A long time away from Substack—apologies to supporters and subscribers. Hoping this marks my return…-ish, LOL!
Home; Again.
Have been living through a phase of transition, for sure: lots of DoorDashing, some freelance admin for a small writer’s org. Perhaps most seismically, I’ve moved into an “intentional community,” otherwise known as a house-share with a lovely group of Radical Faeries (or at least Faerie-adjacent, folk, as I think of myself.)
Put your hands on the wheel
Let the golden age begin
The window down
Feel the moonlight on your skin
More info about the Faeries another time, although you can learn more at Wikipedia. Suffice to say it’s been a good move; though anytime one leaves a place of one’s own (my 520 s.f. studio) and moves into an established community (my 120 s.f. bedroom + shared kitchen) there are adjustments to be made. My housemates are a well-established lot, most all of them multi-year residents of Salmon House.
Desert wind
Cool your aching head
The weight of the world
Drift away instead—Beck, “The Golden Age”
Something I’ve come face-to-face with in this first 10-ish days of co-living is my instinct—neé kneejerk compulsion—to accommodate others immediately, thereby negating not only my own feelings, but dismissing altogether the reality that I might hold desires that exist apart from those I’m gathered with.
Diplomatically, I suppose there’s a great deal to be said for this way of navigating the world, but it doesn’t do much for advancing one’s self-interests. Let’s be honest: as with all human qualities, being unobjectionable has its pros and cons. It’s an unspoken assurance that I am not here to take up space; you won’t be bothered by me, Keep Calm and Carry On; as you were [polite smile]. It can also be a form of self-erasure in the name of being cordial while smugly earning bonus points to be whipped out at the gates of Heaven.
This quality of mine feels baked in; it’s innate AF.
No doubt it is a big part of why I have made and have kept friendships and community connections of many kinds over long years. I prefer the company of folks who are naturally empathetic and who don’t find it difficult to put themselves in other’s shoes, even if only for purposes of argument or addressing perspectives different than their own.
As the child of gracious, kind—genteel—Southern Presbyterian parents, this way of being—this demeanor?—is doubtless a quality passed along both family lineages (though, interestingly, only one of those lineages actually runs through “the South,” the other being a strong vein of Ohio farm folk). That quality of “nice” that embeds “selfless” from the get-go. It’s a quality of “well-intentioned white progressive,” too, and god knows I live at the epicenter of that community here in Portland. So, plus/minus for sure.
Something always takes the place
Of missing pieces
You can take and put together even though
You know there’s something missing
Back to Salmon House: in discussions around kitchen utensils (which I brought with me, natch, into a kitchen already quite full of them), I was quick to dispense with the things I’d brought to the table, since the house already had versions of them on hand. How many wooden spoons or bamboo spatulas can one house support, after all?
I know that sounds like small stakes—and by some definitions, it certainly is. But come my first day really cooking in that shared kitchen, my favorite bamboo spatula and spoon were not there; I’d moved them along so as not to discomfit any existing patterns of utensil use. And in reaching for the no-longer-here spatula, I had a twinge of “Mom gave that to me,” which she certainly had.
Here’s where it gets interesting (to me, at any rate): I’d brought into the house one of those padded kitchen mats (like chefs stand on, to alleviate foot pressure during long days at the stovetop) but the folks I now share a kitchen with weren’t particularly interested. So I offered it to another housemate who has a kitchen of their own. Upon hearing the story of the others passing on the mat, they observed, “you’re allowed to have things in the house, too, you know. We can also incorporate what you want.”
We can? How starkly that struck me.
The sun burned a hole in my roof
I can’t seem to fix it
I hope the rain doesn’t come
And wash me down the gutter—Beck, “Missing”
Inchworm
One of the shared household routines at Salmon House are “Garden Days,” which—as you might expect—are days we all work together in the large gardens surrounding the house. This past Sunday was my first Garden Day, and after a long stretch of weeding, I discussed with housemates a good place to plant a dahlia bulb. It’s a particular variety of dahlia that Greg & I had planted for many years at our community garden plot. When it’s healthy, it provides large dazzling fractal blooms in the gradated colors of a sunset. Maybe that’s really “a sunrise,” since the name of the dahlia is “American Dawn” (not a name I’d have selected for it, but you get what you get!)
The spot we agreed on is in the front garden, tucked in a bit behind some daisies and among some decorative strawberries. So I sat a while and dug a hole in the soil and prepped the bulb’s new home with wood shavings, tomato fertilizer (dahlias share a love of the same nutrient balance), and a scant handful of Mom.
Her ashes, that is. I was careful to mix her into the other materials pretty thoroughly so that the bulb doesn’t wind up “inhaling” a mass of bone ash. There’s something particularly fitting about her cremains finding home in a quadrant of daisies and strawberries, because she loved both. For that matter, she loved tomatoes, too, so even the fertilizer is on-brand for Mom.
It’s not really meant as a memorial dahlia, though with connections to Mom and to Greg (both dead), I hope it thrives. It’s a gorgeous front garden. And I did weave in one additional piece of Mom herstory: when I was a child—kindergarten, I think—I made my mother a ceramic caterpillar. Balls and rings of potter’s clay, bulbous eyes and thick antennae, a variety of glazes that make little sense to me now but must have inspired me at the time. The flat base of the (surprisingly heavy!) caterpillar has my mother’s handwriting in Sharpie: “Jeff Made For Jan”. So he did.
I don’t know if old artifacts placed in gardens please ghosts or banish them. If they’re good luck charms or simply silly trinkets, call-outs (-ins?) to other versions of our selves or other chapters of our lives. I don’t even fully know why I’m still lugging him around—that caterpillar—he must have been on, or near, my mother’s desk when my sister and I were packing up her things a few months after her death in 2019. I’m glad she lugged it around a good long while, and I’m glad it takes up space in the garden at Salmon House
.
xoxo JDF
Of missing pieces
You can take and put together even though
You know there’s something missing
really stayed with me, Jeff. Although, the entire piece is wonderful.