Juxtapositioning

My coming out story

When I moved to the house I’m living in, I made a decision. I would throw open my blinds, my heart, and my life to the outside passing-by world. No more hiding behind fears of being seen. I would challenge myself. I would join the rest of the world. For keeps.

Every day, I see the same people walking by. Sunglassed mothers pushing jogging strollers. The old woman in the plaid shirt-coat who walks as if she’s recovering from a stroke. The Steve Martin lookalike who wears the same royal blue shirt and iPod earbuds every day. The runner who sprints upright down the middle of the street, first this way and then that way, stopping at the end of the block to check his time. The Tuesday night dancers who gather to West Coast Swing across the street in the dance space at the coffee house there. The Wednesday morning family who picnics under the wide maple tree across from my living room. The Friday-night students carrying pizza and beer home to their apartments. My-neighbor-the-artist walking the howling dog-next-door.

And all of them see me, I imagine. They glance over at my window. I sit, writing, inside. My blinds, like my eyes and heart, lay open to the world.

It hasn’t been easy. I have darker moments, moments of doubt and fear, that cause me to twist my blinds closed. I want no one to see me, to see my pain, to know the twisted ugliness that lives inside me in those moments. I cringe at the sunlight outside, knowing I am wasting its preciousness by remaining hidden indoors, and knowing too that its brightness would expose my flesh to the elements and strip me bare, leaving my bleached bones in a dusty heap on the sidewalk for people to politely and hastily step over.

I had a dark time recently. The blinds remained closed for two days, or three. Sunlight blared outside, evil tendrils daring to enter through the cracks. Cars came and went. Mocking footsteps echoed from across the street where happy shiny people played and worked and loved. My heart swam in blackness, my thoughts oozed self-doubt. At last I could hide no more. Something outside called. I slunk invisibly to my car, sure to feel safe in its steely black embrace, and drove off. Immediately the assault began — sunlight! people! open space! — and immediately knew why some people become afraid to leave their homes. I was vulnerable. My powers of invisibility wouldn’t work. I was no longer safe within walls and was instead part of the wide skies. My body flew apart in a million directions, one limb, one cell at a time. I screamed in pain and then wept.

As the tears dried I could feel my body reforming. My hands were still on the wheel. I glanced in the mirror and saw a different face. I pushed on the gas pedal, feeling with quiet resignation my acceptance of the world around me. The walls came down. I was open again. I breathed the world in.

I sit now, observing the life outside my door. Mike, the mailman, just left something in my mailbox. The firetruck from around the corner just went by on its way back to base. A string of Buddhist prayer flags flutters in the tree across the street. In a moment I’ll go out and feel the sun gently warm my body, feel the wind on my face. Feel alive.

Dear Anne LaMott

DISCLOSURE: I suspect I, uh, stole the idea for writing a letter to Anne LaMott from Andy Raskin. Oh, you don’t know Andy Raskin? I didn’t either until about a week ago when his book The Ramen King and I went home with me from the library. I suppose I would have known him if I still listened to NPR — where, apparently, Andy Raskin talks about things — but I haven’t listened to NPR since at least 2005, and in fact the listening to NPR, especially Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion (though I saw the movie — was that cheating?) was ceded to the Other Side in my divorce settlement, much like those old Body Shop stock accounts that probably are still worth only pennies on the dollar.

[A further note on Andy Raskin: Andy, if I may address you directly and at this point I don't see why I shouldn't considering everything you have meant to me this past week, I have to report that I sort of hated you through about the first half of your book. You were kind of a jerk! But then you got all vulnerable and I started thinking Maybe he's on to something here, and I especially liked the technique of letting that horrible inner voice do the talking for awhile so you could really hear it and from where it comes, and then I started thinking that despite your unfortunate inside back cover photograph — the one that makes you look alarmingly identical to the Party of The Other Side in the aforementioned divorce — I'd almost sort of want to meet you. (Not in a creepy way or a stalking way, I promise, but more like in a I think I get you and you seem like a cool guy kind of way.) At least, if it weren't for the fact that semi-famous people are almost always a disappointment in person, I mean, cough, so I've heard. (Not you, of course.) You understand. No offense. Your book rocked, really.]

Dear Anne LaMott,

A few years ago someone commented on the blog I was keeping at the time. You sound just like Anne LaMott! Through the osmosis of such things I knew that Anne LaMott was an author who wrote books. Score! I Googled you. Oh, bummer. I saw references to “God” and “Jesus.” Since I am a person who frequently and liberally sprinkles words like “reincarnation” and “chakra” and “aura” in her conversations, I figured we couldn’t have much to say to one another despite what my well-intentioned commenter thought.

That’s where I was wrong. I adore being wrong.

Last week one of your books jumped off the library shelf into my hands. Well, we say that, books jumping off shelves, but in reality it’s unlikely, I mean seriously, show me the legs that cause all this jumping. How about, the book took my notice? Became magically brighter while everything else fell away? Sure, okay. I was in the Biography section, where, apparently, the lovely librarians in my library have seen fit to stash your books, or some of them. I don’t know, I’m not an expert in library science (but I love that it’s a Science, I mean, Books and Science are two things one doesn’t expect to be combined, you know?), and I don’t even know if there are other books of yours in other locations. I just know I saw A N N E  L A M O T T along the top shelf and something made me stop. Anne Lamott. Well, fine. I guess it’s time to see what ol’ Anne Lamott is like for reals. So I chose a book after scanning the three or four titles that were there. Plan B. Sounds good, I could use a Plan B myself. So I took it home.

I started reading. Interesting. I liked you immediately. I liked how you looked at things. I liked your passion. I liked your cadence, your use of words. The way people use words — which to me are like living, breathing, feeling beings — is important to me. I judge people based on their use (and abuse) of words. Yours were spare. Bare. Frank. Honest. I liked that.

I flipped to the back inner fly leaf. The words tumbled out and the sudden sound of my voice surprised me, “Oh, she’s beautiful!”  Dreadlocks. Hippie-ish jewelry. A warm, slightly self-conscious smile. Someone is taking my photograph and I find that a little ridiculous, your eyes seemed to be saying. A woman growing comfortable with her skin. I liked her very much.

I decided, too, while I read, that we think very much alike. That we’d probably like one another. That we do share a similar writing style. I liked the forthright, tender, compassionate, human woman who emerged from your pages.

Thanks, Anne LaMott, for the gift of you I received through Plan B.

Oh. I can understand your question. What does she want? Well. I wrote to another writer once. I was twelve. His name was Ray Orrock and he was a columnist for a Bay Area newspaper. I adored his writing. His column about driving around the block an extra time just so he could watch the odometer turn from 99999 to 00000 made him seem like just the sort of person I was. At twelve I wasn’t driving, but if I had been that’s just the sort of thing I’d do. So I wrote to him. Poured out my heart. About being misunderstood. About wanting my life to mean something. And you know what? He wrote me back. Took about three months, which in twelve-year-old years is nearly a lifetime of little deaths, but he wrote back. He was kind. He was understanding. He gave advice. Keep your chin up. You’ll be fine. I was embarrassed that I had taken up the time of a 50-year old man and I hid his letter away in a drawer.

So what do I want, Anne LaMott? Writers write to reach people. That’s what they do. It’s why they — we — write. To be heard. To connect. So consider yourself heard and connected. Sure, I don’t know you, but I got a sense from those pages. And writing — reaching, connecting — seemed like a good idea.

Hi, Anne LaMott.

I hate your dog

Somewhere along the way I must have offended the Dog Gods, because dogs and I have had a hate-hate relationship all my life. And when I say I hate dogs, I don’t mean just any dog. I mean your dog.

Dogs have been pissing me off since I was a little kid. When I was three I remember walking down the block from the babysitter’s to the corner candy store to pick up a pack of candy cigarettes. I hated the flavor of these cigarettes — they were a horrid spearmint monstrosity with a powdery coating of cornstarch, not exactly kid-friendly if you ask me — but I adored sucking on them, always careful to let them hang out of my mouth at the proper angle, pink tip glowing, while I rolled up my sleeves and fixed the engines of cars, beat up other kids ,and hung around on streetcorners flicking my switchblade. I was a tough little kid, as tough as I could be while wearing pants that buttoned to my shirts. But walking back from the candy store clutching my sticky loot, I’d invariably encounter my Worst Enemy. A dog. Not just any dog, but a Big Dog. A dog taller than me, with sharp teeth nine feet long that glistened in the sun. That sort of dog. Your dog. And my biggest fear was that the dog could smell my fear from across the street, and run over to me and sink its nine-foot teeth into my leg in the soft place above my knee. I knew this would happen with the certainty that a three-year-old knows that cookies will never happen again and that all of them must be eaten today.

There’s a dog next door to me that I hate. He pokes his head through the curtains during the day when his people are gone, hooking one impossibly thin leg around a chair and staring suspiciously out at the world with his squinty eyes. He alternates this misanthropy with howling and whining, often for hours at a time, a sound that curls through our adjoining wall and pierces my eardrums with the compulsive obsession of a small, mostly white dog who has nothing better to do than terrorize his next-door neighbor with his shrill cries. I have often thought about slipping a flat poisoned sausage under the door while his people are away but I am certain such an act would be traced to me somehow and that forever more I’d be known as the Dog-Killing Lady and people, even people with cats, would shun me, slam their window blinds shut when I walked by and point stiff accusing fingers. So no poison. I send him psychic darts instead, hoping to hear little yelps from the other side of the room from time to time when he gets a particularly sharp one in the backside, but so far I have only succeeded in attracting looks of pathetic disgust from him whenever I walk past his window. Other people stop and exclaim, “Oh, how cute!” and take their cameras out, smiling at his droll antics, but for me he reserves his highest disdain. I hate him.

And if you walk any of the 4000 miles of trails within walking distance of my house, I hate your dog too. Because you are the person who watches your dog crapping and picks it up in a blue plastic bag designed expressly for this purpose. (NOTE: This brings to mind the following conversation: “What do you do for a living?” “Oh, I design dog poop bags. Want to see my portfolio?”) And you carefully tie the bag shut, safely enclosing your dog’s poop inside. AND THEN YOU LEAVE THE FREAKING BAG AT THE SIDE OF THE TRAIL.

I was curious about this phenomena and asked about it in my writer’s group.

“Oh, I know!’ said one dog owning writer (I hate her, too). “It’s so they don’t have to carry the bag around the whole walk. They leave it there and come back and pick it up on the way back.”

In a perfect world, this might be the case. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world where I hate dogs. Your dog. And I see the blue poop bags lining the trails, adorning fence posts like a decoration gone horribly wrong, and I am convinced that 95% of people leaving their blue bags along the trail have no intention whatsoever to picking those blue bags back up on the way back, or ever.

Which begs the question, Why go to the trouble of feeling your dog’s poop in your hand — separated from your dog’s poop by a thin layer of plastic — to mummify it in a blue bag? You’re essentially polluting the trail; does it make you feel better to pollute using a non-biodegradable plastic bag?

Somewhere along the way, dogs figured things out. “If I act really stupid they’ll give me food and let me sleep on the bed and they’ll even pick up my poop! What a great life! I only have to give up my dignity!”

Cats on the other hand, always retain their dignity. They don’t need someone picking up their poop to assert their superiority. They can poop where they damn please, except it pleases them to also bury it. Cats are not stupid. They also have a functioning sense of smell, something that dogs apparently lack despite the pervasive misconception that dogs can smell.

I hate the way your dog smells. Even freshly washed, a dog will always smell like a … dog. They can’t help this. But I don’t want it near me, thank you. I realize that I not only have an over-developed sense of smell but also that I rely heavily on it when making decisions about people, but no. You dog smells. I hate your dog.

I particularly hate your dog when it’s off its leash. Leashes were designed to keep dogs and small children contained within a small space. Anchor the leash to the ground and dogs and children will soon tire themselves out from running endlessly in a circle. This is as it should be. Dogs off their leashes, like small children, are attracted to muddy puddles and smelling things. There is nothing I hate more than someone’s dog’s dog slobber swiped across my hand when I pass an unleashed dog on the trail. If you can’t fully contain your dog, either leave it at home or use a leash. And there’s a particular place in hell reserved for dogs who can’t be stopped from planting their noses in a person’s crotch. If you have a dog who does this, I can’t even speak to you at all. Or look at you. Please go away.

I would wax rhapsodically now about cats and their obvious superiority, but that seems like too contrived a direction for this post, don’t you think? We all pretty much know about cats — how they smell good almost all the time, a faint whiff of cat-spit and clean fur; how clearly intelligent they are; and how I can’t even think of a single cat I have disliked. Dogs I have liked? It was always grudgingly and half-heartedly, and they number less than the fingers on one hand.

But mostly I hate your dog.

There were no dogs harmed in the making of this post. Pity.

Unveiling

Two posts in one day! See if you can hold down the excitement.

What I really need is a good operatic soundtrack

Well! So I can write Poignant and Painful! Isn’t that just made of awesome? But! There’s more than one way to skin a cat, which means, well, ew. What do you do with a cat skin anyway? It’s far too small to make anything useful out of. A hat, maybe? A cat hat would be sort of cool. Here, pussy! As long as it’s not the skin of a cat you actually know. That would just be sort of wrong, except maybe as a tribute. You could keep your cat’s head on the skin and wear the hat so it looks like there’s your head, and then there’s your dead cat’s head perched right on top of yours. Freak. People. Out.

So, what people don’t know about me is that there’s a cartoon world inside me that’s been waiting a long time to come out. It surfaces at odd times. Like when Matthew and I were in Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver, walking over some stepping stones that were thoughtfully and artfully placed over a wee artful stream, dodging the Japanese tourists wanting to cross from the other side, and I burst out laughing at the thought of pushing the tourists in, one quick shove and there they go, cameras and all! I also think about knocking people’s canes out from under them. Or dropping water balloons on them from the 4th floor of a building. We even had a conversation about this.

I think it would be great to drop water balloons on people from tall buildings.

Water balloons? That would hurt.

No, no, not from the top of the building. The third or fourth floor.

Go with the fourth. Fourth is funnier. But getting hit from the fourth floor would still hurt.

Oh, no. I wouldn’t hit people directly. Just throw it near them. It would splat on their feet. And on hot days only. Otherwise it’s just mean.

Yeah, you wouldn’t want to be mean.

And this from a person who can’t bear to walk on someone’s grass instead of the sidewalk. After all! Someone’s grass! That’s like part of their person, their space. The sidewalk is safe and avoids breaking rules.

Oo, rules. That’s changing too, the rule thing.

The other day I bought something that had one of those little magnetic don’t-steal-me tags on the box. You know, the tags that set off an alarm when you walk out of the store with it, unless the cashier remembers to disarm it when you’re paying. I used a self-checkout, paid for the item, and walked out of the store. When I passed the you’re-stealing-something alarm monitor things at the exit, the alarm went off. WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! STEALING ALERT! STEALING ALERT!

Old me:  Stop! Dead in my tracks! I’m not stealing anything, see? Here, I’ll hold up my receipt to the hidden cameras so you can see I AM NOT STEALING ANYTHING. And then! Let me find someone with a red smock or whatever and a name badge with little stars glued onto it, and tell them! I am not stealing! See! My receipt! I am not stealing this! I AM A GOOD PERSON!

New me:  Keep walking. I know I paid for it, WTF. It’s their problem. If they want to send someone after me, fine. But no one even notices when the alarm goes off. So whatever. Keep walking.

I am pretty sure that 99.8% of the population thinks like this “new me,” and that it’s only .02% who are actually concerned with what other people think of them. So glad to have jumped groups, that other thing was exhausting.

Local color

I’ve always enjoyed the places I’ve lived, at least until the worms began crawling out of the woodwork and infiltrating my brain with messages of malaise, causing me to long for U-Haul boxes and the feel of newspaper-wrapped dishes in my hands (I am very good at packing, ask anyone). But no place I’ve lived — and there have been many — has given me the utter joy I feel these days when I step out my front door and face west and the water and the sky and the islands beyond.

Oh no, I take that back. Colorado did that, too. The nightly sight of the Front Range silhouetted against the technicolor sunset sky never grew old in the year I was there, and I wept to leave it.

But this town is even better. I feel a part of the color here, not just a spectator. There’s a difference.

1. Yesterday we drove over the hill into the other part of town. A couple, neither young nor old, stood in the street near their car, talking. He was wearing pajamas. With penguins on them.

2. Today I saw a cat I didn’t know in my yard and then across the street in the shade of the wide maple tree. I opened my front door and called, “Here, kitty kitty kitty!” A woman stepped out of her car parked across the street and asked me if the cat was mine. Later I went over to talk to her; she’s homeless, waiting until she can move in with her son and his girlfriend. A handknit pink hat covered her frosted, over-processed, bleached blonde hair. She said that in parks, where she’s been spending her time, the animals have become her friends. Her name is Jeannie.

3. Matthew and I rode together on my motorcycle the other day. We drove past a strip-mall church. In the parking lot in front of the long low building there were about 8 policemen with bulletproof vests and what I guessed were automatic rifles. One gave a hand signal and they moved as a group toward the church, guns pointed in front of them.

4. The blackberries — which are everywhere, along every trail and path, coming up unbidden in every yard — ripen at different times. If you can brave the thorns and you keep going back every couple of days, there’s an endless supply for a few weeks.

5. The burritos here are the size of newborn babies, but taste much better.

6. You can swim in 60-degree water, sure.

I’ll have to keep my post titles short now

I wrote this about a week ago:

About a year ago, I drove out of one world and into another. I thought then that I had left certain aspects of the old world behind, but I failed to see the invisible trailer attached to my black Honda CR-V, the one carrying the pieces of who I had been. When I started writing here I wrote as if that trailer didn’t move the 3000 miles along with me, as if it was just The New Me here, the one that didn’t feel as if it had walked out of the two-dimensional world of a Mother’s Day card.

In the past year I’ve been rewriting what it is for me to be a mother. Writing and rewriting and endless editing, mostly from within my head and from 3000 miles away, connected by infrequent phone calls and the thick strong cord that forever links us heart to heart. I’m not the mother I was. But not only can’t I escape being a mother now, I have no desire to. I love my children. They are a part of me, and most assuredly I am a part of them.

Two of them are here with me now. We have a week together, not to make up for lost time, but to enjoy the time we have.

Want to know something sorta scary? I have absolutely no memory of writing those words. Oh, sure, the sentiment. Yeah. I remember that. Something something my kids are here and it’s great and something something I’ve been writing for a while as if I have no kids and something something the times they are a-changing something something. Right?

Something like that.

It was a good visit. Too short and also just long enough. 3% of the year. You can pack a lot into 3%, apparently. Like hiking up vertical slopes to regard pristinish mountainish lakes. And hikingsliding back down again. Like skipping through vertudinous* mossy fernlush verdant forests. Like breathing in air dusted with seasalt, pine needles, and ripening blackberries. Like endless shouting games of Wii Tennis and Wii Bowling and wee Wiiness. Like 19 pounds of freshly-picked blueberries and thirty bluestained fingertips. Like tooshort airport hugs and awkward pleading looks.

*made up word

I am a mother.

For a year now I’ve been exploring othermotherhood, alternatives. Just as they, my progeny, my heartspawn, have been exploring their own otherness, their Selfness. They are good Selves, strong Selves, capable Selves, those heartspawn.

I blow them 3000-mile kisses, hoping that can be enough.

~~~~

So, do you like my new look? [twirling a little to show the newness off to its full advantage] I adore this new theme but have not yet found a way to wrap long post titles. Variety makes life interesting, and you’ll just have to guess at the ending.

Sitting shiva

They say that caring for the dead body of a loved one is the most intimate act a human can perform.

~~~~

I drove home in silence today. It was two hours of after-airport surreality, the shotgun seat and the back seat now oddly silent after having been so full for the last ten days. I came home to the smell of bacon frying, the love of a man wafting to greet me at the front door, trying to fill the holes in my heart left vacant by the two who now occupied seats 27A and 27B headed back to humid-hell Pennsylvania after ten days of forest trails and waterside sunsets.

Later, my foot slipped on the kitchen floor. Tonight’s repast, a love offering to the gods of change, left bacon waftings on the floor. Argument ensued, first over the presence of bacon grease on the floor (I could feel my feet sliding baconly; he protested his innocence), and then over its disposition. I said no to the mop wielded by a repentant man. No to the mop. No.

It wasn’t until later, when I slowly and deliberately filled my bucket halfway with hot water and a squirt of soap, got the mop and began to erase the underfoot ghoststeps of two of my children from our past ten days, only ten small days out of the past 365, that I realized what had happened.

It is an act of love, caring for the dead. Sacred. Holy.

The wet floor became shiny, clean. I no longer saw faint footprints on the wood.

It was my duty, my love, to make my home wholly mine again, to take away the bits of Nathaniel and Serena still lingering here. Those bits belong with them in Pennsylvania, to help them feel whole. My duty, my act of love. Mine. No to the man. No to the mop.

The floor is dry now except for a spot or two here and there. The table that holds my paints casts a reflection in the gleaming wood. No more ghostprints. It was my job, my love. Now my two are whole, joined by the waftings they left here and the bits of forest and bayside they collected. Whole, and my home echoes a little for its loss.

Boxes

There’s a box I live in sometimes.

My box is just my size. Like a casket. I lie inside it, feeling its smooth wooden sides, feeling safe. Inside my box it’s just me.

I was nine when I found the box. Every night I’d lie awake inside it, breathing carefully through the air holes someone had put in it, feeling the rocking motion of the waves. Every night I’d lie inside the box set adrift on the ocean, always landing on an island where there was an evil wizard who did unspeakable things to me.

The box lasted at least through fifth grade. That was the year my stomach hurt for three months straight and I left the contents of the brown paper bag containing the vanilla pudding snack cup, the baloney sandwich, and the baggie with a handful of Laura Scudder’s wavy potato chips (why never the flat ones?) uneaten in my desk every day while the too-small purple rib-knit top that I wore every Friday got bigger over my already thin frame.

Disappear. Float off to sea, never to return.

I found the box again just the other day. The inside looks worn, in a good way. Someone varnished it once and the varnish has yellowed a little like the deck of a well-loved sailboat. The box still fits me, even without air holes. The sides feel comfortingly close, like a hug. I lie inside the box and feel at home.

When I was nine and then ten, I never knew where the box came from every night. One minute I’d be lying on my bed and the next I’d hear the sounds of the sides of the box being nailed shut around me and the air holes drilled in, the drill coming close to me but like a stage magician’s sword never drawing blood. The box would be set afloat on the ocean and that was my cue to bring in the element of budding ten-year old sexuality that always happened when I was in it.

Fifth grade was the year that Amanda Viera got breasts and the boys all left the room while we girls were shown a special movie. All I knew was that my stomach hurt every day and that breasts were years away, but nightly I’d be nailed into a box that took me to the evil wizard’s island.

The shadow of the box remained with me for years and I always dredged up words like “dysfunction” and “abuse” when I thought about it or almost felt its comforting worn sides, but now I see my box for what it is.

Protection. A safe haven. A room of my own.

I slept in my box last night, whispering a silent plea to the sleeping, loving man next to me that he not touch me, not put his solid arm through my box and shatter its safety. I felt the hard wooden surface underneath my body, softer than any bed could be, and breathed. I feel its sides still — warm, yielding, mine.

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.

Pink

I have a new thing for pink.

No idea where this comes from. For years, pink was right up there as Most Hated Color in the Universe. Possibly because I was surrounded by it: my walls were an insipid shade of pastel pink, my ruffled bedspread was sort of a washed-out salmon color, and even my rug was pink. There’s a photo of me as a wee thing, lying on that pink rug, nose in a book, wearing something plaid. Oh yes, 1970 was a great year for interior design.

Pink clothes were out. I allowed my body to be clad in drab plaidish kneelength dresses with Peter Pan collars, my long blonde hair with bangs to the forehead partly tied back with what appeared to be a thick length of colored yarn tied in a rabbit-eared bow at the back of my head, but at pink I drew the line.

Pink was for girls.

I thought I was destined to be a boy.

At age 11, I started wearing my older brother’s outgrown clothes. I could mainly get away with this only at home, so on rainy November weekends I snuggled into his old brown corduroy coat. I wanted to wear his old striped tee shirts as well but was afraid to ask for them, so I contented myself with choosing mannish corduroy pants from the Sears catalog.

I still couldn’t be a boy.

I asked to mow the lawn. I loved the snick-snick-snick of the old-fashioned reel mower’s blades, but they were afraid I’d cut off a foot so mostly the answer was no.

I wanted to empty the trash in the house, taking a brown paper bag around once a week to the various wastebaskets dotting the house and then putting the whole thing into the metal can outside the garage in the side yard, but no.

My job was to set the table. Every day. Was that right? Was seven table-settings worth one trash-roundup? I hardly thought so. In addition to setting the table, I also cleared it afterward. Seven times a week, one for every nuclear-family dinner. 14 trips back and forth from the kitchen with plates and forks and knives and spoons while the men in the family sat back with their feet up, lit cigars and took swigs out of brandy bottles.

I also vacuumed (sometimes) and cleaned the bathroom (sometimes) and dusted (frequently). I liked the old metal Electrolux canister vacuum. I liked the smell of Pledge on the old dusting rag, and shaking the rag out afterward on the front porch. I liked moving the knickknacks, one at a time, carefully wiping invisible dust from under and around them, and replacing them again. I liked the smell of Ajax sprinkled into the bathroom sink and the swish of the toilet brush.

But I didn’t like being a girl. I didn’t like being excluded from being taken to the rifle range to shoot a .22 at paper targets. I didn’t like being left out of week-long backpacking expeditions to Mt. Whitney — I never even got to taste the freeze-dried food they took in packets to save weight. I didn’t like the assumption that I was smaller and weaker and somehow not as interesting, because I was a girl.

Pink was a girl color.

In my 20′s I discovered fuchsia. Fuchsia is not pink. Fuchsia is stronger than pink. Better than pink. I had a fuchsia dress. A fuchsia bag. Fuchsia shoes. I embraced fuchsia as the not-quite pink, as the more-than-pink, and as the essence of being more than just a girl.

And then fuchsia became passe and I moved into black and brown and stayed there. For a long time I stayed there. Black and brown are safe. Black and brown have nothing to say. Black and brown hide hurts. Black and brown have no requirements.

This year I moved on from black and brown. Oh sure, they will always be my friends, but I’m making new friends now.

Pink.

It started with a Pepto-Bismol pink sweater. I tempered it by covering it with another sweater in brown, but still the pink was there. Matthew liked it, and said so. I liked it. I liked the person I saw in the mirror who wore it. I liked how it felt.

When I moved last month, I bought furniture in robin’s-egg blue and butter yellow. The other, obvious color that the room needs is pink, so I have begun creating the art for the walls using shades of magenta and turquoise and orange, to bring balance to the walls. Balance to my life.

And this week, a pastel pink tank top found its way to me. It looks good on me, this girl’s color. It feels good. It feels right. Pink.