cold spring treats

"home again home again jiggidy-jig."

for some reason that last line from a childhood rhyme, which I have conflated with other rhymes in which toes become carnivorous swine indecisive about going market, has been bounding through my head at the most inexplicable moments, much like the neighbor's crackedout chocolate lab is currently bounding through our yard. the rest of the voices in my head react as my stalwart goldens do - head cocked to the side, irresistibly expressive eyebrows raised in some wonder and some ambivalence. It first bounced into my thoughts before leaving Madison, when the final challenge was finding the last open space in my loneboat home that was tangential to my blind spot, which only got me wondering - is anything really tangential to my blind spot? As in - how was it I was leaving this wonderful drumlin land, spilling over with of wonderful beings, for another fresh-sqeezed summer, if not acting out some unrecognized wondering that has set me wandering?

The leave-taking - that was the last thing I wanted to take in the end. Compounding this, the impression that all of my things - pillowsbookspaperspapersskirtsandshirtsandpaperslampsheadphonesteapaperspillows - could not possibly harmonize spatially in the one vehicular unit somehow saddened me unutterably. am i on the fast track to the bondage of items that i try, mostly to no avail, not to judge in those of the thingladen-North? Am I conditioning for the ranks of those who contribute to one on the few noble enterprises that continue to enjoy market growth: storage space? My nomadic northern ramble that would take me, jiggidy-jigging, home to the dark pines open waters that raised me, was encumbered - my ability to greet a new horizon was directly inproportionate to the amount of things I would be lugging towards that vanishing point in the distance! The whole drive home I wished for a caravan - a 1.5 room contraption with doorframes that would attach to the doorframes of other caravans until you had a modular unit of countless 1.5 caravans creating more wholes and halves through the miracle technology of attachable doorframes. no more of these fancy-fold-out-individualized-single-serving-astroturf-RV contraptions - lets create the new modular homes! we'll all lock door frames and live in common until the horizon comes calling for another journey.

What I forget always when extracting myself from one place is that the me shaped hole that I perceive as my exit is met in the distance by the soft, intimate, and malleable material that is my childhood home. In a sense the whole of the place I grew up, presently interpreted in a specific tense in my head while experienced in another tense by my body, is the ultimate padded room - not only can you throw yourself against it without anyone questioning your thrashing, but it engulfs you, supports you, and ultimately absorbs the aftershock tremors that always hit a few days later after that many goodbyes in a pillow of familiarity and nostalgia. and so here I am tucked in to this quiet, the eerie choir of peepers drifting over the back forty from the swamp. the willow tree tapping the window. the honeypot, cat, thunderclounds all engage what i have been so missing and can't quite name - and won't since there is no need to respond in a page minimum, to have an opinion and discuss cordially, to critically engage in this idea with two dimensional people who exist first in abstract and then strictly between the structured parenthetical of an intro and conclusion. if I ever exist only between and intro and conclusion somebody jiggidy-jig some sense into me.

So what are these days now? Is it trite to say that, though so arbitrary and domestic to the point of being almost offensive, these days have felt utterly original? they do. it's all so much more a controlled fall to enjoy rather than an imperiled plunge to the next best thing that is always beyond the next best thing. For all that I am snapshot me again - as always in these days of transition - standing in my kitchen of purple cupboards crunching methodically on a mugfull of grapenuts and dried cranberries - having flashbacks of the days and hours and months that brought me a few pixilated points on transcript that are so intangible now and so foreign, all in all. snapshot me superimposed on this childhood world - the dollhouse that grew up now a cluttered house for this doll. and so snapshot me puts down the negatives, lens, steady-as-she-goes tripod, backs up from frantic search through the viewfinder and begins the spring weeding time - mucking about in my mental and physical space for days muddying the waters a bit to see what percolates to the surface. later in the summer i'll start the big dig. but for now i'd rather do what i have learned to do so well in the last four years: skim for content.

cold spring treat #1:
- mug o grapenuts (oral fixation)
- splash o 2% organic milk from glass jug (moral fixation)
- fistfull o dried cranberries (to sweeten the deal)
* eat while standing and musing, when finished leave mug in the sink wash later and use spoon to eat ...
cold spring treat #2
- eady's slow churned real (i.e. New Jersey turnpike) strawberrry icedcream
- take a huge freakin spoonful and walk around the house while eating it, mulling over how much it tastes like those push-ups pops you used to eat as a kid and the entropy that is synapses creating sensory memories