Upper West Side Grace

The first time I saw New York City, I cried. I was fifteen, awkward and so fully aware of my awkwardness that I just kept quiet hoping it might not be so obvious as I sat on a bus filled with mothers and daughters headed up from Baltimore, Maryland for a weekend in "the city." Perhaps this seems melodramatic to cry from a view, but call it feeling overwhelmed by anticipation. As I sat under a dark hue of grey clouds and night skies on a coach weaving into light, I remember the city seemed to move like the moon--chasing me in the reflection of the window. It was my cousin's private school's yearly outing to go on a mother/daughter visit to NYC before Christmas and thankfully my mother and I got to tag along all the way from the Midwest.

As a girl growing up in the middle of nowhere in the middle of this country, you learn that frankly, you are in the middle. This is a good thing. You learn that there is always somewhere else that people are trying to live, wanting to live in order to tell themselves they are somewhere and when they leave their middle town they can "finally be somebody." Or tell themselves so. City names become more like identities, I myself am very guilty of this. At times I've said with pride I lived in Rome, and other times I sound like some pretentious privileged wannabe I myself would roll my eyes at. Yet as a child, I remember reading Madeline books and staring more at the city pretty women, then the twelve girls in two straight lines in Paris. I recall being older and reading about girls growing up in the Upper East Side of New York and taking elevators out of their homes and cabs to school and I would dream at night in the quiet of orchards of sidewalks and city parks. Long before I traveled outside of even Michigan, I would say distant city names: Paris, Warsaw, Prague and Florence as if they were fiction, as if they were some kind of distant gods I wanted to worship or at least live under.

And that first night I saw New York, it was the mere fact that the fiction of a city I had visited in my mind was becoming real. This is what made me cry. No, I wasn't afraid which may sound like a lie coming from someone who hadn't ever been to a city larger than Lansing. From that bus window, New York was a backdrop that I had nothing to compare to, nothing to identify as familiar and yet I knew I liked it immediately. I liked how it did seem to move from a distance and even closer in the city it was in constant motion with buildings towering over water and forgetting about anything wild.

As the bus dropped us off at our hotel, I was immediately hit by city-heavy cold air, the orange glow overhead, the wreathed sky scrapers and I recall forging for some scent of Christmas in all the concrete. It was mid-December and what I did notice women were in fur vests and matching hats and a frank resistant to showing any sense of being cold. I'd love to tell you all that we did from Radio City Music Hall to Central Park, but frankly I don't remember. What I do remember are the clothes and the fashionable fast moving New Yorkers moving just as their city did from a distance. The speed of the women rushing in their importance who seemed to me catalog fresh, and frankly, Vogue worthy.

My previous exposure to fashion had been through reading Vogue at the local library and taking home back issues and trying to mimic outfits. Granted, I was in fourth grade at this time and had a healthy supply of OP pants and turtlenecks. Actually, I think I may have still been wearing Oskosh overalls and of course very thick glasses. I recall one outfit post-Desperately Seeking Susan Madonna consisting of bangles and a headband of lace. I overheard my sister that morning commenting to my mother about my assembled Madonna wanna outfit. As I came to breakfast with my still round belly and elastic pants shadowed by my twelve bangles on each arm my sister said, "you can't let her wear this to school, she looks ridiculous." And yet thankfully, my mother did let me even though I did look ridiculous. No, I didn't take it to the child-whore like a virgin state ever but I would like to think this was my first attempt at merging preppy and punk or maybe geek and goth. Regardless, in fourth grade I thought I would stand out. I'm sure I did.

Thankfully, my mother let me go through other tragic fashion phases and also she thankfully required that I buy my own clothes. So on that trip to New York City, I purchased a head band from Laura Ashley and sadly lost it two days later in a cab. My mother also taught me a lot about sensible style long before our first trip to NYC. I used get up and talk with her in the mornings before she would go to work as a nurse at our local doctor's office. She'd be getting dressed and say, "Talk to me Emily while I get ready." And I would. I would tell her about school, ramble on about something that worried me while my mother would transform herself from bathrobe to beautiful. My mother always looked and still looks attractive even in her uniform. During one of those mornings she told me her personal philosophy of style with clear authority: "Emily, there are three very important things to your sense of style that hardly cost you anything. Number one, always wear clothes that fit you, your body size and shape. Number two, always shower, nothing is more unattractive than someone who looks sloppy and smells. (she'd laugh at this point.) And three, always make sure you have a good hair cut."

I'd like to think these maxims are universally shared and honored for their simplicity, but I want to give my mother credit due to the fact that from a very early age she made her own clothes, took hand-me-downs from more stylish and wealthy aunts who lived in cities, but my mother always had something else. This is something that my husband's grandmother, Doddie also says, "a woman needs a sense of P-R-I-D-E." Yes, Doddie still spells this out each time she says it. This sense of pride is something that I am still developing. Due to a long phase of all black and only jeans and shorn short hair for years, I am still trying to discover my own sense of style. Basically, it took me years of watching old women in foreign countries and in America who would never be caught dead in elastic waist anything, especially sweat pants to really understand style is something you create, not buy, for yourself.

The elegant Roman signoras each day leaving their homes with high heels and stylish sunglasses carting their sometimes dated but always matching handbag have been my greatest teachers. No, it wasn't the women I'd watch slowly extending their long legs out of Ferraris on side streets in Rome, nor the city skinny women of Paris, not even the Eastern European heighted women smoking in cafes who moved as slow and as elegant as silk on skin helped me see style might be in what you put on, but beauty is how you carry yourself in your clothes regardless of age. Roman women taught me that even in age, sun damage and years of living under even a dictator of Mussolini couldn't take away their pride in asserting their beauty. For me, it took two years of waiting at my bus stop before going to school early in a Roman morning, Italy early like 8:30am, to see how women asserted their stylish beauty regardless of gravity or age. I recall when watching one woman barely able to board a bus clowned with her huge Gucci sunglasses and teetering her last days in high heels, I wasn't laughing, but longing. Longing for this kind of stubborn belief in yourself regardless of age or wrinkles.

So I've added another maxim to my mother's sensible sense of style: Beauty is an act of grace. Attractiveness is not youth, labels or even attitude, but something subtle and well, sublime that causes people to pause. Grace is defined as effortless beauty that I believe emanates by confidence. This isn't ego confidence or some kind of feminist edge, asserted over other women, but joy, pure joy in doing what you love and selflessly sharing this passion with others. This joy is an action, say, in making a pie for your family, riding your horse until you are 70, playing tennis into your 80's, looking sexy at 50 or just putting on your best dress at 95 for your birthday. But really it is the joy in still being present and part of this world, not aging into some sweat suit and cropped permed hair, that gives some women gracefulness.

Let me explain. This past spring Greg and I spent some time in New York City to visit friends and to get a city fix of food and to wander together for the first time in a big city as married people. We had such a good time eating cupcakes from Magnolia, an epic burger and fried pig's ear at the Spotted Pig to just loving any random deli sandwich we could find and of course watching beautiful people busily go by.

One morning, Greg had said he wanted to check out a bakery on the Upper West Side which was owned by his brother's college girlfriend's mother. Frankly, I heard Upper West Side and Bakery and that was all I needed to know to hop on the subway to find it. It was sunny and a perfect day to sit in Central Park and well, eat or ponder just how pretentious Paul Simon's lyrics are. As we walked along the sidewalk on the Upper West side headed towards 107 West 70th to Soutine, the bakery, the streets were quiet and bare. The only echo of sound was coming from a lone songbird hiding in the green of a city tree.

That morning as we entered the sweet of the bakery, Greg walked up with the air of confidence and introduced himself to a woman seated behind the counter. She was tallish with a pink stiff dress shirt, a white apron and a matching pink scarf tied around her salt and pepper bobbed hair. I recall smiling and saying nothing but watching her face change as she heard Greg's name. Now smiling she said, "Now that's a name I haven't heard in awhile" as she stood up and moved towards us. I remember watching her hands, her artist hands, for on the subway Greg had told me how Madge Rosenberg had recipes in the Joy of Cooking and how her bakery was famous for wedding cakes. Hands seem important to me as a cook, a writer, a woman and seem to show a person's history as if hands are like some still life attached to each of us. Madge had beautiful hands and she spoke with such clear and steady diction, never rushed, never forceful, just a slow ease of elegance as she filled white bags with sandwiches and fresh berry tarts. She spoke of losing her husband, her three grandchildren, her life in New York alone for the first time while I listened and stood slightly on the side. I just stood back and stared at the birthday candles in packages with a slight covering of dust and overheard Spanish coming from the back of the bakery.

As Greg and Madge were speaking, a group of ladies came in for their order of sandwiches and brownies. These women were part of the Garden Club of America meeting just down the street and stopping by Soutine to pick up their lunch. I noticed one of the woman's sweater had rhinestones spelling out Paris, Rome, Tokyo and Sheboygan. I couldn't resist. I said, "Are you from Sheboygan by chance?" Smiling she said yes and I told her of Michigan and living across the lake, growing up in a village called Suttons Bay. While speaking with this woman, Greg told Madge of my job and I fumbled into their conversation stating how cooking has really merged from my private passion into a job I really adore. She laughed and said, "You know, I never even cooked before I went to Italy. Before that, I just liked to eat. I was in college and I just decided I wanted to learn how to cook and how to bake." I'm not sure why this statement triggered something deep inside of me, but it did. Again, there I was in New York wanting to cry. How pathetic right? Here I go again, being overwhelmed. But as I spoke with Madge, I thought for some brief moment, I could take this feeling or being overwhelmed or intimidated and transform all this awkwardness into grace. I could carry myself like Madge even if I was as old as her daughter, I could resist the ego driven sense of myself. I could stand with a slow calm and say without feeling pretentious that, "I lived in Italy and it humbled and grounded me, while also teaching me to want to be beautiful. Because it did. It gave me the chance to see women who have a stubborn pride and hope in themselves who also seem to be taught as I was that there is beauty feeding others.

As we stood there, I started to pull out my wallet to pay and Madge who just shook her head and in a quiet voice said, "just put that away, Emily." Our bags were full and as we were ready to walk away and say good-bye, Madge said slowly, "wait." She walked back into the kitchen which I couldn't help but peering into, where there was a tray of brownies still warm in the pan. Madge carefully selected a few and put them into yet another white sack. She smiled at me as she extended her arm full of brownies, "these broke" shrugging her shoulder, "enjoy Emily keep cooking," she said holding my eyes with her eyes and smiling fully.

Greg and I walked loaded with food and silently headed towards the green tips of Central Park, passing the Botanical ladies and saying hello again, we kept walking in silence. As we found a place along a small pond to sit and eat our sandwiches, I said to Greg. "I feel like we were just in the presence of someone so beautiful, so present and I cannot explain why I feel like crying." Greg nodded and thankfully he didn't joke about how sweeping of a comment I had just made, he himself was about to cry. He just smiled a slow smile nodding his head while steadily holding my eyes. As we pulled out our baguettes of ham and cheese carefully wrapped in holed plastic, we couldn't stop talking about how Madge had remembered so many details of Greg's family, a visit with Greg's parents and how Madge almost cried herself when she told Greg how sorry she was to hear of Greg's dad's death. Almost finishing our sandwiches, I put my nose into the still warm bag of brownies and said, " I don't think you can make beautiful food without being beautiful yourself." Again, a silly broad generalization, I guess I haven't fully learned the ability to be quiet and graceful yet. As we sat on rocks watching young Koreans practice a wedding, a Russian couple sat slowly in a row boat, and the Majestic seemed to almost hang in the perfectly sunny sky above our view, we ate those brownies and every last crumb in silence watching other couples lose themselves to the midday afternoon in the city park. As if all of us gathered to find a place to slow ourselves down.

Thankfully, Greg and I wrote to Madge to thank her for everything and of course I asked her for her brownie recipe. I want to share it with you so you too can make the simplest of desserts an act of beauty. Remember folks, this is a person who has been in the Joy of Cooking, so this is the real deal. I feel so honored to have met her. Enjoy.

Madge's Brownies

8 ounces semi sweet chocolate

2 ounces milk chocolate

1/2 pound sweet butter

1 3/4 cup white sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

5 large eggs or 4 jumbo eggs

1/4 teaspoon vanilla

1 1/2 cup all purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 cup walnuts

1. Preheat oven to 350 and grease a 9"x 12"x 1 1/2" pan.

2. Melt chocolates and butter over double boiler or in microwave.

3. Beat sugars and eggs, vanilla very well.

4. Beat chocolate mixture into eggs and beat until well combined and color lightens a little.

(Do not over beat or brownies will be crusty).

5. Mix flour, salt, baking powder and nuts into chocolate just until everything is well combined.

6. Spread batter in pan and bake for 40 or maybe less, check at 30 minutes.

Yields: 12 brownies and can be kept wrapped in plastic and refrigerated and kept for three to five days.

The Horoscope of a Wife

I wouldn't claim to be an astrologist. Nor would I say I'm guided by people's "signs" or find myself saying something like, "that is so Cancer of you," to my husband who will be celebrating his birthday tomorrow. Yet, I must admit like many people, I read my horoscope almost religiously every week. I give it my full attention and sometimes, I even cut the column out that lends itself to insight or reflection. Rarely do I find myself justifying people's behavior due to them being such a Virgo or Pisces; however, after teaching nuns who read my palms, told me about the nature of my character based upon the hour I was born and being born under the sign of Taurus, I started to give astrology a bit more credit. Frankly, you don't argue with nuns. You listen, carefully.

I taught a group of international students in Northern Michigan for a year. Despite the remote location of Marquette, we were a varied group including a few nuns from South Korea and Vietnam, a mother and daughter from the Ukraine, and an overly stylish Japanese boy, Haromi, who spent more time on his eye makeup than his homework. Our lessons were four hours long, but with such a varied group, we had a lot to discuss. When you are working with a textbook with titles like, "America, your new home!" you want to supplement with news articles, short stories and songs. We did a lot of role plays and acting in class, which most of the students enjoyed, especially the nuns. Okay everyone, you're at a dinner party socializing, how do you interact, what do you say you like to do? I once overhead someone say, "Hello, I am Sister Jeanne, I enjoy praying and power point presentaions." Besides role playing, most students really liked to learn lyrics to popular songs. Almost everyone, except Haromi, who preferred heavy Icelandic death metal. There we'd be, all sitting around a CD player out looking at a window with snow and sleet while we mouthed, "blackbird singing in the dead of night." Somehow, it seemed pretty beautiful.

A few days before Valentine's Day, sister Maria announced that she wanted to perform a love song. I thought she was going to sing, but as she stood in front of the class with her black orthopedic shoes tapping out the rhythm on the carpet, dressed in her woolen grey habit and gown, she pulled out a harmonica and slowly, but confidently played a sorrowful love song from her country. At first we all just stared, Haromi turned away and put a misplaced hair back in place, but we all sat in silence while sister Maria closed her eyes and what I'd like to think might have been the hum of some God. There were no words to the song, no melody any of us recognized, just her steady confidence of sorrow that had each of our, even Haromi's, black mascara running.

Later in the year, Sister Maria would show the same sense of confidence while reading my palms, telling me "watch out for rabbit men. find man born year of the rat. very important." Sure, I thought, just want I needed, more rats in my life to claim as boyfriends. But when my birthday came around, sister Maria came up after class soliciting me to listen to her advice. "Emelie, you must be careful, your heart so big, but you are bull. Bulls not move fast unless push." What could I say to that? Sure, sister Maria, you take that bumbo jumbo stuff back to Veeitnaam. No, I didn't question a woman raised a Buddhist who chooses to live as a Christian nun. Nope, I listened carefully. Frankly, I even prayed that I might be able to teach her something she didn't already know in one of the three langauges she spoke. Maybe even a fourth or fifth language if you include palm reading, astrology and speaking with gods.

I'd love to claim that year that my teaching of English as a Second Language was all taught in metaphor, folk wisdom, history or even poetry, and all my lessons were moments of insight, but really I taught grammar everyday and sometimes for the entire four hours. Grammar isn't boring, actually it lends itself to all of these other topics I mention, especially when you teach the second conditional. The second conditional is used for unreal situations that might happen in the present or the future. For example, If I were you, I would drive more carefully in the rain. But the best part about teaching grammar, would be to have each student come up with their own examples. Sister Maria's, " if you steal from friend, then God mad." or Valerie from the Ukraine, "if you cheat on love, then you would marry cheat husband." Sure, these students were new to English, but what was I going to say, "No, sister Maria, that's God would be mad. God get it right, already." Don't you think Sister Maria already knew enough about what would or wouldn't happen having grown up during the Vietnam War and choosing to live a life of chastity and poverty? Somehow, I think she didn't need me telling her what to do. Don't get me wrong, I would correct them, but first I'd make sure to compliment their insight.

Luckily, we wouldn't just sit in a classroom with textbooks all the time. Sometimes, I had them over for meals and we would each take turns cooking, teaching each other how to make a favorite dish. Sister Maria taught us how to make Pho, the Ukrainians made ciasko, a Russian apple cake and poor ole Haromi just couldn't seem to ever make it to these classes. But I'd like to think it was in the kitchen, that all of us women really were able to learn from each other. Yet as you might imagine, whenever you have a group of women in the kitchen regardless of where they are from or if you have nuns, the issues of men almost always surfaces. "American women don't know love," Valentina said while sipping on her borscht one cold January afternoon, "American woman are so hard, so cold, and" she paused and leaned closer into us around the table, "they don't know how to cook." She took another sip, while I felt slightly ashamed having been the only American woman at the table. Valentina clarified, "they don't know how to cook for their husbands." At first, I was thinking she was referring to some sad pork chop and a lump of potatoes on a plate, where some Cossack sat slumped like his potatoes with a empty bottle of vodka. But she continued, "you cook to feed family, but you feed family for love." We all sat with bowls in our hands and nodded. I remember telling myself, remember this Emily, you might someday have a husband who might thankfully if Sister Maria had any say, be born during the year of the rat. I didn't say anything. How could I? Who was I to go off on feminism and woman's rights to a woman who had raised three children under Communism and by the slap of the hand of a husband who drank himself to death. Now Valentina was here with her daughter at age 55 to start her "new American life!" Again, you don't argue with Ukrainian women or nuns. You listen and hopefully you remember what they say.

And really, I think Valentina's right. It can be the simplest of soups, a pot roast or a favorite meal for your husband's, mother's or child's birthday or even your new friend's girlfriend in a foreign country. It doesn't matter, you make something that helps everyone who's around the table feel the presence of love. Sure, I know the image of the American housewife with a wooden spoon in hand, a bowl full of chocolate cookie dough and a smile that seems sponsored by Prozac is an image we all as women recognize clearly as a poster for suppression. But really, it doesn't have to be. Once, I made a baked Alaska in January in Poland for a fellow teacher and we gathered around the shoe box apartment I had and ate cake while sitting on the floor. I still like to think that was one my better culinary moments. But bare in mind, I am from the Midwest and I have tendency to fall into the kitchen as my safe place in times of stress and intimidation. Never mind Emily, she's making meat loaf one might say, but really, I'd like to think I follow the advice of Valentina and we cook out of a need to show love.

I cannot say that my husband was born during the year of the rat, but I would like to say, I love to cook for him. Sure, I struggle at times with asking myself how I went from single in stilettos living in Rome to now being a wife who runs a Cooking School in Missoula, Montana where I have to wear sensible shoes because I work on my feet all day. Sure, one could say I sold out, lost my freedom and independence and my European Life! But that would be too easy. Really, I'd like to think I gained something more. And thankfully, I listened to women with more insight, my students, who each dedicated their lives in their own way to love and learned to make or bake something to show for it.

This soup I share with you is one of my favorites in my cache of simple foods. I made this for my mother in-law and some of her friends, for my father who recently visited and of course many times for my husband. It is a good seasonal spring soup, but even in the summer for those random rainy days this feels just right. I first found this in Bon Appetit this past April, but I've made a few changes. Enjoy.

Petite Peas and Tarragon Soup

2 16-ounce packages of frozen petite peas (let thaw)

2 tablespoons of butter or olive oil

1 1/2 cup shallots

4 cups of chicken broth, (use veggie broth if you want a vegetarian soup)

3 tablespoons of fresh tarragon

1 cup milk or cream

1. Heat oil or butter in a heavy large saucepan.

2. Add shallots and saute until golden, about seven minutes.

3. Add thawed peas, four cups of broth and tarragon; bring to boil until flavors blend and peas are tender, about six minutes.

4. Cool slightly.

5. Use a hand held blender, immersion blender, for best results and puree soup.

6. Add milk to soup and let flavors blend.

7. Heat soup on low and serve with a dollop of sour cream or yogurt.

8. Garnish with tarragon leaves and serve.

The Song of Reverse Innocence

It's been over a month since I have written.  As for the delay, I can catalog events and reasons, such as a well-needed trip East to see Greg's homeland and some friends in New York City, a new job promotion, which means running a cooking school, but this is taking more of my time. Therefore, my early mornings are spent either planting or exercising, but really, perhaps my pause from posting is as simple as: I had a birthday.

I have written before about the myths and stereotypes of poets, but as I have admitted before, some of these images can be true. Like most people, poets have birthdays, but for some a birthday is a good passing in your craft, unless you are Keats or Hart Crane. In poetry, age isn't really working against you. Frankly, poetry is an art that takes so much time to be even sightly okay at. Really, I try to tell myself that getting older is actually better for my writing. I tell myself two words every birthday: Elizabeth Bishop. I say her name with reverence for her work and for the girth of her years she dedicated to writing poetry and to perfecting her craft. Yet, I must admit, another birthday sometimes reminds me of yet, another year without my book published. 

Like most people, I try to set goals. I have my everyday to do list, but secretly there are other to do lists, like say, be the poet laureate someday, publish from Copper Canyon Press, go on a book tour and not look so eager. Some of these goals might be too abstract, too lofty or too unobtainable.  But I bet most people have some sort of list around either their desk or in the depths of their minds they want to some day cross off or feel like they are getting closer to reaching.

So this past birthday, I turned 35. Yup, the mark of what some might say, middle age. There seems to be a desire to not fall into typical patterns of say, well, most middle aged people. Such as, changing your dress from designer denim to say, L.L Bean ensembles. But I am not speaking about shallow changes, per say. Most of us don't want to really admit that there might come a time when birthdays shift in focus from celebration to contemplation. Most of us don't want to think that turning a certian age might start to worry us, or say, make us reflect more on being old than being born. Maybe even start to make you think about also, what you wear or really how you see yourself, both physically and mentally.

The idea of birthdays has started to become, for me, a notable notch on the imaginary plaque I have hung above my head that says my name in a changing font from say, balloon shaped letters with squiggly y's to one more bookishly legiable. The once Emily now looks more like, Emily. This past year, my name has changed too from Miss Emily to Mrs. Emily Seitz. This change from seeing yourself, as once just a name being called off on a roster in an English class to seeing your adult name in blank type on an envelope for a gas bill. This shift from youth to well, maturity seems perhaps normal. This sudden awareness that you're seemingly older, maybe not as wise as you had hoped by your age, but certainly well, matured is perhaps a result of just being on the planet another year longer. Yet even regardless of your sex, you find yourself perhaps looking in front of a mirror and seeing a slightly changed version than the person you saw a year previously. As if you stand in front of the mirror, feeling like you need to introduce yourself, "why hello, perhaps you met my younger sister?" Maybe this all seems too typical, too expected to act shocked by becoming older, especially coming from the voice of a woman.

I never thought as a woman I would start to worry about age. Sure, I have now finally started being serious about sunscreen. I recently colored my hair to somehow slow the inertia of grey surfacing out my my skull, and yet it is not the physical elements of age that daunts me. It's the recognition of youth in others. No, not the girls in droves in short shorts parading towns in long summer afternoons or the thirteen-year old boys on bikes carving themselves in trails and pedalling into some sense of freedom. No, these are typical images of youth that are expected and also revered. What is surprising to me are the people who you thought would always be older, dermatologists, divorce lawyers, police officers, most of the profession you hope to land on if you are playing LIFE the game. These are the people who shock me in all their tight skin and bright eyes of youth.

I had my birthday before Greg and I headed East, but this thought of people getting younger around me occurred while we were flying. When we landed in Maine and while leaving our plane, not a small puddle jumper as we call them in Michigan, an actual jet, I noticed the pilot. It had been a very smooth ride from Detroit to Portland, Maine. The pilot's voice sounded calm and assuring and he didn't carry any strong accent through the static. Yet, as we exited and thanked the stewardesses and pilot, I noticed above the starched, short sleeve button-up and ironed navy slacks rested the face of a boy. Not a nervous vein, nor a hesitant smile. Just a boy of man nodding, thanking us all, giving good eye-contact after having completed his probable route he could have done in his sleep. I couldn't stop thinking of his face. He didn't look like anyone other than the hundreds of pilots I have thanked in the past, but what seemed so shocking to me was how somehow while I was sipping ginger ale and reading through the in-flight magazine, it was I who had aged, who felt, older.

As we waited at the baggage claim, for our luggage. I said to Greg, "Hey, let's start playing a game. It's called, "you know you're old when" and then you fill in the blank. For instance, you know you are old when the pilot looks like your nephew. " I waited for his eyes to stop circling the carousel for our now matching luggage. (It's just one of the many perks and standards in getting married. Greg likes to tell people, "we may have eloped, people, but we still have matching luggage." Needless to say, Greg's eyes stayed on the revolving suitcases. Greg didn't find this game as amusing or as fun as I thought he might. But really, it's kind of, well not fun. Greg is two years younger than I and at times likens comments, jokingly of course, by saying, "you know Emily, a woman your age...." And usually I laugh. Age is something we both don't feel haunted by, joke about really, but we know we are amoungst the older crowd of newlyweds. 

And this was one of the reasons we were in Maine. Despite the fact that we are newlyweds by almost a year, we went to Maine to meet family friends, relatives, have a clam bake (thanks to Greg's mom) But mostly we wanted to visit Greg's grandma of 93, Audrey Thibodeau, who goes by Doddie. Doddie lives in Presque Isle, Maine about five hours north of Portland in what is known as Aroostook county or "The County." Doddie still lives in the same house she has for nearly forty years. From my part of the world, we would call her home a manor, but really stepping into Audrey's home is like stepping into, "Doddie's World." Yes, there is Elmo's World and now there is a new version for adult audiences. 

In Doddie's World the world is interesting and vast, yet not distant to her. In Doddie's world, there exists one gas station which she goes to and she believes regardless of what time or day, someone will come out and pump her gas. The gardens around her home are lush and green and surrounded by a history so thick, you'd expect mositquitos to be constantly circling. But no, in Doddie World, she doesn't carry the weight of history with a bitter tongue or a sense of saddness for being one of the only remaining in her family. Doddie is busier and more full of the future than most people I know who are middle aged or say even twenty-one, and, even some second graders.

As you walk into her open home with relics and antiques, she has projects in piles, paintings which hang from all over the world--with cursive lettering on the back telling of the location and date the piece had been either given as a gift or picked up as a souvenir from countless travels around the world she went on with her husband, Tibby. Yet, what struck me the most about Doddie's World was not her petite frame, the mass of black hair she still carries on her head, nor her physical health, but her spirit. Her spirit to want to participate in life. At 93, Doddie feels busier now and more excited by her projects than I can recall when five and days were all Legos and barefoot exploring. In Doddie's World, her to do list is constantly growing and she makes darn sure, goals are also constantly being crossed off.

Doddie is trim, agile, and bright-eyed with the clearest diction I have ever heard. She knew every back road around the dales of northern Maine and could tell you the history of each house and its occupants along with the location of some of the best ice-cream I have ever had. Doddie's stories aren't indulgent or random, she tells stories that are interesting, have direct meaning to context and if she doens't know something, she refers to her Encyclopedia Britannica that dates back to 1972. She said, " I know you kids have that web, but I like these. You know, you just don't know where the question might take you."

And she's right, we sat looking up a question we all had about tapioca and later found ourselves delving into the life-cycle of plants. Sure, this might sound boring to some, but for me, I was in heaven. I have always felt comforted by the slow assurance of being around older people, who are often slower, but more careful with their words. For some older people, it's as if they out grew their ego and decided to hell with it anyway. Maybe it's the simple fact that I feel they are willing to take the time that I myself sometimes need to take to explore ideas. My Woody Allen outlook on life is a tiresome act for some, but with most older people, I fit right in. For example, Doddie had numerous clippings from newspapers and wanted to discuss a recent article she read about prisions in America and their cultural purpose. She said, "you young people read this and tell me what you think." All of us, Greg, myself and Ann, Doddie's sixty-five year old daughter, is still thankfully part of Doddie's young people. While we all chatted about the article, I was engaged, spirited too, and adored Doddie even more for her ability to be interested in the world which seems in many ways, years away from her Aroostook county.

Our day was spent exploring northern Maine, going into antique shops, gazing at the border of of a river and eating French Canadian food. We were all tired by the day and when we went to bed, we all went upstairs to our rooms. Doddie was in the lead and I asked if she needed some help, she smiled and shook her head. She said, "Most people tell me, Doddie how can you live in that big house with all those stairs." She said turning to look me straight in the eye.  "I tell them, you know these stairs are keeping me alive. I go up them about eight times a day and they are keeping my knees, well, keeping my knees working. So I tell them it's actually these stairs that are keeping me alive." And she's right. Doing the daily tasks that get us from each point keep us moving, maybe it cannot keep us our young, but it keeps us living. As we all reached the top Doddie turned to me and say, "You know, stairs also get where you need to go. And I'm tired. Good-night."

The next day before we left, Doddie told me a story about having some members of a Russian orchestra stay at her house. She told me the pianist had stayed and could play some of the finest Rachmaninoff she has heard. She said she waited for him to finish and when he stopped she asked him, "Do you know any Boogie Woogie? Sure enough, he did," she said bright eyed and almost dancing, "you know, he played some of the best Boogie Woogie, I have ever heard. Right here, in the house." I believe it. And I bet she even danced too.

When it was time to leave, Doddie held my arm tight and just smiled looking at me and saying nothing. I found myself almost crying. Maybe it was the fact of just being in the presense of someone so alive, maybe it was the fact that it was Greg's 93 year old grandmother, but I'd like to think it was because of a simple fact: here was a woman who sings the song of reverse innocence. She doesn't seem slightly worried at all about age. Someone who still climbs stairs and likes it. No, she doesn't do it for some midwest martydom of "no, don't worry about me. I can do it. I'll get there, it just might be slow. Don't worry about me, I'll be fine." No, she climbs stairs because well, "it gets me where I want to go," to use Doddie's words. I like to think of her like Sisyphus, Camus's version, who doesn't just push the rock up the hill over and over again, he pushes and chooses to smile.

So as I turn older, middle age and slightly wanting to avoid the fact of time, I have a new female image to reflect upon. One that I'd like to say is spirited by youth and stays mentally active with what interests her. So maybe it is another year without my book published, but I have more stories and female roles to keep me focused. To keep me writing. This villenelle is old, but seems so fitting for Doddie. Times when I like to remind myself of how getting there is sometimes up stairs and getting old doesn't have to be all ego and wrinkles. Enjoy.

How To Get There

I walk alone to where I want to go
Each trip I take, I always travel light.
Alone, but never lonely with my shadow.

Traveling in groups, you're forced to follow,
compromising your future or flight.
I walk alone to where I want to go.

In streets, under the sun and slight glow,
I walk into the last hours of light
alone, but never alone with my shadow.

In an open field, forest and meadow
wildflowers open to the young light,
I walk alone to where I want to go.

On treks, journeys, hikes, I travel solo.
I don't leave a trace or track in sight.
Alone, but never lonely with my shadow.

For directions, never trust your ego.
Follow your shadow, you won't lose sight.
I walk alone to where I want to go.
Alone, but never lonely with my shadow.

When you can't get your spring to sprung

Sure, T.S. Eliot said, "April is the cruelest month." But what happens when May is gray, rain takes its time to leave and even the tulips in your yard seem to be protesting to bloom? I don't blame them. When all is cold and wet, not white, I too want to stay inside and sit cocooned in a duvet with a book in hand and stay seated until spring decides to push winter out of the way. Until something just bursts and decides that really, we have had enough of this flat light to last us a few months until we each need a good dose of November again. But not now. Now, we need a light-hearted breeze, a sun burn on white skin, a reminder that we can eat ice-cream cones with our naked hands, take naps with our head resting on a log, remember that we can exist in the sun without layers of down or wool. Frankly, I am waiting for my spring to come. I imagine I am not the only one either.

I've written a lot about the idea of the poet, the myth of the English teacher and the stereotypes of people who write, but sometimes there is some truth to these shallow descriptions. Sometimes people who find solace in well, solace can get sad. I am not saying that these people look like the women and men in magazine ads for antidepressants. These ads usually have someone who has had their hair done, lip gloss applied and even the men look like they may have recently spent some time at a gym. No, in our ads we cannot handle the look of depression. We can take a picture of a starving child, someone sleeping on a bench in a cold city and I even saw a large picture on the side of a bus of a beaten boy with a blackened eye for an ad against homophobia. We have images for hopelessness, fear, hatred and other reactionary feelings, but depression is something too hard to grasp to ugly to take as it is. It is perhaps too vulnerable, too personal to look at for a long time because well, it is just that; raw vulnerability. And how would we draw it? Photograph it? Paint it? Sometimes I think we cannot. It is simply that, too personal, not something you would want to hang on a wall and glance at while walking past from the kitchen to your bedroom, while thinking of your list of things to do for your day. It would be like hanging up some mirror you would be afraid to look at. It is simply not ad worthy.

And yet, really it is a mirror each of us has probably had to look at sometime in our lives. Depression affects each of us at some time, maybe for some momentarily, maybe some monthly or maybe others most of their lives. It is a heaviness that comes and stays like a season you just want to leave. It can come at any time and I have known some people who even get addicted to it. Call it strange, but some people live in a place of sadness, start each day in darkness and never look for light. They even just call depression home. Some convince themselves that they deserve to live like some dog in a fenced yard of dusted dirt and gravel. But it is not. Depression is not something you deserve, it is something that can come up, it can even surprise you, but we can also practice at also making it go away. Even if at moments you feel confined by it. It is not bigger than you. I also believe you cannot take a pill to truly rid it from you. It can be subsided by medication, but it will survive somewhere deep inside of you until you yourself ask it to kindly, just leave.

I have often told people that the loneliest time in my life was the summer I decided to stay in Rome. There I was in this ancient city of stone and beauty, mid-summer with sun and just hours to explore and walk. But I felt stuck in myself. I was stuck between what I wanted to be and what I was actually doing. This feeling was not new, but came up so suddenly that summer I was shocked that depression had found me in all places, Rome. Rome where I remember it as days of just dog shit and beautifully bored people. Rome where we all want to someday go and see the dirt outline of the chariot races. Why was I depressed in such a city? A city that I later return to in my sleep and only hear as fountains. But that summer, I felt stuck and didn't have any money to leave. That summer I would spend almost entire days and evenings alone surrounded by tourists and tired people working in summered city conditions. I spent days never speaking to a single soul. I know, poor me, white mid-western girl stuck in Rome. How pathetic, the stereotypical poet I can be. Yet that summer I learned something very simple: I decided on doing something to alter my mood instead of hoping for it to happen. I decided I didn't want to be sad anymore. I chose, however small a way to change; that summer I set out to ride my bike everywhere and anywhere I could navigate the city. That summer I rode myself out of a depression. 

I purchased the bike from a fellow teacher at my school who was similar size as I, and despite the fact that I had never seen another girl on a bike (pedaling, that is) in Rome, I didn't let it stop me. I rode it through the sweltering heat, the famed Campo di Fiori, rode it with high heels sometimes. But that simple rhythm, wind on my face and the feeling of moving on my own accord helped me out of my slump. Previously the depression found me with a feeling as though I was perpetually waiting at some bus or tram stop to go somewhere, but not moving at all. Depression makes your body heavy with a restless head. The last thing I needed, with my introspection, was to wait for some mode of transportation to take me to the city center or out. No, that summer I biked there. 

That summer on the bike, weaving through traffic and mopeds, I remember finally not hearing them. When my father came to visit me earlier that spring, he looked at me one night and said, "this is so loud, so busy, can we go back to your apartment?" Rome was perpetually loud and busy and yet on my bike, I could hear myself again: my pedals' cadence, my breath, my thoughts. On my bike, I only had myself to blame or to depend on to get where I wanted. It was a very simple switch in thought and it was just what I needed to remind myself that I was in this amazing city and I needed to learn about it by pedaling myself through every side street, every hill or neglected neighborhood. So in the middle of the summer, I taught myself the streets, the names of outer regions, and found every park and fountain I could.

A year later I found myself in Michigan before grad school and living close to my parents by the big lake. I bought a ten-speed and took that thing everywhere, for hours around inland lakes, into the dusk and sometimes into the night. I just rode and rode and let the momentum of the bike fill me until I was forced to return home to sleep. My mindset wasn't tainted by depression that time, but depression's better-looking cousin: I was in limbo. I was in limbo between teaching overseas and returning to school to write poetry. Yet during that time between roles, I felt like I was again waiting for some bus to get on that I didn't know if it was going to arrive. While I waited, I just biked myself in circles. 

And so I tell you all this, not to say something trite like "if you feel sad, get on your bike." I am not some amazing pro biker or even recovering depression survivor. I am just someone who sometimes gets sad and gets stuck in it. I am like a lot of people, but what I have found is that there are two solutions for being stuck. One, the physical change in moving your body helps like riding your bike. And the second, do something creative with your mind. A creative outlet helps you feel connected to that voice you probably first heard when you learned to ride a bike. If you think back to that moment when you were able to balance on your own and push and pedal until you found yourself laughing, maybe out loud, most likely the voice inside yourself was laughing too. That is the voice of joy, joy in being just who you are--the sometimes happy, the sometimes depressed, and sometimes stereotypical self that all of us can find us being.

Believe me, this sounds like a really simple solution to a not very simple emotion, but it is a start. I think depression is something so heavy that you have to move your body to work it out. Emotions are energy and energy cannot be created nor destroyed. But energy, can be transfered. For me, the momentum of riding my bike somehow displaces my sadness, throws in into the air and hopefully up into all this sky that seems to be able to handle a bit of grey. Also, I can hear myself , my internal voice better when my body is busy moving. This movement helps me be still, helps me return to my desk and to write. 

For me, the rhythms I feel when I bike are the same sounds I hear in my head when I write. My sister, who is an amazing cyclist, told me to try pedaling at a three syllable rotation--so your feet will rotate a full circle while you say the word, for example, thunderstorm, sleeping bag, atrium.  Say these words or find some new ones like: spring will come, to begin, rain away or maybe even my freedom. I don't know, find your own three syllable word of choice, but what ever you do, try to find that sense of joy that we each harbor and hold. It will get you closer to believing spring is really going to come. Until then, here's a poem. 

To Begin

I wear my seat belt when I like myself,

my hand at ten and two like the cuckoo

clock in my kitchen which I won't let coo

or chime since the elf hen inside started

saying shoes.  I wanted to shelve it away

with the pencils or ship it to Caracas,

but clocks are endangered there.

I leave my house before the sun finds

the alarm, ride my bike to work and flirt

with cars to nudge me into curbs, alleys or dirt,

so I can start my day face first to the morning

light and ignore all the people moving in boxes

of metal. I turn up the wren housed in my heart

who warbles from its perch on my desk

and sings with each tick of my pencil. 

The Myth of the English Teacher

Last night was the last class of Ekphrastic Poetry: a month-long workshop based on the relationship between art and poetry. We had such a good group of writers, artists and insightful readers that I will be greatly missing all of them. When a good class gathers and then ends, it can feel like an unwanted break-up. As an English teacher, you so often get to know your students much more quickly and intimately than say if you taught, geometry or gym class. There's rarely a time in math when I recall discussing my favorite theorem or really expressing myself through volleyball. English lends itself towards personal expression and poetry just takes it that much further.

But what I would like to argue against, as a poet and teacher, is the myth of the English teacher: the over-sensitive type standing in front of a group of students with chewed fingernails, coffee stained stutters with a bout of nervous leg syndrome. Someone who is prone to some disorder. Someone boldly wounded. Someone who wants to tell you about their woundness too easily. English teachers aren't all from the same tribe. We are not all just about feelings, wanting students to write about their painful childhoods and some of us will never be caught saying things like, "reading this poem is like waking up on a Tuesday thinking it is really a Sunday." No, some of us want to make sense. Some of us want to help give literature and poetry a better name. A lot of us are just people who like to read and find reading a liberating experience which really we just want to share. Literature is a means to study the history of a culture's consciousness and poetry again takes it that much further. Some of us teachers want to demystify, not simplfy, the world of literature, the workshop and also the idea of the the "writer".

When I think back to my own English teachers, I am pretty sure they represented the wide range of myths of females in literature: the wide scope of the madonna to the whore. Mrs. Craske was everything but crass. No, she wasn't a saint or even Catholic, but she read to us everyday, taught us grammar first then literature, had high expectations, and always encouraged us to read and read voraciously. She didn't give detention or have disciplinary problems, she had what most English teachers have in their pocket: psychological prowess in the art of verbal belittlement. Now, I don't recall anything rude or in severely poor taste, but Mrs. Craske could kick ass with her mouth. She never used profane language, just exacting ways in making you do your work. And she did. She would not tolerate late work, poor effort and laziness and she would tell you just that, in slow very articulated voice over her reading glasses resting on her nose while you feared that pink-lipsticked mouth hovering above your desk.

She stood close to five feet two and yet I remember her as tall. She carried herself well and annuciated perfectly and had a beautiful reading voice. I remember hiding my face while she read Truman Capote's "A Christmas Story", crying into my desk as quietly as I could. What Mrs. Craske gave to me as a student is what I have later used as a teacher: tenacity and strength. The belief to set high expectations, because if you do, perhaps students will reach them and want to reach them. And we usually did in her class. If not, you would certainly hear about it.

Yet sometimes, it's the teacher that doesn't like you that motivates you the most. It is not out of spite or ill-will, more out of those ugly lessons you have to learn early in life if you want to write or if you don't want to be a stereotypical English teacher with a lot of emotional baggage under your tweed jacket and whistful scarf. If you choose to write in this life, you need to learn how to be disliked, rejected and rejected over and over again. Thus is true with my English teacher, Mrs. Hungerford. Mrs. Hungerford showed up at our school mid-year, with outfits that each had a matching belt. She was pretty, too pretty for our small town, and for whatever reason she didn't like me. Ever. Maybe it was because I was on the cusp of my "only wearing muted shades" phase while I sat in the back of the room reading Vonnegut. Mostly, I think it was because of one thing: I wasn't a boy. My dad told me stories of a female professor at college who had a grading scale of : A for athletes, B for boys and C for co-eds. Now, Mrs Hungerford wasn't this extreme, but she was always reading papers from a group of attractive boys who seemed smart, but they were certainly not budding Hemingways.

I recall our final project in tenth grade English with Mrs. Hungerford. It was a simple book report. Now I certainly did not go to a private school, or a school with really high expectations, but at least I can say we were expected to read books. I had selected Slaughter House Five (Vonnegut of course) and had spent a lot of time reading, highlighting and underlining. I've never been a gifted writer, just a worker, so I knew I had to edit and revise a lot. I wasn't one of those write-the-night-before types, so I spent days editing and revising my paper. Days after I had handed it in, Mrs. Hungerford read the entire paper to the class. It was the first time a girl had their paper read out loud. I blushed in the back row. But when the paper was returned with a grade, I was shocked: circled at the bottom of the page was a B. In cursive, she wrote nothing but compliments with few corrections. I was confused so I approached her after class.

Her desk was immaculate and without any pictures, just neat piles of paper. I said nervously, "I don't understand this grade? Will you explain?" Taking off her glasses, she looked at me while seated. "Now your paper is very well written, but it is only four and a half pages. It wouldn't be fair to those who had written five pages when yours is well, shorter. "

"So this is an issue of page length?"

"Yup."

All I remember at the moment was two things: one, my posture changed and I stood as tall and straight as I could and two, I knew I would never forget this moment:

"That doesn't seem fair. If you want to base a grade on length and not content, then fine. You can give me whatever grade you want, but I know this is an A paper. I know my paper is short by one paragraph, but what I did write is solid."

I'd like to say that everyone clapped and all the girls cheered me on like it was some after school special where the awkward kid finds their moment of triumph and the popular kids finally accept them for their weaknesses, try on the geek's glasses and notice how pretty the girl really is. A moment when their faults aren't broadcasted anymore and some song with a driving beat plays in the background. A soundtrack that everyone will later sing while driving alone in their car. But no. No one was there. It was silent. I stood there nervous and yet certain. Mrs. Hungerford cocked an eyebrow and smiled slightly and turned to her piles of papers. I walked out of the room and nothing else was ever said.

There would be others--teachers, professors, and TAs that wouldn't like me. Give me grades based on reasons such as one professor who gave me B- after B- on anything I wrote. He told me with complete seriousness and clarity, "You have a very illogical mind Emily." And another, a TA for my Shakespeare class, wrote on my final paper, "I didn't want to give you an A on anything this semester, but this paper is just too good." It's good to be disliked. It's good to learn how to become even more disciplined, more focused to work for yourself first and not just the doting recognition of others. When you know your "audience" doesn't like you, you work even harder to communicate, to be clear. Also, it is good to know that people might not like you as a person, but they just might like what you write. 

It's good to learn to be more focused on the page, then the person. This also helps when you teach so you yourself aren't overly interested in biography and tell the studies how the poet commited suicide by putting their head in an oven before you tell them how great their poetry is. Really, it doesn't add to what the writer left. And if the students are interested, they can watch some TV late-night documentry with dramatic actors playing their lives. No, stick to the page. Focus on the poem.

When I first met Greg, my now-husband, he told me he got kicked out of his college poetry class within the first week. I knew I was in trouble. He told me he had said something in his first class about not wanting to sit around people just supporting each other and letting abstract words be thrown around the room like some game of Catch the Fledgeling Poet. He was allowed back after speaking with the professor and thankfully he still knows Wallace Stevens by heart and can tell me lines I sometimes forget. He was a Natural Resource student and preferred science to liberal arts, but had requirements to fill and chose intro to poetry. I'm thankful he did and I would imagine some of the others in that class did too. It's good to break down stereotypes of all types, either of student, teacher and hopefully even poet.

It's also a good lesson to learn to thank those who gave you difficult times, who maybe did something that didn't seem fair, but maybe you learned something valuable from it. It's good to thank who hated you, but maybe made you work for yourself, who taught you (perhaps indirectly) to write for what you believe in. As a teacher, I cannot tell you how many times students, sometimes the ones I thought hated me the my requirements the most, later find a way to say thank you, thank you for expecting so much from me. Thanks for not being too easy, but earnest. Thanks for not judging me or my feelings towards you. Really, it's good to even be forgiving of those English teachers that maybe stood with cigarette orange fingers and sadness. Under all that tweed and self inflicted tenderness, they are people too. 

Who knows, there might be more insurance salesmen sitting behind some desk writing out a sonnet, or some English teacher who climbs big mountains in their free time, or even a poet who loves this world so much they dream of flowers mostly, mostly in shades of colors other than black.

This poem I share with you perhaps isn't the most seasonal, but it is one that I really wrote just for myself --not from some place drenched in a lot of emotion or trying to say really anything revolutionary--just a simple still life of my joy in writing. 

Blueberries

The hardy perennials of July thrive

in sand, survive arctic winds and lay still

for months to sink their roots around

rocks, and when I sit on moss and granite

to collect them, I never let myself eat 

one. I stare at their mouths

open in the shape of a star.

The five tips resisting,

so my fingers won't ink my lips

blue. The color of a pen I never lend,

keep for myself while I wait to taste

the words ripening in my ear.

So Much Sky, Sometimes

Stephanie Frostad's "The Invention of Sorrow"

This painting is at the Missoula Art Museum and has been recently acquired as part of the Contemporary Collector's Circle. The CCC is a group of individuals who purchase pieces by regional artists which reflect the imagery of the American West. The American West seems to be about the most Romantic phrase I can think of still used in our culture. I'm also surprised by how often it is still referred to as a mythical and poetical ideal. As if all this vast land, this space is our Greece; our country's place for stories to be told as fables and morality tales where characters rise and fall into iconic lessons. Like some sort of Steinbeck in all of us exists as shovel, meadow, depression, water, and work. We live as prairie by day and California by night. Our stories are those of wind over dried land instead of oceans. In our myths, we gave up the sailboat and mast for the automobile and factory. And what is left, is what was left before in Ancient tales, epic pursuits: just a man and a woman trying to love each other, trying to find solace below all this sky. 

Divorce Yourself

It was late spring in 1998 and all went from white to green in a manner of what felt like a few short days in Poland. Perhaps the only similarity between Montana and this country is how spring arrives. It comes like its name--sprouting out from layers of white and shades of dusted brown. I had been teaching English at a British school to students, all Polish, from the ages of six to sixty-five. Eleven years had passed since the Velvet Revolution, but even the six year olds told me that Poland has always been more like a radish; a thin covering of red, but mostly white--mostly democratic. And they were right. They were feisty about learning, very capable at arguing even at age six in broken English. All were determined to learn English with the hopes to move farther west in hopes to land jobs with the help of their English as if it was the one thing that could overshadow their passport.

Most of my students knew about America through television, but they wanted to know how many bathrooms I had in my house growing up and how many people did I have to share my bedroom with. But regardless of their questions, all of them were very diligent students. I was too. I studied Polish to read poetry not in translation, but mostly for practical purposes: to travel. And I did. I explored the beautiful fields and mountains and countryside of the great land that literally means, field. I took lessons twice a week with a tutor who spoke three other languages fluently and yet had never left her hometown of Kielce, known to Poles as the "knife city." Kielce was tough, but I loved it. Sure, it was mostly grey bloc houses, but it was surrounded by rolling hills and few people who spoke English. I loved the fact that it was the town where the Krakowian clergy would come to "catch some air." As if air was like butterflies, and all they had to do was walk around the rolling hills to fill their lungs before they went back to incense, stone and prayer. 

I travelled that spring a lot and felt like a clergyman myself. I just wanted to get out into the hills and remember that God wasn't something just to think about in buildings. I was anxious to find wildflowers and small towns along the Wisla and searched for churches in the hills with onion-domed roofs. I was going to stay past spring and into June to travel more in Eastern Europe. I had my thoughts on Odessa or maybe even Kiev, but my sister called and wanted to come and visit, travel with me for a few weeks and "see Europe." I recall trying to arrange plans via the phone, a static line over the Atlantic and all the way to Portland, Oregon where she lived and worked as a designer for Nike. She had two weeks and I thought we might go to Croatia and work our way along crumbling cities and the Adriatic to hopefully find ourselves on the Korcula islands. I was missing water and wanted to keep traveling in "the East", but she had it already settled: we were going to Switzerland.

She sent me maps and had everything planned out as to where we would stay and how we would get there. There was Davos and the Graubunden region and we were going to go to via Salzburg, the "home" of The Sound of Music, which is my sister's favorite movie. I tried to tell her that the Zloty (Polish currency) was not strong and that I would be limited with finances. Even though I made the same as an anesthesiologist in Poland, $300, a month: I knew it wouldn't go far in Switzerland. But she was determined. And my sister's determination is one thing no one can mess with. And so I agreed, mostly I didn't push it because it was my sister's first trip to Europe, but mostly I agreed because it was her first big adventure after her divorce.

She had married young and well, it just didn't work out as she had planned. I was in college when it happened and I don't recall much other than it was hard, a shock, not her choice and so she moved from Michigan to the west where my brother lived; Portland, Oregon. She arrived and worked her way from temp jobs in a lumber mill, to spraying perfume at department stores to finally landing a job in Nike. She told me on a train in Austria that she had lied in the interview for her job about knowing certain computer programs. Once she had the job, she would stay and teach herself after hours all that she needed to "already know." Say what you want about Nike, but what it gave my sister was confidence. It gave her a chance to start again, to believe in herself in the middle of a time when she could barely drive. She was distracted by sadness, by her changing identity from wife to single woman, but mostly I think she felt tattooed by a word I think she felt she had inscribed on herself: divorce.

And so when my sister said, "we are going to Switzerland." I did what I had always done with my sister; I went along and tried to use humor instead of arguing. Thankfully, I had something else I could finally add to my cache: the ability to speak foreign languages. When my sister arrived in Warsaw, I remember even though she was smiling, she looked tired, thin and worn from not just a transatlantic trip: she looked worn from life. Sure, I had been in Poland for a year where I watched a woman walk on her hands to the market and later drag her vegetables in a bag, wrapped around one of her limp legs. Life was hard in Poland, you pushed people on buses to get on, you ate standing up sometimes in soup kitchens, men cried in public even when they weren't drunk. But when I first saw my sister,  I just wanted to take her hand and not let go. For the first time, I wanted help her, I wanted to do something: I wanted be my sister's guide and more than just her joking side kick. 

And I was. While traveling from Krakow to Prague, we took an overnight train, a couchette, and I knew we would have to show our passports in the middle of the night, so I had mine and my sister's ready. In the middle of night, a knock came at the door with a stern voice following, "Pashport Kuntrol"  with a thick Polish accent. I opened the door, handed the documents to a young man in a grey suit , who stamped them, gave a nod, and then left. But when a second knock came, I became a bit suspicious. I opened the door and this time there were two men standing. Same procedure and when I closed the door, my sister had awakened and asked what was wrong. "Nothing" I said, "I think just a bunch of curious bored passport controllers who want to see some girls in pajamas." By the third time there was a knock, I opened the door and four men were standing there. I decided to not be quiet and use some of the words my Polish tutor had taught me in whispers in her house.  I wasn't shy or rude, but directly asked them in Polish, "Christ, do you really need four controllers to wake us up three times? I think you just want to see two American girls in their pajamas and not just our passports?" Their mouths dropped and they scurried away with their heads down. I smiled and closed the door. I turned to see my sister on the top bunk laughing so hard she almost fell out. We still laugh about that scene of men, even today. 

There were more scenes from that trip that we both hold on to: our first funicular ride up into the Alps, eating chocolate in St. Moritz, and braiding my sister's hair to look like Heidi before we climbed up past cows and alpine homes with weathered window boxes, up into the clouded mountains, up into what feels like the atrium of the earth, up to the attic of Europe. At the top of the Alps, you feel you are beyond birds, seasons, and even time--where it is all snow, rock and wind. Here, it is where rivers, grass, and meadows and maybe even where humans began. It is no wonder, Graubunden, translates as The League (or state) of God's House. 

Maybe I'm being a bit too metaphysical, but what I know was in the middle of that summer, my sister and I began again. We became something different to each other; we became friends. This is the beauty of family because it is defined by relationships.  Maybe you aren't close to a sibling or even a parent when you are younger, but through time and sometimes a birth, a death, maturity or just a trip you can change the dynamics of your relationship. Relationships shift and change, just like plate tectonics. Sometimes in the middle of our lives we begin to see even ourselves differently, we can grow, we can even be different to those in our family. We can divorce ourselves from old roles, or old habits that maybe just don't work anymore. We can re-invent even our family dynamics, even in the middle of our lives. I feel pretty lucky. My sister and I got to do it while we climbed mountains and ate Swiss chocolate.

We made more trips together, more meetings in foreign airports, more travels filled with scenes we still laugh about, like the time we hitchhiked in Northern Italy, where I chatted with the driver in Italian while my sister sat in the back seat. When he dropped us off at our hotel, she said, "He seemed nice." waving.

 "Really?" I said, slapping the door. "We argued the whole time. He complained about giving us a ride and I told him to lighten up. He had a story to tell his friends for days about two young American girls he picked up. That guy was a total jerk." 

"Oh, you sounded like you were friends." she said laughing.

"No way. I think Italian makes even arguments sound pretty." 

Besides our different roles while we travel, my sister and I both love to explore markets and eat well and eat anything wherever we go. This recipe is one that I always give credit to my sister for either inventing or mimicking from one of her own trips she took to Italy with her husband. These olives outshine any roasted olive recipe that I know of and have been a staple in my house and they taste great in the middle of any season. Enjoy.

Becky's Roasted Olives

3 to 4 cups of olives, a mix of green and black brine-cured olives, pits left in

1/4 teaspoon of red pepper flakes

1 teaspoon of fresh rosemary, cut up

1/2 teaspoon of orange or tangerine zest

1/2 cup of olive oil

1. Preheat oven to 300 

2. mix all of the above ingredients in a bowl, (can be put in the fridge for a few hours to marinade too.)

3. put olives in a roasting pan and over with foil

4. roast for about an hour