the meat and the matrix

The rain comes and goes. My desk lamp flickers in and out every once in a while, incandescent flirtation. I have an empty coffee cup, a crumpled paper snowflake, a green pen, and the impossibility of summarizing Luce Irigaray, all looking up at me from the half-shadowed desk. Perhaps I will pop popcorn for dinner. Perhaps I will drink water into clarity.

Everything is a mystery.

I called my mom tonight, and she listened to me talk about how disoriented I feel recently, how exhausted, how quickly the world seems to speed by as I spend hours and hours of each day tucked between books' covers. I am pulled taut by the irony of spending all this time in my reading and studying and thoughts, ignoring my skin muscles tendons blood bones until my eyes twitch and my thumbs ache with holding pages open and my stomach growls for attention -- ironic because I'm studying, in part, the problems of separating out our bodies from our minds and our souls.

The cicadas are insistent. The air is cooling off. The sky is fading.

Let us find the beauty in seraphed printed alphabets and the scent of thin-pressed paper pulp and glue, yes, and let us find beauty in still life photographs posted on the rich blogland (as I so often do, and remember to breathe), but let us also find beauty in making eye contact with a stranger on the sidewalk, and let us find beauty in the minuscule trapezoids on the backs of our own hands, the jut of a collarbone, the rough of a heel. J had me feel S's glossy brown arm in church this morning, to note the smoothness of her skin: let us find beauty in the moments where we touch one another.

Little boys bounce a ball in the dusky courtyard. Somewhere a song has ended.

five sense friday

touching: tongs and feeling the steam from a pot of boiling jar lids -- trying to free them of their tomato sauce scent so I can store things like rice in them without unfortunate effects

smelling: said sauce (and pickle scents, too), and fall-spiced coffee

tasting: cheetos. mmm fake orange powder

seeing: Neuromancer -- read it?

hearing: classical radio. when am I not?

it is coming

When I was a little girl, I always rode the bus home from school, and in the fall this meant climbing down from the bus and crossing the street, dragging my feet through the several yards of maple-leaf crunch driveway, and then plunging from the crisp afternoon into the warmth of the kitchen just beyond the side door. And the scents of that kitchen: oh, the warm oven scents.

Today I made pumpkin chocolate chip bread, a perennial family favorite, and as I sat on the couch reading Midnight's Children and the aroma of baking cinnamon-nutmeg-pumpkin began to fill the apartment, I found myself floating back through those layers of an autumn afternoon: the anticipation of an ending school day; the cool of the steel-skied afternoon and its blaze of changing leaves; the chatter of a bus ride (or, on more introverted days, the downy safety of a novel, perhaps Little House or Anne of Green Gables); the front maple, side door, kitchen welcome, Mom's smile, snack; and probably the seduction of a stubby pencil and a notebook, or more reading, watching the light fade and waiting for an always good dinner (excepting canned green beans and vegetable soup).

It is up to me now to fill my own home with its scents, to celebrate this favorite season with its leaf-magic and cozy evenings, and today I did. I've shared the recipe before, but here it is again:

Autumn Afternoon Pumpkin Bread

2.5 C sugar

1 C oil

4 eggs

3 and 1/3 C flour

2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/4 tsp allspice

1/4 tsp ground ginger

2/3 C water

15 oz can pumpkin puree (or pureed cooked pumpkin or winter squash)

1 C chocolate chips

1/4 C minced candied ginger (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350. Grease bottoms and halfway up sides of two bread tins (9x5, I think).

2. Beat sugar and oil together in your largest bowl. Add eggs, beating well after each.

3. In a separate large bowl, combine dry ingredients (flour through ground ginger).

4. Alternately add dry ingredient mixture and water to oil/sugar/egg mixture, mixing just to incorporate. Then add pumpkin puree, just until incorporated. Finally, fold in chocolate chips and ginger, if using.

5. Bake 55-60 minutes -- test with a toothpick near the center. Cool in pans for 10 min, then remove and cool on wire rack.

five sense friday

Let's keep at least one thing going.

sight: my hands, which are stained red from beets and black from printer ink -- a collage of the week

sound: air hammers and a compressor (?) and workmen calling back and forth as they re-roof our apartment building; passing traffic, Fur Elise on the radio

smell: onions, also on my hands, from last night's dinner prep; coffee stirred with cinnamon sticks

touch: a cardigan on my all-summer-long-bare arms

taste: waffles and late-season strawberries, plus peanut butter

autumn is coming

I haven't posted here in a while. Let's blame it on the beginning of the school year.

I'm thinking about doing five senses friday. So here it is:

Smelling: old books in stacks and damp wood window frames

Tasting: the popcorn I'm about to pop for dinner

Seeing: pixelation and fifty million gorgeous blogs

Hearing: the movie Before Sunrise -- to motivate me to clean -- don't ask for the logic here

Feeling: beads around my neck