jolie laide: July 2010

jolie laide

I started this when I lived in Brooklyn and struggled for grace in a city that grants moments of beauty and ugliness breathtakingly close to one another. Now I live in a place where things are a different kind of ugly and the beauty is pedestrian. I struggle with that.

7.25.2010

The phone rings, a little too late at night for politesse. And so the next day, I am driving north through this impossible, beautiful landscape, welcoming another soul to the Hotel California. There is something about this bluest of skies, this edge of a great continent, this air so sere you are no longer conscience of breathing, that unloosens people. I brought enough food for a few days, enough money for a few days, but I can't do much more than that.

Today the plants outside are making another small offering. The strawberries are coming out like debutantes, one at a time, dazzling and new. The runners are only a year old, so they are giving what they can. I am grateful for that, and for this hillside mooring in this strange place.

7.13.2010

I have been married for 15 months and there have been no funerals. There is a moment in every day when I am grateful for this, usually with my arm over his chest, feeling sleep pull him down in uneven jerks. Going 40 years without feeling love will lie on your bones like that.

I often find myself looking into the face of someone who has made the same mistakes as me, but has been made to pay for every single one. I hope they can feel me, behind my work-appropriate cardigan, my neat fingernails, my suburban lady car. I have built bridges over my steep ravines, but still those dark and slippery banks remain.