A Sheep in Wolf''s Clothing

Not like this. This is a wolf in sheep's clothing. And believe it or not, it's from a front yard Christmas display in my neighborhood. It could well be some pop culture commentary that I am unaware of, but I think it's more likely political commentary. Some sheep are marked red. Others are blue. I mean, it's weird and kinda scary, right? Maybe also a little funny? Here's the whole thing.

The driver of the team of sheep is Planet of the Apes meets the Grinch. And the baby. I don't know what to say about the baby.

Anyhow, here's a happy thought. What if Omicron is a sheep in wolf's clothing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/28/health/covid-omicron-antibodies-delta.html

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/dec/18/is-there-any-good-news-at-all-on-omicron-yes-there-are-small-signs-of-hope

Comfort and joy to you

And how about some joy to the world while we're at it? Oh, wait. Yeah. Supply chain. Well, I have a Christmas tree inside and another one outside. I look at those lights a lot.

I settled on my New Year's resolutions today. 1) Be excedingly polite to everyone I encounter. 2) Walk every single day in January, no matter the temperature.

I will not follow this trail out onto Lake Harriet, but I am lucky to live in such a beautiful place with a lovely creek that leads to the lake, and I will walk, even if it's so cold I can only go a little ways. I actually love winter if I don't have to drive in it. And I've made up with my Yak Traks, which last year I thought didn't provide quite enough traction. Somehow I feel very secure in them now.

Hope you're feeling secure in some way, dear reader. I hope there's joy in your world and comfort too. Let your light shine.

Here's a poem I heard yesterday. https://onbeing.org/programs/danez-smith-im-going-back-to-minnesota-where-sadness-makes-sense/

Breaking up with Mr. Zio

Mr. Zio is my heart monitor. We've been close these past two weeks, investigating all of the pings and rattles. Anxiety? Not anxiety? Who knows these days, right? But tomorrow, I peel him off my chest and send him packing in a box. Such wonders modern medicine provides! I'm a little fuzzy about what happens after that, but I'm sure there'll be some sort of report. How are you, dear reader? What's pinging and rattling in your life? I'm obsessed with making collages. No art background. Just pandemic online heart-saving classes. I'm mystified by the glues and finishes. I like my finished work to be smooth. I don't want wrinkles. I don't want shine. But I put together these masterpieces with all kinds of snippets, and some papers like one type of glue with other papers like another.

These two collages seem to me to be about luck. Luck feels like such a mover and a shaker to me these days. I'm planning a party--a missed major milestones party. I've ordered food and cakes (one cake for each of the four big occassions we've missed.) My son and his family are traveling from Phoenix. Hey, Southwest Airlines, I'm imploring you NOT to cancel that flight. Because 38 tacos. Because four cakes. Because I have not seen them for more than two years. I'm just so shocked every time I think or say that. More than two years. For god sake, dear pilots, I've already put the extra boards in the table.

Dear everyone, wishing you luck with your endeavors.

Thanks for the memories--and your martini recipe

It was my mom's birthday a few days ago. I had a martini and bought a lottery ticket--which is the way I celebrate now that she no longer enjoys these earthly delights.

It's an odd feeling to have both parents gone. Sometimes I feel like a pale balloon, disconnected from the people who landed me here.

A dear friend sent me this book,"Heartwood" by Barbara Becker. It arrived on my mom's birthday. I've just begun to read it. Here's what the author says about the title which comes from the name for the central core of a tree. "...this supporting pillar no longer participates in the life process of a tree--transporting and storing water and nutrients. Although dead, heartwood will not decay or lose its sturdiness while the outer, living rings of newer growth sustain it. In the perfect ecology of a tree, the dead become the heart of the living, and the living nourish the enduring essence of the dead."

So that's what I was doing with that martini--nourishing the enduring essence of the dead.

Every night as I settle into bed in my freshly painted room, I think of my dead loved ones. And how it is to love the dead. It's so different from how we love the living. To be able to touch. To be able to talk. These are the profound joys of the living.

Well hi, Come here often?

That's the outfit I've worn almost every day for the past two weeks. I've been painting all the trim in my house white, wiping out the 70's golden oak, the 50's weird not-gray-not-brown, some previously painted white trim that was a dull, thin grayish white, punctuated with drips. It's all going to match now. No drips, no cracks, no nail holes. I've used up almost an entire tube of caulk. I had a terrible case of buyer's remorse when I bought this house. The narrow hallways with its seven doors of chipped 1950's veneer, the doorway trim with a single coat of white paint slapped on. The dark armed light fixture lurking like spider on the eight-foot hallway ceiling, the crowing achievement of bad choices.

Today I'm wearing real clothes. I hired a professional painter to do the bay window in my living room and the hallway ceiling, which has a new light fixture now. He saw the work I'd done since he came to give the estimate a few weeks ago. "You could have done this yourself," he said as he brushed paint on the window seat. "If I was hiring help,I'd hire you." See? Someone might actually pay me for one of my skills. But I want to be DONE with painting. I have one more room's worth of door and window trim to paint--and a couple of baseboards in my kitchen. I'm going to stain my super cool 1950s wooden front door a reddish brown that will look awesome with the little landing pad of slate tile in my entry way. Then that's it. I'm going to make art and write. I'm going to make a handbound book with handmade paper of my 33 Divorceville collages (which you can find on my Instagram page if your interested.) I'm going to make bigger collages and more paper and bind books. And it is my intention to publish an essay or a piece of fiction on Medium.com once a month. Maybe twice. But I write as slowly as I paint, so maybe just once. Medium has a new thing going on. You can subscribe to my page. So when I do write once a month, you'll get an email about it. This means income sans paintbrush. You can subscribe here: https://demanuelclemen.medium.com After you get to my Medium.com page look for the little "Get an email.." message at the bottom? Click there.

You can also become a paying member of Medium.com and support more of your favorite writers while getting unlimited access to lots of good writing, including pieces by famous writers like Susan Orlean and great magazines like The Atlantic. Basic membership is 5.00 per month. I write both fiction and nonfiction about adoption, divorce, dystopia, death, grief, and...Hollywood! It's more fun than it sounds. Tell your friends. Share this post. Share my subscription link. Sharing is good. Thank you.

Thanks for the nectar

I didn't know that a peony bud and a black ant were the perfect couple. Thanks to a phenomenon called biological mutualism, the ant sips a tiny bit of nectar from the bud without disfiguring it, while the peony benefits from the ant's predatory nature as it wards off other insects that can harm the flowers.There are so many surprises in a garden. The biggest surprise will of course be actually harvesting fruits and vegetables.That's all some weeks away since the last frost in Minnesota is sometime around Mother's Day, and things are just getting started. A few weeks ago I didn't know what any of these things popping out of the ground were. I can name them all now, and I've learned not to believe everything I read about them. Dame's rocket and Solomon's seal are a weeds (a.k.a.wildflowers with a propensity for spreading) according to some, but I'm hoping they pop up again next year. My goal is to have a garden full of native plants, very loosely choreographed--a bit shaggy around the edges where it meets a lawn that, I hope, will be taken over by wild clover.

Going outside is the first thing I want to do in the mornings, or at least walk around looking out all of my windows. It's a kaleidescope out there. A turn of a calendar page changes blossons to leaves, or a blooming redbud to a blooming Japanese barberry. One day the pinkie-sized flowers of the false starry lily are replaced by lillies of the valley.In a week a dead looking stump transforms into a grape vine. Soon the ferns will be knocking on the windows asking to be let in.

Bob Dylan is 80, and in a couple months I'll be asking where all the flowers have gone.

The Ephemerals

Plants known as ephemerals respond readily to spring's early warmth and fade back into the earth during the heat of summer. So I've read anyway. I bought my house in December. The yard, as far as I could tell, was grass bordered by curving beds of gravel. How Zen, I thought. Maybe I'll make hypertufa garden orbs, grow some herbs and vegetables in some big pots and call it a day. It's been a cold spring in here Minnesota, but in the last couple of weeks green things are rocketing out of the ground. There will be no room for garden orbs. I'm trying to make sense of it all, using an app on my phone to ID things and marveling at the fortitude of the plants pushing their way through a thick layer of black garden cloth and gravel. I'm also trying to make sense of the death of my friend Shanna, who left this Earth by her own hand not quite two weeks ago. As another friend put it, depression is a murderer and a liar. Shanna pushed her way through a layer of darkness, and I was in a writing group with her as she blossomed. I never shared a meal with her--or even a drink or a cup of coffee--our common ground was writing and struggle. Her own rough life gave her a nose for the sadness and pain of others.Shanna emailed me more than once when I was at the bottom to tell me to see her therapist. As I remember it she followed up with a phonecall. I went to the therapist. I made it out of the bottomless hole I was in. Shanna made it out too. She wrote a novel,Oh!You Pretty Things a few years ago that got all around fine reviews. She moved. I moved. We weren't ever see each other/talk regularly friends--and time and distance, well,you know how that goes. Things happened that I don't know about. Then Shanna got Covid in November and shared her struggle on Facebook. She was super sick. I posted on her wall like a zillion other friends. I PM-ed her now and then to not clutter up her wall of well-wishes, so numererous were the messages from friends and fellow writers. But she didn't get well and became a long-hauler. And overwhelmed by Covid and god knows what all, she took her life. Muffin and cupcake, she'd call me and the other writers in our group. Sweet cakes and sparkle pie. Shanna was a secret sauce of heart-aching empathy cut with wicked wit and profanity. Honestly, there was no one fucking like her. Not even close. I haven't felt like doing much this past ten days. I pull weeds and put comments from my fellow writers into the appropriate folders for the essays I'm trying to finish. I cut out images for collages, but don't make anything. I look at the Virgina bluebells in my gardern and think the word ephemeral. They'll be gone soon, I guess. But you wouldn't know it to look at them right now. Ephemeral.

Partying with the dead--reefer and potato salad

The spread from my mom's birthday party in 2012. I think there's potato salad in one of those bowls.

 A dream: Dan's daughter came to visit. I was living in a house on a hill, not unlike the first house I ever owned in the Sliver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. The slope down to the sidewalk was so steep that when people walked by you could only see the tops of their heads.  "Hey you're in town!" a friend of Dusty's said to her as he looked up and caught a glimpse of her through the open window. We cranked the window fully open and sat on the window seat as she introduced us, describing me as the woman who tried to keep her father alive. Tried and failed, I thought.

Later more friends came over. Friends of Dusty's, friends of Dan's. People I knew and people I didn't. They talked about a house they were buying together. You have to come see it, someone said.

But first there were guests to feed. Dusty went out to buy potatoes so we could make potato salad. I already had two bags of potatoes, but that was okay. We'd make a lot of potato salad. We piled the potatoes into a pot and put it on the stove on low and went out to look at the house. Dusty explained that when Dan was alive I wanted to buy him a house so he could stop working. (In real life, back in 2010 or so,  I thought about buying  a loft downtown near little Tokyo and figured he could live there if he wanted.) The house that Dusty and her friends were buying was not a house exactly. It was a former event venue. The bathrooms were huge with numerous stalls. The women's bathroom was painted fuchsia and silver. "Great for parties," someone said. Next we squeezed into a room piled high with furniture. "This could be our dining room table," someone said as we edged around a dark carved table big enough for a dozen or more. On top of it were two ornately carved boxes with dragons rising up from their lids. "This is where we'll keep the reefer," I said. (Really, I said that in the dream. Hahahaha.)

Back at my house, we checked on the potatoes and took them off the stove to cool. People and more people. Drinks in our hands. And there he was--Dan, sitting next to me. No one but me seemed to notice him. "You're chewing gum," he said. Your brothers must be visiting. You always chew gum when your brothers visit. (God, dreams are weird.) I reminded him that my brothers lived far away and almost never visited. 

"But they did visit recently," I said. "When our mother died." Dan's mouth opened into a silent O. 

"What!?" he said. "Oh dear you, come here so I can hold you." He wrapped his arms around me, and I tried to figure out how all of this worked. Was I supposed to let a dead loved know when another loved one joined their ranks? And how was I supposed to do that exactly? How did moving from the land of the living to the land of the dead work? Who could I ask? Meanwhile Dan held me, and the sensation of his black polar fleece jacket was so familiar that it made me sad, remembering when he wore it when he was alive. And that was a mystery too. How did he get his jacket back? It was given to me after he died and I wore it under my coat last winter in Minneapolis. I lost it on a bus because I got too hot hurrying to the bus stop and tied it around my waist beneath my wool coat. A block or so after I got off the bus I noticed it was gone. I went back to look for it but never found it. I am puzzling through all of this reality about the lost jacket in the dream, and I can't figure that out either. There are all these things I don't know--- the mysterious world of the dead and how they are notified when others die. How they get their lost clothes back. How they come back to visit. I can't figure any of it out. 

"I wish you'd come back more often," I said. "Come back to visit because I miss you." My face was wet with tears. (And indeed it was when I awoke.)

Full-immunity day

I'm now as immune from Covid-19 as I can be. It feels great. It will feel even greater when everyone I love can say the same.

My new immune life will not be like my pre-Covid life. I have no plans to fly or go to the theatre--the idea of doing those things makes me profoundly uncomfortable right now. I have no plans to dine indoors until Minnesota has reached full herd-immunity, and sadly, I won't be hanging out in a bar right now--unless there are sidewalk tables--or maybe if everyone is older (and presumably vaccinated)? But, I'm gonna do a lot of other stuff. So much stuff. 

And in case you're wondering if I make any happy collages, I do. See above.

And here's another one. But I'm posting my 33-divorce collages on Instagram one at a time. It's the final purge of all that.

33 Collages....about my divorce

 

I've been over the break-up of my marriage so many times I've lost count. Over means over--until that feeling is over. And then there you are again. In it.

When I found out that the Someone intended to terminate (in fact had terminated) my alimony at the end of 2020, I dropped into feeling it all again. Add in a pandemic, a quarantine, and a recent interest in all things book arts--and here you have it. One collage for every year spent with someone I never really knew. 

These individual collages are not meant to each sum up a particular year, but simply reflect my thoughts and feelings in the moment of making them. 

And  of course, “These are works made of paper. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.”  I might add that life often feels as fragile as paper and seems quite dependent on coincidence.

In a day or two I hope to sign the official paper that says I expect no more alimony. It turns out that the Someone is not only completely retired, he's in ill-health. 

As this final collage of the series reflects, I'm ready to move on.

Light a Candle and Move On

You can't always get what you want

This squirrel wants birdseed. 

I want some more years of alimony. 

Neither is going to happen. 

My bird feeder is a Brome Squirrel Buster Plus. The Ferrari of bird feeders.

As for the alimony, once upon a time it, too, was pretty high-powered. Now it's sitting in the junkyard. 

I'm okay with it. Really. (No, this blog has not been hacked. It's me. Denise. The person who ranted all through her 41/2 year divorce proceedings and beyond.)  I'm glad I bought the spendy bird feeder before the Ferrari ran off the road. 

And here is a postcard from Divorceville (No, it wasn't a wonderful time and  I don't wish you were here.)

Expulsion (5x7 original collage with magazine papers, handpainted paper, and construction paper)

You don't have to stay married forever

But divorce is just another word for infinity.

 

It's cold here. Dangerously cold--if you are caught out in it unprepared. Right now it's -8. With the windchill -24, and it is predicted to get as cold as -30 or -40 this weekend. I just took the garbage out, which is one of my most favorite things to do in this Covid winter. I get to walk on the pathway through my backyard, past the big tree, and down the steps, and across the driveway to the alley where the all the cans are. An unpredicted plus that I did not realize when I bought this house is that the garbage cans never need to be moved. They just sit there on the border of my driveway and the alleyway. No wheeling in and wheeling out. A small good surprise.

I have hit the Covid wall, which is much in the news lately as we all realize that even when vaccinated we can still get sick or transmit this vile illness. I am not yet vaccinated, and my provider's website had not been updated in ages. It's stuck on 75 and older. Maybe I will be 75 by the time they update it.

I am alternately happily busy making handmade paper, mending, making collages, writing, swearing at the TV, and watching my fancy new squirrel-proof bird feeder....when I'm not wondering what the hell my purpose is on this Earth. Just in the last few days I've seen chickadees, juncos, finches, hairy and downy woodpeckers, and the cardinal you see in my very amateur photo.  Oh, and I made my first attempt at ice luminaria, pictured at the top of this post.

The wildlife situation is so much fun here on ground level. Every morning the first order of the day is studying the tracks. Rabbits. Squirrels. And I think that is a raccoon print below.  I welcome all creatures. They are out there in -40 surviving. When the temperatures began to drop a few days ago, I watched squirrels paw up leaves and carry them in their mouths to insulate their abodes.

A not-so-small bad surprise is that the someone cut off my alimony. I've consulted with an attorney, roamed around here a few nights past my bedtime, spent a whole day in bed, spent another couple of days counting all my pennies. All that has been helpful--but the most satisfying thing has been collaging. It's just that I can't really send this type of card to anyone. So I'm going to put a couple here.

Humiliation

Kick in the Head

Here's a quote about collaging by Terry Tempest Williams:"If the world is torn to pieces, I want to see what story I can find in the fragmentation. I have taken to making collages.  I want to see whether a different narrative might arise from pouring over American magazines, tearing them up and putting them back together in a shape that makes sense to me. When everything is coming apart, the art of assemblage feels like a worthy pastime"

I love coincidences

 Several months ago, pre-election, when I was on a book making binge, I made this.

It's a flip book in the style of the Exquisite Corpse game.

The pages are divided into thirds. Each whole page depicts a person, and when you flip a section of the page,  part of the person can be changed into someone else. Fun and games, and my mind saw a message just in the format. Walk in someone else's shoes. Get inside someone else's head. Feel what's going on in the heart of someone that isn't you. I thought the book needed a few words though so I excerpted several lines of a poem called, "In This Place." Turns out it's a poem by Amanda Gorman. I had no idea, back then, how appropriate that would be.

In other news, I am in this place--my new house in my new study where everything finally has a place and I no longer have to excavate a bin from beneath a bed to find a certain piece of paper.

Here are the other books I made during the book making binge.

And the sturdy deep shelves with room for books and my never ending collection of stuff.

The tiny closet is a wonder. There's room for my handmade paper, my hand-marbled paper, and all the stuff I use for collaging, plus the usual crap one keeps in a filing cabinet. Things like a final decree of divorce, mediation agreements, new divorce advice, tax forms, etc. 

A long while ago, there was this coincidence. Life is so mysterious and interesting. 

Pernickety Lemon makes an Inauguration Day blossom

 

About 10 days ago I awoke to find Persnickety's leaves turned upside down and feeling as thin as tissue paper. We were all worn thin. So thin. Persnickety is working on a blossom now which seems all wrong for winter in Minnesota, but I'll be glad for it and see where it goes. Joe Biden really wasn't my choice for the Democratic nominee, but yeah, I'll see where it goes because I felt like blossoming when I saw our vice president sworn in this morning. 

Pernickety is quite the sensitive thing. The ups and downs of moving and open windows due to Covid and people come to fix this and that in my house have nearly done her in. I've had some ups and downs with the Someone recently, and Persnickety and I have been sisters in distress. I swear to you that while my gut was roiling this morning, I remembered my intestinal upset immediately post marriage break-up when I thought I most certainly had cancer and would be dead in weeks. I had that same terrible feeling, and I thought to myself, well...maybe the someone just responded to my email. He had. 

You might note the draft stopper thing on the windowsill in the photo above. It improved the texture of Persnickety's leaves almost immediately, and the very next morning after I put it on the sill, the leaves turned themselves right side up. I'm going to be holding one of those against my heart.

And I'll be studying Amanda Gorman's poem from this morning's festivities. I thought her reading of her truth-telling poem was flawless.

The Hill We Climb

by Amanda Gorman

When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade
We've braved the belly of the beast
We've learned that quiet isn't always peace
And the norms and notions
of what just is
Isn’t always just-ice
And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we've weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished
We the successors of a country and a time
Where a skinny Black girl
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one
And yes we are far from polished
far from pristine
but that doesn’t mean we are
striving to form a union that is perfect
We are striving to forge a union with purpose
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and
conditions of man
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us
but what stands before us
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside
We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms
to one another
We seek harm to none and harmony for all
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew
That even as we hurt, we hoped
That even as we tired, we tried
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious
Not because we will never again know defeat
but because we will never again sow division
Scripture tells us to envision
that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree
And no one shall make them afraid
If we’re to live up to our own time
Then victory won’t lie in the blade
But in all the bridges we’ve made
That is the promise to glade
The hill we climb
If only we dare
It's because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it’s the past we step into
and how we repair it
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation
rather than share it
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy
And this effort very nearly succeeded
But while democracy can be periodically delayed
it can never be permanently defeated
In this truth
in this faith we trust
For while we have our eyes on the future
history has its eyes on us
This is the era of just redemption
We feared at its inception
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs
of such a terrifying hour
but within it we found the power
to author a new chapter
To offer hope and laughter to ourselves
So while once we asked,
how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?
Now we assert
How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was
but move to what shall be
A country that is bruised but whole,
benevolent but bold,
fierce and free
We will not be turned around
or interrupted by intimidation
because we know our inaction and inertia
will be the inheritance of the next generation
Our blunders become their burdens
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy
and change our children’s birthright
So let us leave behind a country
better than the one we were left with
Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest,
we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one
We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the west,
we will rise from the windswept northeast
where our forefathers first realized revolution
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states,
we will rise from the sunbaked south
We will rebuild, reconcile and recover
and every known nook of our nation and
every corner called our country,
our people diverse and beautiful will emerge,
battered and beautiful
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it

Persnickety Lemon moves from a condo to a house

 

I bought a lemon tree this past spring and set it on my condo balcony where it grew taller and and blossomed. It wasn't thrilled when I brought it inside just before the first frost. I noticed it was beset with white fly, and so sprayed it with sulfur in my condo bathtub. Twice. It protested. 

Then I protested, deciding condo life was not for me for a myriad of reasons. My brother M. didn't seem surprised when I told him. "You need dirt," he said. My daughter C. said that I was one of those people who just need to be "in charge of my shit." Okay. 

So Persnickety Lemon and I moved. Moving is never fun. Moving during a pandemic is fraught with complications.

I stood on the balcony while the movers took everything away. I opened all the windows in the new house while the movers brought the things inside. Persnickety Lemon does not have a parka and was not happy about the open windows on moving day. Or the open windows the day the painters came.

I am not happy that my furniture is way too big for this little 1950s house and that the dining room table fills the whole main room and the only place for a couch is in the basement. But I'm going to make some changes. And Persnickety Lemon is going to get some new leaves.

There are many things to like here.

Like the sunrise in my picture window.

And my utterly charming backyard with its sturdy shed. I can see that red door from my bedroom window, and it looks like a beacon of possibility.

Happy 2021 to you. I wish you good health.