explained to her what "white flight" was, and how after integration, there had been an exodus of white familes to the west, and that the establishment of most of the city's private schools coincided with this era. I told her how Patrick's mother grew up around the corner from Central High, graduating with the class of '57, but that I couldn't show her the wonderful, rambling house that Patrick so warmly remembered from his childhood, because it had been torn down after the family moved his grandmother out. The neighbourhood was well into its decline by that point. I told her about gangs, and crackhouses, and drivebys.

My mother's face was crestfallen. I might as well have told her the moon landing had been faked, and we were still in Vietnam.

"What was it all for, then?" she asked. "What's changed?" I remember her voice sounding very young and small.

I turned onto the overpass to cross the ironically-named "free" way—the Wall—and headed back north. Exit here for White, here for Safe.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know."

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Quid ni?

You know how some things happen to you in life, and you realize that you kind of knew all along it would unfold that way? Like when I met Patrick, and I suddenly remembered being a little girl who stared into the flames of candles and saw a man with that same long yellow hair. Some stops along the road are well signed, even if you don't always look up to read them.

Others just aren't on the map.

The South sure wasn't on mine. This is my tenth spring here, and it still feels like I am dreaming sometimes. The surrealism is heightened in springtime, when the trees are snowing blossoms in steady drifts and I feel like I am walking across the opening credits of a Technicolor film. Sure, it's there at other times of the year, like when my toddler, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, stretches out his arms and says, "Mama, HAY-ULP-MUH-EE." But it is this time of year when the distance I've travelled is most pronounced.

I'm about to get in a huge amount of trouble with my compatriots. Watch the comments section either explode, or go icily silent.

Newfoundland is cold.

No, wait, that's not the whole truth.

Much of it is wet also.

As someone from St. John's recently observed to me, people there reminisce about the good weather days the way people in other places remember the bad ones. They are the exception, not the rule.

I didn't know what spring was until I moved here. I didn't know that in some places people had easter eggs hunts outside, in the green grass. (I also didn't know that other kids weren't leaving a glass of rum for Santa on Christmas Eve, but that's a story for another day). I didn't know that the concept of four distinct seasons of equal duration wasn't just a fairy tale you read about in books.

I can hear it all now. "It's not that cold." "It hardly ever snows in St. John's." "Corner Brook summers are hot." "We do too have a spring!"

Let me rush in to avow that my island home is an extraordinarily beautiful place. Like no other. But we are an obstinate race, as islanders often are. I think some of this has to be chalked up to natural selection. You know the people who threw their lot in with the place had to have worn out their welcome back home.

Our inheirited rebellious streak is compounded by an acquired defensiveness, borne of perpetually being picked on by the big kid next door. Canada has a nasty tendency to pinch and poke us, and call us names. And although we understand that they themselves have self-esteem issues arising from being more or less ignored by the even bigger kid down the block, it still hurts our feelings and causes us to make rude gestures behind their back.

What all this adds up to is that we are a little on the sensitive side. It is difficult, if not actually illegal, for a Newfoundlander to admit to an outsider that there is any downside at all to living on a remote outcropping of rock in the middle of the North Atlantic.

When I was in Ireland recently, many of my fellow Newfoundlanders expressed wonder that I would live away from the island for so long. There was a small, but earnest lobby effort to coax me out of exile, cunningly directed at my husband. And you know, I do pine for certain aspects of home. The ocean. The people. My family. The culture. The fish and chips.

Here, my friends and countrymen, is the deal-breaker:

These are photos taken last weekend of my sister, niece and nephew on what my mother calls "a beautiful spring day" in the Bay of Islands, Newfoundland:


And here we have my three-year-old, playing in the neighbourhood creek, on an actual spring day two days ago:


To lend balance to this comparison, in another month's time, the snow will be gone from all but the mountains across the bay from my mother's place, and here the creek bed will be bone dry. Here, it will be so hot and so humid that the walk from the front door to the driveway will be exhausting. When it is cold, you can always put on more clothes, but when it is hot, you can only get so naked. I have come to regard Arkansas summers the same way I did Newfoundland winters: as something to endure.

And as lovely and lush as it is here, there are few places on earth that can touch the beauty of the island on those fleeting summer days. It truly takes one's breath away. On those days, all else is forgotten.

I thought Patrick summed it up beautifully in his live narration of our vacation video from a few years back. We were pulling out of the ferry terminal on the southeast tip of the island. There is silence as the camera pans over the barren granite cliffs that thrust out of the sea like battlements.

" Look at that," you hear Patrick say, in a voice that is almost pained, forgetting for a moment that his comments are being captured for posterity, and that family vaction videos are generally G-rated. "Why would anyone live here, except that it's so... fucking beautiful."

I think it would make a great national motto. Anybody know the latin for "fucking?"

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Song of the South

Oh, I have a blog? That requires coming indoors and sitting at the computer? You can't be serious. Who's bright idea was that?

It is spring, and my brain is full of golden, dozey pollen. Those of you who have circumnavigated the solar year with me might remember this seasonal condition. The April 2006 archive shows a whopping two entries.

As with this time last year, I have been spending every spare minute outdoors. The boys went back to school today, and as soon as they were dismissed I sped them off to the park, where they spent the rest of the afternoon chasing salamanders and crawdads out from under rocks, as boys in April should. Watching them scramble around a creek bed, barefoot and trousers rolled, always makes me feel like I have stumbled into a Mark Twain story.

Our camping trip was fantastic. Few people realize that Arkansas is a beautiful place. I once received condolences from a couple in a restaurant in Maine when I told them I had moved here. Ignorant Yankees. They have no idea. Thursday's drive through the Ozarks took my breath away. As did our hike through Devil's Den, with the dogwoods all in bloom. A hickory forest is an enchanted place to stand.

Less enchanting, but no less demanding of reverence, was the copperhead snake we ran into on the way. I guess a bird had dropped him on the branch. Talk about a rock and a hard place. He was fairly pissed off by the time our party came along, with a dozen children stampeding in front. There was a great deal of shouting at each other before we all moved along, one of the Daddies going back to lend the snake a hand.

Get it?

Sorry folks, it's just not going to get much better until the heat kicks in and I'm forced back to the climate controlled interior. Ninety two degrees today. It won't be much longer.

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O, to be in Arkansas, now that Spring is here.

Granted, people do not make my bed and change my towels for me here. When I speak with the mortgage company, they do not smile and say, I see your charges have been taken care of, Madam. When I stand up and clear my throat to speak, my children do not tilt their heads in rapt attention, or even offer to buy me a drink afterwards. Unbelievably, I have to drive my own car and tote my own bags in and out of it. Whenever I have had to wipe someone's bum since coming home from Ireland, I can't help but think, "don't you know who I am??"

But there are worse places to live, worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than a backyard crawdad boil with my bestest friends, a few beers and a trampoline filled with our several hundred children, a riot of angels springing up to heaven.

Even if they don't care who I am.

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So much for bleak midwinter

When Patrick and I drove up to Arkansas from San Miguel de Allende in his baby blue '64 Comet, it was springtime. "Well, what do you think of Arkansas?" he asked me, somewhere between Texarkana and Little Rock.

"Bushy," I replied.

In fact, I found it claustrophobic. I had spent most of my life on an island. I was used to being able to see into the distance. I was more at home in the high desert than I was here.

I have never completely lost that choking feeling. It is so lush here. In the spring it feels like the honeysuckle vines might snake around your ankles and pull you under. Not all the foliage dies back in winter. The magnolias and pines and camelias are evergreen. But enough of it falls to the ground that you can finally see the trees for the forest. Everything seems sharper and more clear.

I am no photographer. But here is a little story in pictures. I'm supposed to be locked upstairs writing poetry. Don't tell anyone you saw me here.

---

The sun came out.



So I took Fanny, our Rottschund for a walk in the woods.



Her front end is no more attractive, believe me.



When the boys and I ponder what god looks like (if god had a look),
my guess is sunlight on the water.



This is what god looks like to Fanny.



Those are clusters of mistletoe. Do you know how they get the mistletoe out of the trees for Christmas? They shoot it down with guns, that's how.

I wrote a poem about midwinter once. It was published in this book. If you go in for that sort of thing, you can also read it here.

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That Which is Good and Right About America



My husband would say it's "John-by-god-Wayne", just to get a rise out of me, but the indisputable truth is that cheese dip best represents all that is good and right, noble and true about this great and demented country of his.

And not just any cheese dip. I'm talking Ro-tel & Velveeta cheese dip. Manna of the trailer park. Do not--I mean, don't even--email me from anywhere outside the USA to tell me that the dip your local Mexican eatery serves up is more authentic than this, like I don't know what real queso is. In the first place, unless you are emailing from Mexico, the menu at your local eatery bears little resemblance to anything really Mexican, no matter how many little painted skeletons are adorning the place. In the second place, I'm not talking about Mexican cheese dip or, more properly, Tex-Mex cheese dip (going to Mexico and asking for cheese dip will get you the same look I imagine you'd get for requesting sweet and sour chicken balls in Beijing). I am sorry to get testy, but a few months ago I posted how there's nothing like a southern peach, and y'all got all defensive on my ass, like I was turning my back on all the other fruits and nations of the world. Let us not compare peaches and apples, people. I stand by my words: there is nothing like a southern peach. Or Ro-tel cheese dip. Deal with it.

I have been scouring the blogosphere for good Irish blogs, in anticipation of our trip in the new year. The other day, I came across Cashmere Boots, a Southern Californian living in Dublin. She was cringing over a news report that Texans were experimenting with fried coke. I say, power to them. This is the kind of envelope-pushing that both put a man on the moon and brought us pancake-on-a-stick and it needs to be celebrated.

I don't have the cringe factor. Americans don't embarass me in the world way that they can other Americans. And they don't frighten me, the way they do everyone else in the world, because living here among them, instead of being on the outside looking in, gives a more nuanced perspective than one gets from the media. I learned in very short order that the country and the nation are two very separate entities, and usually it is the latter that gets projected onto the global village tv screen.

My husband would like me to demonstrate just a little more apprehension. He will rattle off conspiracy theories and civil rights violations and gets frustrated that I am not more visibly upset. It' s not that I am unconcerned about these things, it's just that I grew up in a culture that was virulently anti-american, and George W. Bush notwithstanding, I have yet to see anything as bad or as shocking as what I was brought up to believe about the place. Patrick acts like it's news that the American military-industrial complex is inclined toward facism. That power corrupts is not exactly earthshattering to me. I am still marvelling, ten years later, at how much works in this country, in spite of it.

Cheese dip, for instance. In cheese dip, I trust.

Now, in case you skipped the link above, go and watch Jon-by-god-Stewart discuss pancake-on-a-stick. Also deserving of the title of this post. Jon Stewart, too.

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Southern Signs of Fall

Growing up in the north, with its fleeting summers and epic winters, the first chilly days of autumn always ushered in a certain sense of melancholy, if not outright despair. It took years for my brain to quit associating the turning of the leaves with impending doom, but I am finally acclimated to epic summers (with heat as brutal as the deepest and most abiding snow) and fleeting winters (a bi- or even tri-annual occurance called "Snow-Day", triggering mass hysteria and looting in the supermarkets).

The last couple of years I have notice myself getting excited--exhilarated, even--at the first nip in the air. Autumn has become my favorite season. Mid-October to December is like one long festival here, building momentum with Halloween, peaking with Thanksgiving, sustained through Christmas and finally winding down on New Year's Day. The kick-off is the State Fair, to which I took my two older sons yesterday.

I heart the State Fair. To me, it is a microcosm of America. The lights. The crowds. The excess. The crassness. The sweetness. It's teenage farmboys in wrangler jeans and straw hats. It's a little goth family eating pink cotton candy from a bag. It's a fat black baby sucking on a bottle of coke. It's two Mexican guys in shearling coats lined up at the Old West photo booth. It's rednecks with mullets and white boys with dreadlocks. It's a middle-aged dad holding each of his teenage daughters under his arms as they fly in slow motion over the midway on a bungee cord and the P.A. system blasting Coldplay's "Yellow" and me getting choked up about it. It's the lemonade vendor who wants to charge me three bucks for an empty cup and it's the stranger who gives us a dozen ride tickets on her way out. It's a deep-fried twinkie and a staggering amount of pork.

As with the full-scale version of this country, I am more of a gawker than a participant. I am too timid to ride anything but the merry-go-round or ferris wheel. I am too carb-conscious to eat the twinkie, too skeptical to shoot the cans. My pleasure is entirely vicarious. I'm strictly in in it for the people-watching. And the people I love to watch best of all are my boys. They were beside themselves the whole time. My five-year-old, coming down the Super Slide, looked like one of those old Life magazine photos of pilots doing Mach-3. His eyes were popping out of his head and his mouth was set in a wrap-around grimace. Oh shit, I thought. Then he hit the bottom, and screamed, "That was WICKED!!" My seven-year-old could not be deflected from the games this year, as in past years. I finally relented and let him pick a floating duck, for which he "won" a cheap plastic sword. He pulled it out of the plastic wrapper like it was Excalibur in the anvil, he was so pleased with it.

I did join them on the Monkey Maze, which had a maze of mirrors to get through. No way were they going in there alone. One thing that characterizes our annual excursions to the fair is the relentless drilling I give the boys on stranger safety. I make them memorize my cell phone number. I quiz them on who to approach for help if they get lost. The first thing we do inside the gates is fill out i.d. bands and I point out all the police officers. It's a wonder they are able to have fun at all after I get through with the briefing.

Anyway, there we were running like hamsters through the Monkey Maze, banging into mirrors, and although there was a stampede of children ahead and behind us, I had each of mine firmly by the hand. My eldest, behind me, seemed to be hanging back a little. "Come on!," I shouted. "Stay together!"

"HEY!" I heard finally. "HEY!" "LADY! You've got the WRONG HAND!"

Poor kid. Now I have to expand my drill to warn my children about people like me.



Another rite of the season I get a kick out of observing is football. In the south, that means principally college ball, and in this state, it means the Southeastern Conference and the University of Arkansas Razorbacks, a.k.a. the Hogs. My husband is a Hogs fanatic. I have never seen an American football game of any stripe outside of television. I would like to go to one, but not to watch the game. As with the state fair, it's the cultural trappings that fascinate me. I especially like the food. I would probably be perfectly happy to attend the tailgate parties without ever entering the stadium.

I try to follow the game, but I'm just not wired for it. There's too many things happening on the field at once, and so many interruptions. It's not a patriotic bias; I'm the same with hockey. Baseball, I can grasp, because it's very linear. Man throws ball, man hits ball, man runs, team scores. Football seems to be all over the damn place.

I do enjoy listening in on the post-game commentary, however, much to my husband's irritation. I find their earnestness amusing, and I like to interject my own take on things.

"What happened out there today, Coach?"

"Well, Bob, there was a football game. There were a lot of guys chasing a ball on a field. One guy would get the ball, and the other guys would all jump on him. Then there'd be a commercial break."

"Describe the scene in the locker room, Jim."

"Rampant homoeroticism, Bob. Flagrant ass-slapping."

Curiously, my husband has yet to invite me to accompany him to a live game.

Woo-pig-sooie.

---

(Calling the faithful: today's post at Finslippy is soliciting recommendations of good, underexposed blogs. Just so you know. Because I'd hate any really good bloggers to go unmentioned.)

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My Linguistic Profile:

35% Yankee

30% General American English

25% Dixie

5% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

This online widget analyzed my dialect based on an exhaustive list of six or seven questions. It is regrettably U.S-centric, but I think it illustrates my split linguistic personality. I have no earthly idea which five percent of my vocabulary qualifies as "Midwestern". Perhaps it has to do with my Finnish origins (see below).

Mongrel

My girlfriend Heather rang me up the other night, bored and looking for a defenseless immigrant to mock.

"Did you just answer the phone, "Hah?"

"Um, I don't know, did I?"

Insert smirking sound made by forcing air through the back of one's palatte into one's nose here. "Actually, you've been saying, 'Hah' for a while. I just wondered if you knew."

In case you are not from around these here parts, "Hah" is what southerners say in salutation. Like allo/bonjour. Or hola. Often it is accompanied by y'all, as in "Hah y'all."

I have lived south of the U.S. Interstate 40--what some consider the modern Mason-Dixon line-- for over ten years now. It is to be expected that by now I have picked up a smattering of the vernacular for which this region is both celebrated and reviled the world over. What is surprising is the sponge-like absorption with which I have soaked it up. I would have thought my native dialect would have held up better.

Before coming here, I lived in Newfoundland, which has its own encyclopedic Dictionary of Newfoundland English and at any given moment is maggoty (crawling) with four or five hundred linguistics students from abroad doing their thesis work by molesting the locals with field recorders. When I bother to reveal in conversation that I am from Newfoundland (which I don't unless I think we will know each other for longer than half an hour because it often involves a tiresome lesson in geo-politics, after which most of you will persist in thinking I am Finnish) the occasional well-traveled American will remark, "but you don't have an accent."

It hasn't been deleted from my hard drive altogether. My husband claims it comes out anytime I am on the telephone to my family back on the island. To his southern ear, which cannot process any sound wave that moves past the speed of drawl, it sounds like a chipmunk speaking with an Irish lilt. And my roots show from time to time in remnants of my native vocabulary, like when I forget and ask to use the washroom instead of restroom or bathroom and get shown the laundry room. Or say root for route, or "auhnt" for aunt. Or use "Go-wan!" to express disbelief instead of "No way!" Or say "arse" to my husband and "bum" to my children when referring to their rear ends wanting a boot or a spank.

It's a bit of a muddle. Possibly even my children don't understand what I mean when I tell them someone's fixin' to get a spank on the bum if they don't bloody well quit hollerin'. This would explain why they ignore me.

If this were a video post, I would now cue one of those earnest doctoral linguistics students to face the camera, like the "famous historian" in Monty Python's Holy Grail, to explain why it isn't really at all surprising a Newfoundlander should take so readily to the dialect of the American south, both areas being largely settled by the same anglo-celtic stock, with a common ancestral folk tradition and similar periods of relative geographical isolation during which regional accents and vernacular incubated.

Then I would cue a knight in armour to chop his head off.

Bah y'all.

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G'day, Steve.

It was ungodly early when I saw the news yesterday morning that Steve Irwin, a.k.a. the Crocodile Hunter, had been killed while snorkelling off the coast of Australia.

My first thought was, how very sad for his wife and children. My second thought was, my seven year-old son will be heartbroken. My third thought was, I will never, ever go swimming in the waters of northwestern Australia. If the Bill Bryson book I am reading, In a Sunburned Country, weren't enough to warn me off already, now I am a true believer.

A pot of coffee later, I thought of my friend Georgia and rang her up.

"Well, I just felt I had to reach out to an Australian," I said when she picked up. "And you're it, mate."

"You're the fifth person to call me this morning," she said, sounding baffled and amused. I assume she is still in the denial stage of grieving (her next door neighbor, however, is apparently quite distraught).

Come right down to it, Jeff Corwin is much more my cup of tea when it comes to guys with camera crews running around in the bush molesting wildlife. Although the genre as a whole has come a long way since my childhood, when all we had was the sadistic Marlon Perkins sending poor Jim into the lion's den week after week on Wild Kingdom. Nonetheless, I admired Irwin's effort to make us see beauty and purpose in creatures we have been taught to revile, principally crocodilians and snakes.

My sympathies have long tended to lean with the snakes. Maybe it's because we don't have any reptiles in Newfoundland on which to project primal fear, or maybe it's because deep down I've always known, had it been me in the garden of Eden, I would also have gone for the fruit (see "Sublime", below). I think they are beautiful, and I love it when one crosses my path (as long as I see them first). We have had several good-size king snakes around the yard, and last weekend there was a lovely brown water snake that would greet me at the water's edge when I'd go down to the lake at the conference center.

My husband, like most southern men, is of the "Whack first, ask questions later" school of zoology. The post-mortem report is invariably, "copperhead." The slender brown grass snakes that turn up in the garden from time to time, no more than a handspan long, are always "baby copperheads" which are supposedly "even more poisonous." This elicits much eye-rolling from me, and disavowals of assistance from him come the day I am finally bitten and lie twitching in the driveway. When I told him that the Crocodile Hunter had been killed, I thought I detected just a glint of biblical vindication in his expression (although, bizarrely, it turned out to be a stingray that dispatched him--the terrestial parallell would be a bull rider being gored by a goat).

My sons took the news in stride, as it turned out. Our resident mystic, my middle son, said after a moment's pause, "Now he's awake."

When it comes to knowledge of life, good and evil, my money's on the wisdom of snakes and babes, hands down, every time.

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Sublime

I was twenty-six years old before I ever tasted a real peach. Such wild fierce beauty as is found on my island home is enjoyed at a price, part of which is having to eat produce that was picked well before its prime in a field in some other corner of the continent and has been entombed in a freight container for a month (wild blueberries and lobster go a long, long way toward offsetting this deprivation). The "peaches" of my youth were as hard as baseballs and odorless if they were unprocessed, or slimy and slick if they were tinned.

A real southern peach-- whose surface temperature has never slipped below 80 degrees, whose soft skins sloughs away at the first nuzzle of your lips, whose flesh can be ploughed under with the tip of your tongue, and whose scarlett pit, upon first glimpse, causes your mouth to pucker involuntarily in anticipation of sucking pulp and nectar from every dimple-- that is an experience that I probably couldn't have fully appreciated before I was twenty-six.

A little seasoning enhances everything.


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