What We’ve Completely 100% Changed Our Minds About

By: | May 24, 2023

I’m not sure why I’m interested in what people change their minds about – maybe because I’m at the age where a person looks back and wonders what the hell that was all about. Like, a person of a certain age tries to find the through-lines of life and sees how many of them just turn around and head off in the opposite direction. Is this the process of maturation? is it just response to new information? I’m not sure about people who don’t sometimes completely 100% change their minds. Do such people even exist? Anyway, I asked my colleagues on LWON for examples of U-turns.

KATE: I used to feel embarrassed about being from New Jersey. Whenever a new person asked me where I grew up, I said, Oh, you know. Around. Sometimes I said Ocean. This was true in both the broadest sense–we never lived too far from the Atlantic—and literally, as I went to high school in Ocean Township. It also served to obscure what I considered the mortifying truth.

Those who have never been to New Jersey may believe the state is crowded, greasy, belligerent, the scowling little brother of New York. They might expect the people there to be loud, tacky, caught up in organized crime, gym-tan-laundry, acrylic nails, hoop earrings, cannoli, bagels, hair spray. And they’d be right. My classmates could easily have joined the cast of Jersey Shore. Our region didn’t have a county fair; it had an Italian-American festival. Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi were local gods. So yes, this is New Jersey. But it isn’t all of it.

It took moving far away for me to realize that New Jersey is weird. Our state monster has cloven hooves and bat wings and flapped straight up and out the chimney the moment he was born. New Jersey is the only U.S. state with no official song, because a composer named Red Mascara (yes, really) was so annoying in his quest to get his piece selected that the state government banned the entire concept of a state song altogether. The state canine is the seeing eye dog. New Jersey is diverse and full of culture. You can get a stack of chocolate-chip pancakes or a cup of matzoh-ball soup or both at 2 a.m. if you want to. My people are not restrained, complex, or elegant. We are blunt and earthy and dazzlingly accessorized. We are wave-pounded, salt-crusted, and heavy on the bass. We fight for what we care about. We bring the best desserts.

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Free

By: | May 22, 2023
Cartoon drawing of a beaming wedge of yellow cheese and a happy baguette riding a purple bald eagle through a blue sky

Twenty-one years ago, Domino’s Pizza ran a fairly mundane promotion: customers who purchased a large one-topping pizza would also receive an order of cheesy bread, on the house. This event would not have even registered for me, or anyone I knew, had Domino’s not advertised it like this: 

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The Molt

By: | May 19, 2023

Brown

Penguins are black and white—everyone knows this—except when they aren’t, like in April, at a place called Punta Tombo. Punta Tombo is a gnarled peninsula in southern Argentina that hosts a large colony of Magellanic penguins. Every September, more than two hundred thousand of them come here to breed. They pair up, lay a clutch of two eggs, incubate those eggs, have a brood of two chicks, feed those chicks, and, finally, watch those chicks strike off on their own. The luckiest penguins go through all those steps over the course of several months. The vast majority of penguins are not that lucky, however. Some never find a mate, or a kelp gull eats their eggs, or their chicks starve, and so on. Sometimes I am astonished at all the ways they can be unlucky. Even so, no matter the outcome of the breeding season, once March and April arrive, every single penguin molts.

The molt seems to me a harsh way to close the year. Some birds only molt a few feathers at a time so they can keep living their lives more or less unaffected by the need for new plumage. Not so Magellanic penguins. Magellanic penguins undergo what is called a catastrophic molt, which means they replace all their feathers at the same time. To prepare for this involved procedure, they first leave the colony for two or three weeks to stuff themselves with food. When they return, they settle in a nest, or sometimes just a patch of open ground, and stop preening and oiling their feathers. Deprived of care and oil, the feathers soon lose their lustrous blackness, fading to brown. The colony fills with brown penguins.

This is the first stage of the molt. Because we are creative, we call it Brown. Think of it as the beginning of the end.


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The Death of the Moth Would Be Just Fine By Me, Thanks

By: | May 17, 2023
A small brown miller moth crossed out behind the no symbol

The invasion is now in full swing. I am not sure if I’ll make it beyond tonight. You have no idea what I’ve seen out there.

It began a few nights ago, though it was chilly then. The earth gleamed with moisture. There were fewer of them; the cold and the rain held them off, I think.

We knew they were coming, because it’s that time of year, but we did not know, yet, that there would be so many. How could we know?

That first night, I saw one or two. Oh. Oh no. They’re back, I thought. A couple days later came the first sign that this invasion would be epic. We could not know, for real, because the state entomologist whose forecasts I read with alacrity has apparently retired. So I have no idea what the miller moth season will be like this year; I can only pray that it will not be as bad as the summer of 2020, or heavens forbid, the summer of 1989.

But then one morning last week, I opened the door for the dog. Several of them had glommed onto my storm door, seeking warmth, and I’d just dislodged them. Some half-dozen moths fell stupidly onto my head, while many (so many) others fluttered directly into my face and hair. My screams traveled the neighborhood and brought my children to tears. My screams heralded the miller moths’ annual arrival. My screams trumpeted the beginning of the end.

The end is nigh. The end of my love of the summer night is upon us. I cannot be out there when they are there. I cannot go to the door in peace, or anything resembling normalcy, when they are out there. I cringe. I shiver. I falter. I flail, Elaine-like, entranced by fear. I dance and I zigzag, not unlike—well, one might say, not unlike one of them. I shriek into the ear of my literary agent while on a phone call, I hurt my arm in the door in my attempt to slam it on them. Unfortunately, I have never been conscious of a strange sort of pity for them.

I went outside tonight to hear the great horned owls, which are in the early stages of their mating season. The hoo-hu-hooo, hoo-hu-hooo, hoo-hu-hooo flying from treetops is one of my favorite experiences in the woods I now inhabit. Dusk is such a wonderful time in the early-summer mountains. The hummingbirds were buzzing to my feeder, the turkeys were gobbling about something, the magpies were screeching, what I think was a pine siskin was screech-squealing in the woods, and the owls were getting an early start. I went out just to stand there, to hear the birdsong and to watch the night come by. I thought I saw a few small blurs flit across my vision, so I blinked a few times. I need a new eyeglass prescription. Wait—no. My eyes were not adjusting. I was seeing real movement in front of the trees, above the trees, all around and within and through the trees. I was seeing them.

I saw dozens of them, at least. Hundreds of thousands of them were flying past my porch, probably at least 1.5 million of them per square foot. It was horrible to think that one billion miller moths were out there with me, flying above my 3/4 of an acre. A trillion moths is too many moths for anyone, but especially for me.

Thump. Thump. Thump. I went inside and could no longer hear the great horned owls, but instead the stupid muffled sound of Colorado’s most obnoxious creatures fluttering haplessly against the windows. They were trying to reach the light. I hate them so much. I do not see the pure bead of life in them; I am so sorry. They are my greatest phobia. They are dusty, hence their “miller” nickname, and their poop is maroon and weirdly large and it stains the walls, and why? They are oddly proportioned, with huge fat bodies and long legs and stubby little delta wings. I cannot describe them further, I am sorry. The end is nigh. I hope my neighbor bears eat them all.

If you’re reading this, I have survived to write another day. Working in the dark, after my children were safely sleeping, I survived logging into WordPress amid the sound of them beating their wings against my windows. Thump. Thump. Thump. My friend down the street texted me a photo: What the hell? They are in my fireplace!

If you’re reading this, I actually may or may not still be alive. We will see what tonight brings.

May the ghost of Virginia Woolf forgive me.

Image: Adapted from Flickr user Louis – CC BY-SA 2.0

Island Mom

By: | May 15, 2023

There are things I have not revisited since spring 2020 because they remind me too much of the darkest days of the pandemic. Puzzles, for instance. I have not done a puzzle in three years, nor have I eaten frozen Costco salmon (my parents panic-bought us roughly a million fillets in mid-March, and it took us months to get through them). There are pairs of pants I refuse to wear because they remind me of being extremely depressed. My one solace, in those days, was playing Animal Crossing on my Nintendo Switch. There, I “saw” friends by visiting their islands while chatting with them on Zoom, and I built a virtual house and a virtual garden and nobody there had COVID. I even wrote about its questionable ethics here in July 2020.

Recently, I logged back on after months away from my island. Weeds surrounded my virtual orchard; my villager friends said passive aggressive things like, “We were worried about you!” I had a few dozen messages in the mailbox outside my house: the local airlines sending me a note of thanks (spam); Fuscia, the pink deer who is my best friend in the game, inexplicably sent me a refrigerator (?); and there were multiple gifts and notes from “Mom.”

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Motherhood: The Second Child

By: | May 12, 2023

Back in 2017, I wrote a post debating whether I should have a second child. I almost didn’t. We tried and tried. We even went to a fertility clinic. And then we decided it probably wasn’t meant to be. I was already 40. “Let’s give it two more months and then call it quits,” I told my husband.  

And then there it was, the plus sign. I looked at it with mistrust. This had happened before. A plus and then, nothing. I went about my life. But the plus didn’t fade. The baby was real and (fuck!) a boy.

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“People need to know we’re here.” A Conversation with Jennifer Lunden

By: | May 10, 2023
A beam of light falls on an unmade bed in a dark room.

Jennifer Lunden is the author of the astounding new book American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. She’s also a good friend. This is Part 1 of our conversation about work, exhaustion, and writing while ill.

Kate: I know American Breakdown has been a very long time in the making. When did you start writing this book?

Lunden: In some ways, it started when I found a biography of Alice James in a used bookstore in 1994. Alice was the sister of the writer Henry James and the psychologist William James, and she was, most of her life, bedridden with an illness that felt very similar to the one that I was dealing with. Hers was called neurasthenia; I had been diagnosed with what we now call myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Reading that book was the seed, because I felt like I’d found my soulmate or kindred spirit, this person who completely understood in an embodied way what it was like to be as sick as I was.

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Bring the World to Its Senses

By: | May 8, 2023

Under a spring sky in the high desert of Western Colorado, we had a little gathering at our house. My wife’s childhood friend, awarded author and translator of Lithuanian poetry Laima Vince, stood on our wooden deck discussing a Jewish poet who was executed along with her family at the age of 19 in 1941 outside of the small Lithuanian town where they lived. Laima translated the young woman’s work into a beautiful book, including reproductions of journal pages revealing a swooning love life complete with teenage heartbreak, ink on two of the pages dotted with three drops of tears.

Matilda Olkinaitė’s journals and poems were hidden in a church and hardly seen by anyone until they were unpacked from a dresser and shown to Laima in 2017. Otherwise, they would have easily disappeared, and the young poet’s name would be lost. As war rose around her, the poems became dark with premonitions as, Laima wrote, “she wished she could bring the world back to its senses.” Less than a year before she was murdered and buried in an unmarked weedy peat bog, Matilda wrote:

It is so difficult for me. I wish I could utter that one word.

Just one word for the crowds and for the nations.

The processions would pause. Time would come to a halt.

All the generations would stop and listen.

Several months ago, my wife Daiva and I traveled to her family’s homeland in Lithuania, where she’s been returning since she was a teenager when the country was still under Soviet occupation. As we drove the countryside we came on sign after sign indicating a tragedy had happened in one place or another, mass graves where a village burned to the ground, murders unspeakable, concrete bunkers old enough to have become part of the landscape. The numbers of the dead at each site range far and wide; 105, 49, 50,000.

Daiva took me down a gravel road puddled with rain to a place she’d visited before, a haunting and beautiful scene for her. We parked and walked up a hill in birch trees and damp grass where 40-some residents of the massacred village of Ablinga are memorialized. They were killed by Nazis in World War II, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, sisters, brothers. What was left of them and their village was burned. Trees have been carved into remembrances, and walking through their renderings I felt crushed. In one wooden trunk, a father held his arms around a mother who held onto their two daughters, the youngest turned to face inward as if hiding from something. She had two braids tied with ribbons down her back, now cracked where the wood had split from age. The father’s hands, oversized, as if they could hold off anything, were placed so they made contact with everyone in the family. It was impossible not to cry. 

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