If “our breath hung in the air” describes swirling exhalations
on a chilly winter day, when each word
or sigh condenses to a face-high fog and feathers idly into space,
then our breath sank like anchors –
cannonballs plummeting through the thick July air
and onto the pine needled ground below.
Inhalations like two blunt knives plunge with each step
until one of us halts
and,
doubled over,
hand against a tree,
asks the other to wait.
A bundle of sage
burned the house down.
It was a prenuptial ritual,
tensions high and the newly-
bought home, cursed. A quirky hippie
neighborhood had just the right thing:
a natural food co-op.
half
As a person born in the dead of winter in a northern climate, I’ve always honored my warmer half-birthday a little more than is socially acceptable. One can only stomach so many sledding parties (the same is not true of swimming) and the chapped face and soggy mittens that come with it. Of course my mother got creative, with snow Twister and pin the carrot on the snowman as aperitifs to the main event, but there was no escaping the overall theme. If only I had been born in July instead, I could have had annual pool parties like my much cooler cousin. If I had been born in July, maybe I would have learned to swim better. Maybe I would look better in nail polish. Maybe I would be able to tan.
But today is not my half-birthday. It’s much worse than that: it’s my dog’s. Yes, my spicy little Scorpio pup turns 6 months old today, and I’m here to tell you all about his canine accomplishments.
Month 0, November: A puppy is born to a lovely breeder in Florida, one of five males in a litter of seven. His mother is a golden retriever, his father a miniature poodle from the same sire line as my in-laws’ doodle. Gotta love word-of-mouth advertising.
Month 1, December: We’re contacted about the litter and get weekly picture updates. We acknowledge that they are all Very Good Boys and we’d be lucky to have any one of them.
Month 2, January: We fly down to Florida. We have fourth pick, so choice of the remaining two males. They’re almost exactly the same, but one looks into our faces and gives us each a small ear lick. He’s red all over except for tiny white tufts on his back toes. We dub him Otis and endure an incredibly traumatic flight home. He becomes an office dog, and I cave to the pressures of making him an Instagram account almost immediately (@otis_p_lord, if you must know).
Month 3, February: Otis masters many tricks and commands, including highlights such as “leave it”, “give me five”, and “go to bed”. He goes to a brewery. He learns stairs. He sits in a tote. He becomes an impromptu therapy dog after the sudden death of a friend. He takes a very cold camping trip and gets to frolic and hike off-leash. He poops only sticks for days after said trip.
Month 4, March: Otis goes to the groomer. He becomes a working-from-home dog. He finishes his first jar of peanut butter. As it gets warmer, he enjoys deck life, and after completing his puppy shots gets to experience parks.
Month 5, April: Otis sees a hail storm. He has his first emergency vet trip. He breaks 25 pounds and gets a new harness. He perfects the art of lounging.
Month 6, May: Otis participates in a socially distant graduation ceremony. He goes backpacking (sans pack, for now) and discovers he already knows how to swim. He devours an entire corn cob and we consequently learn new medicinal uses for hydrogen peroxide.
Thank you, Otis, for bringing such light in a weird time. Happy half-birthday, pupper.
downstairs
I have a dream in which the downstairs of my grandmother’s house is the inside of a pleasant cave. It’s not very dark though, and the divots in the rock walls where bookshelves ought to have been are layered with a plush base of vibrant green moss. It’s my home, and the patter of condensation is the soundtrack.
It wasn’t a dream, but it felt like one: A ghostly hand, doubtless of an older cousin attempting to spook the younger, poked up behind the double-sided fish tank imbedded in the wall between the downstairs living room (a room known not for its furniture, but for its hot tub) and the laundry room (a room known not for its appliances, but for the boxes of puzzles contained within). I thought for years that the spooky hand was a sophisticated feature of the fish tank.
We’re rollerblading in the garage. I sling myself around the ceiling supports in circles and figure-eights. Smooth cement is preferable to blacktop and much preferable to an old country road; besides, it’s winter in New England. No one’s going rollerblading outside.
The downstairs has its own bathroom, something that I always thought should exist. It’s in the laundry room. I’m dreaming again.
It’s night and we’re finally old enough to stay up around the house after she goes to bed. We’re in satin slips from the ‘70s that we’re passing off as oversized yet delicate dresses. I step down to the river, feel the cool slate on my bare feet. The water flows down the rest of the stairs in a small waterfall and meets the sea that is the downstairs below. It’s not a dream. Just imagination.
brew
Last year my partner and I, with the help of our brothers-in-law, brewed the beer that would be served at our wedding reception. A good friend had gifted us a brew kit a while back, as it had always been an aspiration of my partner to brew; so was born our hobby.
We are amateur brewmasters for sure (in both senses of the word: lovers of brewing, as well as very much nonprofessionals at it). We still use recipe kits and stick to the directions, but even in our small experience we’ve learned a few things that might be helpful for those interested in dabbling.
1. The actual work involved in brewing is 10% brewing, 90% cleaning.
You have to clean everything before you begin (because it’s been in the basement for several months). You have to sanitize everything, multiple times. And you have to clean up the mess afterwards. The brewing itself (what my partner calls the “dirty part”), is mostly just dumping ingredients into a pot and making sure nothing boils over.
2. A large workspace is indispensable.
We currently live in an estimated 450 square foot apartment (and that includes cabinets and counter space). We have a half stove and a kitchen that’s more of a passageway than an actual functional cooking space. You can’t pass from one end of it to the other if the fridge door is open. After four or so brewing sessions in this situation, we finally decided this weekend to bring it outside. A picnic table in open air did the trick.
3. A good heating element makes all the difference.
While our kitchen burner in the past had taken over an hour to bring 2.5 gallons of water to a boil (and was barely able to keep it there), our handy-dandy camp stove boiled it in 28 minutes flat. (Another great wedding present!) Over the entire boil, we used about one and a half canisters of camp gas. A two-pack of Coleman propane is about seven bucks at Target.
4. A hose and a cooler > a kitchen sink.
When it comes time to rapid-cool your wort, ditch the sink. A great benefit of bringing our boil outside was being able to cool it much more efficiently – with an ice and hose water filled cooler. We’ve never had luck using a wort chiller or ice water filled sink. It takes too long and water spills all over the kitchen. So if you have an Igloo wide enough to fit your 5 gallon kettle, you will have way better luck chilling your wort. We got our wort down to 100 degrees in about ten minutes with hose water and 60 lbs. of ice. Best part? When we were done, we could just dump the ice water on the lawn.
5. Bring a friend.
Brewing is a slog if you try to do it yourself. There’s too much cleaning and bulky gear involved. Do it with someone else interested in brewing, or else bribe a friend with the fruits of your labor.
So, if anyone cares, that’s my two cents about brewing. Cheers!
weekends
My life has undergone a major change in the form of a new profession since I last posted, giving me an excuse (granted, a poor one) for not having written in almost three months. Along with exciting challenges, skill development, and renewed self-confidence, this job has also afforded me weekends off for the first time consistently in about a decade – my entire working life. With almost nine years together under our belts, my partner and I are suddenly presented with a landscape of opportunities that have, until now, required one of us to take a day off of work, and in some cases, unpaid.
A number of extremely generous friends left us, post-graduation, with essentially everything we needed to furnish an apartment. So, last year, rather than asking for new flatware for our wedding, we filled our registry with something that would bring us closer than any set of matching forks and knives could: backpacking gear. This was before we were certain I would have weekends off any time soon to use it.
It sat in our closet for almost a year.
Finally in July, my partner’s PTO piling up from having no one to take time off with, we took a long weekend anyway to break in our gear.
Two months after we returned, I had a shiny new full-time job. Three months later, we did a whole backpacking trip on a regular old weekend. Nobody missed work. Nobody used PTO. It was a weekend years in the making.
Leaving a good job of five years for an entirely new field was unbelievably hard, but I knew that where I was was not sustainable. Prioritizing requires sacrifice. In the end the upheaval is always worth it.
dream
Inside every child is a dream they know to be impossible, but which they choose believe is plausible anyway, whether for fun or in earnest, or in my case both. Some call this willful self-delusion hope, some faith, some confidence. Whatever it is, mine was that there was a secret dressing room hidden inside the wall of the bedroom that my sister and I shared.
People who know me know I’m not especially girly in the traditional sense, although I have loved pink and my favorite Disney princess was Cinderella for a time (it has since changed to Mulan). But in general, I was the sporty daughter, the one who hung out with my dad while he grilled and scrimmaged with him while the burgers cooked. I was much more interested in shooting hoops or playing piano than in developing my sense of fashion. My idea of a fun person to make-believe to be was the hard-working colonial woman or professional detective rather than a princess or queen. And yet for a few years I had myself convinced that a magical chamber full of fabric and elaborate dresses of my own design lay between the inner and outer walls of my bedroom.
My sister and I had bunk beds in the early years, and we’d talk to each other before falling asleep, her on the top bunk, me slowly destroying her boxspring from below. I don’t recall most of these post-bedtime conversations, but I do remember developing this dream together: we would dig a hole in the wall one day and miraculously find a hidden room behind. With each our own dresser and sewing machine, surrounded by perfect warm lighting and plenty of mirrors, this room would fulfill our wildest fantasy of becoming runway designers, with, of course, the help of Fashion Plates.
One night as Christmas was approaching we lay in our beds discussing what we wanted most for Christmas. Our conversation turned to the secret dressing room. As an unbelieving Santa-less household, we were unsure of how to make our bizarre request known. So that night we prayed for it, brimming with conviction that we would wake up Christmas morning with our very own secret chamber radiating through the bedroom wall. We were disappointed and maybe even a little surprised when it didn’t happen, but we held out hope for at least another year, occasionally drawing blueprints of how it would look. I can still picture it: a private, cozy yet spacious place with incandescents glowing and our parents none-the-wiser.
As an adult I’m sure I have new highly-developed self-delusions, like being able to create the perfectly-executed meal plan or becoming a kombucha master or having a perpetually clean floor. I’ve realized over time that these dreams are only crazy because they require a high amount of effort, not because they’re somehow magical by nature. As privileged children we think things will be handed to us, because that has most often been our experience of the world. Even in a household with chores and responsibilities, my meals came hot on a plate, my water was running, my bed had as many blankets as I needed. Weren’t all things like this? Convenient and quick? But you soon learn that everything has a price, and you must determine which dreams are worth the effort.
sweet
Dropping my oldest sister off at college was a family affair. My dad took a bunch of time off work, and we all piled into the car. She was the first grandchild to go to college, so my grandparents tagged along in their motorhome, and we caravanned with them ten hours down to Pennsylvania.
We rented a cabin, and my grandparents stayed at an RV park. A trail wound through the woods behind the park, and Nanny took me on a mushroom hunt. We must’ve found a dozen different species, including one that looked like a white rose, nestled at the foot of a tree trunk. I was seven. For breakfasts, my parents had bought a large pack of individual-sized cereal boxes. We weren’t usually allowed to eat sugary cereals, so this was a vacation treat. Oreo O’s were hot at the time, but I liked Frosted Flakes best.
I remember my other sister crying hysterically as we left the oldest to brave the unknown world of post-secondary education. To console her, I offered a lick of the double popsicle I had gotten from the cafeteria.
We got lost in Amish country on a Sunday, and I could feel the adults’ concern growing in the front seats, but I still enjoyed looking at the patchwork fields stretching in both directions, for miles. This was back when I thought grown-ups could and would fix anything. At one of the few stores open, I got a big swirled lollipop, and my grandparents got directions.
We went to Hershey Park. Though perhaps wasted on a family that didn’t like crowds or crazy rides, I think we had a good time. There was free chocolate.
I’ve never considered myself particularly motivated by a sweet-tooth (whereas I would readily admit to having a weakness for chips or popcorn), but apparently most of my memories from that time in my life involve sugar. Oh, to be seven, candy in hand, and in the back seat!
twenty-five
Broad, red, raging gulps
Puffs of steam rise heavenward
A rainmaking dance
neverland
Had I known adulthood primarily consisted of comparing insurance policy premiums, weighing how much I dislike a bed frame against how much I like its price tag, and sweeping the floor with a broom that’s far too shabby not to itself be in the garbage, I may never have grown up at all. At home, it’s the endless cycle of creating of your own filth and cleaning it up again; at work, it’s the saving of the day by a thread (and sometimes not), and, in either case, often by no merit or fault of your own but simply by blind luck; in the world, it’s the breathtaking gap between the information and experience you’re expected to have and what you’re actually familiar with, which not that long ago was limited to that you’re supposed to brush your teeth twice a day and wash your hands before dinner.
I’m pretty sure nothing could have prepared me for most of this stage of my life, except what I’m doing now, which is merely living it. Periodically as a kid and teenager I would ask my dad to explain to me what insurance was. I’d always end up frustrated, never having made headway in comprehending it at all. While I don’t pretend to fully understand those damned institutions (does anyone? do they?), after a few years of exposure to their various forms I at least have a basic understanding of what they’re for, which kinds are required, and which ones are scams.
There are very few specific things I can point to and say, “Yes, this prepared me for adult life.” I learned how to fill out a check in seventh grade math, a skill I now use at my job and to pay rent. My sister was in third grade and just learning cursive when I signed my name for the first time, copying the shapes of the relevant letters off her homework as best I could. The next day, I presented the result proudly to my kindergarten teacher, from whom I received a light rebuke for attempting something too far above my grade level. From the very beginning, it was Leslie Mae Howard written everywhere, on everything. Every assignment page had my full name at the top (in third grade, followed by a smiley face, a star, and a heart). I even loved to spell it aloud. In fifth grade, when we learned to type, it was all about typing it as fast as I could, and in as many fonts as possible. To groom myself for official intentions, I practiced signing in fancy cursive, trying to imitate the spidery precision of my grandmother’s checkbook handwriting. Today, the hurried signature I scrawl on invoices resembles my name less than ever, about half the syllables having been abandoned, and my past self would be utterly shocked to see that I’ve dropped my middle name from the mark altogether.
My past self would be utterly shocked by many things, some about paths I’ve taken, some about paths the world around me has taken. She would be proud that I still make time to write, and pleased that, careless signature aside, I do still love my name. She would not dare to believe that I’m acquainted with what PIP insurance is or that I go braless in public, often. She’d be gratified that I refuse to back down on my status as a nerd, and surprised that it has actually helped me in a lot of social situations as an adult and rarely—if ever—harmed me.
I’m very fortunate that it has been a relatively slow and steady transition for me; I know many others whose shift into adulthood was more of a hard shove than a gentle progression. I imagine the rest of life must just be like this, too: practicing until it’s natural. Or just pretending until it starts to make a little sense.
(They clearly omitted my middle name here against my will.)
threepinederoga 