Summer Lovin'

For ten years, summer has been a source of dread for me. Memorial Day, a holiday of unhappiness. While people in other parts of the country were having cookouts, celebrating the beginning of the season of summer and cookouts and outdoor living and winter being very far away, I was hiding out, trying to pretend that I wasn't about to commence the Season of Hell. 115+ temperatures. (It's a dry heat, my foot. After 105 degrees, it doesn't make a difference. And at least when you get humidity, you get storms.)  Days of relentless sunshine. 

 No more. 

This first Memorial Day back home, I got a pleasant reminder of how summer could be. I strolled down the block of an Indianapolis suburb with friends and their two toddling boys.  I watched them blow bubbles; I watched the sun illuminate brilliant blossoms that would already be struggling to survive in the desert. 

I did a totally traditional thing and went to a friend's house for a delicious cookout. (Mmmmm, cheesy brats...)

And I did something totally different, but that I think can and does happen quite a lot here in the Heartland...I went out on a pontoon boat and spent an afternoon bobbing about on Heritage Lake, swimming and drinking beers and watching kids frolic and being hauled around in a tube...

And watching thunderheads gather, and dissipate...

It was a good day, and it actually left me somewhat happily anticipating the months ahead. 

So, no more summers in hell. Lazy evenings spent watching fireflies; blowing bubbles; bobbing about on lakes; cookouts with all the meat; road trips down country roads; Icees and lemonade and margaritas and adventures. I'm ready to leave hell and love summer. 

Indiana @ 200

There are many, many things that please me about being home again--first, that I am home now, just about 10 years after I left; what a nice, round number!--but second and most of all, that I've returned home at the Bicentennial time, a celebration of my state being a state for 200 years.

There are a lot of BFD events going on this year--we have a license plate commemorating the bicentennial, and we are doing a torch relay through every county and ending on the State House lawn; but there are a lot of modest events and projects, reflecting the equally modest towns and cities and townships and hamlets from which they originate. All of them, though, share the common thread of fierce pride in our home, and the history of it.

I've always been a bit of a history nut. I would beg my grandparents to tell me about "The Olden Days" growing up on their Indiana farms. I majored in history in college. I devour historical fiction and have a freakish recall for dates and love poring over old photographs. And I love learning about the history and the quirks and the houses and the everything around Indiana, for here's the thing: my grandparents grew up in Tipton County, one of those seemingly insignificant counties, and hundreds of thousands of folks' grandparents grew up in 91 other counties of insignificance in this state, and perhaps millions of grandchildren and great grandchildren and so on will never know everything about their families. The composition of Indiana is more than just its people; it is a million stories, untold, never known, forgotten, modified, buried, preserved, pondered.

And celebrating the Bicentennial is, in a way, celebrating each of the long-passed, long-forgotten, anonymous folks that have populated our state and its history. The weathered farmers, the steel workers, the housewives who were never just housewives, the politicians who steered us to where we are now (for better or for worse), the earnest civil servants, the freemen who fled the South, the Klansmen who persecuted them and brought shame to our doorstep, the hundreds and thousands who have lived and died in this state without making the Hoosier Hall of Fame. We are all part of the history of this plucky, overlooked, defensive state, and we are celebrating our own anonymous spot in the ongoing history. Maybe, just maybe, acknowledging that is my own Bicentennial Project.

Oh Hell, She's Cookin' Now!

Cookery. 

I love the sound of that word--the rhythm of the consonants, the way the word just kind of rolls along. It's one of the words that sounds like what it conveys; it not only sounds edible but actually rather delicious.

So many of my memories of my grandmother--my Mawga--involve her in the kitchen. I suppose it's not such a remarkable thing; she was a product of Midcentury America, after all. By the I was a little girl in the 1980s attending elementary school, being told I could be a President or an astronaut by female teachers who were probably once told that was all they could hope to become, my grandmother was still at home, cooking.

The sizzle of smelly salmon patties. The warning hiss of the pressure cooker. The clatter and rattle of the cast iron skillet against the stove as she popped popcorn in preparation for our Saturday night tradition of popcorn and The Golden Girls. My hands, squelching through the raw meat and bread crumbs as we rolled meatballs. Her hands, as she rolled and cut egg noodles, as she spread pink icing over my birthday cake. Her voice, reflecting that she might make Sue's chicken that night. (Who the hell was Sue, anyway?) My grandfather,  making cameo appearances as he mashed the potatoes vigorously every Thanksgiving (to this day, mashed potatoes, no matter how fancy or locally-sourced or foodie-ish, don't taste the same; they lack the quiet, stubborn strength and loyalty that came through my grandfather's potato masher) and grilled hamburgers and hotdogs every Memorial Day, every Fourth of July, every Labor Day.

Yet for all the cooking she did, she didn't do much to teach me how to cook. The one cooking lesson my Mawga gave me was pretty terse: "If you can read, you can cook." I can't say that I ever sought out her tutelage, as Eldest Sister did--I remember, as both Mawga and Eldest progressed in age, Mawga ceded more and more culinary power and responsibility to Eldest. Over the years, I've made a few pretty half-hearted efforts at cookery, and in recent years, less and less. Scoots Magoo was usually condescending at best, slightly mocking at worst, when I attempted to cook, and as our home life disintegrated in other ways, it was less and less of a pleasure to cook.

Well, f**k that noise. I'm home. And I can read. So I can cook.

Not in Kansas...er, California...anymore.

Tornados and I have a longstanding relationship.

The summer I was 10, I began to have nightmares about them. Chaotic funnels emerging vindictively from black skies while I watched and worried, Am I safe? What about my family? What about my blue blanket? Sure, I was 10 years old, so OF COURSE I was worried about my security blanket. (Still am, to this day, in all fairness.) But I was 10 years old and worried about my family and having dreams of something that basically represents uncontrolled chaos. If that's not a telling indication of my neuroses to come...

The summer I was 16, I watched Twister. Who didn't?

I still love that movie. Who doesn't?

February of 1998, I was in my first (and so far, only) tornado. It was an EF2, and it came at us very quickly. There wasn't time to be terrified--there was barely enough time to charge to my grandparents' bedroom and wake them up and take shelter in the closet. Down in Florida, we didn't have the benefit of basements or tornado sirens. Ugh.

When I came to Indiana (Round One) I knew there would be weather--accompanied by the weird warbling wail of tornado sirens, piercing the heavy, humid spring and fall air. And there was, and I grew used to it. And then, when I came back to Indiana (Round Two) I was stupidly eager for the wild weather.

Last night, I got my wish. The weather was stormy all evening, but at one point, I heard the faint sound of the tornado sirens, and so I started to hustle. I grabbed Indiana, threw him in the downstairs bathroom, and hunted down Austen. I threw Austen in the downstairs bathroom, but as I did, out popped Indiana, who led me on a merry chase while I not-so-silently cursed him. No sooner did I catch him and throw him back in the bathroom, did Austen dart out. 

So, five minutes later (plenty of time for a death storm of doom to bring an abrupt end to my Indiana fairytale), the three of us were finally all stowed away in the downstairs bathroom, 

...Indiana, making safety his utmost priority,

And Austen, not so much. 

20 minutes later, after a lot of rain and not much else, we emerged and carried on with our evening. Turned out a tornado had touched down about 25 miles to the west of us...no damage reported. But honestly, after the tornado of chaos my life was for the last several years...this is pretty darned preferable.

Just so long as the tornado doesn't pick up my house and deposit it in California. 

And just like that, a month has passed. And what a month it has been--filled with all of the things that I've missed about Indiana. The food, the people, the weather, the land. The strangest thing is allowing myself to adjust to the fact that I don't need to get everything done in a certain amount of time. Always before, I was vacationing here, and had to cram in this event, that sightseeing, those friends in a limited period of time, and if I didn't get a chance, well, I'd have to wait for the next time.

Now, of course, there is no end point (other than death, but let's not focus too much on that just now), because I am never ever ever moving away from Indiana again, so there's more time--all the time, actually--to see and do and experience and taste and explore. Of course, I thought that before, when I lived here for grad school, and put off many things, to my detriment. So it's a tricky balance, permitting myself to do things at my leisure, and yet not putting them off. And it's made all the trickier by working 5 days a week, and still trying to get settled in. Turns out moving cross-country is no mean feat.

Not a day goes by that I don't pause and remind myself that I am so frickin blessed to be here. I keep waiting for the reality to settle in (perhaps it will with my first paycheck), keep waiting for the blues, for loneliness, for regret. But so far, there is none. None at all. There's only me, and this day here in Hoosierville, and my determination to enjoy every minute, hour, day, week, month, and year of it. I will live and die here, and I want to make sure that there's a lot of life in the living part of it.

No more wishing I was somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else.

Just me, here, now.

The first two weeks

It's hard to believe that I am coming up on the end of my second week at home. Some days, the routine and quotidian demands and ongoing annoyances of a cross-country move keep me from really pondering on the profundity of all that's happened. And then there are some moments when reality slams into me and it's oh holy cow, how did I manage to make this my life again?

I reckon I spent so long being unhappy and missing it here, I forced myself to think that it would never be different.

Anyway. Here are a few highlights...


The Homecoming:

I rolled into town around rush hour--ha, "rush hour"--and immediately made tracks for the place where I'm now living. Within two hours, I was vegging out on the couch with my friend/slumlord, eating pizza, watching Archer, and trying to coax the kitties out of the various improbable hidey-holes they managed to winkle themselves into.


The Home: 

I love where I am living. Slowly (slower still because of the dickhole jerkface movers) I am nesting and trying to light the home fires.  Like the last place I lived, this is the perfect set-up. My friend/slumlord travels quite a bit, so I have been rattling about the townhouse on my own. My window overlooks the front of the house and the surrounding homes, and it's pretty much idyllic. The cats are settling in, and so am I. 

The Family and Friends:
I left Indiana right around the time that MySpace, and not long after that, Facebook, became The Thing. And say what you want about the pervasiveness of technology, the shallowness of social media, etc.--Facebook has been an absolute godsend to me. I've kept my Indiana ties strong in part because of it, was able to see lots of folks and keep in touch and easily make plans on my vacations. (And, ahem, maybe send the occasional very tipsily honest late-night Facebook message.) And so when I came home, it wasn't long before folks came calling, and they have all been sources of warmth, laughter, relieved smiles, and good-humored agreements to my various crackpot plans.

One especially fun evening, my friends Michael and Anna (Manna!) 

came over to help me assemble various pieces of crappy furniture...which basically

 meant that Michael assembled the furniture while Anna and I drank cider and heckled him. 

Right after I landed, it was Easter, so I headed over to Manna's to spend the evening with them. In my long-proclaimed but little-exercised status as Crazy Aunt Mel, I helped their son, Wesley, and their friends' daughter Lucy, dye Easter eggs, and I quickly learned a valuable lesson: when parents are presented with a remotely responsible adult to help out with the children, the parents do have a way of mysteriously disappearing. Can't say as I blame them--it's a chance for them to have adult quiet time!

Wesley is demonstrating how we could decorate our eggs. "This is just an egg-sample," 

he says helpfully, and of course his pun-loving dad heartily approved.

After our Easter dinner (homemade focaccia pizza) we noticed that the weather was turning stormy, so I took off after that pretty sharpish. Which brings us to...


The Weather:

Not five minutes after leaving, the storm whooshed in--storms here move so quickly--and I was startled by a loud bang on the car roof. Hail! I can't remember ever having driven through a hail storm--and it was harder than driving through any rain or fog. Visibility was awful, and I was terrified that some baseball-sized chunk of frozen death would crack my windshield.

Both myself and my beleaguered car finally made it home unscathed, and we were welcomed back by a hearty layer of the hail, all over the block.

Since then, we've had wind, rain, freezing nights, and beautiful spring days. My favorites, of course, are the ominous storms that come up so quickly and leave you breathless with equal parts dread and excitement.

Food:

AUUUUURGH, the food! As one of my Indy friends put it, "there's no reason NOT to eat locally-grown things." She's right, of course, given all of the farms around here. I don't know that I can taste a difference, Philistine that I am, but it seems like there are so many restaurants that are local affairs, that take pride in pretentiously delicious dishes. Most memorable food so far: strawberry shortcake from Louie's Wine Dive, and the fried green tomato BLT from Sweetgrass.

Except...I'm trying to a bit of cooking myself, and made a "lightened up" broccoli-cheese soup that was absolutely delicious! It's lovely to live in a chilly place where I can cook and eat comfort foods like this.

There are so many other things that I could wax ecstatic upon--the seasons, the architecture, my new job, the plans that I'm hatching for the life ahead of me. But for now, I think I shall heat up the last of that delicious soup and contemplate the rainy day that is supposed to come along tomorrow.

This is what blessed, peaceful bliss feels like.

Third Time's The Charm...

"But she wasn't back where she'd started; she'd simply arrived where she'd left off, this time smarter and stronger and maybe even stripped of illusions." -Kate Bollick


The First Time of Significance...

The fall I was 14, my paternal grandmother--a dotty old woman we called Lady Sue, I don't even know why--called me up, all excited because she had gotten a good deal on an airplane ticket and wanted to fly me up to see her and her husband, my Grandpa Fritz. (Again, not sure why we called him that. They were a couple of odd ducks to be sure; to this day my sisters and I recall an incident concerning them and a fight over ketchup and peas, and no one remembers the outcome, but we sure as heck remember the fight).

So I flew up to Indianapolis in October 1994 and visited my grandparents, and their son, my uncle, picked me up and drove me down to Bloomington. It was a great place to live, he told me. He raved about what a young, vibrant feel the place had, what with it being a university town and all. I was 14; to me, college was ages away and only promised troubling things like...College Algebra. The only other things about Bloomington that stood out to me were the grey, chilly weather and the piles of dead leaves; accustomed as I was to the balmy climes of Florida, this was a novelty to me, and I begged my uncle to let me rake his lawn.

The Second Time of Significance...

The late summer of 2004, when I was 24, I arrived in Bloomington, chased out of Florida by a hurricane. I was excited to live somewhere brand-new and completely different, and for the first six weeks of my time there, I was completely starry-eyed, enchanted with the old buildings and houses, the swarms of young people, the amazing variety of foods, the different trees and climate...Of course, the feeling didn't last; grad school and real life and yes, winter and the feeling of being trapped in a small town all overwhelmed me, and while I still loved it, the novelty wore off.

The Third Time of Significance...

Now. Right Now. Spring of 2016, almost 10 years since I moved away from Bloomington, I am back. Yesterday, when driving through the downtown area to meet up with friends for lunch, that old sense of wonder tugged at me a little. Bloomington is a bit magical--"a town forever young", I once read it described as--but I am not forever young. I am not 14 or 24. I'm almost 36, about to be divorced, basically circling back around to the beginning and trying to pick up a different thread of my life story. It's almost like, when I was young, I'd read the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels in reverse,  carefully following which storylines and choices took me to the best outcome. Only I'm doing it now, living my life in reverse a little.

 I don't have many dreams and hopes beyond what has driven me over the past year--stay alive, get divorced, protect yourself, get out. Now that all of that has been accomplished... I'm not thinking too much about anything else other than "being successful at my new job" and "being worthy of this new third time..." I don't really know what comes next. But I've been given a chance, and this time, I hope I get it right.