Hoarded Ordinaries

Today’s another busy, rainy day: looks like I’ll be inside all day catching up (still!) with grading and such. I’ve been in something of a funk this past week or so: it’s summer so I should be relaxing, yet I’m teaching what amounts to a full course-load…for what amounts to part-time pay. In the back of my mind is the thought that I should do something spectacular to celebrate my completion of the PhD: after working for a decade toward this one goal, I celebrated minimally and then headed right back to work. The realities of adjunct teaching (and adjunct salaries) make it difficult to do something hedonistic like go on vacation or take a span of time off. Still, I underestimated the level of “post traumatic stress” (as one former prof termed it) that sprouts in the aftermath of realizing PhD actually means “Piled Higher and Deeper.”

When you’re feeling in a funk, it’s easy to overlook the obvious. There’s so much to be thankful for. Even though I don’t have the time (or money) to celebrate my diss-completion in the way I’d like, I am grateful to be done. Someday, Powers-That-Be willing, I’ll have the time and resources to take my summers off, to travel, to enjoy leisure. In the meantime, my dues-paying existence isn’t bad at all: as I’ve said before, my current situation is better than a 9-to-5 desk job. Way back in the days when I was an evangelical Christian (believe it or not), a wise pastor once remarked that the only difference between a monastery and a prison is gratitude: if you’re thankful for what you have, a prison can be a place of spiritual practice, and if you forget to be thankful for what you have, even a beautifully peaceful monastery can be a drag.

It’s difficult to remember to be grateful, to seek the extraordinary within the humdrum details of our day-to-day lives. Thank goodness we have other folks to remind us. This morning my buddy Fred from Fragments from Floyd posted a lovingly illustrated essay on “The Ordinary.” In it, Fred pretty much sums up the aesthetic philosophy of “Hoarded Ordinaries” and its author: the place where beauty hides isn’t some far-off beach, distant fog-shrouded mountaintop, or exotic foreign bazaar (although, of course, I wouldn’t mind visiting any of these). Instead, the place where beauty lies is in our own backyard, in a plain-Jane pasture viewed from our mailbox or on the sun-dappled side of a barn we see every morning over yet another cup of much-needed coffee.

These days in Keene, Canada mayflower and false Solomon’s seal are blooming in the woods along the Ashuelot River; both of these members of the lily family are very common. Both mayflower and false Solomon’s seal are, in a word, ordinary: you’ll see them everywhere along shady trails, and your eyes will begin to ignore them as you look for more showy, spectacular, or rare beauties. But Fred’s right, of course. The ordinary is all we have: it is, after all, the very stuff of our days. It is by watching the daily passage of common lovelies that we train our eye to catch the spectacularly uncommon; through the door of the ordinary, the extraordinary creeps. Are you watching? Will you recognize it when it arrives hidden and silent, cloaked in green?

This week has been stormy. Unlike the otherwise fearless Kathleen, I’m not freaked out by thunderstorms. Although I have my share of neurotic phobias–I don’t like earthquakes, I tend to get claustrophic in crowds, and I hate using telephones–thunderstorms don’t phase me. In fact, I’ve actually enjoyed the tempestuous downpours and sky-illuminating pyrotechnics we’ve been treated to every night this week.

Last night as I drove home from the Women’s Literature class I teach once a week in Bow, I drove over a mountain ridge in the midst of a thunderstorm. When I used to commute from Hillsboro to Keene, I’d drive this winding, undulating span of road several times a week in all sorts of weathers: snow, sleet, hail. When you drive over a mountain ridge, you can’t tell from the bottom what sort of weather you’ll face at the top: what starts out as rain in the lowlands might turn to freezing rain as you crest the ridge.

My mother for one hates to drive at night, much less on a rainy night; she still can’t believe that I used to drive over the mountains in snow, sleet, and rain, much less on nights characterized by such weather. I drive a Subaru, and I drive carefully. Although I’ve seen more than a few cars (and one tractor-trailer truck) fishtail off this stretch of road, I’ve come to know and respect it as a familiar friend: if you tend to its curves and heed its slippery spots, this road won’t cast you off. About a year ago I saw a bald eagle winging its way over Granite Lake as I drove this road to Keene from Hillsboro; on another day last year I saw a groundhog-toting coyote trot in front of my oncoming car, and just this past March, I saw a fisher-cat dart cross the road in front of me. Last night I didn’t see any wildlife on my way home fom Bow, but the light show was pretty amazing as 360-degrees of sky were illuminated by crackling flashes of pure rain-rinsed energy.

Although I’m awed rather than frightened by spring thunderstorms, I do (as I mentioned) have my share of neurotic phobias. Ever since I started keeping this blog, I’ve experienced this weird freak-out whenever people I know “in person” read my blog. I’m cool when someone like Kathleen reads my blog since she met the “blog-me” before meeting the “in person” me. But when friends, family, or students read my blog, I get strangely nervous. Somehow, in my mind there’s a different kind, level, or degree of intimacy that I share with online acquaintances versus in-person ones: the “me” you’ll meet in person is somehow different from the “me” you’ll meet here. That isn’t to say that I lie in my blog or present a false self in person; it’s just to say that we all have various personae that we present in different situations, so the thought of mixing my “real” with my “virtual” self is somehow disconcerting.

Several months ago, for instance, I freaked out a bit when my landlord mentioned having read parts of my blog. “Oh my God!” I fretted. “I hope he didn’t read the post about my underwear!” For some similarly neurotic reason, I get anxious whenever I check my referral log and notice someone from Toledo, Ohio has accessed my site: might that be one of my in-laws or a former professor? Although I know that several in-laws and at least one former professor have read my blog, I still grow nervous at the thought that these folks might be reading: what if I say something here that doesn’t match my in-person persona, or what if I say something that can or will be used against me?

I get even more nervous when I learn that a student, past or present, has checked out my blog. Within the past week, at least one of my current Keene State students and at least one member of that aforementioned Women’s Lit class have read and commented upon my blog, a realization that stopped my heart for a moment. Is allowing your students to read about your underwear choices in accord with proper professor/student protocol? What if a student reads a particularly inappropriate or non-PC comment here? If you could be a fly on the wall in my Women’s Lit class, you’d realize how blatantly absurd these concerns are: within the confines of that classroom, my eight fabulous female students and I have talked (and laughed uproariously) about everything from vibrators to preferred methods for offing an oafish spouse. (If you’ve read Susan Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles, you know that the way to get rid of an obnoxious hubby is to “knot it.”) So it’s not like any of those ladies is going to be shocked to hear that have secret ambitions of becoming a stripper.

So just imagine how odd I felt when I discovered via my new-found friend Shane at Nickerblog that a former writing student of mine keeps a blog of her own. Does that mean she followed Shane’s link to my blog? Is she freaking out at the thought that I’m reading her’s? Although I don’t see myself as being the Intimidating Intellectual type, maybe my students find my Professorial Persona to be threatening or intrusive or…whatever. If I were a student, I’d be embarrassed to have a professor read my blog: heck, half the time I embarrass myself when I read my own blog.

And so they say that only six degrees of separation come between any two people on the face of the planet: if any given person clicks through the right six blogs, they’ll eventually land here on my site whether I’m ready to greet them or not. The thought of six degrees of separation is, in my book, far more scary than facing 360-degrees of mountain-cracking thunder and lightning. Human behavior, after all, is far less predictable (and far more dangerous) than any weather you’ll find on a mountain ridge. Keeping a blog is like wearing a tin funnel on your head in the middle of an electrical storm: at any moment, ZAP, who knows what (or who) will hit you. There’s a certain beauty in unpredictability, and maybe that’s what drives those of us who are flatlanders by nature into the dizzying, lightning-defying reaches of the blogosphere. Right about now, though, I think I should change the name “Hoarded Ordinaries” to “Duck and Cover.”

It’s been rainy here in Keene these past few days: both last night and the night before there have been rousing thunderstorms. In the aftermath of such storms, the air is charged with energy and the earth smells rich and fertile: you can almost feel yourself sinking into the soil as it composts your feet on contact.

On Sunday during a sunny spell the dog and I walked to Ashuelot River Park while Chris went golfing: two distinctly different ways of communing with nature. The river was dotted with kayakers–greenhorns, judging from their frantic paddling–and the trails were peopled with divorced dads shepherding flocks of visiting children. During the week when the dog and I walk the river, we see unaccompanied boys who race their bikes on the trail and wade into ponds to catch turtles and snakes; yesterday, only Reggie waded while I tried to hunt down frogs, all the turtles having apparently gone into hiding for the day.

I heard three kinds of frogs yesterday–slews of green frogs, a couple bullfrogs, and one tree-frog–but I saw only a single mud-brown bullfrog who splashed into the water at the dog’s approach. Minutes later, I explored a new-to-me side trail that snakes the turtle pond I’ve mentioned before while Reggie went wading, in mud, yet again. He must have startled one of those green frogs since I heard an amphibious shriek and then a liquid plop: when it comes to scaring up frogs, Reggie has me beat, being less hesitant about mud and mire.

Today has been an inside day: on Monday I post a week’s worth of assignments to both of my online classes, then I teach a face-to-face class at Keene State, then I drive some 45 minutes to teach a night class in Bow, NH. It’s summer-time, but I’m teaching four different courses at three institutions: a grammar class along with three distinctly different lit classes. This morning I had papers to grade and assignments to read: I’m catching (but not yet caught) up from that trip to see relatives to Ohio, and before that the end-term crunch, and before that the final stages of the diss. One of these days, I’ll catch up with classes, and housework, and the piles of bills, papers, and other tasks that have accumulated…someday, someday.

In the meantime, though, I like to remember yesterday’s ferns and frogs, denizens of cool, moist places: I bet life’s pretty simple when you’re a fern or frog, your days spent jumping from dogs and inquisitive boys or just sprouting from rhizomes and spewing out spores. As careful as I was yesterday, I still muddied my feet, so before we headed back into town and then on home, both Reggie and I waded in the river, he up to his belly, I up to the tops of my mud-blackened toes. Sometimes you just need to take some time to cool your heels, and right about now the Ashuelot River would be just as good a spot as any.

What a difference 20 days make. The photo on the left was taken on May 1st; the photo on the right was taken on May 20th. I don’t fancy myself a photographer, but I am a collector obsessed with time. Sometimes when I snap yet another shot of some shop window or overlooked doorway, I ask myself why I bother to chronicle such insignificant places. Often an odd response pops into consciousness: “Someday when all this is gone, people will wonder what life was like in the old days.” Town square statues seem lasting enough, but the Buddhist in me knows that impermanence surrounds us: even if this statue is here for years to come (and there’s no guarantee of that, or anything), chances are I won’t be. Even if I spend the rest of my life in Keene, something that’s not likely given the state of the academic job market, eventually I’ll grow old, my sight and memories will fade, and I’ll die. But somewhere in cyberspace–somewhere in the synapses of a reader or two, perhaps–these and other images might live on. Here stood one set of eyes with a camera on two separate days in May, 2004, and these two precise moments will never pass this way again.

I’ve posted such before-and-after images on several occasions: one of the surprise joys of keeping an illustrated blog is the way you can use your entries to travel in time. This recent photo of a spring-cleaned picnic table in Keene’s Depot Square, for instance, hearkens back to an image of the same picnic table minus fresh paint and chess boards that I took last October then posted in March. Although the angle of the photo is different, you can tell it’s the same table if you compare the splintered wood at its base: apparently, they paint only the tops of picnic tables here in Keene. Although it’s been rearranged and repainted, this table has been doing its civic duty in Depot Square since October at least. How long before that did this picnic table languish in total obscurity?

This weekend Chris and I went to see the film Troy. Apart from several interesting departures from Homer’s original story, the film was quite good: if nothing else, it was delightful (ummm, yeah) to see a buff and hunky Brad Pitt as an arrogant and entirely sexy Achilles. (Hector and Odysseus weren’t bad on the eyes, either: ladies, tell your fellas this is a manly action film, which it is, then sit back and enjoy lots of sweaty, sword-wielding studs.) One of the themes that the film drives home a bit too heavy-handedly is that Achilles fought to preserve his name throughout history: when a messenger boy tells Achilles he’d be too frightened to fight a huge Thessalian opponent, Achilles looks the boy in the eye and says, “That is why no one will remember your name.”

We all want to be remembered by someone: even if history forgets our names, we’d like to think that our friends and family at least will recall our lives and eventual passing. It’s arrogantly anthropomorphic, I think, to save remembrance for humans alone: why shouldn’t tables and shop-windows be memorialized as well? Someone took care to build these objects, at one point someone took care to tend them, and even if these objects have since fallen into benign neglect, they and the nameless hands who wrought them deserve some sort of immortality. I don’t know the story of this overgrown doorway, but I know it looked quite different in March when it showed not a hint of green. (To see the “before” image of this same doorway, click here then scroll halfway down.) Nature continually moves on, with each season following the previous like a turning wheel, and only we humans and our arts hold the promise of remembrance. If we don’t cherish and remember abandoned doorways and faded flowers, who will? Without remembrance, why bother with time?

In one of Achilles’ more contemplative moments, he remarks to the slave girl Briseis that the gods envy men because men are mortal. Overwhelmed by the monotony of time, the gods realize that only mortals can truly appreciate beauty because that beauty is fleeting, our mortal lives ultimately being the fuel of time. It is true that the most poignant moments of Troy occur when various characters acknowledge that their time is short: Hector’s final leavetaking of his wife and infant son, for instance, is heartbreaking because he knows he will not return alive. When we breeze through our days thinking that time and its accidents are infinite, we miss the particulars of life’s pageantry; once we become acutely aware of impermanence, though, we heed life’s tiny details as a means of time-keeping. These chimney swifts overhead sound the same as those last summer, and the black-throated green warbler singing from a conifer here in Keene sounds the same as those heard in the Ohio pines of my childhood. These details provide continuity and a kind of immortality: it is such remembrance that brings meaning to otherwise anonymous days.

Both film and photography are a luxury and, ultimately, a crutch: Homer imagined and then recited from memory the details of the Trojan War along with the intricate stories of each of its heroes. Our task is much less daunting. Given the stuff of our days, can we remember the particulars that give our lives beauty and specificity? Given the monotonous march of time, can we remember the precise shape and pattern of every footfall?

Have I ever mentioned how beautiful the area around Keene is? When we moved to New Hampshire from the Boston area, we were looking to buy an affordable house, but we also were looking to live amongst mountains. Living in New Hampshire’s north country, in the midst of the White Mountains, would have been beautiful, but it would have been too far from gainful employment. Hillsborough, NH was our initial compromise: it was close enough, in theory, that Chris could still work in Boston, and it was equidistant from several larger college towns (including Keene) where I could teach.

Ultimately, though, Hillsborough was a poor choice for us. The town is small, the population is largely blue-collar, and Chris and I felt out of our element. Our house, although nestled in the woods across from a large State Forest that offered plenty of hiking, was dimly lit and situated in a subdivision peopled by families with children: Chris in particular felt out-of-place in a neighborhood of minivans and Little League moms. Although it turned out to be a good financial investment, our three-bedroom house was too large for an intentionally childless couple. When Chris left corporate America to pursue music full-time, it was difficult to justify my teaching a backbreaking adjunct teaching load at a handful of colleges just to (barely) pay the mortgage.

Last summer, we consciously downsized, selling that house in Hillsborough and nearly 3/4 of our possessions before moving into our humble little two-bedroom apartment here in Keene. Instead of driving some 45-minutes one way to a handful of colleges, I now walk 5 minutes to one. Instead of two cars, we drive (occasionally) one. We’ve traded white-picket-fence, child-rearing neighbors for ones who are college kids: they stay up too late listening to loud music, and so do we. We live within walking distance from an artsy old renovated theatre, a handful of coffeeshops and good restaurants, and the prettiest (and most pedestrian-friendly) downtown I’ve ever seen. And when folks around town ask what we do for a living, I can honestly say, “I teach at the college, and my husband’s a musician” without getting slack-jawed stares. Keene’s a good fit for us. It’s a town where even we as outsiders feel like we belong.

And best of all, Keene is located in just about the prettiest place you can imagine. Ringed by hills and in the shadow of Mount Monadnock, Keene offers good hiking close to home. I’ve mentioned on several occasions going hiking at Goose Pond here in Keene, and I’ve posted pictures from Goose Pond even more frequently. When I don’t have time for the ten-minute drive to Goose Pond, I can walk to Ashuelot River Park, which I’ve mentioned here previously. And yesterday, after languishing with
wanderlust for too long, I at long last explored the
Horatio Colony Preserve, which I’d been wanting to explore ever since we moved to Keene last summer.

As my good luck would have it, the Horatio Colony Preserve is located less than ten minutes from our apartment; the vista at the head of this entry is less than five minutes away from Keene’s brand new Home Depot, Bed, Bath & Beyond, and Borders. If I had a bike (a purchase that I’m leaning increasingly towards, given Keene’s abundant bike trails), I could bike to the Preserve and then go hiking. Although the Preserve is small (“only” several hundred acres with “only” three-and-a-half miles of hiking trails), it offers a delightful illusion of wild isolation. I spent less than two hours wandering aimlessly at the Preserve yesterday, and when I came home that wanderlust was for the moment at least entirely satiated.

Like any other sort of carnal craving, wanderlust is easy enough to satisfy. You needn’t go far, and you needn’t go for long: you just need to work up a good heart-pounding sweat. Approximately half of yesterday’s stroll was up a moderate but undeniable incline, a tangible reminder of how out-of-shape my sedentary academic body has become. There’s something about sweating, panting, and feeling your heart pound in your throat that wipes away any and all thoughts and worries. For just under two hours yesterday–and during the endorphin-soaked aftermath of those two hours–I wasn’t thinking about course-prep, the academic job-market, the latest accumulation of dirty dishes and laundry, etc. It was just me and my heart, lungs, and feet facing the tangible reality of gravity.

I didn’t spend a lot of time yesterday stopping and looking; instead, I kept walking, and huffing and puffing, my way up, up, up an incline that would have provided far less challenge to a person used to hill-climbing. The entire way, I did my birding by ear: you don’t have to stop to identify the calls of black-throated green and black-throated blue warblers, scarlet tanagers, olive-sided flycatchers, Eastern wood pewees, and red-eyed vireos, all of which I heard but did not see yesterday. I did pause once or twice to admire the pink lady’s slippers which were blooming, and I did try (unsuccessfully) to stalk one particular chipmunk that froze almost-close-enough (in theory) for me to snap his picture. For the most part, though, I kept walking. The mosquitoes were mercilessly undeterred by the all-natural citronella repellent I’d slathered myself with; apparently, our local blood-suckers actually like the taste of citronella, for both mosquitoes and black flies descended in droves upon my head and arms whenever I’d stop. So, I stopped rarely, letting the breeze of my own momentum brush away the bugs. And when I got home, I promptly ordered some real insect repellent as recommended by Leslee. Next time, I’ll be better prepared.

Blood-lusting bugs notwithstanding, I did take a moment or two (more like twenty) to lie down on the rock outcrop right down summit from the ruins of the Colony family’s old Tip-Top House, on the northern slope of West Hill overlooking the town of Keene. The granite there is speckled with moss and lichens, and the ants, caterpillars, and inch-worms were out, but I didn’t mind sharing sun with them. Had I walked the trails the “right” way around, I would have come to this scenic outcrop early into my hike; as it was, I walked the mapped-out loop backwards, thereby assuring (by felicitous accident) that I could enjoy this vista toward the end of my walk when I was good and ready for it. Once you’ve given enough blood to the mosquitoes and black flies, you don’t necessarily mind giving a drop or two more if the view is good and the lying-down is comfortable enough. Some folks travel far and wide to find such spots of sweat-soaked, heart-pounding, blood-sucking heaven, and it’s been in my (relative) backyard all along.

Today’s “Photo Friday” theme is “Macro.” I’ve had this current digital camera for almost a year now, we had a hand-me-down digi-cam for a year or so before that, and I never realized that there is a special “macro” setting for taking extreme close-up shots. All this time I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) to take close-up pix of wildflowers, insects, and such, and all this time I’ve been wondering why none of them turn out. Duh. Guess I should have read the Owner’s Manual. So, here are two pix taken in my own backyard with the new-to-me Macro setting on my digi-cam: guess you can expect to see more close-up pix of flowers and insects in the days to come as I play with this newly-discovered feature.

The horsetails that I’d mentioned in several previous posts are now blanketing the waste places along the bikepath with a muted hue of green. The birches along the path are similarly leaved and lush, creating a screen of textured green by the overlooked side of one of downtown’s busiest pathways. For a long time while I was finishing up the diss, I longed to lie down in a mossy, flower-strewn hillside: this slope of horsetails is the right color but not nearly remote enough for idle loafing. My search continues for a place to rest my head and cool my heels. In the meantime, these horsetails apparently think that a busy path in downtown Keene is the perfect spot to set down their perennial rhizomes.