Posts Tagged With: writing

Earth. Wind. Fire

Posted on August 30, 2013 by Laura M Gibson

Many years ago, when we lived in the Eastern Sierra, John and I were nearly evacuated from our home. That summer, the Rainbow Fire brought firefighters from all over the West to our small mountain town. Whether and how we’d have to leave was all people could talk about. For over a week, the sky was heavy with blood-red smoke that occluded the sun. We kept our truck packed with a few essentials, those we couldn’t bear to lose. Just in case. Firefighters saved the day then, as they will soon, I hope, in the hundreds of fires that rage now in the West.

Years away from that proximity to wildfire have made me forget how fire worry cloaks dry places in summer. When we lived in Pennsylvania, I can’t remember one fire scare that didn’t involve a structure. Floods were that region’s menace. In our seven years there, the shed in our backyard flooded three times. Next to a culvert which backed up every spring from heavy rain and idiotically designed drainage from a nearby golf course, the shed was full of things we’d carried from move to move. Memorabilia, furniture, yard tools. One March evening John and I forged through our backyard in chest-high water and hacked a section of fencing away so the water could drain instead of flooding the house.

In the Pacific Northwest, late summer means smoke from fires east and south. My favorite woods are closed down by the timber company in August and September. Just in case. But in general, for many years, I have spoken of fires as not that near to us. They are over there.

This year, fire has been on my mind pretty much since spring, when we decided to move. It is a story both short and long, too tedious to report here, and is also the reason for the radio silence in this blog space.

John and I have moved a lot in our together life, each time purposefully, each time surprised we’re doing it again, each time mystified about the way our belongings have multiplied like those gremlins in that awful 80s film. Moving means limbo and heartache, straddling the line between the love of one place and the hope about the next place. It’s exhausting, exhilarating, overwhelming, terrifying. The cleansing power of fire – a proper burn of most of our things and the party that would accompany it – was a solution I thought about more than I should have.

Before we moved, I ended up burning only a few things I’m not at liberty to report here, but suffice it to say there was (probably) too much beer involved. Not as a retardant but as liquid encouragement.

The second night in our new town, which is in the high desert, we were jolted awake by a thunderstorm and a fire raging in the hills above town. It was three o’clock in the morning. The seven fire trucks worth of sirens I counted were ultimately eclipsed by the din of thunder above us, which boomed so loud it rattled the glasses in the cabinets and made the dog hide behind the toilet (I’m not sure why this was a safe zone, but she felt that it was). The kids climbed into bed with us, and it would’ve felt like a scene from The Sound of Music, except that ash blasted into the house through the open windows until it occurred to us to close them.

The next morning we found all the surfaces in the house covered with chunky silt. Parked on the street, our car looked like it had been in a ticker tape parade.

This. Our new life. We’ve moved from the one of the rainiest places in the West to one of the driest, a climate John and I haven’t lived in for fifteen years. In the months that led up to being here, I made a habit of turning to John and telling him all our moving troubles and expenses could be solved by one thing.

“Oh yeah?,” he’d say, “What’s that? A brigade of leprechaun movers?”

His ideas were different every time. A team of furniture-hungry zombies. The world’s biggest yard sale with a complimentary deep-fried bar – Oreos, pickles, butter. A Dumptruck Demolition Derby, all the contestants loaded down with our household goods. The crowd could trash-pick our stuff when the event was over. The list was endless.

“Nothing so theatrical,” I’d say. “I was thinking a book of matches.”

“Your solution lacks imagination.”

Maybe.

I didn’t think we’d move again, at least not this far away. For months, while I packed up our belongings, I cursed the weight of them, the knickknacks and kitchen crap, the books (oh dear, I DO have a problem), the clothes and shoes and yard stuff and furniture. I fantasized about using this life change as an opportunity to become a family of ascetics. We could retrofit our trailer and practice micro living, everything we owned having more than one purpose. Downsizing! The next frontier!

With my truck: Eleven trips of donated goods, one trip to give away items to family members, several more trips to deliver plants in pots and those dug up from the yard to friends, one trip to the food bank. A massive neighborhood yard sale. And still, we had too much crap.

I mean, what do we really NEED my high school lettergirl jacket for? Or the skis John lost in an avalanche twenty years ago that we found the next spring? Or the newspapers from 1875 wrapped in wax paper my great aunt gave me?

It turns out downsizing is a tricky business. Even though we gave away so much, we still have too much to fit into our new house. (I’m mostly sure we’re not hoarders). So we did what all good Americans do and put the overage of our lives in a storage unit. Boxes upon boxes of it, where it will probably mold overwinter in the rainy Northwest, the plywood walls of the unit wet with condensation as so often happens, and then we’ll probably have to get rid of it anyway. Maybe we’ll learn our lesson this time.

Now that the world is burning all around us, the thought of lighting matches doesn’t bring me much joy. Each morning we wake to see what our day will bring. Some days it is a “red flag warning” (a trifecta of wind, lightning and plenty of tinder). Others it is an AQI (Air Quality Index) level Orange or Red (UNHEALTHY). Above Red are Purple and Maroon, levels that are “HAZARDOUS.” We plan our time outdoors accordingly. Morning is best. In the afternoon it’s hot as balls, and the air reeks of fire and burns our lungs.

The kids have begun to ask what would make the world reach Purple or Maroon, and I don’t trust myself to answer, because of course I’ve imagined something apocalyptic already that involves much more than wildfires. As a family, we keep our fingers crossed that fire will not be the thing to get us into those foreboding AQI colors.

Truthfully, now that I’m a high desert dweller again, I can’t make the joke about needing a book of matches without thinking about the loss of life and property this year’s fire season has already cost.

But at some point we’ll have to face the music with the rest of our things, and I’m pretty sure the leprechauns are not going to help us out. I guess I’ll stow my matches for another time. Just in case. For when the rains come (I hear they do here), for when there’s not such a constant reminder of how nature is the boss of us. For our next move.

Or maybe I’ll put my matches away for good. Now that I’m thinking about it, John’s Dumptruck Demolition Derby idea isn’t half bad. We DO have a county fair here…

Categories: demolition derby, writing | Tags: demolition derby, nature, outdoors, small towns, writing | 4 Comments

Just the Haircut Stuff

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Laura M Gibson

Riley and I are home alone on a warm Friday afternoon. We’re not very frisky at the end of the week, both of us happy to curl up with a book or a movie. But the weather is so lovely, and the espaliered fruit trees I’ve let grow wild are in need of pruning. We go outside before the day fades and gather our tools.

Clippers in hand, Riley cuts back the dead hydrangea blooms that wintered on the bush. Up on a ladder, I prune the cherries and then the apple trees, throwing the boughs into a pile in the yard. Not too far into our work, as the air cools, we decide what we really need is a fire. Our yard is too small for a proper burn barrel, but we’ve got a portable fire pit, so we haul that out, as well as the pieces of the Christmas tree Owen cut and stacked a few months ago. Riley goes inside to get the matches, and I realize I’m excited it’s just the two of us, about to share an important rite of passage – a girl learning to build a fire. We love our boys, but their presence changes the time.

I’ve just finished reading a book with a daunting title by Dr. Leonard Sax: Girls on the Edge: The Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls–Sexual Identity, the Cyberbubble, Obsessions, Environmental Toxins. I don’t feast on a regular diet of self-helpish books, but this one was recommended by a friend, and it was worth the read. Sax’s perspective has made me think even more concertedly about what and how we teach girls on purpose and through example. A girl emerging from girlhood with a sense of who she is and a confidence in that identity makes a perilous journey, and not enough of us are paying attention in the right ways, Sax suggests, especially in a culture that pushes girls to be objectified, consumed, subservient.

How well John and I buffer Riley from being awash in pursuits of pop culture and also guide her toward survival and resistance keeps me up some nights. Most days I think we’re doing okay, even if she does know every stinking lyric to Taylor Swift’s songs. I have to admit, they’re catchy, but they reek of teen angst; it’s disconcerting to catch my daughter, gripping her hairbrush like a microphone, sing-shouting “We are never ever ever getting back together” to herself in the bathroom mirror with just the right amount of venom.

While she’s inside the house, it occurs to me Riley’s nine already. Much older than I was when I learned to make a fire. What am I so busy doing we can’t make time for this? And if I’ve shanked teaching her this elemental skill, what else am I shanking?

But she knows a lot, I discover. She’s been reading The Daring Book for Girls by Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz, and also paying attention. Close attention.

“I’m a good watcher,” she says. She builds a teepee of dried leaves and kindling she’s culled from the wood pile. She chooses a good fire-poking stick from the cherry boughs I’ve hacked. We talk about safety and how to feed a fire. She nods and tells me she’s got it; she knows what to do. I show her how to strike a match, and then hand her the matches and let her begin, enjoying her delight at this responsibility. She’s brought her clippers and found a small saw, and she uses both to manage the size of her fuel. Pulling a chair close to the heat, she’s a serious fire tender, watching the flames with intent. She feeds the fire while I finish pruning, our conversation across the yard meandering and associative. We walk about the stars and planets, what animals we’ll have on our imaginary ranch, how she reached her record of 213 jumps in a row on a pogo stick.

cherry blossoms

Dark falls around us, but we don’t go inside. She wants to know if the green limbs of the cherries and apples will burn, so she conducts an experiment and learns wet boughs kill the fire and the tinder-dry Christmas tree creates a fire so high it makes its own wind. She wonders whether the cuttings will grow if we stick them directly into dirt, so we choose a few to experiment with in that way, and a few others to bring inside and force bloom. “What does that mean?” she asks me.

“It’s a trick,” I say. “The plant is fooled that it’s spring, so it lets the blossoms come out of the buds early.” As I form my answer, it occurs to me we could just as easily be talking about the journey of girls today, and the way culture sexualizes them, tricking them into acting like adults before they know what that means emotionally. The loud metaphor makes me stop for a minute and follow the breadcrumbs. I watch Riley choose stems and put them into an old metal pitcher we use as a vase.

I’m sick at heart at the thought of her forced to bloom out of her magical world by pressure to become a woman too early. Growing up will come for her eventually, and she’ll lose interest in climbing trees and playing her imaginary dragon games, in challenging herself for the next pogo stick record and building seven room forts out of blankets and pillows in the family room. Innocence won’t last, is already leaving, I know, but I send up a please to the trees that Riley’s safe passage into her pre-teens also means she holds onto the person she’s becoming, and not a version of the girl she thinks she ought to be.

We cut red currant and Daphne boughs to bring inside as well, because if a few stems are good, more are better, and we’re talking about how the whole house will be full of spring. Maybe it’s the jasmine-lemon scent of the Daphne that has bloomed already, on its own time, or my penchant for drama fueled by remembering a few of Sax’s less savory anecdotes about girls gone wild, meant to be cautionary tales. Down the Rabbit Hole I go, imagining a version of Riley that trawls the mall and has Bieber Fever, hinges her fashion choices around her five pairs of Ugs and gives up sports for cheerleading. Then there’s a boyfriend who’s too old for her with some gold chains and a red Mustang, and she fails out of school and is having sex in the back of a car, and she has a couple of piercings and maybe there’s some pole dancing, and I’m working myself into a vicious panic and feeling like I need a beer or maybe six, and I know my visions suffer under the pathetic weight of being cliché and cast in a low-budget-made-for-television-glow, and I’m supposed to be good at narrative but I can’t even make a scary-daughter-dystopia that’s interesting.

And how did I get here from being excited about teaching her to build a fire? Which I didn’t do anyway because she already knows how.

Riley finishes her arrangements of cherry boughs in the vase and turns to me. “So. It’s kind of like cheating and being the boss of nature,” she says. “You wouldn’t want to cut too much, though. Just the haircut stuff.”

Clever girl. I’m swimming back to the surface, where I send my B-Rate-Riley production packing and I nod, thinking about a week from now, when all the stems we bring inside will be in full bloom, a reminder of building a fire, and the way my girl knows herself so well already. “Yes,” I say. “Just the haircut stuff is perfect.”

red currant

Categories: books, gardening, girls, Uncategorized, writing | Tags: gardening, girls, parenting, plants, teaching, writing | 1 Comment

Harvest of People

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Laura M Gibson

Each new year I engage in the secret, irrational hope of making resolutions. My good intentions usually last until about March, although each year I hope will be the exception, when I make it all the way to December. Maybe 2013 will be it. I hope so. This year the list looks like it generally does, a collection of rusted resolves from previous years and some new ones too. They’re written on post-its that have already lost their sticky-power; I keep finding them on the floor or attached to the bottoms of my socks. Probably, there should be fewer than ten and I should keep them to myself, but I’m still in the honeymoon period, encouraged by the way sharing them might help them to survive:

practice the Zora way = more wag & less bark
learn to play guitar
run a marathon
do at least 10 minutes of core per day (before you stick your head inside the computer; how hard can it be?)
write
write
finish a draft of a novel
be grateful
be humble
be centered

Now, almost at the end of January, I have resolve still in the tank, though the guitar has been swapped out for a ukulele. I’m awful at it. I watch You-Tube videos to keep myself motivated. Maybe by spring I’ll be able to strum something that sounds like a song.

I’m trying not to spend too much time looking ahead, but it’s dark and cold and gray. Blessedly, the days are getting longer. It’s time to start mapping out the garden, order seeds, and calculate what my soil will grow. With spring in the wings, it’s a little hard to practice living centered in the now, especially when a whole lot of the now, honestly, is pretty painful. Having to explain to my kids why friends lose their jobs, or get cancer, or decide to divorce, what the hell the deal is with Twitter, or why bullies have such power, or why there are all those empty desks in Connecticut, leaves me feeling inadequate to the task. We must learn to rub along with people of all kinds, I say to them. Some relationships are for business, others are toxic and teach you about boundaries and knowing yourself. Some relationships are for friendship, some are for love, some fall away. It’s all part of the deal, I tell them. Our job is to acknowledge that we can’t control other people or their responses to the world, we can only be in charge of ourselves. But they’re kids; they think I’m not hearing them well enough. They want life to be decipherable, literal, with rules they can anticipate and apply.

I try, always, to end these hard conversations with what we are grateful for –the winter wren; books and chocolate; our chickens, who press themselves in a heap against the glass of the slider doors, asking to come inside and be with us when it’s cold; the woods; the tangle of people we hold dear in our lives, for whom we have fierce love. But some days, when the world feels bleak, and when my advice is cold comfort for kids working to make sense of the world, digging for gratitude is damn hard.

Before the new year a poem by Max Coots arrived in the mail from a friend. Max is someone I’d never heard of, but his words — grounded, grateful, funny– made me want to invite him over for dinner or a glass of wine. I asked Uncle Google about him and discovered he died in 2009 after a long, rich life as a Renaissance Man. A Unitarian Universalist minister, a sculptor of gargoyles (this, alone, is enough to make me half fall in love with him), a poet, and a gardener, Reverend Max was the kind of guy who spent his life working to embody my resolutions. Maybe not the ukulele or the ten minutes of core, but it seems to me he was the kind of spirit I aim to be.

Anyway, here’s to Max, to the journey resolutions bring, to sowing seeds — real and metaphoric–with kids, to a garden of friends, and to gratitude:

A HARVEST OF PEOPLE

Max Coots

Let us give thanks for a bounty of people:

For generous friends, with smiles as bright as their blossoms.

For feisty friends as tart as apples;

For continuous friends who, like scallions and cucumbers, keep reminding us that we’ve had them.

For crotchety friends, as sour as rhubarb and as indestructible;

For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and as elegant as a row of corn; and the others as plain as potatoes and as good for you.

For friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as endless as zucchini, and who, like parsnips, can be counted on to see you through the winter.

For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time.

For young friends, who wind around like tendrils and hold us.

We give thanks for friends now gone, like gardens past that have been

harvested, but who fed us in their times that we might live.

Categories: community, gardening, writing | Tags: friendship, gardening, poetry, writing | 5 Comments

just feel the road

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Laura M Gibson

I was only about twelve when my Dad taught me to drive. We kept it from my mother for a few years, an easy thing to do since most of those early miles were on dirt roads in Georgia, travelled so Dad and I could troll the woods for firewood in later summer and fall. Going woodin’, we called it. Of his children, four of them girls, I was the oldest. For a long time I think he figured there would be no son; I was interested in learning to do what I saw boys doing, and Dad wanted to teach someone. So I learned to play baseball, chop wood, work on cars, and drive our enormous Chevy truck.

Dad was probably often nervous, though there was never any real evidence of panic. That first year, I wasn’t tall enough to see over the steering wheel. I sometimes sat on a phone book if the road was narrow, and I recall always gripping the wheel so hard my hands would remember that clutched position for an hour afterward. “Just feel the road,” he’d say, and I had no idea what that meant. “Keep that strip along the center of the hood lined up with the right shoulder.” I’d nod and try and focus on everything at once, which was hard. Dad sat in the passenger seat, gesturing out the window with the beer he opened as soon as I took the wheel, wondering aloud how much wood we’d need to get through winter.

If the truck got too close to the edge of the road, he’d point me away from that spot with his beer –“You don’t want to pulse the gas pedal. Steady and mellow. That’s the way.” –then go on talking. Writing this makes me smile and shake my head all at once. Those were some of the best times I had with my father. Inside the truck’s cab we shared a sense of joint purpose and camaraderie; our mission was to get firewood, but we were working at other things, too, namely how in the hell to speak each other’s language. I wasn’t a handful of a kid, but I was their first teenager, and that was foreign territory for my parents. In those days, it wasn’t uncommon for the passenger to drink in the car, nor for kids to drive early. Looking back, what was uncommon was for this to be a father-daughter ritual.

I didn’t think too much about it when I was a teen, but now that I’m a parent, living in an age full of entitled kids, hyper-vigilant parents, and too many friends who’ve died in car accidents where drinking and driving was the cause, I can’t help but see the past through a new lens. To be sure, I won’t duplicate this driving school method with my own kids. Still, as a teenager, I was aware of the gift I’d been given, and how being able to operate a vehicle would unfold more freedoms if I did a good job and proved I could keep calm and carry on.

Of course, I didn’t always make good choices. Who does? The blessing and the curse of those years is an inability to see the world very clearly. Early on in my driving career I scratched the whole left flank of a friend’s parents’ car against their garden hose reel handle. I wasn’t supposed to be driving that car, which is another story I’m not prepared to tell – I’m not sure I even had a license yet. My parents made me write a formal apology, deliver it in person, and pay for a new paint job. Another time I let the car my sisters and I shared run out of oil and it threw a rod, ruining the engine. My punishment that time was to spend weekends with Dad rebuilding the engine.

Now I’m the parent of a teenager, and the question of driving is beginning to occupy more space in our family conversations. For many years, I imagined I’d be the parent who taught her kids to drive early, like Dad taught me, minus the beer drinking and the chainsaw. But I’m thinking I’m not that cool after all. Like a lot of boys, my son Owen’s a fidgeter, a disrupter, and full of restless energy that gets him into trouble too much of the time. He’s book smart but not that street smart, despite our (mostly) patient efforts to help him build this toolbox.

Me: Why did you shoot your sister in the eye with a rubber band at point-blank range?

Owen: I don’t know.

Me: Please help me understand why you opened the car door while I was driving on the freeway.

Owen: I’m not sure. I didn’t fall out, though.

Me: Help me see why you were hitting golf balls down the alley toward the neighbors’ houses.

Owen: I don’t know. But I didn’t hit any windows.

Me: You understand, right, when you respond in a nasty way to a group text that more than one

person can see it?

Owen: Wait. That was a group text?

I don’t want to air all of our dirty family laundry (what would I write about?), but these sorts of episodes make me really wonder about letting Owen get behind the wheel of a car, even if I’m also there, not drinking beer while gently guiding him toward good driving and decision-making skills.

To wit. This past Thanksgiving, when part of my extended family gathered at my aunt and uncle’s farm. On this farm they have a golf cart, which they use as a utility vehicle to get my grandmother out of the house so she can see the property and breathe fresh air. The kids believe this to be a false use for the cart – they spend hours driving it. Picture a golf cart packed with kids. Owen at the wheel because he’s usually the oldest cousin there. There’s much careening down the slope of the west pasture too fast. Dogs chase behind because kids are fun and will feed them treats they’re not supposed to have. Kids hang off the sides of the cart singing, screaming and frequently falling off. Often there’s crying and fighting. They get back on and don’t tell their parents, because then the golf cart would be put into the barn on time-out.

My dog Zora loves the golf cart almost as much as she loves cats and squirrels. She especially loves the wheels of the golf cart, which she attacks while making ferocious attack-dog noises. I’ve trained her not to do this, so when I drive the cart she either gets in with me or runs alongside. But Owen thinks Zora’s frantic, yipping game is fun, and so he encourages her.

Dogs, in the end, no matter how smart they are, are not that smart when they’re on the chase. Boys I’ve given birth to, in the end, no matter how smart they are, are not that smart when they’re in a chasing game. You can see where this is going.

Just before Thanksgiving dinner the kids came running back to the house to report that Owen had run the dog over with the golf cart. We all went outside, my Dad included, who turned to me to say, “You don’t let him drive the car yet, do you?” Owen was walking up the hill carrying the dog. He put her down and she stood up, though she kept licking at her backside.

Me: Please help me understand why you let her chase the wheel. We’ve talked about that a lot.

Owen: Well. She wanted to. Do you think she’ll be okay? I think she got stuck under the axle.

The next day, Zora couldn’t walk. So we spent Black Friday at the vet shopping for x-rays that told us there were no broken bones or internal bleeding. She’s hopped up on pain meds, and she’s going to be fine, though we’re only just taking short walks.

John and I decided a reasonable consequence for Owen was no more golf cart privileges at the farm. At least for now. It’ll sting as an outcome, because the next cousin in line is only ten. She’ll be delighted to be the new chief driver, though. Owen’s also had to write me a check out of his savings account to pay the vet bill, which is doubly painful because that money is meant for his future driving self.

Owen: But how will I have enough money to pay for car insurance when I need it?

Me: (Response not fit to print)

As for Owen’s official driver’s training, I’m thinking I’ll import my Dad to do the job. As long as he saves the beer for after.

Categories: dogs, writing | Tags: dogs, parenting, writing | 6 Comments

i could be that bird

Posted on October 27, 2012 by Laura M Gibson

Kathleen Dean Moore’s book, Wild Comfort, is a gorgeous and rich collection of essays. Moore’s writing is lyrical and dense, not the kind of prose you can gobble up in one sitting. I found myself carrying this book with me wherever I went all week, comforted by its presence in my bag, anticipating having ten minutes (more if I could get them) to read a passage. Her pieces are reflections of what we give and take from the natural world; how we grieve and what that means; the ways our culture invites us to fall away from nature in the name of progress and how, still, we find we need the solace of wilderness. To be a naturalist, Moore suggests, is to have a kind of split personality – part grim reality, the byproduct of seeing environment through a scientist’s lens; part heady joy of one whose senses are on full alert.

For my part, I find grim reality is a space I occupy too often. I forget, in my obsession with humanity’s dark underbelly, evident especially in this election season, that there’s so much to be grateful for – the kids I work with in the school garden who’ll try any vegetable I ask them to because they love the space they’ve helped to cultivate, the bumper crop of Jonagold apples bursting from my tiny, espaliered trees. The color amber. How my dog’s feet smell like Fritos.

I could choose to find joy more than I do, focusing less on how the world seems determined to forget history, or how any shopping excursion is proof we really are zombies and don’t know it yet, or how a generator and a crossbow are probably the best tools in preparation for the end-of-days. I could choose to be the bird of Emily Dickinson’s poem, the one singing her heart out through the storm: “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul…” I could be the bird and live a more intentional life with less cynicism. I could be that bird…

In her book, Moore frets about not living an intentional enough life. As an exercise in gratitude, she decided to establish a “happy basket” on her desk, into which she put pieces of paper with notes recording times she felt really happy. Her plan was to document things that brought her joy for a year, and then go through and evaluate the data. Ultimately, she didn’t make it for the year, which I love. One crummy day eight months or so into the project, she tipped out the basket to see what those scraps could tell her – chiefly, that none of the ways the world said she should be happy actually made her happy. Not stuff or success. Ideas, solitude, her kids, and moving in the outdoors delivered joy and grounded her.

Yesterday I was talking to a dear friend on the phone, lamenting the way I am built to be dissatisfied, suggesting I, too, should start a happy basket. She was quiet for a minute, and then said to me, “But that’s what your blog is. You don’t need a basket for your desk.”

Which I guess is true as I look back over my posts.

While we were on the phone, I stood at the window and watched the caramelized colors of autumn in my backyard, the quilt of leaves I would have to rake again before the rain came. There’s one holdout of summer’s gaudy blaze left in the yard, a fuchsia in full bloom. Fuchsia have a reputation for being difficult to grow, temperamental without diligent fertilizing, and prone to dying easily if you don’t baby them. I have utterly neglected this plant, which lives in a planter box on my deck. While everything else around it is closing up shop for winter, this fuchsia is hardy, saucy, showing off with her pendulous bloom, her firecracker bloomers.

I was about to ring off, promising to post a missive worthy of a happy basket if I could dip into the well and find something, when a female Anna’s Hummingbird arrived to my fuchsia, sucking down nectar as fast as she could. Not all of them migrate from our part of the state, I guess, and maybe this one intended to meet some friends in California or Mexico later.

But she stayed for a while, immersed in feeding on each one of those sweet fuchsia globes long enough to allow me a good look at her red-flecked head and peacock-colored wings. Although my friend is thousands of miles away, we saw it together. A gift to witness and to share, a thing I would’ve written on a scrap of paper and put in a basket.

Categories: books, gardening, writing | Tags: nature, outdoors, writing | Leave a comment

the short story is anything but dead

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Laura M Gibson

Many writers compelled to craft short fiction do so against the big question about whether the short story is dying. As a writer and a reader, I don’t feel this is true at all. But then, I’m a fan of the form, even on days when I want to light my work on fire. Short stories are the perfect length for the hectic life. They’re much easier to inhabit, to fully drop into and then emerge out of, than novels. You can get the satisfaction of a full narrative arc in the time it takes to commute to work, cook something at the stove, or wait at a doctor’s office. I’ve even read flash fiction while brushing my teeth (a few times I’ve stood at the sink with suds in my mouth, the toothbrush forgotten).

I’m not saying reading short fiction should only be shoe-horned between other activities; I’m only pointing out it can be done that way, very satisfyingly. Also, I’m guessing the reading life looks like this for many of us — more catch-as-catch-can and less feet-up-on-the-couch than we’d like it to be.

I’d argue the short story isn’t as “pallid” or “ill from neglect” as Mary Gaitskill once suggested. Nor are short stories just “written for editors and teachers rather than for readers,” as Stephen King once lamented was the by-product of a shrinking readership. There are many fine journals out there doing the good, hard work of keeping the short form alive, and a heap of talented emerging writers showing up in those pages. And there are readers. Plenty of them, and not all of them writers.

Readers are smart, after all, and know when they’re in good hands. This is one of the first tenets you learn in any writing program.

Speaking of being in good hands, each year the Chicago Tribune invites writers to submit short fiction for its Nelson Algren Award. Named after the writer Nelson Algren, the contest is free. You can submit two stories. If you win, there’s a generous prize, your piece is published in the paper, and you get to be in the company of fellow Nelson Algren winners like Louise Erdrich, Julia Glass, Melissa Bank and E.J Levy, to name just a few.

Beginning in February of this year, the Tribune added a book geek’s membership society called Printers Row. Taking a page out of One Story‘s mission to send singleton stories to subscribers every three weeks, Printers Row sends out a weekly short story. It’s also free to submit work for this project, and you can track your submission on Submishmash.

Heather E. Goodman‘s kick-ass story His Dog won the 2008 Nelson Algren Award and is now out as a Printers Row piece. Goodman’s characters are a hardscrabble lot, eking out a life on the land and with each other. The story is tender, gritty, unrelenting and carries you toward an inevitability that is the perfect final act, though you don’t see it coming. But don’t believe me. Read it for yourself online or pony up for a Printers Row subscription. You’ll get to hold this gem in your hands and be reminded each week that the short story is alive and well.

Categories: fiction, publishing, short story, writing | Tags: fiction, publishing, short story, writing | 3 Comments

how to grow a vigilante garden

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Laura M Gibson

The view of my neighbor’s house from my front windows has pissed me off for years. It’s a 1950s ranch, which is not its real problem. I’ve lived in a few ranchers over the years and been happy – you can make them cute. But the offender on my current street is an unloved thing. Amidst a street of Craftsmen and storybook homes built in the 1920s, it looks a little like it’s crashing a Kentucky Derby party in a tight polyester pants suit. Beige asbestos siding, peeled country-blue shutter paint, cracked front steps and a tragic aluminum screened door that claps in the breeze. It’s not good.

I don’t know the owner, but I do know the house is a rental that can’t seem to keep occupants for more than a few months. Two haphazard front garden beds of invasive plants have died, one by one, over the years. When someone comes to “care” for the yard, this means the high grass is mowed quickly and left to rot in clumps. The latest dead plant is tossed into the back of the rusty truck on top of grass clippings.

Finally, about six months ago, there was nothing left in one bed but weeds and dirt. My next door neighbor (I’ll call her Sally) went over to weed it. The other bed, just beneath the living room window, was home to some jaundiced boxwoods. There wasn’t much she could do with those.

The whole of this house, from its single-paned windows to its listing chimney and waist-high backyard grass, was asking for help.

The place has been empty this time for months, a For Rent sign advertising its awesomeness – Great Neighborhood!—at the edge of the yard. My neighbors and I hold our breath, hoping someone will move in soon.

Two weeks ago the sky opened and delivered the gift of spectacular weather. A real, live bender. Since then, our street has been stoned out on Vitamin D and things in bloom.

A week into our sun blitz, I’d dug up several hostas and helliobores, intending to pot them up and donate them for our school plant sale. I pulled out the nandina (The owner before me had a real thing for plants from Asia). I set them out on the grass.

My plan was spontaneous. Mostly.

It was broad daylight. People were out mowing, raking, walking. I grabbed a shovel and a wheelbarrow and trundled my plants across the street. I set them out in a pattern I thought would work and planted them. I filled a watering can, added some fish emulsion, and soaked them. After that, I sat on my front steps and had a beer, watching over my guerilla garden.

The next day one of my neighbors (I’ll call her Dolores) said to me, “I saw you.” Dolores wagged her eyebrows.

“Oh really? When?” (Uh oh. Trespassing is bad. I knew I should’ve done it at night.)

“I’m so glad you did that, because I was just about to do the same thing!”

Dolores brought over a holly bush from her yard. Another neighbor (I’ll call her Martha) donated a Japanese maple. I mowed the grass twice when it got too high, and then decided to pay my son to do it. More plants showed up mysteriously. I planted them all, and the place was really beginning to look like someone loved it, at least a little. We were cooking with gas. A community of garden lovers taking matters into our own hands! Next stop, a coat of paint! A new door! Re-pointing the chimney!

Today I was working away at my desk, one eye on our new garden, thinking about when I’d get over there to water (Hooking our hose up to their spigot was definitely trespassing, John informed me. Also, the water was turned off).

Up pulled a beat-up pickup. Out came a weed whacker. A man with a cigarette drooping from his mouth attacked the yard. My son had just mowed. Mr. Cigarette mowed again anyway. Then he took out the plants (Our plants! Sally’s, Dolores’s, Martha’s and mine!) and threw them into a heap in the front yard.

I ran across the street, my hands in the air, demanding to know what his plan was.

He turned to look at me through goggles covered in wet grass flakes. “The guy’s paying me to take all this out. He says they’re dead.”

I pulled a leaf off one of the helliobores and showed it to him. “Do they look dead to you?”

“Well. No.” He looked over his shoulder at the boxwoods, already gone.

“Did someone buy the place? Or rent it?”

“I don’t know, Lady. I’m just getting paid to do the yard.”

“Did he rent it? He never calls back.” Even to my own ears I sounded pathetic.

“You want me to call him? I’ll call him. Then I can get back to work.” He dialed the phone, waited for an answer and fiddled with the handle of his weed whacker.

It’s true I’d been calling the number every few days, pretending to be a renter on the message so the owner would call me back. I’d just called again that morning.

On the other end the owner answered. “Um. Yeah. There’s some lady here who’s mad about the yard. She says she wants to talk to you.” He passed me the phone.

“Oh, hiii. I live across the street.” (Friendly. Check. Breezy. Check.) “You’ve got some guy here taking out all the plants? Because not all of them are dead, you know. (Oh dear. A little nasty.) I’m just hoping you aren’t planning to leave the beds bare? Like they’ve been for, you know, a few years?”

Traffic noise on the other end. A siren flaring and fading. “I don’t live in town. It’s hard to take care of.” A young guy. I’d heard he inherited the place from his mother.

“I bet.”

Long pause. Another siren. “The last time I was there about a month ago everything was dead.”

This was the time to tell him NOT ANYMORE. Garden vigilantism is your new friend, Mister. But landscaping seemed a much bigger trespass than mowing. And I’d made rules about my methods, too, which suddenly seemed completely crazy. I didn’t MOVE any plants already there. I just added them. I didn’t sneak over at night; I gardened in the light of day. But it was too complicated to explain.

“You’ve really let it go,” I said. “Some of us in the neighborhood are mowing the front grass.”

He laughed. “Really? Cool.”

“Have you rented it out? Or are you selling it?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve got a bunch of people looking at it.” (This was a lie. I live right here and no one has).

I asked what the rent was, and he told me. His inflated figure explained why no one wanted it: he was smoking crack. He’d never get that kind of money for the place.

“That seems like a lot.”

Radio silence. Some honking and a woman shouting.

“Could you just not leave the gardens bare?”

“Absolutely,” he said, then hung up.

I asked Mr. Cigarette to save the plants he’d dug up, and he said he would. “Could you put the boxwoods back in? They’re pretty healthy, don’t you think?”

“You gonna pay me?”

“You’re already being paid, aren’t you?”

“Just kidding. Never hurts to ask,” he said and lit another cigarette. “I’m supposed to go to Fred Meyer and get new plants. You got a problem with that?”

He looked at me through the smoke.

I should’ve stepped away. Let well enough alone. Transferred my energies to another cause. “Can I write down some plants that would be good?” I said. “I mean, if it’s all the same to you. If the owner doesn’t care. It seems like he doesn’t care.”

“Knock yourself out, Lady.”

I wanted to lurk around, making sure he’d be as good as his word, but I didn’t.

Later in the day, I checked to see what he’d done. The boxwoods had been replanted unevenly, like the person planting them was drunk. On the far end, the biggest one had its roots exposed and lay on the ground. Our plants, mine and Sally’s and Dolores’s and Martha’s, were all gone.

I’d lost. I told myself I’d gotten what I deserved for muscling a situation that wasn’t mine to steer.

Around nine in the evening my doorbell rang. On the front lawn stood Sally and Dolores. They were giggling, sharing a bottle of Tequila hidden inside a paper bag.

“We don’t know what the hell happened over there today,” Sally said. She gestured to the house across the street. “Somebody told us you were in the front yard with that gardener guy trying to save the plants.”

They laughed and offered me a drink. They said if we didn’t do something a bunch of hoodlums would break in and cook meth over there, or dismantle the place for the metal. Both scenarios are a pretty big stretch, but I admired their passion.

“He said he’d save them for me,” I said. “I guess he decided I was too insane.”

“Come with us. We have a present for you.”

They took me into Sally’s backyard, where all our plants sat in a wheelbarrow by the garage.

“We got these out of the trash can behind that house,” Dolores said. “Can you believe that asshole? Throwing away our plants?”

Sally chimed in. “Yeah. This is our neighborhood.” She took a swig of Tequila and offered some to me. “We figured you’d want to…you know…do something with them.”

Tequila’s not my friend, so I said no to that. But I’m up for gardening with my new posse. Anytime.

Categories: community, gardening, girls, Uncategorized, writing | Tags: community, gardening, girls, plants, small towns, writing | 6 Comments

the well of souls

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Laura M Gibson

A few years ago, on a sunny spring morning, I woke up to find eight plants had been stolen from my front yard. Not whole pots of plants waiting to find homes, but mature bushes from the ground. Mornings are not my sharpest time. It took a couple beats to identify what was missing while I stood at my front window, eyeing the yard over the rim of a coffee cup, confused.

Once outside, it didn’t take long to see the problem. A trail of dirt faded off down the sidewalk two houses away and then veered into the street. The thieves took a whole hedge of Pieris Mountain Fire that had been there for years. I liked them for their jaunty winter foliage, and they were one of the things I’d kept from the previous owners. Just at a place where I felt the yard had started to reflect my landscape sensibilities, I’d spent several weeks working on that section of the yard – taking down a hideous fence, planting native species. Now all I had was a bald section that looked like the front teeth of my yard had been knocked out.

My neighbor Tom across the street had had some plants stolen the month before. The morning after it happened, several of us stood on the sidewalk in front of his house, shaking our heads at the news and wondering what the hell was going on in the world. Those were Japanese Maples, still in pots sitting down the driveway and around the back of the house. Someone was paying attention. It was creepy. Tom bought more, and these got stolen, too, before he had a chance to put them in the ground. He gave up and planted something cheaper. Azaleas, I think.

John wandered out to the sidewalk after a while and stood next to me kicking at the dirt, cussing, one of his less acceptable mixed-company hobbies. He’s actually kind of a poet. For pirates.

“What do we do? Call the police? Tom said all they did was take the details over the phone.”

“I guess,” he said. “Maybe they’ll send someone now that it’s happened three times.” He pushed dirt into one of the holes with the toe of his shoe.

“Don’t mess up the crime scene.”

“This is shitty,” he said.

It felt absurd to even suggest involving the police. I probably couldn’t identify my plants. I doubted they’d be able to. It was the perfect crime, really. I looked around at my neighbors’ yards from a lens of stealthy acquisition. Our street was a goldmine.

Thirty minutes later, we stood on the sidewalk again with the police department’s Landscape Crime Detective (I’m not making it up). She was a one-woman show in a newly created position in response to the rash of landscape crimes happening especially in our neighborhood. The fact that lots of other people were waking to find their yards bare made me feel only slightly better. Mostly, I had a hard time listening to her while I mulled over the world’s seedy underbelly. Also, I should know her name and what her rank is. Is detective a rank?…I’ll just call her Detective Blue, which is lame, I know.

Detective Blue wrote down all our particulars in her little notebook, licking her pen a few times to keep it working. She was from New Jersey. “We have a lead on a couple of plant rings in town,” she said, “but I’m afraid your bushes are gone. How much were they worth?”

John threw the rest of his coffee onto the grass. “Oh, Jesus. Let me walk away first before she talks about how much she spends on the garden,” he said.

“But those plants were already here,” I said. “Also, you love the garden. Also, I get a lot of my plants from friends.”

He shrugged. “True. I’m just saying, it seems like we shouldn’t plant the same thing in this spot.”

Mountain Fire

As a gardener, I was out of whack for weeks. It was hard to reconcile what had been stolen. Not just plants, but sweat equity, creativity, joy. I don’t have ten acres (yet) to tend, and while I wait for the time when that works, I’m transforming the space I do have into something uniquely mine. Gardening gifts me all these things and also keeps me from going bat-shit crazy living so close to neighbors, whom I mostly like. But still.

As a victim of theft, I was very pissed and a little paranoid. Someone had been casing the neighborhood. What else in my yard had the chance of being taken? Why hadn’t the dog barked in the night? The windows were open. How could I not have heard someone digging outside?

I left that spot bare. Afraid to plant the same thing. Not sure what else to put there. I spent a lot of time thinking about black market gardening, and whether those chain-linked-roadside stands that were stuffed with potted plants along the rural highways were legitimate.

A few months later, a zinger of an inspiration came while I was in the woods. There were people at the heart of those landscape crimes who were trying to eke out a living in a bad economy. What if those people were a bunch of kids? What if they lived off the grid? What would that look like? How would they decide what to steal? Who would be in charge? What else was at stake?

Thus began a novel in response to some of those questions. It’s a mess. It’s my first. The characters are very patient with me, and we’re searching for the story together. It might be a project that lives in a drawer later, and I’m not too romantic about it being a bestseller or anything. Some days it feels like giving birth. Not the fluffy-after-labor-with-a-good-smelling-baby-in-your-arms part, but the in-labor-with-no-epidural part.

Still, I believe in the project as passionately as I believe in putting my hands in the dirt. This month marks one year I’ve been world-making with my band of plant thieves. I’m darn grateful for these girls in my life, which I guess means I’m grateful for being robbed, because without my gone plants I might never have pulled this collection of souls out of the “well of souls,” as Dorothy Allison calls that place where inspiration is born.

I eventually did plant something in the bare spot. Grass. That seems about right for now, until I get the urge to put in corn.

Categories: gardening, girls, writing | Tags: crime, gardening, girls, nature, outdoors, plants, small towns, urban farming, writing | Leave a comment

chicken in space

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Laura M Gibson

Before I began the glamorous work of becoming a writer, I was a high school teacher. I worked in several high schools over the years, doing everything from teaching English to driving the van for science field trips, but my favorite job was my first (and longest) in Bishop, California. One of many small towns flanking the high desert of the Sierra Nevada range, Bishop is on the highway between Los Angeles and Reno, and many view it as nothing more than a place to stop and get gas before they go skiing at Mammoth Mountain.

But I loved it there. In fact, I never intended to leave. Until I fell in love and then I did leave, but that’s another story.

Bishop Union High School is a small place filled with a band of passionate teachers, most of whom have chosen to work and live in the Owens Valley for a certain way of life. Pretty much anything you want to do outdoors is at your feet there. Bishop has Mule Days (a whole weekend devoted to celebrating the mule; it’s fantastic; you must put it on your bucket list), world-class fishing and rock climbing, hot springs, and a rich history of conservatives and liberals working to get along. I could go on. Someday I’ll move back.

My favorite tidbit about my old stomping grounds is this: Recently, students at Bishop Union High School sent a rubber chicken named Camilla into space.

What’s more, their venture was (will continue to be) sponsored by NASA. Camilla is NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory mascot who has upwards of 20,000 followers on Facebook and Twitter. I’d like to say I still have my finger on the pulse at B.U.H.S., but I only know about the project because the students involved were interviewed on Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me last weekend. Instantly transported back to my time as a teacher there, I listened as Peter Sagal interviewed young scientists from Earth to Sky, a team of Bishop’s middle and high school students who are working on various astrobiology projects. Probably it was a coincidence, but the kids Sagal interviewed were all girls. I almost cried at the great, good hope of a tribe of young girls choosing science ( at lunch; it’s not even a class!) instead of the raft of pursuits they no doubt feel culture expects of them. But, I digress. I’m sure there are plenty of boys in Earth to Sky, too. They just weren’t interviewed.

I’m tempted to pack my bags right now and join up with Earth and Sky. Or just hang out with kids pumped about science. Right now they’re waiting to see what Camilla’s “radiation badges,” sent away to a commercial lab for testing, will reveal. My guess is Camilla’s relationship with Bishop’s kids isn’t over. I bet they’re already planning what she’ll be armed with the next time she goes up.

A SHORT LIST OF DELICIOUS DETAILS ABOUT CAMILLA’S LAUNCH

The kids launched her into “near-space” during a solar radiation storm in a helium balloon that went up to 124,00 feet
Her balloon popped, of course, and she floated back to earth by parachute
She was fully rigged with 2 GPS units
She wore a knitted space suit made by a gal from Missouri
7 insects and 24 sunflower seeds were along for the ride
None of the insects survived, but you can find them pinned to the “Foamboard of Death” as examples for all future adventuresome insects about what will happen if you try to go to the edge of space (maybe this explains Camilla’s look of horror…or maybe that’s joy?)
The 24 sunflower seeds have been planted by 5th graders to see if radiated seeds will produce flowers, too

Categories: chickens, girls | Tags: chickens, girls, science, teaching, writing | 5 Comments

demolition…a love story

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Laura M Gibson

For a while when I was young we lived in a very small town in northern California. Hours from any major city, you could only get to it on steep, winding roads. There were no stop lights, no big box stores or fast food franchises. I could walk anywhere in town from my house and, as long as I was home by dinner, I was allowed to roam. Looking back from the lens of parenthood and a world that feels more complicated and more dangerous than it did then, I realize what a gift that kind of childhood was.

Every summer we had a big Fourth of July celebration. Our main park was also home to the fairgrounds and baseball diamonds, a community center and forest service offices. Before the holiday weekend, a cavalcade of semis barreled into town and disgorged their sea-monsterish carnival parts while kids made excuses to hang out at the park and watch the carnies set up shop. Elsewhere in the park, our local chapter of the Lions lined up trailers for food and beer in the concessions area by the playground and organized vintage fire trucks from five counties to participate in the parade. A rodeo, a greased pig race on the baseball field, sack and three-legged races on the park lawn, music at the bandstand — our town transformed itself into a Norman Rockwell painting. At least on the surface.

I loved all those things, of course, but what I really loved best was Sunday night, at the end of the holiday, when the demolition derby happened in the rodeo arena. It was more popular than the rodeo, better attended than the parade, and every year the stands were so packed those who came late had to hang on the fence to watch. Relative to the other events, it cost a lot of money to get in. People had generally blown through whatever cash they’d allotted for the weekend by then, myself included, but that didn’t stop us. The derby was the finale of our festivities.

The evening began with the rodeo queen and her court racing around the arena brandishing various flags. Crammed into the tiny announcer’s booth, the school choir sang the national anthem. After that the water trucks watered down the competition area to ensure cars would never get much traction. The boy scouts sold popcorn and nuts, cotton candy and soda, and one of the rodeo clowns usually sat on the fence to entertain us in between events. Derby cars caravanned slowly into the arena and parked facing the stands in a chevron so we could have a proper look at them. Usually there were twelve or fifteen entries, sometimes more. Inside, these cars had been stripped down — gas tanks moved to the back, roll bars installed, all the seats except for the driver’s and the glass taken out. They were old Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Chryslers –trash-picked from junkyards or someone’s collection of vehicles from their land — implanted with engines that could withstand battle. Cars were worked on all year in secret. Drivers were people we knew from the bank and the hardware store, parents and teachers and firemen. Once in the arena, derby drivers pulled themselves out of cars through driver’s side windows (the doors had been welded shut), and then stood theatrically, often in costume, next to their rides.

The exterior of the car was the thing. Painted, bedazzled, props welded to their tops, the cars were voted on by the audience before they even raced. Voting was crude, the winner decided upon by the announcer for loudest applause. I was generally hoarse from whistling and cheering before the destruction part ever started.

The suspense, until we got to see what we all came for, was delicious, tortuous. In the beginning, three or four cars at a time would race in “circles” around the arena, like it was a NASCAR event. There were several heats of this sort of racing so we could get a look at how each car performed. After that, cars came back again in sets of three or four and ran the track backwards, and this was the beginning of lost bumpers, dented doors, radiators spewing hot fluid onto the arena floor. Between heats, cars drove behind the arena to a place we couldn’t see, where each driver had a pit crew that kept the thing going for the big event.

The big event, when all hell broke loose, was, of course, what we’d all really come to see. Event coordinators made us sit through a singer with a guitar, usually, or the rodeo clown doing his bit with a bull. Water trucks mudded down the arena again. We fidgeted through intermission, placed bets, loaded up on more snacks until cars limped back into the arena and staged themselves in a circle facing out. The announcer gave the call. Every engine gunned. Sparks flew. The din thrummed in our chests. And then it began. Drivers circled and rammed each other, ganged up on cars with popped tires and flattened back ends. Props were severed from the tops of cars. Some cars died early on, the driver required to sit inside until it was over. Sometimes a dead car magically resurrected itself, able to battle again, a thrilling reversal of fortune. I loved every minute of it.

Since that town, I’ve lived in several others that also host derbies. One summer in my first few years of teaching a friend of mine from the city came to visit during our town’s Memorial Day celebration. A die-hard urbanite who prided himself on visiting small towns only through drive-by, Brody was fascinated with the mule parade, the craft fair, and the rodeo, at which we featured chariot steer roping (which was more about how not to get ripped from your homemade, welded chariot by your horse than lassoing a hysterical steer calf). He loved it all, but what he loved best was the destruction derby.

Because my husband was a paramedic, we were allowed access to the gate at the end of the arena. Brody and I hung on the fence, close enough to get sprayed by mud, and watched people I worked with ram into each other. Cars caught fire and got hooked together, waging attack as hybrid, two-car beasts.

A few minutes into the finale, Brody turned to me a little wild-eyed, and said, “Now I know how the Romans felt.” He raised his fist into the air. “Throw in some more Christians!”

Maybe my zeal for the derby grows from some primordial delight humans harbor for watching destruction. Maybe it comes from the disjoint in witnessing people I know to be reasonable, thoughtful humans in their everyday lives step into an impulse that’s surprising, shocking. I’m riveted by the marriage of art and savagery, of community and competition, of recycling and waste.

I’m in another small town now, and we have a derby here, too. This year I’ll partake in the demolition again. Only this time, I’ll be in the arena, driving an ’85 Cutlass.