Readers! I made a bit of a tactical error way back when, by creating a mailing list AND a blog with its own separate list, and I have a million social media accounts I neglect. All of which is to say, forgive me if you’re getting this news twice or thrice, but eager I am to share that I have new poems out in the world!
But first…is it spring where you are? Earlier this week we had another massive storm here in northern California. The rain, a constant pitter-patter. The rain, filling up my crawlspace and dripping in my window. The rain, flooding roadways and overflowing rivers and closing highways.
Atmospheric rivers. We’ve had—seven?
And the wind—yesterday, a tree crushed the house next to the one where my band practices. I thought for sure the eucalyptuses on Albany Hill were going to come down. On Sunday, driving north from visiting family in Santa Barbara, my kid compared the landscape to Hawaii—he’s inherited my love of hyperbole for sure, but nonetheless: there’s not much golden about the Golden State these days. Everything is green.
Oh, but—the flowers are beginning to pop out. Battered, petals everywhere, but—in bloom. And we need them. With the rains have come the when it rains, it pours, adage—seems like many people I know have had more than their share of tragedy recently.
So: bring on spring. And with spring showers come…spring poems?
Then two terrific literary journals arrived in my mailbox. You can read “Frontier” in the latest issue of The Journal and “A Day at the Beach” in this spectacular issue of Ecotone.
But we’ll chat before then, I hope. Drop me a line.
And if you’d like to hear from me just four times a year, use the pop-up that appears on this website to sign up for my mailing list. That’s the easiest shortcut to my rambling newsy updates about new poems and more (I share reading recs, too).
I hope this finds you well, dry, and as happy as can be, and I send you my gratitude, as always, for sharing with anyone you think might be interested.
Friends, here’s what the Spring Equinox looks like here in Northern California.
I got so excited about the torrential rains predicted last Saturday, a gig-postponing, movie-afternoon kind of rain. Instead, it sprinkled for an hour. Climate change and drought, folks, climate change and drought. But when the sun came out again I decided to photograph some of the spring gorgeousness in my garden. Look at this camellia! She’s one of hundreds on the tree. I hope this incredible pink flower brings you hope for brighter days. There’s been so much global and personal tragedy of late—there are really no words for it. Just to say, if you’re struggling, if you’re despairing, I see you.
In my world, there’s been a vaguely soul-crushing attempt at house-buying and some publications to share.
My (very) personal essay “The Stranger Who Got Me Pregnant” was published in Literary Mama in January. Thank you to everyone who read it, commented, and sent me kind notes. I felt really good about getting Sam’s and my story out in the world. I also have poems forthcoming in The Fourth River and Ecotone. And while I won’t be at this year’s AWP conference, I am THRILLED to share that I’ll be moderating a panel with Gabriela Garcia, Masha Rumer, and Shugri Said Sahl at the Bay Area Book Festival the weekend of May 7-8. Thank you, again, City of Berkeley Civic Arts program, for granting me the time and space to write and curate a panel about immigration, ancestry, and motherhood. Tickets and the full schedule are coming April 8th. It’s always an incredibly meaningful literary weekend. Hope to see some of you there!
With love and gratitude for your support,
Susie
p.s.I spent a bunch of time watching a tutorial to improve the look of my blog posts. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s improving! If you received this twice, that’s because you’re on my blog mailing list and my Mailchimp newsletter. Feel free to unsubscribe from one. : )
It would take a thousand photos to really explain a year of Covid. We had one slideshow.
New Year’s Eve, 2021. We enjoyed a Covid-style masked backyard cocktail with friends and came home for a decadent fondue dinner just the four of us. I’d thrown the photos together an hour or two before. The slideshow started with the boisterous New Year’s Day 2020 party we’d attended, traveled on through the last picture I have of my parents standing in front of our old house, the one we said goodbye to in 2020. And then my leg, all marked up with Sharpie before I had my varicose veins removed last January. Valentine’s Day (26 Valentines, glued by the preschooler, and a heart-shaped cake). The last in-person show my band played at Ale Industries. The trip on BART to I-don’t-remember-where, the kids looking hella East Bay in Warriors gear and caps.
And then, a blurry image of us and some friends surrounded by empty booze bottles and take-out containers the night they announced the schools would be closing, the last night we gathered inside with others for almost a year.
The slideshow rolled on, the photos imprecise, unstaged. List after list, schedule after schedule. One entitled “Basic Rules” (the gem: BE NICE TO EACH OTHER!!), one named, simply, “Projects.” Then, photos of said projects: “Ancient Room,” the flower-collections, the swirl paintings. The hikes and makeshift sensory table. All those days of homeschooling. The Elsa-from-Frozen dress I sewed for my four-year-old. Easter, the kids’ hair already floppy. Making jam with the last of the plums. Black Lives Matter protests, masked and distanced. I could go on and on and I kind of want to, because more than a trip down memory lane, the slideshow felt like a testimony to the difficulty and occasional beauty of a year spent completely under wraps.
This past week, the news, the blogs, and the sosh are all filled with retrospective accounts of the pandemic year, with incredibly depressing death toll numbers and more bolstering reports of vaccines delivered (I’ve had my first shot, even!). We’re headed, I think, out of this thing, and I have a feeling it will take us a few weeks, months, maybe even years to get used to our resumed freedom. Sometimes, now, when I find myself out two nights a week (a birthday gathering around someone’s fire pit, say, and an after-dinner walk), I’m exhausted afterwards. I’m exhausted anyway, let’s face it, but somehow the socializing is so novel and extroverted that it completely takes it out of me. The other night when my 11-year-old and I were discussing the great disappointment of a sixth-grade-year spent almost entirely online, I tried to introduce the silver lining: “school’s starting on April 12th,” I reminded him. “I know,” he said. “Scary.”
And I so got where he was coming from: it’s wonderful to think of life getting back to normal. Of school starting. And for a hundred reasons, it also feels scary.
On New Year’s Eve we watched a 2020 slideshow, and I decided I’m making a slideshow every year from now on. I want to remember every silly photo we took: the last of the plums, the double rainbow that made my kids grin. The incredible fall colors that showed up in late November. And the time my little one dressed up in a gold cape, a floppy green hat, and ring after ring of leis, and posed, grinning, in my bedroom, as though he didn’t even know Covid existed.
What memories will YOU take away from this year? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
We made it through two weeks of homeschooling, two weeks of working from home with two kids around, two weeks of The Spring of the Virus. Even if the Shelter in Place order lasts into summer, into fall?God forbid?it will be springtime in my mind when my future wise self and I look back on this global Coronavirus pandemic. Covid19 shut us all down right as the tulips and asparagus burst forth. The other morning, eerily quiet since traffic has so slowed and Bart is running shorter hours and fewer trains, I heard a flock of Canada geese flying over the house. Heading North for summer? Choosing a different path in quieter skies? It was nice to hear them.
HIGH.?
Things at our house are going better than expected, much better than I?d feared. When we made it to last weekend, I could even say, honestly, that we were doing okay. This after a desperate and depressed couple of days; the shops were overrun with people (but devoid of toilet paper), and I ran into a teacher from my son?s school and we both burst into tears. Governor Newsom had just announced that our kids might not go back to school this year, and that was the reality that hit me the hardest both personally and globally: all these children, for whom school is structure and lifeline, are now floating, aimless, free. My son?s got his best teacher so far, and as Ben put it, we wanted the whole year with him?we needed the whole year!?and we don?t get it. It?s hard not to feel betrayed and devastated.
Except that my kid is, basically, fine.
At ten, he?s both sensitive and oblivious, and nothing if not an introvert. He admitted last week that he?s not much missing anyone, and he?s happily reading, doing his math, shooting hoops, and driving us nuts. The three-year-old seems to be thriving, too, which is confusing to me since he loves his preschool so very much. But he?s easier to be around, less exhausted, more cheerful, sleeping better, and thriving on our makeshift routine: every day at ten, when the morning work shift (mine) ends and I start on kid duty, we cook something together, then have experiential learning time (the endless project of making an Ancient Rome diorama) before family lunch. PE is every day from 2:30-4:00: we scooter, or we bike ride, or we meet up with friends outside and keep a careful six feet away. Or we trek up to Indian Rock and climb around.
The running underlying thread of dread. The confusion and guilt of doing okay: am I faring better than some of my colleagues, than some of my friends? Should I feel bad about this? Is this time the calm before the storm, before the colleges and non-profits close and our income disappears? Will all of our favorite businesses go under? Are the kids who thrived on the routine of school going to back-slide during this time and be forever behind, perpetuating the achievement gap in our city? Will we plummet into a global recession that has consequences so long-lasting my kids will feel them in their early adulthood? And will we get and survive this thing? What about our loved ones?
It?s almost unnecessary to outline these fears. We all have them. Even on the good days, they?re there. It?s like this brilliant quote from that show ?The Good Place,? when the Eleanor character is trying to describe what it?s like being human to someone who?s immortal. ?We humans know about death,? she says. ?So we?re all always a little bit sad underneath.? We humans know about Coronavirus, so we?re always a little bit sad underneath. None of us will ever be the same after this spring of the virus.
BUFFALO.
?It?s good to keep knowing yourself,? says Alicia Keys in this delightful video. The strangest/most magical part of The Spring of the Virus? Really seeing the four people who make up our family in clearer ways than usual. When all the schedules are wiped clean, when we?re the only people we see, somehow I know us all better, and differently. L is shyer than I remembered, and consistently happy to entertain himself. Ben takes deep solace in growing things. I?m alive if I?ve got my early mornings and a cup of tea, writing poems. And little S thrives on being needed, on being cherished, more than ever.
Sending love and light, readers, for your Spring of the Virus. We?ll get through this.
High, Low, Buffalo, similar to Rose and Thorn, is a dinnertime game that was introduced to me by my friend An Honest Mom. Over dinner, you share your day: the high, the low, and the magical, or strange, or odd thing you?re still mulling over: the buffalo.
p.s.
Need some recipe ideas while you?re stuck at home? Check out:
**And remember that it?s very likely that your local, independent bookstore is doing online orders. Mine is! Amazon will survive this crisis. Your local bookstore might not. So buy your books indie, friends.
[ASIDE: Reader, I’m not happy with the aesthetics of my blog posts. I tried to make the font larger for better readability, but then things looked even more catty-wonkus. If there are any WordPress mavens out there, please drop me a line, yo?]
At the end of last summer, I wrote a blog post called “Family Vacation: Same Crap, Different Location.” We’d gone back East for three weeks, only to have both of my parents end up in the hospital. Sammy was in his biting phase. Ben was working too much. And since the summer experience here in NorCal before we went was kind of a nothing burger, the whole summer felt like a reality-TV show about The Sandwich Generation, starring yours truly as the haggard 40-something mother of two whiny children.
I don’t know if I had all of that in mind when I planned this summer, or if we just got lucky, but I’m sitting here of a Thursday feeling genuinely sad that school is starting again on Monday. It’s been a fantastic summer for our family, if not quiiiiiite as amazing as the carefree summers of my youth, then still the best one could expect with two children. It’s been a summer of growth and hard work and bonding and fun, of optimism and realism and good fortune.
Why?
?> One. I had great boundaries.
Most academics have the summer off. I do not, but my summer schedule is fairly flexible, and I made sure it stayed that way. I won’t reveal all my tricks of the trade, but suffice to say, I managed to have one of my best work summers yet, by being present with my students but clear about my boundaries. I didn’t get roped into drama. I LOVED my students this summer, you guys. They were smart and engaged and funny and grateful. Who knew?
?> Two. I didn’t overindulge.
Bald-faced lie. Yes I did. I had approximately 78* glasses of booze, spread over a series of fun nights: on camping trips, by the pool, in the afternoon, at gigs, every night in Maine. I also ate delicious food all summer long, had ice cream occasionally, and binge-read novels.
But I ALSO maintained some good habits: I stretched and did my back exercises EVERY morning. I exercised a ton, and I still got up 3-4 mornings a week to write. Woot! That leaves me going into fall without that slightly terrifying feeling that there is a very rude awakening coming in the next ten days.
?> Three. I was spontaneous.
The invitation from my college friend came unexpectedly: did I want to visit her at her cabin in the Sierras that weekend? I’m not great with last-minute plans, but when I saw only one thing on the calendar, I thought, why not? I’m so glad I did. One thing that’s been sorely missing from my life since I had kids is real time in the wilderness, not just sweet urban hikes but being in landscapes that smell like trees, where there’s no electricity, where you hear owls at night. L and I drove three hours up, up, up into the mountains. We hiked in Desolation Wilderness, swam and kayaked in a frigid and beautiful lake, and saw a bald eagle. The only cell coverage to be found was at the top of a steep outcropping of rocks. Maybe if we all had to make that kind of effort to check Facebook, the world would be a different place.
?> Four. I lowered my expectations.
And in doing so, I also raised them. To save money and because, frankly, he wasn’t too excited about it, I didn’t enroll L in week after week of camp. But instead of sitting around reading Calvin & Hobbes like last year, he rode his bike to friends’ houses. He explored at the creek. He helped us plan a camping trip. This summer, my son turned ten and became more independent, too. Summer is nothing if not a time for growth and change, to recharge before the next big thing(s). (Last year of elementary! A new class to plan and teach for me! Preschool!)
?> Five. I counted my blessings.
Not everyone gets to spend two weeks on an island in Maine and then fly to England for five days. Not everyone gets to have three amazing weekends away in California. Color me incredibly grateful for my charmed life, for my community, for my friends, for my flexible summers, and for my parents, who don’t mind how long we stay and who always help with the plane tickets.
And while I wax rhapsodic about how great the last few months have been, I also remind myself that there are children in cages along the border, reproductive rights being threatened, and endangered species being taken off the list. Part of a summer recharge is gathering the energy to return to real life refreshed and ready to fight for what you love.
How was YOUR summer? Nothing burger, or magic? I’d love to hear from you.
I'm working from the premise that motherhood is not just all diapers, tantrums, and setting limits. It's interesting. Okay, sometimes. 