Seasonal Reading

On the day of the dead, when the year too dies...

Cader Idris, by umbrellasheep

There are certain books that are forever linked in my mind with specific seasons. It's October again, and as I do every year, I'm rereading Susan Cooper's The Grey King.

Set in late October in the mountains of northwest Wales, The Grey King paints its scenes with Cooper's typical precision. One of her most striking gifts is the ability to integrate the minutiae of time and place into her stories so that the land and the seasons become characters in their own right. Take, for example, a passage from The Grey King:

... he peered out at the little grey town as the windscreen wipers tried in vain, twitch-creak, twitch-creak, to banish the fine misty rain from the glass. Deserted shops lined the little street, and a few bent figures in raincoats scurried by; he saw a church, a small hotel, more neat houses. Then the road was widening and they were out between trim hedges, with open fields beyond, and green hills rising against the sky: a grey sky, featureless with mist....

Rhys turned the car inland, towards the mountains, and almost at once Will had a strange new feeling of enclosure, almost of menace. The little road was narrow here, like a tunnel, with its high grass banks and looming hedges like green walls on either side. Whenever they passed the gap where a hedge opened to a field through a gate, he could see the green-brown bulk of hillsides rearing up at the grey sky. And ahead, as bends in the road showed the open sky briefly through the trees, a higher fold of grey hills loomed in the distance, disappearing into ragged cloud. Will felt he was in a part of Britain like none he had ever known before: a secret, enclosed place, with powers hidden in its shrouded centuries at which he could not begin to guess.

Stone hut in Snowdonia, by magnuscanis

I don't know when I first read the books in the Dark Is Rising cycle, but now I can't see the trees changing colors without wanting to reach for The Grey King, just as the smell of pine needles and the metallic tang of snow makes me wish to curl up with The Dark Is Rising (book 2 in the series).

Cooper is one of the rare authors who uses her setting as something more than just a frame on which to hang her narrative. Like a candle in a dark room, she picks out elements of beauty from the treasure trove of British and Celtic legends, yet leaves a sense of infinite mystery hanging just beyond the light. The world her stories inhabit seems to exist long before and long after her characters come to life.

Two of the five books in Cooper's young adult fantasy cycle received Newbery nods. In the hands of a lesser author, they might have been reduced to narrow cubbies like "action-adventure," "neo-Celtic Arthurian fantasy," or the dreaded "bittersweet coming-of-age story." The Dark Is Rising books both inhabit and transcend these genres; they are true classics.

What books do you read every year, and when?

Anne and Laura

A bedroom in the original "Green Gables"

I’ve recently started rereading the “Anne of Green Gables” books. Maybe I was inspired by a Facebook meme asking me to list the 15 books I’ll never forget. Maybe “Green Gables” is my official summer reading, infused as it is with memories of Junetime PBS pledge drives and afternoons too hot to do anything but read.

I think the real reason, though, is that I’m getting married in seven weeks. The “Little House on the Prairie” and “Green Gables” books shaped my ideas of womanhood like no other books I’ve ever read. As I prepare for my wedding, I revisit these touchstones of my girlhood to remind myself who I used to be and learn again who I am.

What strikes me now is how different they have appeared to me as I’ve grown. Following Anne and Laura in their journeys to adulthood, I can trace the evolution of my own attitudes toward adulthood and marriage. When I first read them, I was nine or ten or twelve years old and they embodied everything I wanted to be. I, too, was precocious, dreamy, gawky, the smartest in my class. Of course I dressed up as Laura Ingalls Wilder for Halloween! My life, I thought, was on an orderly path to a career in teaching, qualified independence, and the inevitable wedding to my Gilbert Blythe or Almanzo Wilder. Since there was no romantically-charged academic rivalry between me and any of my classmates, I figured the Almanzo model—quietly heroic, plainspoken—would be my fate.

After a few years at my feminist-leaning all-girls Catholic high school (yes, they do exist!), my opinion of the Green Gables and Little House books was entirely different. My readings of my childhood favorites were tinged with contempt; Anne and Laura forsook promising careers to get married and… that’s it? They quit? Just to spend all their time worrying about jam and babies? They might have been good enough icons for, say, the unenlightened 1950’s, but surely the late twentieth century needed feminine examples better suited to reversing millennia of male oppression.

I didn’t read Anne and Laura’s stories for many years after that, thinking that I’d left them behind. Then I met Tony. Our courtship was uneventful except for the remarkable serendipity of our first meeting—not storybook material at all. In the weeks and months leading up to our wedding, we talked about the future: careers, houses, children. I was surprised at the desires I found myself expressing, incompatible with the relentless ambition I once believed to be my duty as a Western woman.

Now, as I read their stories again, Anne and Laura’s choices don’t seem like inevitable defeat at the hands of the patriarchy. What stands out are their rebellions, the fierce spirit that inspired them to strike out on their own in times when women still depended on men for their livelihoods—and then to negotiate marriage on their own terms. I’m reminded that while a wedding may be the end of one book, it is the beginning of another.

Laundry Day

While Tony slaved away at 14-hour days at his company's conference in San Francisco, I decided to surprise him by doing the laundry. All of it. At the same time.

Understand, we have a washer-dryer in our penthouse urban paradise. It's small, meaning that I have to wash the bedclothes one sheet at a time, and so slow that a full cycle of regular clothing can take up to two and a half hours and still be damp at the end. The fact that this sort of arrangement is ubiquitous in Europe (at least according to our landlord) is small comfort. Though we manage to keep up well enough with our day to day needs, you can imagine how the nonessentials pile up. Add to that the magnificent wedding shower gift of new sheets and towels, and our situation had become dire.

So I rented a station wagon (!!!) from Zipcar and threw ginormous bundles of laundry down the stairwell. Linus, who had already suffered through the trauma of Tony's 4am departure, was convinced that I was packing up and leaving him forever and began a howling fit commensurate to his grief. (Nothing in this life is always sunshine and puppydogs. Not even puppydogs.)

It took 4 giant washing machines, three and a half hours, and one emergency trip to the ATM, but we finally have clean sheets again. Sometimes the suburban life is very appealing.

(Ed.: Sorry for the repost. Mobile uploading didn't go as I planned)

The Power of the Mocha

Tony, enjoying a mocha at our favorite coffee shop (where everyone really does know our names). It's the only thing that makes him human in the morning.

It has long been our habit to compete with each other in making absurd puns using the word "mocha". Typically we select a theme such as slogans (in mocha we trust), Christmas carols, or hymns (what a friend we have in mocha!). Then the last person to dissolve in helpless laughter is the winner.

I like our rituals.

Making subway rides go faster

Behold my latest effort: socks. The yarn is that niftiest of inventions, self-striping sock yarn (who knew?). It is handed down from a friend who had to give away some of her stash when she moved into a smaller apartment. The delicious irony? Tony and I now live in the same size apartment, two floors up from her. Yes. They are small.

My needles are US size 1 -- just about the thinnest you can get -- and are made of bamboo. They are light and flexible; using them is like knitting with toothpicks. The stitch marker that mark sthe beginning of the heel section is actually a light bulb-shaped paperclip. Ah, electric industry swag.

Where I stand on the risk ladder

On April Fool's night, Wednesday, April 1, Tony came home from work and began to rearrange our living room for his weekly poker game. He slid the sofa into the kitchen, carried the coffee table into the bedroom, and extracted his motley collection of folding chairs from the corners they inhabit six and a half days a week in our tiny apartment. Suddenly his phone rang, flashing my name. He picked it up: "Hey." A strange voice answered: "There's been an accident. You're going to have to go to the hospital." What happened, Tony wanted to know, which hospital? "I'll call you back."


At the same time, I was stretched out on the side of a rain-slick road, trembling from shock and fear and cold, feeling my way around the holes in my memory. I had awoken to lights and strange faces in my eyes. They wanted to know what day it was. My lower lip was swollen and sticky with blood.

In the month since crashing my 150cc motorscooter in the warehouse district near Gallaudet University, I've tried to stitch together my patchwork memories. Based on what I remember and what the paramedics told me, I think I lost traction on a right-hand turn and panicked, slamming on the rear brakes. Braking in the middle of a turn is one of the worst things you can do on a motorcycle. Instead of laying the scooter down on the right side and collecting a few bruises, I caused the scooter to flip violently to the left, throwing me off to land on my face (judging by the gouges on my helmet) and slide down the road. The paramedics told me with some admiration that I must have practically hydroplaned on the wet street.

I don't know how long I was unconscious; I don't know who called the ambulance. When I woke up, my helmet, jacket and gloves had already been removed and my jeans were soaking wet. The paramedics, jolly and gentle, put a plastic collar around my neck and strapped me to a board for the ride to the hospital. With effort, I told them Tony's phone number from memory and insisted repeatedly that they had to call him. I tried to tell them that it was poker night and someone with a car would be able to give him a ride.

The paramedics left me in the hospital waiting room, still immobilized in the stretcher. I never learned their names.

Uncontrollable shivering. A desperate need to use the bathroom, followed by a near-disaster when my left leg collapsed as I tried to stand up. X-ray. CAT scan. Tony arriving with dry clothes. Nothing broken, though my left knee was swollen and my left calf hurt so much I couldn't bear to have it touched. Going home on crutches at 2am.

A month later, I can once again walk and turn my head and lift my left arm above shoulder level. There's an unexplained achy lump in my left calf, which might be a blood clot, a torn muscle, or a knot that never loosened. I'm still waiting to hear from the doctor.

Tony and my family weren't surprised that I was back on my scooter the next week. Others marveled that I had the courage to ride again, but here's the thing: when you choose to engage in potentially dangerous activity, you decide how much risk you're willing to take. Then you live with that decision. I spent a lot of money on good riding gear and everything that I bought did the job that it was supposed to do: the armor in my jacket prevented me from dislocating my shoulder, the chin bar on my helmet kept my face in one piece, the gloves ensured that I still have skin on my hands.

I knew what I was getting into. I may never look at turns the same way again, but the crash hasn't changed my attitude toward riding. That's life: you pays your money and you takes your chances.

Turn and face the strange changes, Part 1

Dear Friends and Fans,

I've been meaning to send the Official Meganomics Update for some time, but I kept delaying my efforts because several major life issues were still in flux, and I wanted to have something concrete and certain to write.

After three months of apartment agony, Tony and I have finally moved. We rent a top-floor apartment in a condo building that, like so many ambitious condo projects in DC after the economic downturn, has been converted into rental units. It has many luxury yuppie fixin's like granite countertops, a balcony, and one of those nifty kitchen sink faucets that pulls out and converts to a sprayer (whee!). We are very happy with it (the animals are unanimously in favor of the sunny south-facing balcony), and we anticipate staying here for a while. The only drawback is that the downstairs neighbor complains that she can hear Linus's toenails clicking through the hardwood floor, but clearly she's deranged because Linus is perfect in every way. I'm just glad not to be moving every six months anymore!

Linus works on his tan

New home... for now

Earlier this fall, no longer able to stand the hour-long commute separating us, Tony and I moved in together. It's a choice that I would never, in my devout Catholic girlhood, have imagined making. I still have some old-fashioned beliefs about relationships.

But DC is big, expensive and hard to get around if you don't have a car. Our houses were five miles apart on opposite sides of the Potomac river: a 25 minute trip by car, but an hour or more by public transportation. It grew harder and harder to bear the vagaries of DC subway travel and to limit our time together to a rigidly-outlined dating schedule. If one of us went away, even for a few days, we might not see each other for over a week.

My lease ended in November, so we began a tentative apartment hunt in August. We had just about settled on a well-run apartment complex in the Maryland suburb of Silver Spring--a little far from downtown DC but quiet and pleasant--when the owners of our favorite coffee shop, where we've been eating twice a week for a year, told us that their friends were almost finished renovating the upstairs apartment of the house next door.

Well.

A ten-minute walk from a metro station in the neighborhood I've grown to love AND easy access to the best mochas in DC? We were sold. It seemed too good to be true.

And, of course, it was. The owners promised us several renovations, some of which were still incomplete when we moved in. That was ok. We could be understanding tenants. No mailbox? Letters could slide under the door! A front door that only locks with a padlock, from the outside? Someone had been hired to redesign the whole entrance--and designers are so unreliable! Anemic heat? You know how old buildings can be!

Then the kitchen sink started to leak. Our landlords would call a plumber and ask us to meet him during work hours... and then he wouldn't show. After another couple of days and more phone calls, the landlords would hire another plumber, who might show up or not. And another. After eight weeks and a complete replacement of the (newly installed) disposal and pipes, the sink only leaks a little, small drips easily caught in a cereal bowl that I dump out once a week or so. We've kind of given up on that because we have bigger issues to deal with.

The first time I ever ran the clothes dryer at night, it shorted out the current for our whole apartment. That's because all the outlets in our apartment are--wait for it--wired to a single circuit. The apartment is under-powered for the number of appliances it contains, so our landlord was supposed to apply to PEPCO (our local electric company) to increase the voltage sent to the apartment. PEPCO has no record of any such application. For now, we have to turn off the heat every time we run the dryer. I forgot today and had to replace yet another fuse.

Tony is bent on getting our of here with our security deposit and credit rating intact, so he began the grievance process by sending our landlords a letter listing all the housing codes the apartment violates (at least four) and threatening to schedule an inspection with the local housing agency if they haven't begun repairs in two weeks. Did I mention that Tony is my hero? He is now in charge of all customer service complaints.

For my part, I am ambivalent about leaving. The apartment is inconvenient at best and, with our exits impeded front and back (the fire escape is bent and rusty), dangerous at worst. Ok. But it offers a lot of things that many other places won't: we can have the animals with no problem; I can store the scooter, the bike, and the trailer in our back yard; and the kitchen is a glorious, gorgeous expanse of sunlight from its south-facing windows and storm door. That picture above? That's Linus on his private sun porch, where he guards the approach to our "castle" while enjoying the greenhouse effect. Plus, I dream of growing herbs--maybe even potatoes!--on the fire escape come spring.

I just want our landlords to fix the problems so we don't have to move again (remind me to tell you about the sofa delivery nightmare sometime). Tony wants to live in a place that has adequate heat and power supply. The saga of the kitchen sink has shown us that improvements, if they come, will be lengthy, inconvenient and unreliable.

We're in for an exciting couple of months. These days find me more and more nostalgic for the beautiful little apartment I had in Winston-Salem, where I paid $450 a month to live by myself near a park in the center of town AND had stained-glass windows. Alas.

But there's an upside: Tony is here at last. Forever.

Season's Greetings

Several readers have asked, most flatteringly, for updates. I hope to provide some soon. In the meantime, we extend from our family to yours our very best wishes for a peaceful and love-filled holiday season.

Merry Christmas* and Happy New Year from Megan, Tony, Linus and Pepper!

(* retroactive ;-) )

Million-dollar dog strikes again

Linus has contracted kennel cough, a common disease among dogs that is essentially canine bronchitis. It is noisy, unpleasant, and inconvenient for the both of us (phlegmy coughs = no sleep and frequent cleanup). He's responded very well to antibiotics and doggie Sudafed, however-- even though the latter made him so dopey that he often seemed to lose track of simple things, like where he was and what he meant to do next.

This is the first real health problem Linus has had in a year, so I should count myself lucky. Though his immune system may always be weak, his recent second birthday marked the close of a happy and mostly healthy year. He has attained his final weight (45 pounds) and established an ever-widening fan club in the DC area.

Linus's birthday will always be special to me. After the first year, my family and I held a party to celebrate the achievement of his simply surviving for that difficult twelve months. This year, I am reminded how precarious his puppy days were, and how grateful I should be for the cheerful, sturdy dog he's become.

This year's birthday present was a new dog bed, as Tony firmly nixed the bringing of any of Linus's old, scavenged, ratty beds into our new apartment (new apartment! Soon! Hooray!). After a good deal of searching, I found a bed that was well-built, washable, and stuffed with recycled soda bottles to satisfy Linus's desire to be an environmentally friendly dog (not that I'm projecting or anything). Here it is, with the center cushion, arranged just the way he likes it:

A far cry from this sad specimen, no?



One reason I've never wanted to work for an animal shelter is my certain knowledge that I would want to save every animal that entered the doors, and fail, and continually be breaking my heart. It is that knowledge that makes me so grateful for the chance to have saved one unfortunate creature, even if I can't save them all.

I hab a code

Bleh.


more animals

The first cold of the season has struck Tony, my officemate, and me. I blame Tony for bringing it with him to said officemate's debate party last Friday (Obama FTW, by the way!).

Of course it's unfair of me to pin this all on poor Tony, who heaven knows did his own share of suffering. He and I have a tacit agreement, however: I am allowed to get irrationally angry at stupid things, as long as I take out my anger on him and not on myself as I did in my scarier and less healthy days. Strange maybe, but it works for us.

Mysterious Ways

One year and five days ago, Tony and I attempted to meet at a neighborhood bar for drinks, an occasion now officially known as The Worst First Date Ever to Have a Second Date (TM).

Two months and 17 days ago--on my birthday--he asked me to marry him. I cried. And then I said yes.
He is one of the best gifts God has ever given me.

Back in the saddle

Where to begin? A friend, having recently resumed blog-writing after an absence of many months, suggested that it is easier to begin in medias res than to risk the distraction of a lengthy and complicated catch-up entry. I am tempted to follow her advice, except that I couldn't write without reference to all the things, good, bad and wonderful, that have happened in the interim. It has been an eventful four months.

I shall catch you up, faithful readers, but I will do so by taking the advice of that other cyber-authority, Manolo the Shoeblogger, and writing lots of posts. With pictures.

What's that you say?

The first draft isn't due till April 15th?
Dave Olson, you are the best thesis advisor ever!

The Moment of Truth. What a fucker.

Very soon, I'll have to stop researching and organizing and start... writing. I hate that part.

Thesis (or not)

You're probably going to be seeing a lot more posts from me now, since I'm supposed to be writing my Master's thesis. The first draft is due April 1.

I'm writing about measurement in the nonprofit field--specifically, how grantmakers and foundations measure and evaluate "success" in this often-nebulous field. Details to come soon, as my procrastination becomes ever more frantic.

Here, have a picture of Linus in luxury:


Oh, and I have inadvertently grown Mushroom-Zilla. More soon.

Bonjour le monde!

We return (again). Wow, two and a half [ed: now three] months. What happened? Well, there was Christmas and the ensuing madness. Tony spent the Christmas week at his parent's house in Michigan, which was awful and led to us agreeing never, ever, ever to spend Christmas apart again. Then when he came back to DC, he brought a special present back just for me: a nasty Northern cold that robbed me of my voice and left me bedridden for days. But not in an interesting 19th-century heroine kind of way--more like a crotchety great-uncle who lays around and moans and never actually sleeps though he always claims to be tired, and who always wants to know "Where's my chicken soup? I said I wanted chicken soup BRING-ME-MY-SOUP-DAMMIT!"

Suffice to say, I am not a good invalid.

Then, even while I was recovering from the Plague, I got a new part-time job waiting tables at a local restaurant. The characters are, of course, novel-worthy subjects and I can't complain with the money, but the late nights kick my ass. For the first couple of weeks, I had to take an extra-long lunch break every day so I could nap--or I would visibly nod off in meetings and lose track of crucial details (like proofreading our ads). Now I schedule my naps. The Sunday afternoon doze had become A Priority, and woe to anyone who interferes with it.

You know what else has been kicking my ass? Winter. I was fine through Valentine's Day. But then it was Lent, a time of penance and sacrifice, and it was SO COLD, and I foolishly gave up tea as my Lenten sacrifice, and it's SO COLD, and there are no more holidays till Easter and I'M READY FOR IT TO BE SPRING WAAAAHHHH. Honestly, I've just given up. I wear a full layer of SmartWool under my clothes at all time and I put on my down parka even when I bike. You win, Winter.

We finally received our first heating bill this [ed: last] month and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, with the result that the heat for the house has been turned down to Arctic levels. Here's how the we're dealing with it:

Seriously, I drew the line and started running a space heater in my room when I noticed that Linus was visibly shivering.

And what else has been keeping me busy? Well, being miserable at my day job has kind of sucked all my energy away. I realized two weeks in that it wasn't going to be a good fit for me and determined to stick it out for at least a year, but I'm starting to reach the end of my rope. My boss isn't a bad person, but he's not a particularly good boss. And Marketing? Totally not my bag. But there is hope on the horizon, maybe! And look--much-deserving, ever-struggling Beth has a new job that she's excited about--so miracles really do happen.

Speaking of miracles:

Tony, as quiet and as essential to me as air.

Exhibit A in the Good vs. Evil debate

Taken over 6 months ago in Winston (ah, my lovely lost apartment!). He is now taller and more graceful, but otherwise pretty much the same.


As Tony Metro observed, "Obsessed with socks from an early age."

Good puppy? Evil puppy? Traffic light puppy?

You decide!

Gas attack!

After taking advantage of Nate and Rebekah's generous hospitality long enough, I realized it was time for Linus and me to find a more permanent temporary home in DC--one where I could have cats and ransom my beloved Pepper from my parents' house. Through my connections with a neighborhood maven, I heard of a beautiful townhouse for rent five blocks from where I was living. I jumped on the opportunity, advertised the other two bedrooms on Craigslist, and after a hectic four-week roommate-hunting period was all set to move in.

Then the day after we all moved in one of my roomies detected a gas leak. We thought it might be in the basement crawl space, so we brought some plumbers out. Three separate plumbers came out over the course of four (heatless and stoveless) days, took a look at the 12" x 18" entrance to the crawl space, and unceremoniously left. A fourth might have been willing to chance it, but discovered that the gas was running through illegal copper pipes and refused to touch the job for fear of liability issues.

Finally Plumber #5, clearly an outside-of-the box kind of guy, conducted a more systematic inquiry and found the leak--right by the gas meter, where anyone could have turned it off.

So now we have heat and--we hope--the problem is fixed. The owner (who didn't know about any of this before Plumber #4 pointed it out) plans to have all the illegal pipes taken out and replaced with...whatever it is you're supposed to run gas through, but obviously none of us is eager to do this in winter as it involved shutting off the heat for several days while contractors rip up the basement and, quite possibly, the kitchen. So we're going to try to get through the winter and hope nothing else happens. Not the ideal solution, but there it is.

Really makes you rethink the joys of home ownership.