I keep thinking about photography and place and belonging and the ways those connect and diverge— the way we take photos the same scenes over and over over the course of a life in a family album— growth marks on door frames of rented apartments. How this makes us feel like we belong but landlords but also would we really want to have the moral burden of ownership? Is that even possible?? So here’s a view of these thoughts in my grubby bed as I recover from a surgery that removed a chunk of my arm to eradicate cancer brought on pretty directly by climate change. I’m missing Eula Biss’s “Having and Being Had” which is exactly relavent (my sister is reading it off my shelf while she’s here helping me recover). Doris Lessing’s title “Walking in the Shade” for her autobiography of reverse “immigration”—-colonizer of South Africa returning to England—-largely in principle and  in protest against apartheid. The rates of skin cancer in northern white people who are the primary colonizers of warmer climates—- bringers of capitalism which literally fuels climate change which directly increases skin cancers… these are still fragments of thought. 

“Autobiography of Red” by Anne Carson

“Tinisima” by Elena Poniatowska 

“Belonging” by bell hooks

“Hold Still” by Sally Mann

“Q’s Legacy” by Helene Hanff

“Working it Out” edited by Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels

“Lost Children Archive” by Valeria Luiselli

“On Photography” by Susan Sontag 

“River” by Esther Kinsky

“Grove” by Esther Kinsky

“Living by the Word” by Alice Walker

“Walking in the Shade” by Doris Lessing

“Having and Being Had” by Eula Biss

“The Yellow House” by Sarah Broom

“A House of my Own” by Sandra Ciserno 

I know there are lots more I should be referencing.

 A Summer without Sun

nights on the fire escape with glass of wine

sit under trees at Seward, move with the shade

the western deck of the public pool

movies in the parks after sunset

after dinner walks

Sit on bench in shade of the FDR

read on couch during heat of day

afternoons in the gem room at the Natural History Museum

 

To do: return toilet seat

            print bookmarks

            refill adhd meds

            drop off paperwork at school

 "Think about the familiar small routines of your own day and how they'd be affected by an invasion. Are you or your family sitting by the window? Mightn't it shatter in an explosion? Are you seriously going to drop your child off at school with missiles falling? You were going to have coffee with a friend, but it says on Facebook there's a gun battle near the place you were supposed to meet up."

-from the London Review of Books, James Meek's Dispatches from Kyiv on 24/2/22

I will be dropping my kid off at school...

"...then put the kids to bed. The kids took a long time to fall asleep, so we read to them for more than an hour. We are reading 'Comet in Moominland,' which has suited the last few weeks well. There is stuff like. 'Let's go dancing--the comet isn't coming until Sunday, so we have plenty of time to dance.'"

-from the New Yorker, Masha Gessen's interview with Lena Samoilenko in Kyiv

I read that to my kid too. 

 

1. painted doodles of solidarity while bambi paints away an afternoon 2. strawberry ice cream and a coffee because we can and nothing makes you want to give the world (or ice cream) to your kid like seeing videos of the train platforms in Kyiv right now 3. refreshing news 4. playing super heroes instead of listening to the news on the kitchen radio cause you don't want to scare your kid.

 I tend to come back to this record when historical events happen--I think of that poem by Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky, "We Lived Happily During the War" that everyone is sharing right now. It's a similar impulse. The "what were you doing when ____ happened" impulse. The attempt to fit unthinkable things into your own life. So: the Thursday in late February that Putin invaded Ukraine on, my kid and I had a battle over going out in the cold-- and then another over scooter versus stroller. I won the first, she one the second. We ate cookies in a nearly empty Washington Square, under leaden skies, till our fingers were too cold to hold them. Then we threw the crumbs to the pigeons and ducked into Caffe Reggio's street seating to warm up. They have heaters in there. bambi dictated a story to me about giant flower families. I wouldn't say it was the most ordinary of days. I was acutely aware of the significance--showing up in the dull dread deep in my gut--like March 2020 and June 2020. But it was also quite a nice day. 

Everyone's faces looked wide and blank on the subway-- you could hear the sounds of air raid sirens and Ukrainian voices coming from various phones across the platform. Everyone acknowledging the need to not look away by playing videos with sound on for anyone around to hear. 

But winter carries on. And now it's the weekend. We had some wine. Steaks were on sale. So we ate that while refreshing the news.

 

 

I meant to be a full time graduate student by now. It had been the plan since I got pregnant with bambi--I'd run the bookcart and live off jesse's income because I couldn't afford to go back to work as a barista given the cost of childcare. And now I have a school age kid and time on my hands. Back to school made sense. And was reassuring to look forward to all those times I felt sheepish about seeming (being) a kept woman--we have seasons and the stay at home mom one was just that: temporary. It didn't make me a bad feminist; no more than me supporting jesse through his grad school made him a leech. Sure, I wanted to avoid the evangelical kid stereotype where we fool ourselves into thinking we're modern feminist women ("we can be feminists and christians too") because we work a low skill job to support our husbands while they get the high skill degree that sets them up to be lifelong "providers" then we, the wives, then retire from the workforce (and often the world) to raise as many children as we can.  This sounds like the 50s but its a very real scenario that plays out over and over in the culture I was raised in still today. 

I barely managed to finish the application in time, got accepted at a SUNY school for a fully online degree in library science-- all while spiraling into a panic of flashbacks from high school and college. It was bad enough that I made an appointment with a psychiatrist and a few weeks before the start of grad school I had a brand new ADHD diagnosis. I stuck it out for a few weeks as my face bled from reverting fully back to my teenage self's face picking habit, I woke myself up screaming most nights, if I slept at all, and sobbed over online discussion board contributions that took me a full day to compose. Then I dropped out. 

Now I have reading days. bookselling days. sourcing days. I've had two bookcart installations. This makes it sound like I have a lot going on--but read back over that. To the outside eye I am a stay at home mom who spends her child free time reading, thrifting and browsing bookstores and dabbling in my instagram business. Must be nice. It is. I did not want to be this. I learn more and more about ADHD-- see all the places and times I should have been diagnosed as a child-- and wonder if I would be a stay at home mom if I actually had been diagnosed at a normal age. And if it's too late.

And so, this continues to be, a record of apparent aimlessness. Maybe its record will add up to something.

one of the two installations that make me seem legitimate.

haphazard courses of self led study.

an ever growing library and child.

day long walks through central park till the weather got too cold for indefinite outdoor outings.

 this one time, in early pandemic, we went to a cabin on an otherwise uninhabited island in Maine. I couldn't sleep cause the quiet was too loud--until the early morning hours when the lobster people checked the traps just off our shore-- their shouts lulled me into the familiar sleep of a new yorker used to the whistles and shouts of sanitation workers all night. also being the only people on an island was not as safe feeling as it sounds... basically I was convinced we'd be murdered at any minute by a seaworthy murderer. I'd like to say it was pandemic nerves but my brain has always kept me in plentiful supply of these scenarios. 

NOTE: I've been sitting on these for a few years now and had to get them out before I could proceed.