Then I was gone and seemingly very far away.
It was time to go home when Jesse and I married and started making our own home. Our own sense of home. It was time to go home and see mountains again, wear some flannel, and forget the rat race I'd gotten into when I was blinking or sleeping. Jesse and I were working--we were always working--and we were tired. Our home was tired.
I don't suggest moving immediately after a marriage. It's been difficult and all of our plants died when we were driving across states. I don't know when we'll feel settled or honeymoon-ish. Television makes me think this needs to happen. Literature makes me surprised people even try to make this happen. Either way, hard.
This weekend, we got to get away from our new home and take a trip to NYC. A four hour drive.
When we got there, it was a lot like our old home. Everyone moving to get somewhere. But now that we are in our new, slower, home, we could slow down more. We didn't walk as fast--not like when we were Chicagoans. We noticed things like cherry trees and space. We noticed more in general.
NYC loveliness
I'm not suggesting we've come to any terms with our new location or that we've improved in our readjustment, but we've started to open our eyes again.
In Ithaca, Jesse is roasting coffee. His hands our burnt, once his eyelashes. It's a physical job and he's tired often; he's wondering when and if he'll get to integrate his QC knowledge, his passion for statistics and databases, and see how roasting can become something that works with brewing. He his anxious sometimes for things to move faster. My dad says most young people are anxious for things to move faster and we should really try to value things moving at the pace they move.
I'm working at a bakery. 4:30 am deliveries and baking scones, muffins, cookies, and bars for the rest of the days. My hands, too, are burnt. My tastebuds are tired, which is a surprising feeling. I'm excited about food and food research, flavor profiles, and flavor developments. I spent a good deal of time, in NYC, looking at the food and seeing how aesthetics matter in sales. I listened to people who wanted a cookie that "looked homemade" and then complained when the edges were too spread. I noticed the difficulty of consistency in something that has so many variables. Easier to sell a burnt cookie with even color and shape than a "just right" cookie that might dip in the middle.
We are both doing these new things and wondering if they are the "right" things or the "forever" things. I keep telling myself that things are temporary, nothing needs to be the way it is for always. Then I look at Jesse, at my new husband, and I hope somethings are not temporary.
It's difficult.
I haven't been writing too much, but I'm going back into old work and attending to what wasn't developed or finished. I'm finding my older voice and putting it into a new place, to see how the dialect is influenced, how the words are changing to look more like this coast.
handmade paper drying
Look for new work and keep watching to see me try to figure out how to make poetry more akin to a visual art (something I already consider it to be). I've been papermaking, working on building a home press, and trying to see what my poems want me to do next. This is--like our marriage--about process and change. I'm in the process and I need to figure out how it is happening and what I can do with it and within it.
paper mulch and screen
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