pomodoro, day 2. (1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

 Once upon a time, there was a girl. She moved  across the country to a place where the sky was largely grey. She'd fly back East for Christmas and feel awe as the sky turned a blue that was as sharp as ice and cut the eyes. The jetport was white concrete in the middle of the jagged buildings of Boston, pushed up against the water. As you took off from the tarmac, the plane cast a shadow on the white-capped harbor, and the sandbars grew larger the farther they spread out to sea, some with small buildings or lighthouses to warn ships ahead.

That girl, obviously, is me.

I've been to Boston most often in the winter time, and it is always very cold. It is an in-between place for me, a place I move through towards the trains and buses and airplanes and cars I need to take. In the lengths of time between these things, there are spaces. It is winter, and there is a small crusting of icy snow over the park. We're in the neighborhood where my first kiss lives. He's in a tiny apartment owned by his parents, working 18 hours a day in finance. I don't entirely understand what he does for a living, only that it's stressful enough for him to need a tiny oven that fits on his countertop. The oven has a scanner that reads your individually wrapped meals, and uses the data to heat the food to the right temperature in the right amount of time. You have to buy the oven in order to eat the food, but I'm not here to judge.

I'm here to tell you about the cold.

There's a park outside of his apartment. In the winter, the ground is an icy coat of snow. A bridge crosses over some water that is hard and grey like steel. People let their dogs run off-leash through the snow, and the little legs kick of ice crystals and glitter like shrapnel under the icy sun.

I'm here to tell you about how cold it is when I fly home.

The water in Boston Harbor always looks white-capped. There's a park by the airport, with a promenade that follows the shore before curling into a jetty. When you walk the jetty, the wind whips your face with your hair and then hits your face for good measure. You can listen to the water hitting the sides of the rocks and the roar of the jetliners overhead. I stop there before my flight, listening to the planes and the water against the rocks and losing feeling in my cheeks as the wind hits my face.

From the airport, you can take a local train downtown, then walk to the train station. The train station isn't warm. Even the bathroom is cold, with white glaring lights. You can wait in the space for your train, fill the time with a phone call to your family, and they will ask you about the wind in the background, about the loud static announcements overhead, about the chatter of the people on distant benches. It is hard to find a place that is quiet. It is impossible to find a place that is warm. There is a small chain doughnut stand where your mother orders a small bag of hash browns.

I have been to Boston in the summertime, but it was a long time ago. There were jellyfish in the aquarium, floating in a blue glow, and the profile of my first kiss's face cut out against the water. There was a long walk to Bunker Hill with my history class in high school, climbing 294 stairs to a small window that looks out over the city.

I did want to move to Boston once, but it was a long time ago, before I found warmer places much farther away. How far do you need to go to be warm? How close do you need to stay? Where is family and where is home?

This past summer, I visited the house where I had my first kiss. The family lives about forty minutes south of Boston, and it never is cold there. We were having tea and pastries, and his mother told us they were selling the house. I felt a physical need to go upstairs, to see the bed where I'd spent that night. But that had been many years before, and I wasn't allowed to just walk up the stairs to their bedrooms. I contented myself with looking at the couch. Ten years later, it was the same soft yellow color, faded with time and wear. He'd tasted of wine. I wore a sundress that pressed my small breasts flat. I'd sewn up the front buttons so the sundress wouldn't gape and expose the soft flesh, and later, he'd try to unbutton them that night in the bed, laughing. I snuck into the guest room early the next morning, still wearing his shirt, which is now in a small space of my closet carved out for past lovers.

That summer was very warm. 

The park was very cold. There was a layer of icy snow over the ground. His mother tells me he has a small oven that scans his food, very futuristic. The dogs run off-leash through the snow, kicking up ice crystals. I've come from very far away, debarked from a plane that flew in over whitecaps. I miss my home. I miss summer. I miss being warm in a place where the sky is usually grey.

~~~~

(This Christmas was the first year I've spent away from the family that raised me. I moved really far -- over three thousand miles to the other side of the country. It's way too far to drive home, and I'm not about to take a plane in a pandemic. The sky was grey here, but it was warm inside, with the fire lit. There were no trains, or planes, or cars to carry me through spaces. I woke, and put the kettle on for tea, and sat by the fire while I waited for the water boil.

There's something to be said for staying close, for not having to get on a plane to get you where you want to go. And how home can migrate across many miles to another side of the sea, and how much warmer it can be here, even if the sky is grey.)

moving from new jersey

I should just lie at this point; invent a story that starts with my mother giving birth to me here--maybe in Harborview Medical Center downtown, or in the more modern Swedish Medical Center, where Chris's nieces were born.

But that removes my mother from the story, and she gave birth to me in New Jersey, in a cesearan operation after ___ hours of labor in Morristown Medical Center. She moved to Jersey for college, and stayed there longer than she'd ever lived away. Long enough to marry, get pregnant, raise a kid, get divorced, and sell a house.

I've now lived in Washington for seven years, four months, and twenty days -- not quite longer than I've lived anywhere else, but if combined with college, I'm just a couple of years shy. The car that I drove cross-country still has the registration sticker from New Jersey's DMV, peeling slightly at the corner of my windshield. It's valid through 2014, including its one-year extension.

When I first moved here, I wanted to write stories about everyone's stories. No one seemed native to Seattle, so why did they move here? What adventures did they encounter on their journeys out here? I was 22. Everyone's story interested me. 

A girl asked me last week where I was from, and I just wanted to lie. She was young, probably 22, fresh out of college and curious about my story. She'd realized that no one seemed to be from here. I wanted to lie and tell her about Harborview, but I told her the truth. 

"I'm from New Jersey," I said. 

"That's so cool, I'm from Florida!" she said.

"I've been here for about eight years though," I said, not responding to the Florida prompt. At this point, Florida was as obscure a place to me as Jersey.

I read diaries of Seattle's pioneers in my free time. I finished a 300 page book about Chief Seattle. My boyfriend was born here (okay, in the suburbs, but we'll make it work). I can point out three skyscrapers downtown and tell you what restaurant I went before it was built there, or what bar I used to bike past there when I lived downtown, or how those condos used to be the Two Bells and they had a really good deal on Mac N' Cheese.

But there are still signs. The New York Times arrives at my doorstep Sunday morning. I take my eggs with salt, pepper, and ketchup. I really, really miss the beach, and think Washington's coastline is a sad excuse for a shoreline.

I really want to rip that sticker off my car, and I don't want to hear your story.

 hiiiii cutie, how you doing?
                             - text message from jessie, my childhood best friend

Yesterday, I quit my job. Yes, it's a pandemic. Yes, 10% of America is unemployed. A large part of me is trying to forgive myself for this, cajoling myself into believing that it is okay to not have it figured out yet. Just like seven years ago, when I graduated from college, and all the adults in the room asked where to next?

it. is. okay.

"Good for you for getting out of this monstrous place."

                             - courtney, my coworker

I'm looking at where to buy costco pants online, and wondering if this is crazy, when I'm about to be out of work. I don't shop at costco. I don't shop online. And yet, I am craving these black stretchy ankle-pants for $19.99. They have free returns, with $5 for shipping and handling. The pants are modeled by the woman who runs the goat rescue where I volunteer. My drive to the rescue this morning had a $1.50 toll. I need to buy gas for my car soon, which costs about $30. I went to the dentist after and spent $38 on a laser to clean the bacteria off my teeth. I bought toothbrushes and period supplied at Target for $8.00. I'm not going to have a job next week.

it. is okay.

I didn't grow up with friends coming over. I had an alcoholic father and a mother who took all her calls in the bedroom. I'd creep close to her door, my bare feet quiet on the carpet, listening to her words through an inch of wood.

My father moved out when I was in third grade, and took all his rage and fury with him. The house was quiet again. He returned again, and left again, and by then I was old enough to stay out late with my mother's car, doing anything to keep away--and my friends away--from home.

~~~~

I don't know how to entertain. I want to please everyone -- my alcoholic father, one mistake away from a horrible fury. My sweet, long-suffering mother, too delicate to consider. All my friends who gave me reasons not to go home. How do you entertain when you've never built a home? I spend long hours cleaning my house, sterilizing the surfaces, preparing food, hiding traces of my life.

 How will my friends feel in my space? Will they judge the moss growing on the patio outside my bedroom? Is the toilet clean enough? Do I have to hide every stack of paper? Why can't I just leave all these things as they are, and talk about them like a human?

As it is, I last had people over on Halloween, almost a year ago. I baked a pizza with hand-made dough in the shape of a jack-o-lantern, with pine nuts for its eyes and teeth. I put the camping chair inside and tried to get people to feel comfortable sitting down. I didn't offer alcohol--perhaps for obvious reasons. And everyone was sent home with a treat bag.

It wasn't casual, but there were people in my home.

~~~

How do I hang out with people, casually? How do I invite them into my home without putting on a show? I don't want to be the little girl hiding behind the door. I want the door to be wide open, welcoming my friends inside.

I don't write like I used to. Ten years ago, I was an English major, while for the last three years, I've spent every day drawing blood and doing lab work monitoring heart rates under anesthesia. There's no way I can come back from that.

Maybe the change isn't bad. Does the world really want me to wax on with every adjective I know, just because words are too beautiful to cut any out?

Or are the facts of the matter better, with a few sparse words I still remember thrown in?

them apples

There's an apple stand off the interstate in northern Washington state. The red barn rises out of the lolling hills and green.

 'FRESH CIDER.'

I've heard stories about how good this cider is: crisp and clear, perfect in late summer or all through fall. The stand's been there for the seven years I've lived here, but I've never been in all the time I've lived in Seattle.

Seven years later, I make it out there. I'm looking to get out of the city for the time. It's an hour and a half drive along a single four-lane road until you see the barn.

When you pull off the interstate, you make a hard round-a-about and end up at a dead four-way. The barn has a gravel lot, and the car tires crush then pleasantly, sounding like when you leave the city to get to your grandma's house in the country. The red barn walls rise in front of your car, the wood a little weathered now that you're close. There's a white farming family manning the place: an older dad and his son, freshly thirty, unloading cases of apples into a large machine that pulps them down and spills out their juice. Heaps of apple pulp lay in piles around them.

Corn fields press in close, swaying behind the barn and the dad and his kid pulping apples. I don't see any orchards, and the only apples I see are in boxes.

Inside the double doors, there are three small children, all tow-headed and under ten. They man the small check-out stand, strangely quiet and shy as two newcomers enter. Their mother works a larger counter across the empty barn, working the donut maker. She's making donuts from a pre-made paste and working the dough with her hands. We order a half dozen, and she pours out a vast plastic jug of canola oil, then fries the dough that's floured her hands.

"Do you own all the corn around your farm?" I ask shyly.

She's older, in her thirties like her husband. These three kids are clearly hers.

"My father-in-law sold all the land a few years ago. The rent it out. The renters plant the corn."

She doesn't offer more explanation, and I'm too embarrassed for her family to ask. Or rather embarrassed by our country, and sad for her family.

Because clearly, there came a time, when it became cheaper, instead of tilling the land the man owned, to sell if it to a large farming corporation, and found it cheap, and quite profitable, to plant lots of corn for cheap and sell it fast, to anyone who would buy.

But the family, they kept the barn. The order some apples--maybe from a local farm in eastern Washington, or maybe from some farm corporation because it's cheaper, and that's all they can do right now. The son, now proprietor of his family's barn, works with his own son to pulp these apples and make some juice. His wife makes apple cider donuts. His babies work the Square app at the counter.

"Do you take card?"

It's a nervous question -- we're already holding the half-dozen donuts. The powder is on my fingers.

It's a stupid question. Of course they take card. How would they ever make a living on just cash? The babies at the register, still shy and sweet, ring me up on Square.

just wait a second, okay?

five years isn't that long of a time, is it? it's not like a new decade started. it's not like I had time to get a second bachelor's degree. (I mean, I did. But I also didn't). I couldn't have changed my profession to science. or moved three times and lived on a houseboat without real plumbing. (the kitchen sink drained into a lake).

my mom didn't sell the house I grew up in, and I couldn't have driven a small boxtruck through a class 4 wind storm and four states to bring her her mattress and heavy wooden bed frame.

we couldn't have a new president. especially not one who thinks you can inject disinfectant into your body to fight germs??

my dad and I didn't visit the statue of liberty that one February, and he definitely didn't elope without telling me to a woman I met just one time. you know, that time in the dark, while she smoked cigarettes on their shared back porch. the one who lives in the other half of his duplex. in new jersey. the place I grew up? the place I haven't been to in over a year.

it's not like there's been a world-wide pandemic or anything.

five years. it's not so long of a while, you know?