Jiaozi

The trees and me

The tree guys are here. They are, in fact, certified arborists, but I call them tree guys. This morning I told Ella they were lumberjacks. I'm trying to make the operation sound more jolly.

I am a tree-hugger. I've spent most of my life in the shade of Washington evergreens, and I hate to lose a tree. We have 12 to 15 major trees on our half-acre. Most are Douglas Firs, about -- how tall? I am terrible at estimating. Maybe 120 feet? Way up to the sky.

I would let them be, but ever since we've moved into this house I have feared the wind. For the past few years, we've had the same weather pattern each winter: soaking rains followed by high winds. This is bad for trees, loosening up their roots and then knocking them down. I know someone whose house was cleaved by a large tree. It was one of those situations where, if their kids had gone to bed 20 minutes sooner, they would have been crushed in their beds. They had to move out of their house for months. 

A couple of years ago, the kids missed a week of school because of an area-wide power outage that lasted days. Strange, in this area, to miss school on account of rain! This never happened when I was a kid. I blame global warming.

Whenever we have a major windstorm, I cower in bed all night, shaking at every big gust. Once, when Big A was on a business trip, I hustled everyone down to the basement to sleep. I felt foolish, but what if you're the unlucky person who puts your kids to bed 20 minutes sooner? I didn't want to take that chance.

Yet I used to love a windstorm. I loved the drama and I loved watching from the coziness of indoors. So finally I called the tree guys. They don't like to take down trees unnecessarily, and they don't do nasty things like hack the tops off trees or prune them indiscriminately. We're taking down one fir next to the house that has damaged roots (Big A hates that tree because it dumps debris on the roof, so this is his Christmas present) and thinning or pruning the rest to reduce wind resistance. I will be able to sleep better this winter.

But I hate the sound of a chain saw, and that's what I have in my yard right now. It's worse than a dentist's drill. I remember when I was a child and the chain saws came and took away our secret woods and put ticky-tacky houses in their place. Whenever I hear a chain saw in the neighborhood, I go into full Mrs. Kravitz mode, snooping around to see what's up. I've had neighbors take down trees that I enjoyed looking at and whose privacy screening I appreciated. It's certainly their right as a property owner to take down a tree, but I feel the loss as if the tree were my own. So I hope we're not worrying the neighbors.

And we'll have a lot of wood to burn this winter, which will be nice if the power goes out again and we have to sleep in the living room and do homework by firelight.

Chick lit

Oh, dear. There I go being discouraging again. I have to find a happy ending for this thread.

Here's my situation this week. I have four writing assignments on the table, plus another possible client, I have the usual housework waiting for me, and I am getting hit with homework this week. All three kids want help at the same time; mostly what they need is to be talked down from their panic, but sometimes even I can't figure out what the teacher wants. Also: why are fourth-graders talking about associative, distributive, and commutative properties in math? Most of them hardly know their subtraction facts. Anyway, things are a bit hectic here.

If you haven't read the comments on the last two posts, please do, because Tracie is one step ahead of me and keeps bringing up things I wanted to talk about...later. But since she got me thinking, I'll go ahead and get it all out now. (I'll try to break it up so the posts aren't unbearably long.)

Tracie mentions money. I deeply resent the tyranny of money. I resent that the housing market became so inflated in our area that we, along with almost everyone else we know, are house poor. After paying for a place to park ourselves, there's little money left. We are not really materialistic people, so I can do without having a lot of fancy things, but there are valuable experiences that require money, too -- extracurricular classes and sports and travel and higher education.

But money has always been a problem for families and artists, regardless of era, gender, or medium. Not everyone is as lucky as James Joyce and Vincent van Gogh, who had younger brothers who rescued them financially (a lot). Many artists in history found wealthy patrons (for which they paid a price), but most just struggled along, and this is still true today. Nobody goes into the arts to make money. I once worked with several writers who had each published a number of moderately successful books, but still worked days as technical writers so they could support their families with regular income and health benefits.

I am fortunate to have a partner whose stable income enables me to work only sporadically these days. I can't complain if that means I'm the one here when the kids get home or the washer starts to leak or the cat throws up. Like Maia, I dream about having a wife myself. (A mom retreat is a great idea.) But really, just being able to avoid a 9 to 5 job is an incredible luxury, and I want to be mindful of that. Despite what I may think about the current math curriculum, it is a privilege to be home when my children get off the school bus. I wish I could have been home this much when they were babies.

So. Time is a hurdle. Money is a hurdle. But perhaps the biggest hurdle is the one Tracie refers to as "the guidelines imposed by a patriarchal culture that determine the standards of successful art." Starting with subject matter, women artists and writers are often at a disadvantage. Why is bullfighting a worthy subject for literature, but not childbirth? Why is the death of a soldier on the battlefield a noble subject, while the grief of his widow is not? Why is baseball taken more seriously than cooking?  Is it talent that puts Claude Monet on the A list and Mary Cassatt on the B list, or subject matter? Like men, women make art and literature out of the big issues -- life, death, love, meaning -- but from a different point of view. It should not be seen as a lesser point of view.

Which brings me back to the issue of money. Men, having controlled the flow of money throughout history, have also made the determination of what constitutes great art. Art made by women is too often labeled as sentimental, trivial, or even childish (e.g., "chick lit," "mommy blogging"). Women have more economic power than ever before. Is it possible to use our clout to redefine art in such a way that women's interests and perceptions are considered art-worthy? (I don't want to overdo the stereotypes. There are women who write about sports and men who write about their children, and both women and men paint nature. But -- you know what I mean.)

Of course, in order to make art for people to support, we need time. So I seem to have come full circle. Okay, happy ending coming up, I promise.

To be continued...

Mom art

Sorry. I did not mean for that last post to sound so discouraging. I don't share Emily Carr's conviction that it is impossible to manage both art and home. As I tell my kids, "Difficult is not the same thing as impossible." (You can imagine how well that goes over with them.)

But. The outlook isn't promising. Women have been grossly underrepresented among the ranks of artists, writers, and composers throughout history. There are many reasons for this, but let's consider just the distractions of home and family, which affect women's creative output to a much greater degree than men's. Emily Carr, Mary Cassatt, Louisa May Alcott -- unmarried, no children. Virginia Woolf, Georgia O'Keefe, Ayn Rand -- married, no children. Sylvia Plath -- married, with children, and we know how that ended.

In this supposed age of equality, we ought to be able to find more examples of successful mother-artists. And, indeed, I could name Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, Anne Tyler, Sally Mann, and Meryl Streep. (Obviously, I am more familiar with writers than with other artists.) But it's still an uphill struggle. Who do you think did the grocery shopping, Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo? Who made dinner, Alfred Stieglitz or Georgia O'Keeffe? I don't know for sure, but I can guess. And they didn't even have children to take care of.

There is hope. Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65 when she published her first book, and Anna "Grandma" Moses was 79 when she had her first exhibition. So we have plenty of time to catch up after the kids leave home, right? That's what I keep telling myself.

Unfortunately, finding the time to make art is just one of many hurdles we face.

To be continued...

Artist cookery! Artist housekeeping!

I've been reading about Canadian artist and writer Emily Carr lately. This summer we took a trip to her hometown of Victoria, British Columbia. I read an article about her in the onboard magazine on the boat ride up and became intrigued with her.

Carr was born in Victoria in 1871. She studied art in San Francisco, London, and Paris, and eventually returned to British Columbia to live. She painted in a postimpressionist or fauvist style; her work was strongly influenced by the art and culture of the First Nations people of the Pacific Northwest. 

Carr never married. However, from 1917 to 1928, feeling discouraged by reaction to her work, she all but gave up painting and made ends meet by raising dogs and rabbits, growing vegetables, creating small pottery objects, and running a ladies' boarding house. She loathed the boarding house; even the boarders criticized her paintings that were hung around the house. But she had to make ends meet somehow.

In her book Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr (published posthumously in 1946), she wrote of this period:

When I started the boarding house people had said, “Artist cookery! Artist housekeeping!” and rolled their eyes. I proved that an artist could cook and could housekeep; but that an artist could paint honestly and keep boarders simultaneously I did not prove.

Later, Carr began to think of painting again, realizing what she had lost.

At long last I learned, too, to surmount the housekeeping humdrum which I had allowed to drift between me and the painting which I now saw was the real worth of my existence.

An American artist came to visit at my house.

“Come, let us go to Beacon Hill or the sea, while morning is still young,” he said.

“The beds! The dishes! The meals!” I moaned.

“Will wait—young morning on Beacon Hill won’t. Don’t tether yourself to a dishpan, woman! Beds, vegetables! They are not the essentials!”

Suddenly I realized brag and stubbornness had goaded me into proving to my family that an artist could cook, could housekeep. Silly, rebellious me! Hadn’t I for fifteen years bruised body and soul, nearly killed my Art by allowing these to take first place in my life?

She returned to painting, with a measure of recognition this time. Later in life, after suffering a stroke, she turned to writing, ultimately completely seven books, most of which were published after her death in 1945. Today she is among the most beloved Canadian artists and authors.

Though Carr was not a mother, I was struck by her descriptions of how domestic work gets in the way of art. Of course, caring for our children, home, and family are not "unessential." We signed up for that job. But it's incredibly difficult to do creative work -- and really, all work requires some creativity -- when you're constantly being called away to deal with domestic obligations.

And, more often than not, it's the woman of the house who has the majority of the domestic duties. During the course of writing this post, I stepped away to wash the dishes, do three loads of laundry, exercise the dog, scrub the coffeepot, and spackle some holes in a door. Plus I did a bit of paying work. And that's a light day. Soon the children will be home and I'll be on snack and homework duty. Is it any wonder I keep losing the thread?

The interruptions take a toll. Anyone who does creative work knows how important it is to get "in the zone" -- the state of being completely absorbed in your work, to the point of becoming unaware of the passing of time and oblivious to the need for sleep or food. That sort of concentrated effort is impossible if there are children and animals around. When I am working, I deeply resent having to stop to make dinner. I'm not hungry, so why should anyone else be? It's hard to put the brakes on the thoughts racing around in my head and slow down long enough to slice tomatoes and boil pasta. But the children must be fed.

There is no escaping the housekeeping humdrum just yet. Children are not boarders, but they will leave us someday just the same. We have to make the most of our time with them. So we do the best we can -- we care for family and home, try to earn some money, and make art when no one is looking. That will have to do for now.

To be continued...

Slip Slidin' Away

The month of August was filled with reunions: gatherings with friends from the present and the near and distant past. This left me a bit disoriented at times. I felt like The Time Traveler (minus the nudity), never knowing which timeframe I'd find myself in from day to day.

First Ella's travel group from China got together -- that is, the three families who are still in touch got together, one family having vanished from the face of the earth. We live within 50 miles of one another, and meet once or twice a year. The girls have a few moments of shyness, and then they run off to play as if they were never apart. We always recreate their red couch picture, minus Ella bursting into tears as she did in the original photo. The girls are headed into fourth grade now, and it is hard to remember when they were so little we had to prop them up against one another because they couldn't sit up on their own. One would go down, and they'd all fall like dominoes.

Then we had May's Chinese language and dance teacher over for dinner, along with her daughter, who attends an Ivy League university. I felt as nervous as if we were preparing for a homestudy, which, in a way, we were -- I realized that I wanted her to approve of how we are raising these children from her homeland. She was born in the same province as Bess, so we showed her our photo album so she could comment on the familiar sights. I am always interested to hear her views on the differences in child rearing between China and America. She is horrified by how spoiled American children are. I may write more about that later.

The last week of August was a whirl of social activity. I had lunch with three former co-workers, all men. Though we are separated by distance and current work situation -- one is retired, one is working, one is a vice president, and I'm a freelancer -- we quickly fell into the easy camaraderie that made working together such a pleasure. We talked and laughed and and compared notes on work and kids and grandkids (they are all grandfathers now) and aging. One highlight was hearing these middle-aged men talk about how much they love yoga class. Who knew?

May, Ella, and I also got together with two Internet friends, current and waiting China adoptive parents. Though the children didn't know one another previously, and ranged in age from 4 to 12, they played together beautifully. They are so much alike, and yet so different. Is there a special bond between our daughters from China, or are they just being kids? Either way, it is reassuring that they will be able to share experiences as they get older and feel less like confiding in their clueless parents.

The last gathering of the month was unplanned, an impromptu high school reunion that started as a small dinner with a classmate who had been out of the country for many years and grew to include 20 or 30 people, including a few teachers. We met at a restaurant in our hometown, commandeering the back room and confusing the poor waitress by changing seats many times while we chatted with different people. There was remarkably little "Hey, remember that time we..." and more catching up and just enjoying one another's company. Our high school was unusual, an experimental "open concept" school, and we are bonded by the oddness of those four years (that's a story in itself), but we turned out okay. I have to say that Facebook made this reunion possible; for some reason, last month we hit the tipping point, and a horde of us old folks signed on. There goes the neighborhood, kids!

I made the 90-minute drive back home in the dark, enjoying the chance to be alone in the car, just gliding down the freeway and thinking my own thoughts. I put Paul Simon in the CD player, and he was the perfect accompaniment to the drive. I wondered whether Kodachrome even exists anymore (in fact, Kodak retired it this summer). I cried, as always, at "American Tune." And I thought about my friends and I, still crazy after all these years. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Derailed

We took our family trip to Canada last week. On the boat ride over I got sick, and things went downhill from there. The doctor at home figured it was food poisoning. Thank goodness nobody else in the family got it; I'm not sure whether they were exposed, but they all have cast-iron stomachs anyway.

Nothing like a good bout of gastroenteritis to bring you face to face with your own mortality. I had time to contemplate life and death and the meaning of both while enjoying the refreshing coolness of the bathroom floor tiles. I still feel a bit wrung out, but we now have less than two weeks of summer left, and of course I haven't done half the things I intended to do. Onward and upward.

O Canada

Me: Ella, here are some pictures of Victoria, British Columbia, where we're going to visit.

Ella: That's Canada? [pause] I didn't expect it to be so nice.

Even summer has its limits

Ha ha, universe! Very funny! I finally sing the praises of summer, and you turn the Evergreen State into a pizza oven!

The temperature in Seattle hit 102 degrees yesterday, surpassing the previous all-time high of 100. (The average high for July is around 77 degrees.) I know folks in the southern states are laughing at us because this is typical for them. And people in the northeast and over in England are laughing at our complaints because they have had more than their share of clouds and rain lately.

But we aren't equipped for this, just as we aren't equipped for snow. Our houses have big windows to help us capture the little bit of sun we usually get. They turn into magnifying glasses when it's this hot. Most people don't have air conditioning at home. Yesterday five branches of the Seattle Public Library had to close because the temperature inside hit 90 degrees. When you can't find refuge in a cool, quiet library, you know things are bad. (It doesn't help that half the floor space in most libraries is now taken up with computer stations.)

Tomorrow we will be at a relatively cool 85 degrees, and you can bet that we'll appreciate it. In the meantime, don't laugh at us until you've walked a mile in our Birkenstocks.

Summer: An appreciation

I never really cared for summer when I was a kid. Not going to school was a huge advantage, of course. But summer was sooooo boring. After we'd watched the morning edition of Jeopardy! and a rerun of The Andy Griffith Show, there was nothing for us to do. And it was too hot. (Which we defined as anything above 75 degrees.) Or it was raining. Both unacceptable. Whining about it just got us sent outside to lie on the crisp brown grass and listen to the grasshoppers and watch the heat-wave mirages on the asphalt. My family seldom took an out-of-town vacation, and for some strange reason my mother did not believe that keeping us entertained was her responsibility, so summer stretched before us like a long road to nowhere. Those three months seemed interminable.

When I was grown and working full-time, summer was the same as any other season, except hotter. The children went to summer day camp or preschool while I went to work. When I got home from the office, I started my second job as mom. I tried to send the kids outside when they whined about being bored, but then I had to spend 20 minutes getting them to stand still while I put sunscreen on them, which kind of defeated the goal of getting them out of my hair. Little kids don't travel well, so our vacations mostly consisted of heading over to the grandparents' house for a few days, where it was even hotter, but someone else did the cooking.

It wasn't until the past few years, when the kids have become older and my workload lighter, that I have truly appreciated summer. Summers are much shorter now, both in my perception and in reality; kids don't get out of school until the end of June instead of the beginning, so summer lasts only a couple of months. Still, the kids complain that they're bored -- with 75 channels on three TVs, DVD players, a Wii, a computer, Nintendo DS consoles, MP3 players, bicycles, a dog, 10,000 books, innumerable toys, and a closet full of art supplies -- ha! I try not to make it my responsibility. I say corny things like, "If you can read, you never have to be bored." Or, "If you can't find something to do, I have some rooms that need to be cleaned." And they complain about the heat -- yes, it does get hotter now, but almost everywhere they go there's air conditioning, so what's the problem?

I have no tolerance for their complaints, because I love summer. I love the long days full of sunshine. I love the quick, fierce rains. I love sitting in the quiet twilight. I love eating fresh local produce -- nectarines, cherries, berries, zucchini, heirloom tomatoes. I love cooking and eating outside. I love wearing a T-shirt and shorts and flip-flops every day. I love going to the beach and listening to the surf while reading a book just for fun. Nothing to do? That's not boredom, that's relaxation. I say freedom's just another word for nothing left to do. I'm happy to have a chance to put my feet up.

I don't want summer to end. Ever. I can't take the Seattle drizzle anymore. It took a few decades, but I'm over it. Around February I'm ready to stick my head in the oven. I get tired of meat and potatoes and canned fruit. I grow weary of my winter clothes after the ninth straight month of wearing them. I've had it with homework. It's soooo boring.

I want to retire to someplace that's sunny all the time. But never gets above 75 degrees. Because that's just too hot, really. (Don't tell the kids I said that.)

Making my list, checking it twice

Gifts bought and wrapped? Check.

Roast in the refrigerator? Check.

Cards mailed? Check.

Snow sledded on? Check. (Yes. By me.)

Cookies and fudge made and either eaten or taken to neighbors? Check.

Hot chocolate (spiked and unspiked) drunk? Check.

It's a Wonderful Life watched? Check.

Nonstop Christmas music listened to? Check.

Planned blog posts written? Not so much.

Family and friends visited with? No. (Canceled on account of snow.)

Eight out of ten isn't bad. Better than most years. And there's still one day left.

I hope you're doing okay with your list.