Writing and Other Household Chores

About two weeks ago, I was in the kitchen, scrounging through the refrigerator hoping to pull together a meal with leftovers.

"Don't take this the wrong way, Mom," said 17, from a chair at the table. "But you don't really...umm...you know...cook anymore."

I'm sure she was expecting me to argue. Her face registered surprise at my response.

"Yeah, I know. Food doesn't seem as important to me as it used to."

I have devoted a good portion of my life as a mother to food. Not only the making of it, but the art of it, creating a table of menus for the week, adding quotes about hunger and appetite and delayed gratification at the top, setting the table with real dishes and clothes napkins.

My efforts didn't stop at dinner. When we hit the high school years, with kids coming home all hours of the evening, as someone else was leaving for work or play practice or a game, I came up with family breakfasts. I often woke up at 5am to make homemade pancakes, a particularly time-sensitive batter that had to set 20 minutes before being poured onto the griddle. Other mornings, I made breakfast burritos, yogurt and fruit smoothies, or grilled peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. The night before, we set up an assembly line for everyone to make their own lunches.

These days, money gets direct deposited into their lunch account, which was set up by my husband. When the balance gets low, he gets a notice to replenish the account. I am not sure if the cost varies that much, particularly now, with my time becoming more and more precious.

That day in the kitchen, 17 listed some of her favorite dinners that I "used to make." Fried rice, roasted red pepper soup, pasta salad, none of them fancy dishes that took excessive time to prepare. What they did take was planning, and creative energy, to put together meals that offered a somewhat balanced menu for each of our eaters (one vegetarian, two self-proclaimed carnivores, one with egg allergies, and a young one who would eat anything as long as it came from my plate.) And shopping, making a detailed grocery list, stopping at the bread outlet, the farmer's market and a couple of grocery stores. These days, my creative energy is going other places, like into these blog posts, as well as revision of my current collection of short stories, submission of completed stories to literary journals, meetings with my writing group, and working on art pieces to sell for income.

To be completely honest, cooking isn't the only chore I have fallen behind on. My kids and husband have been doing their own laundry for years, but at this point, I am usually wearing my last clean pair of socks. I drive my car until the last second before making time to get gas. I don't chaperone school field trips. We regularly run out of toilet paper, as well as toothpaste and laundry detergent (Fortunately, our milk gets delivered).

And I have not bought a single Christmas present this year. I am even contemplating giving them money.

Which brings me to my biggest question so far. How did Sophie do it?

I researched the site of the Tolstoy's summer home. The home itself has been preserved just as it was when Sophie and Leo lived there. Their grandson operates a hotel on the site, as well as a cafe which uses Sophia's recipes. I read that they have developed an app that would allow me to download her recipes to make in my own kitchen. It is only available in Russian, though they expect to launch an English version in 2015.

Great. Then what will I do? I am reminded of the documentary about women artists, Who Does She Think She Is, in which one of women says, "I needed a wife too."

The rub is that I enjoy(ed) doing things for my family. But I want to do more than support their lives. I want my own. I have stories that need to be written. And the further I get into this project, the louder their voices become in my head. So the problem becomes a matter of choice, Sophie's choice. I can either go crazy trying to suppress the creative calling in my head while tending to my family, or I can let some things fall away. Day by day I am deciding what those things are, trying to avoid the narcisstic trap of the artist, keeping it in balance with the needs of my family. I don't think that I will find an answer to this dilemma, in part because my life is not static. Just as I shifted from family dinners to family breakfasts, I will have to stay resilient, bending to pick up something that gets dropped along the way, holding on to as much as I can, and hoping, hoping, that it is all worth it.

 

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Souvenirs

I spent yesterday at the British Library. Yes, the British Libary, in London. About two weeks ago, my husband called and asked if I would like to join him on a short trip that he had to make for work. In uncharacteristic style, I said yes,without considering the consequences, like childcare and my daughter's winter band concert and deadlines. Had I thought about those things, I definitely would not be here.

And I would not have seen Jane Austen's hand written manuscript of Persuasion, the pages on which Charlotte Bronte wrote the death of Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic. Or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Within the manuscript were revisions suggested by her husband Percy Shelley. Beside the manuscript was a letter from Lord Byron describing it as "wonderful book considering it was written by a nineteen-year-old woman."

The previous day, I toured Windsor Castle, where I saw handwritten journals pages from Elizabeth I, a letter to Queen Victoria from Abraham Lincoln, and my personal favorite, the diary of 11-year-old Elizabeth II, opened to the page describing her parents' coronation as King and Queen of England. The young future queen describes the gentleman she didn't know who led them out of the cathedral to a room, where they had tea and cakes before.... at this point she reaches the end of the page, which I cannot turn as it is behind glass. The words are written in pencil, and for some reason, this strikes me as remarkable.

I have already purchased a pencil in the gift shop, my standard souvenir. It is red, with WINDSOR CASTLE written down the side and a tiny gold crown on top. I like pencils as souvenirs, for many reasons. One, I don't have to worry about size. It is easy to pack and inexpensive. But pencils are also usable, and as such, do not last forever.

And perhaps that is why I am intrigued by the young queen's diary. A pencil seems so small and unsophisticated, especially for a queen. At the library, the sketches in William Blake's notebook are done in pencil, and so Leonardo da Vinci's drawings studying the flight of birds, and Michaelango's notes about his work on the Sisteen Chapel ceiling. Even those writers whose manuscripts are written in ink are not precious with words. Percy crossed out and rewrote things in his wife's writing, as did Charlotte and Jane and so many others.

What I see in looking at these manuscripts is their humanity, of queens and presidents and artists. Somewhere along the way, these are people whom we have exalted, but there was a time where each of them was a person at a desk, trying to find the right words to tell a story.

This morning, when I sit down to copy lines of Anna Karenina, I feel a tiny bit closer to what I have been trying to find through this project. I am trying to find the magic that moves words from my head to the piece of paper in front of me. Like my decision to come to London, I must not overthink this, or I will lose the magic that can be created by taking up a pencil.

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Motion Sickness

Last Saturday, I went to my sister-in-law's fiftieth birthday party, held in the barn behind a friend's house. The Birthday girl hired a contra band (not to be confused with contraband) and a couple of musicians from a small town south of Indy. A young women played the fiddle and used her foot to drum out the rythym on a wooden platform at her feet. The caller, an older man with patience that wore very thin by the end of the night, instructed us in the moves of a series of dances. We do-si-doed and almandered and bowed, to our dance partner and our neighbor. We swung each other round, we sashayed between two lines, and we convinced ourselves we had it down, just as the caller sped up and we went the wrong direction, smiling and laughing the entire time.

The dance floor only started to spin when I stopped moving.

We sat down, heaving for breath and trying to steady ourselves, both feet on the ground. I gulped water, and took small sips from the whiskey and coke that I made earlier that evening. The dizzy feeling was frighteningly reminescent of drinking too much, when I would lie down in bed, one foot on the floor to stop the room from turning on its axis.

Sunday morning, I woke with a headache. My body felt heavy and stiff. When I sat up and asked my husband why I felt like I had been hit by a train, he said, the dancing, in a calm voice. He, of course, was already up and showered and dressed, and like a good husband, presenting me with a cup of hot tea.

What does this have to do with copying a manuscript by hand? Well, for one thing, the physical feelings are strikingly similar. I spent most of yesterday catching up my AK pages. I got behind due to a writing conference that backed right up a Thanksgiving week where we welcomed home three of college students,children, cleaned house and prepared for two family gatherings, one for my side, one for his. I baked pies (an activity which also had to be doubled when I forgot to put spices in the first batch), brined a turkey that only days before had been running around on a farm just out of town, and mopped floors. Okay, my husband did the mopping, alongside 13, who for some reason, inherited a recessive toilet-cleaning gene from me. All this to say that I had not copied pages for almost two weeks.

Monday morning, with everyone gone, I sat down with a cup of tea and a leftover-turkey sandwich and put pen to paper. I coped seven pages, which is still behind schedule but edging me closer to my next mile-marker of page 150. I hope to reach it by the end of the week. I have not timed myself as I write, but my best guess is that writing my daily two pages takes just over an hour (without interruptions). That means I estimate that I spent close to four hours writing yesterday. When I stopped and looked up, my stomach gave a lurch. I pushed my glasses to the top my head to acclimate my eyes, then moved to the couch to lie down.

An hour later, I opened my eyes and managed to walk upstairs. I still felt nauseous, but I needed to head out to pick up the kids at school. In the car, I turned on the radio and sang along to Christmas carols. I stopped at Target to buy rabbit food and green beans to serve with macaroni and cheese for dinner. After checkout, I bought a bag of popcorn at the concession and filled my water bottle from the fountain. By the time, I stepped outside into the cold wind, I was feeling fairly normal again.

When I copy pages, I am physically engaged in the act. My shoulders, my neck, my back get stiff. I stretch and move, try to remember to tighten my core muscles, sit up straight. I cross and uncross my legs. Sometimes I stand up and move behind the chair, crossing my arms across the back of it and folding my body forward at the hips. I stand back up and twist side to side, swing my arms wide. When I began this project, I had no idea that it would be such a physical process, which may sound stupid, but I thought only of my hands, how they might get tired, my carpal tunnel might be aggravated. I have been surprised by how exhausting this work is. I cannot help but wonder at what we have lost, creatively, by removing the physicality of work from our daily lives, not only for writers, but in other areas too: the swish-swish of the spatula and the flicking in my wrist as I smooth the frosting on a cake, the squaring of a shirt when I bring in the arms and fold it in half and smooth out the fabric, the pull at my midsection and in my shoulders when I sweep or rake. At its very heart, this project, like so many things in life, is about the physical act of creation.

Last night I sat down on the bed, tired but not ready to sleep. It had been a productive day.

"Why is it that the more I do, the more I want to do?" I said to my husband, who was already lying in bed with his book propped on his chest.

"I don't know, but it's true."

I was dressed in pajamas, but my body was not quite ready to rest. It had a momentum going, like when I was on the dance floor and I had put my hand up to meet my partner's and we twirled round each other without even trying.

 

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The Parade of Horribles

Here are the facts that I found on the internet:

An Indian surgeon used infected instruments to sterilize 83 women in about six hours, according to a local medical official, leaving 10 of them dead and another 69 hospitalized in the central state of Chhattisgarh.

-Bloomburg

India sterilized over 4 million people last year, about 97% of whom were women.

-Time Magazine

R.K. Gupta, 59, operated on 83 women in five hours on Saturday, according to the BBC. Dr RK Gupta and his assistant carried out tubectomies on 130 women at two separate camps on Saturday and Monday.

-BBC

The women, who were each paid $10 to undergo the operation, were sent home Saturday evening.

-USA Today

Now, here's the advantage of being an artist; I don't have to stick to the facts. I get to tell you a story.

Wednesday morning, I wake at 5am, when the alarm goes off. My husband set it, so he could get up early and edit a paper for our daughter, a junior in college. Normally, we wake at 5:30 to the Bob and Tom show (don't judge; it has sentimental value to us from when we were dating). At 5am, the radio reports the news. In my half-wake state, I listen to a broadcast about doctors rushing to India where 11 women have died and 63 are hospitalized after undergoing voluntary sterilization, for which they were paid approximately $10, or 600 rupees.

I get out of bed, after about 20 minutes buried beneath the covers on the first truly cold morning this season, went downstairs to make breakfast and feed the dog. I make egg sandwiches, but I break the yolk on the first egg and give it to the dog. My husband offers (read: is coerced to leave a little early so I don't have to go out in the cold) to take the kids to school.

13 is on the bus by 8:15.

In the 2 hours between shifts, I decide to fold the mountain of laundry at the foot of my bed. I turn on the news (yes, we have a tv in our bedroom. Again, don't judge; if you had seven kids and wanted to watch an episode of Parenthood without being interrupted to braid someone's hair or go pick up posterboard for a project due the next day, you would too.). I want to hear more about the women in India who have died.

By the time the laundry is finished and put away, I have heard the results of Robin Williams' autopsy, seen the Rockettes preview their new holiday show, and watched an interview with Jon Stewart. I see numerous accounts of an early snow storm. Not one newscaster mentions the deaths in India. Later I troll the internet to find more information. I try to find the value of 600 rupees to a young Indian mother. The only thing I find are tourist sites with details on how eat a good meal in India for less than $10. I want to know how $10 can change a young woman's life so much that she is willing to offer up her body for her country. In the United States, you can get $25 for donating plasma. $25 could take my entire family to lunch buffet at the local Indian restaurant.

I do find a photo of young mother, recovering in a hospital bed while she breastfeeding a toddler who lies beside her. Beds line one long white wall of the sterilization camp. The mother wears brightly colored clothing and gold bangles and wraps herself and her child in a red blanket.

I am angry at a government that sterilizes young married women but leaves their husband virile, while a young woman, who went to the police station in June to beg for her husband's release, is allegedly gang raped by four police officers when she refuses to pay a bribe (How much is the bribe I wonder? The value of 600 rupees comes to mind.)

And I am angry at a male doctor, who when I was 25 and had an irregular Pap smear, put his hand on my knee, bare below the hem of my paper gown, and told me to let him worry about whether it is anything to be concerned about.

And at the young doctor in Anna Karenina, who insists on examining Kitty naked. She is suffering from depression; she has turned away the man she loves for someone who she thought would be exciting and thrilling to spend her life with. And this young doctor cannot understand why anyone would question his hands on her body. In fact, she should consider herself lucky to be examined by him.

And at a pediatrician who tells me I should start my 11-year-old daughter on the HPV vaccine in case anything ever happens to her.

And at a husband who goes to bed at night while his wife stays up for hours copying his manuscript.

 

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Finding my Inner Child

Friday morning, I found myself sitting at a table with three women I did not know, in a room full of women. There were less than five men scattered around, and when I asked at the front sign-in table, the woman who was volunteering told me that of the 53 at the earlier seating of Breakfast for the Babies, seven were men. While waiting in the buffet line, I heard a woman introduce herself as a State Senator. As I walked back to my table with a plate of food, I heard another woman say she was a freelance artist, another a retired high school teacher. At my table, the woman to my left talked about returning from a trip, and making plans to babyproof her house for grandchildren that would be visiting over the holidays.

"We haven't been home for Christmas in years. We always go on a trip. So now I have to drag out the decorations, and I need at least two pack-n-plays."

I sat, sipping tea, staring into my book, occasionally staring out the window at the 360 degree view of Indianapolis, wondering what I was doing here. Then the executive director of Project Home Indy stood up to speak.

"Stories. (Pause, smiling at the audience). We all have stories."

And I knew why I was there: to tell their story.

Project Home Indy provides a safe residence for homeless pregnant teens and teen mothers. They help the mothers stay in school, make sure moms and babies get good medical care, and provide counseling. PHI is not a mansion. There is space only for 5 girls and their babies at any given time. And that may not seem like much, especially in a world where high numbers mean higher value.

"100 percent of our moms have experienced trauma. How else do you end up fifteen and pregnant?"

If all of the moms have experienced trauma, we can only guess at their stories. And despite the work of Project Home Indy, I never heard Laksmi talk about replacing those traumatic stories. You can't. The bad parts of life can't be censored out. I did hear her voice catch when she mentioned that some of us have bad stories. I saw her make a joke at her own expense, and pretend to wipe away the pain. I saw myself, remembered the therapist who suggested that it could be helpful to go back and talk to my inner child, tell her that it would be okay. This felt like a lie to me. No one, not even the stronger, somewhat healed adult version of the little girl I was, can tell me that it will be okay. Nothing we do will make it better for her.

Project Home Indy helps mothers heal, so their children have better stories.

I don't know how Sophie fared after her husband died, or how she took care of her family. I will never know how things turn out for Anna Karenina's children. How will they heal? How many of the 200 kidnapped Nigerian girls are already pregnant? Somehow, we have to break the cycle, change young girl's stories, rework them, write different endings, make things right for the next ones. It is the stories that have not yet been told that can change women's lives. They are our inner children, waiting for their lives to unfold.

http://www.projecthomeindy.org

Project Home Indy
P.O. Box 683
Indianapolis, Indiana 46206

 

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Revising Tolstoy

Chapter 32 opens with this line: "The first person to meet Anna at home was her son."

How clever, I thought, for Tolstoy to give Anna a son instead of a daughter. How different the story, even Anna, would be if her child was a daughter, instead of another male character to whom Anna is drawn. And for those of you who know the story, the child who comes later adds another dimension of possibility to the story. I had a writing teacher once who told me that one way to get through my writer's block was to change the protaganist from a male to a female. And how easy it was, on my computer, to replace one name with another, to order up new pronouns. Fiction writers, unlike the rest of us, have this luxury.

I had lunch last week with a friend who is a minister. We were discussing the impact of gender-based language in religious texts. She told me that her father, who was also a minister, preached that man meant all humankind, until his daughter becamed ordained, and the use of he and she became very personal. She told me, and this is where the limits of my knowledge reveal themselves, that one of her favorite scriptures involves Jesus recognizing that he is limited, by his phyical form, to being a man. His maleness limits him.

Not true for Tolstoy and other fiction writers who are do not tell the "truth," as we call the facts of a story that has happened in real life. We fiction writers can turn everything on its head, making Abraham Lincoln, rather convincingly if you ask me, into a Vampire Hunter as Seth Grahame-Smith does. We can even take already written stories, and by changing less than one-fourth of the original text, turn a classic into Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I personally love these new versions of the classics. I believe that if we gave Literature teachers the freedom to use them in class, their students would enjoy the reading and still have an understanding of the original story. On the bookshelves in my home, you will find Alice in Zombieland, Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim (a curious case that allows us to talk about language that dehumanizes without using the words from the plantation era that are offensive), and of course, my favorite, Android Karenina.

These new versions embrace something that many writers fear: Revision.

What we fear, writers and perhaps all of us, is change. We don't want to give up that which we hold dear. We allow ourselves to believe that the way it is, the way it has always been, is the best and right and maybe even the only way. What if Willingness to change is the only way to stay alive? In the case of literature, allowing these stories to change and transform keeps them alive in the imagination of a new generation of readers.

We live in a time when books have been abundant and readily available to the masses. When Beatrix Potter was publishing Peter Rabbit, she did the unthinkable, as a respectable lady, and went into the factory to demand that her book be printed on smaller pages and with fewer ink colors to make it less expensive, and thereby more accessible to readers. And in the novel Seabiscuit, the young jockey carries a burlap bag of books with him for most of his life, a small stack that he reads and rereads. And as I am writing the words of Anna Karenina, I wonder what new discoveries Sophia made on subsequent passes through the novel. What did she glean that we miss when we read it once, as young college students, never to return to it again. What would we gain if instead of having a constant stream of new books at our disposal, we had only four or five books to read again and again for the whole of our lives? When a book becomes ours, when we read it again and again, could we be allowing ourselves to reimagine the world of the story in a way that the orginal author never did?

 

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The Curse

My daughter read The Scarlet Letter in Literature class. Every year, the teacher gives extra credit to students who create their own crafty version of Hester's badge of shame. 17 told me that last year, one student used his father's welding equipment to creat a cast iron image of an A. I was going to knit one, she said, but another girl is already doing that. Ever her mother's daughter, 17 decided to make a pillow. This is why I came in from work to find her red IU sweatpants spread out on the dining room table, ready to go under the knife.

"Wait! Don't cut those. They are really nice. We can find something else for you."

"But I never wear them. Why does it matter?"

"If you don't want them, I can give them to the clothing bank at church."

In the end, we found some old red pants, and she kept her IU ones. While I made dinner, she layed her pattern on the fabric, pinned it in place and cut out two shapes. She sewed them right side out, because we could not figure out how to turn the shape right side out after stitching it (A's have that pesky hole in the center). She slid into the kitchen, Risky-Business style (fully-clothed), smiling and holding her Scarlet Letter over her head.

"Where is the pillow stuffing?" she asked.

I grimaced, not sure I had any, and not wanting to drive to the store, I wondered what else she could use.

Then I remembered the Sock Basket.

Before my husband and I blended into a family of nine, I had two pairs of running socks, which I washed and carefully reunited a couple of times a week. But less than a month into our marriage, one lonely sock remained in my possession. I held onto it, and occasionally another would turn up in the sock basket, the catchall for every mismatched sock in our house, but by that the time, the other one would have gone missing. Almost ten years later, our oldest kid teaches 6th grade English and lives on her own. Three of our kids are in college, and a fourth is visiting a college in Ohio today. Only two little monkeys will be jumping in the bed, and those two do their own laundry. So earlier that day, I had emptied the sock basket into a plastic bag, which sat at the bottom of the steps. I couldn't bring myself to throw it away. This is my curse. I hoard anything that I think can be used later. I should be forced to sew a single, unmatched sock on my clothing as a badge of shame.

When I plopped the bag on the table beside my daughter, she looked up at me and glared. But she took up her scissors and began to cut the socks first into strips and then little squares. 13 refused to help, on the grounds that she wasn't allowed to borrow 17's phone charger earlier that evening. I initially begged off (trigger finger, remember?) but after dinner came in to help. She shooed me away, saying that she didn't have anything else to do. When she was finished stuffing the pillow, she used gold glitter glue to recreate the elaborate embroidery Hester added to her letter.

When I came down to make tea the next morning, I found the pillow laying on the table. I picked it up; it had a satisfying denseness to it. What would the teacher do will all those Scarlet Letters, and what had become of all the letters from years past? And then I realized, I had not salvaged anything. Eventually everything must go.

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Pain Relievers

We're pretty good these days at alleviating pain and discomfort. Currently, I am taking ibuprofen to ease the pain in my right thumb from a condition called Trigger Finger, so named because when I bend my thumb, tendon catches, pulls, and with an audible pop, tendon springs from its sheath. At some point, hopefully this year, because, as my husband pointed out this morning, we have met our out-of-pocket deductible, I will have to have a "procedure." The doctor assures me this will fix the problem.

 

But I wonder. My hands already bear the scars of other stories: a skin graft from burning oil, which the nurse told me is the most common burn for women, a triangle of ropy skin where the oil spilled back as I tried to put out the fire; 1/2 of a missing joint on the ring finger of the same hand, an industrial accident when I spent a summer working in a plastics factory; a moon-shaped scar from a knife that slipped while I was cutting a pan of cookies into squares. Given that I have bitten my nails since I was six, and that I am also, while I write this post, wearing a brace on my left hand for carpal tunnel, I would say that my hands have born the brunt of pain in my life.

Perhaps this why I write a line from Susan Vreeland inside the cover of each new journal: Even a scarred hand can bring forth greatness. It is a line from her novel The Passion of Artemesia, about a woman painter in the time of Michaelangelo. A priest tied Artemesia's hands with rope and squeezed them until all the bones broke, as punishment for adultery with a man (who, as you have probably already guessed, raped her). Artemsia continued to paint despite the constant pain in her hands.

 

I have found that while surgery relieves the pain of injury or stress, each scar brings a new form of discomfort that never recedes. If you are ever around when I bump my hand on the edge of a table or countertop, my reaction might seem extravagant. And if I have my trigger thumb repaired, it is likely that the condition will pop up in another finger. But what would I do without my hands? All the work I enjoy and am called to do requires the use of my fingers and hands. I have, as of today, copied 100 pages of Anna Karenina. I sew, knit and embroider. I gather eggs from my chickens. In the summer, I pick pounds of blueberries to freeze for the winter. On my walks, I watch the squirrels, and notice bits of shell and nut fall to the ground. What would a squirrel do without its paws? It could not survive. How lucky I am, I think, to be able to repair the damage to mine.

 

This past week, I worked at my parents' house, helping to clear out the garage of old furniture and wood. Once, while supervising the burn barrel in the backyard, I reached out to push a piece of wood down into the fire. The pain in my thumb was so sharp that I pulled back as if the flames emanated from inside my own bones. When I asked my mom if she had any pain relievers, she told me that my sister had taken the last two the night before. There was no way to get more; the driveway was filled with the vans and trucks of shoppers at the moving sale. I had no choice but to keep working. And so I did. I worked until about noon, drove home, and spent the weekend weatherizing windows. I painted the walls in the new space where I hope to sell my artwork. Now the pain is a constant ache. And I will call the doctor as soon as I finish this post. The doctor will make an appointment for me to return in a week or so, at which time he will make a small incision and go in and cut the sheath, allowing the tendon to move back and forward with ease. And until then, I will continue to work, and write, with pain. Because the alternative, to do nothing, in no less pain free.

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Losing the Lead in My Pencil

Whenever I refused to eat something as a child, my dad would coax me by saying, "It will put lead in your pencil." I think I was in college, at a large table in the dining hall, when understanding of this metaphor hit me.

The image came to me again, late last night, sitting in a silent house, copying pages from Anna Karenina. My first pen will soon run out of ink.

I have recently copied the scenes at the ball. Kitty enters, fake hair piled on her head, pink dress covered with tissuey roses, perfectly done up to attract the attention of Vronsky. She feels quite certain of her appearance, until she dances past Anna Karenina. She takes in Anna's dress, black velvet trimmed with lace, and thinks how much more beautiful she is dressed this way, instead of in violet, as Kitty had been attempting to convince her to wear. And Anna's hair, adorned only with a wreath of flowers, is beautiful in a way that Kitty could not achieve with her cake tower of a hairdo. And Anna's shoulder, bare. Her necklace, stunning, keeping one's eye drawn to her naked skin.

Anna is putting lead in everyone's pencil that night, even Kitty's.

And Vronsky's, another detail that Kitty notices.

If you are picturing Kiera Knightly right now, let me draw you a different picture. I can't quote it directly, because I used my latest round of pages to stuff care packages to my college kids, but when Vronsky first sees Anna at the train station, he notes the roundness of her woman's figure, a contrast to the constant referral to Kitty's thin arms and wispy appearance. And as a reader, I know exactly when Vronsky is smitten: when Anna alone speaks up on behalf of the poor widow standing beside the track where the her husband has been crushed by a train. On cue, Vronsky disappears to find the woman and give her money.

I admire Anna, at the ball, being Anna, an older woman, married with a child, called to Moscow to save her brother's marriage while tending to her nephews and nieces who tug on her dress with their gooey child hands, drooled over by Vronsky in a room full of made-up maidens. Anna has a beauty that has come with age and experience. She has tenderness that make her vulnerable and strong.

I am thinking this as I copy pages, late on the eve of my baby's thirteenth birthday, as my pen's ink fades from glistening black to a scratchy gray: that aging has it's own beauty.

 

 

 

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A Salmon Kind of Love

My friend Jennifer used to say that men were monomonical, a fancy word for obsessed, driven. And she was not refering to sex. She meant they could zero in a project or job and block out everything around them. Implied, in her comment, was the idea that a woman had to keep all the balls in the air, even when they had something to accomplish that should, in theory, be given all her attention.

Monday night, on the way home from my writing group, I was thinking of this, because I knew we were out of dog food, but I also knew that by midnight, I had to submit a story for an upcoming workshop, a story that was less than halfway through its current revision. The dog, I reasoned, was already in bed for the night, and wouldn't notice his empty bowl, and so, I chose my story. I sent the story in, at 11:32 by the clock at the corner of my computer screen and headed up to bed, where my husband had been asleep already for hours.

Yes, hours. The reason I was debating the dog food question: My husband had an interview at 6:30 am the next morning, for the case he is working on. And today, he left the house at 4am for a trip to New York.

Only a couple of days before, we were in Michigan, watching salmon trying to leap over a four-foot dam. The fish didn't know where they are going; their only goal was to get as far as they could before spawning. We stood in awe of these beautiful fish, who doggedly worked their way against the current before attempting and occasionally making the leap over the concrete barrier from which a monster of water rushed at them. There were six of us, three couples, male and female, plus an older man and his dog. And I noticed everyone was saying, "He almost made it that time!" and "Look at him! He's beautiful!" and my favorite, "Come on Dude, you can do it!" When I mentioned that I thought the salmon were going to lay eggs, which meant they were female, we began to correct ourselves. And then one of the women said she thought they were capable of being both male and female, as some animals can be.

Thank goodness for the internet, where we were able to find the answer. Turns out both male and female of the species, are driven to swim upstream until they have completely exhausted themselves and can swim not farther. Then the females lay eggs. The male fish fertilize them, afterward heading off to find another female of the species.

Most of the time, we humans don't know what we are doing either. We spend way too much time analyzing why we do things, or debating, whether in our heads or with each other, whether this way or that way is right, or more likely, why the other person's way of doing things is wrong. And when I began this project, I was pretty sure that Sophia Tolstoy was not treatly fairly by her husband or the history books. But the more I write, I hear not only Sophie's voice, but the exchange of words between Leo and his wife. He wrote, she copied, he wrote again, and so it went. Anna Karenina may symbolize Russian politics or culture or human nature, but it was first, before it became a novel, an exchange of words between two people who loved each other, who began their relationship by exchanging diaries, so that they could know everything about each other. I find that as I write, I hear a tenderness in my ears, of Leo for his wife, and I did not expect this.

Humans have the capacity for love that is about more than procreation, more than maternal love or love between husband and wife. This I believe. And yet we try to limit Love, judge it, declare one kind good and another kind bad. But love is love, even flawed, broken, makes-me-want-to-beat-my-head against the wall love. Love drives us to swim upstream and fling ourselves against concrete barriers, often with no understanding of why.

Choosing to finish my story does not diminish my love for my husband, or even my dog, or my children. Perhaps this is why I empathize at times with Leo, who responded to the call to write stories, at great cost to his relationship with his wife. And Sophia answered her own callings, to her photography, her children, and to a man with whom she became friends after the death of her seven-year-old son. No one knows if they had a physical affair, but from her diaries, it is clear that she felt love for him. And I have a close friend to whom I declare my love every day at the end of our emails. It is a different kind of love than I feel for my husband, but I feel it just as strongly, and the two do not compete with each other.

The thing is, the end result is the same for both of us, human and salmon. Once we fight to get upstream, lay our eggs and protect them until they can live on their own, we die. We can choose to throw ourselves against the wall until we make it across, or we can give up and throw ourselves in front of an oncoming train. Either way, it ends the same way. Both ways are painful and disorienting. And every moment of every day we choose whether to keep going or to stop where we are.

 

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Dreaming in Sophie

I have heard than when a person becomes immersed in the culture of a foreign country, she begins to dream in the new language. And I have seen this happen too; when my neice returned Spain after only seven weeks of complete immersion, she would begin a sentence in English but lapse into Spanish halfway through her words. It was as if some other person interrupted her to finish the thought, the way married couples or best friends do.

I do not speak a foreign language fluently, but last night, I began to dream in Sophie.

Not a dream about Sophie, but in Sophie, as if she and I were one.

I was a bit behind on writing pages from Anna Karenina, so I spent a good chunk of Saturday catching up and copied over seven pages before my hand finally revolted. On Sunday, I went back to it, sticking with my usual two pages, and some change, in hopes of staying caught up. For the first time in the novel, I have encountered a lengthy period occupied by only two women, Anna and her sister-in-law Dolly, who is deciding whether or not to forgive her husband for an affair with the governess. Perhaps the quantity of time spent copying the discussion of how women are nothing without their husbands and families, coupled with a defense of how a man's affair has nothing to do with his sacred love for his wife, merged my subconscious with Sophie's in a new way.

Whatever it was, I woke at 5am this morning, feeling not quite myself. I can't quite explain the dreamstate, or how it felt. I only know that something has shifted, in the novel and in myself. And its funny, because it is not a feeling that makes me want to completely turn to my writing at the expense of my household chores and family relationships. In fact, in addition to the nearly ten pages of AK that I copied, I also cleaned the chicken coop, gave the children's sermon at church, baked zucchini muffins, folded laundry, and helped 12 and Almost 17 clean their bedrooms. I folded laundry, swapped out summer clothes, all this after having dinner with my husband and some friends on Friday night. Writing this list feels a tad bit arrogant, but I am telling you this, because the weekend is not a typically productive time for me, a fact that makes me feel even more that my body has been possessed by another creature.

There are so many times when writing feels perilously simliar to mothering, that feeling that another being is suckling off of your energy stores, that somehow you must muster the energy to rise and greet the demanding creature that you have created. I entered willingly into this project, at least at the beginning, but now, she is here, a beating heart that I cannot neglect.

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Girls

 

Sixty pages into the novel, and our main character has yet to show up. I am growing tired of Oblonsky's dinners with his pals, with young men showing off and ice skating, of Vronsky's arrogance that he is not hurting anyone. All the while, the women go to bed alone, praying to God to let it all be okay.

And I think of Sophia Tolstoy writing these lines, not once, but eight times, late at night after everyone else has gone to bed. And I have decided that Sophie, along with Anna and Kitty, needed girlfriends.

Not Mean Girl girlfriends, or women to help her get the housework finished. She needed heart-connected, warrior women girlfriends, the kind who show up on a Friday night bearing bottles of wine and a pack of cigarettes, the kind who don't care if her daughters come in and out, eating their pistachios or overhearing an occasional curse word.

Sophie needed someone to say, Girl, you copied that damn novel eight times; If you can do that, you can anything. Then they would sit outside until 4am, beside a fire started with the first 59 pages of the novel, finally going inside to fall asleep until morning. Almost 17 gets up and turn off the lights in the house.

The next day, Sophie would wake up and go back to copying pages and doing laundry. She would fold the sheets and towels, put them away in the cabinet. But she would notice that Almost 17, rather than being traumatized by the evenings' shenaningans, is sitting at the piano with sheet music, teaching herself how to play a song.

 

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Claiming my Light and my Shadow

School started for my children in early August. Six weeks later, my daughter's black school pants still lay on the dining room table, orange chalk marks indicating where to place the hem. I pass them nearly every evening, mourning another day that the job has gone undone. Until finally, last night, as I walk in after work carrying bags of groceries from the car, 12 says, without looking up from the computer where she is finishing a (late) report on women's roles in Egypt, "Are you still going to hem my black pants?"

"I'll do it tonight after dinner."

Do I need to tell you that it didn't happen? Likely not. Nor did I make the chocolate chip cookies which were my inspiration for stopping at the grocery, on a rainy evening, after a long day at work.

I do, however, climb into bed at 9:11, according the old clock radio on my nightstand, a glass of milk and two leftover Girl Scout cookies on the shelf above it. My husband and stepson are downstairs in the den watching the Colts play on tv. When Almost 17 wanders in, asking if I made the cookies, I look at her and shake my head.

I never get to everything I intend to do.

But today has been one of those rare gems: I wake early and make chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast; once the early shift is out the door, I sit down and hem, unevenly, my daughter's black school pants, lay them over her chair and call her to breakfast; I pick up my computer from the repair shop; I sit down to copy two pages of Anna Karenina, and end at four, when Levin concedes Kitty's hand to Vronsky and exits.

I am aware that I take on too much, as a mother and as an artist. And it would be easy to feel like a failure. Some days, many days, I do, choosing to stare at the long list of chores on my fridge, paralyzed by the Bigness of beginning the first story in a new collection, or hand-copying an 800 page novel.

Could it be that the secret to success is as simple as an early bedtime? In summer, when we are tempted into late-night games, my father-in-law says, "He who hoots with the Owls, doth not soar with the Eagles." And off to bed he goes. But some of the best times I have are in those late night hours, playing Euchre while bugs launch themselves against the window screens, or staying up late to finish a novel, or sitting in a rocking chair at 2am, staring into the face of a nursing baby. There is no making sense of it, no guarantee that what works today will do so tomorrow, or with the next kid or the next book.

Perhaps that is why I keep coming back to this line in Anna Karenina: "All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow."

 

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Cotton Candy Crazy

It is a cool morning in the midwest. The windows are open, so I can hear the fading cicadas and the grinding school bus as it picks up speed after picking up my daughter, who entered the kitchen this morning, grumbling that there was nothing good for her lunch. I stopped my work to look in the fridge for some options. A hard-boiled egg? Celery sticks and peanut butter?

 

"You're not helping by asking about things I don't want."

 

So I go back to my writing. I am nearing 50 pages with still no Anna Karenina figuring into the story. Levin has been rejected by Kitty. Dolly has left her cheating husband, Stepan Arkadyevitch going on and on about why he was entitled to sleep with the governess. But still no Anna. She remains invisible, and silent. A thought occurs to me as I contemplate this, my hands moving of their own accord over the curve of each c and b and y. Why bother putting her name in the title? What value was there in that, for the book is not really about her. And if I were Anna, I would want more recognition for the use of my name, especially knowing that it is Anna who pays the ultimate price for the story to resolve itself.

 

I suppose the value of a woman's time is on my mind in other ways. I began my new job last week. Already I have worked more hours than I recorded on my timesheet, in an attempt to organize my workspace and schedule so that, ultimately, I will have to spend less time doing that. And on the homefront, I am trying to put some new procedures in place, beginning with a weekly menu, posted on the fridge, with assigned helpers for each night. 12 is coming home to an empty house for the first time in her dozen years of life, so I have write out her daily to-do list and leave it on the table each afternoon, including extra chores that will ease my workload. In exchange for her services, I offer her a weekly allowance of $10, another first in our household. And the last shall be first.....

 

I cannot avoid the thoughts that spin their threads into a great pink ball of cotton candy in my head: we pay for what we value. And Sophie Tolstoy, like Anna, was an invisible character in the writing of this story. Not only did she remain unpaid, because Leo took the stance I did regarding allowance, that we do this work because we are part of a family and we have a responsibility to share the work, but she also had no say in how the rewards of that work would be used. Like me, she might have sat up long after everyone else was asleep, her fingers aching with stiffness on a cool autumn evening, while a pot of chicken and vegetables bubbles on the stove for the next day's dinner, clean dishes piled up to dry on the counter, piles of yet undone laundry waiting for her to wake the next morning, knowing that her work was important for the survival and happiness of her family.

 

Unlike me, she did not get a paycheck. No part of the income from Anna Karenina went into a retirement fund in her name. She couldn't siphon a percentage of the money into a 429 so that her kids would be able to go to college even if their father wasn't around to help. She couldn't decide if it was worth the money she made to hire a housecleaner but maybe not worth buying a new pair of shoes. When the family wagon broke down, she couldn't take out a debit card in her name to get it fixed. All she could do was let those cotton candy thoughts spin in her head, sticky and blinding, and go a little crazy.

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Labor

"We in the country try to bring our hands into such a state as will be most convenient for working with. So we cut our nails; sometimes we turn up our sleeves. And here people purposely let their nails grow as long as they will, and link on small saucers by way of studs, so thay they can do nothing with their hands." -Leo Tolstory, Anna Karenina

 

These are the words of Levin, a country farmer who has come to Moscow to propose to Kitty, a young woman from a wealthy family. Levin's friend, Stepan Arkadyevitch responds that people grow out their nails to show that they work with their minds not their hands. We have not come so far today, in the way we view labor, often doing anything we can to escape it.

 

And even though I broke down last week and bought a new washing machine, after two months of hauling our dirty clothes to the laundromat, my one goal this weekend is to do a load of laundry in the old wringer washer I found in the crawl space of our cabin in Michigan. What was I hoping to accomplish? I think more than anything, I wanted to get my hands wet. I wanted to push the fabric through the rollers, being careful not to get my fingers caught, which a bit of research revealed to be a devastating injury. I chose an easy load: one set of twin sheets from the girls' bunk beds. The rest of them, I confess, are piled in plastic tubs for the return trip to Indy and a final destination inside my new-fangled machine at home.

 

The most difficult part was filling two tubs without working our old well pump so much that I would have to be replace it too. Toward this end, I walked through the house, gathering up old water glasses and finding water anywhere I could to ease the load. I poured out the pitcher of water we keep in the fridge to drink. I dumped the foot rinse bucket in as well. When the sky began to drizzle, I considered setting out buckets to collect water, all this while working 100 feet from the lake. I managed about to get the tub half full, stuffing a bread bag in place of the missing drain stopper.

 

I wanted it to be hard. I wanted to labor over that laundry, but I found it surprisingly easy. The crank turned with little effort from me, pushing the water out of the fabric. I put it through again and again, until the only visible water appeared as the bottom hem went through the rollers. I took to throwing the sheet over my shoulder as I approached the end, to keep it from falling back into the tub. My clothes became as wet as the sheets. I was surprised when I stopped cranking; the wetness was wringing itself out of me as well. This easy labor had worked me into a sweat. How is it that I find it much harder to pin together these words? I wish they would flow from me like water or my own sweat. Sometimes a story does pour out of me that way, and I am tricked into thinking that writing is easy, but it is only because I have discounted the days or weeks it took me to get myself to the page. Many of my stories involve some kind of work, kneading bread or hand-whipping egg whites into meringue or mending jeans, field research that I must do before I can write. It helps that this research, like today's laundry labor, feeds and clothes my family.

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Interruption

I have not written, a new blog entry or pages of AK, in over a week. It would be easy for me to let this go, except that Sophie Speaks is out there. This project is no longer an idea, a spark, but a real thing. I see it in the notebook paper building up in my binder; I hear it in the comments from friends and colleagues who have read my posts. It is real, as real as the need to arrange carpool, go to work, and cook dinner. It has value to me. Only I can make this work. Only I can pick up my pen and write, five or six lines at a time if necessary. If I stopped writing, no one would make me go back to it. The idea would disappear like a white sock at the bottom of my laundry pile. But it is possible that if I stick with it, if I can see it through to the end, it might make a difference to someone else.

 

A few days ago, I took a trip to Nashville with my daughter and two of her friends. For them, it was more like a pilgrimage. We went to see One Direction, the current boy band phenomenon. I confess that I was not exactly looking forward to trip. I am not much of a joiner, as moms go. I wished that I could send 12 along without me, but some part of me also knew that I couldn't do that to her. She needed her own person there.

 

The concert was pretty much what I expected. Screaming girls, bored parents, overpriced sodas and beers and long lines to get in and out. What I didn't expect was to be schooled in the less mainstream musical culture. One of 12's friends insisted that we visit Third Man Records, a small shop and production studio founded by Jack White of the White Stripes. How can one girl be equally obsessed with Liam Hemmings and Jack White? I still don't have that answer. But our visit to the small square building, painted black, was worth the entire trip. I bought White's documentary, It Might Get Loud, a series of interviews with guitar players sharing stories of how they got into music. They did whatever they had to do to get their hands on crappy instruments and play, without lessons or parents reminding them to practice. They put replaced their beds with amp and slept on foam mattresses. They moved furniture to barter for guitars. They ignored the people who told them that what they were doing was not important.

 

Of course, there was the ever-present gift shop. When a friend of mine found out that we were going, she asked me to buy a sticker. I let 12 pick that out, and I chose one for myself. (Normally I buy pencils as souvenirs, but Third Man Records did not sell these). I put the sticker on my Sophie Speaks binder, as a reminder to myself.

 

12's friend told me this is a line from one of Jack White's songs. I looked up the lyrics, hoping for some insight, but I didn't find anything other than what I had already gleaned, that Love, even Capital L-Love, pure white LOVE, cannot keep me from this work. I will continue to come back to it, in the hope that someday, someone will read one line of what I have written and find a spark of inspiration.

 

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Killing Your Darlings

Its the third week of Sophie Speaks, and I am finding it tough to make time for Her.

 

The thing is I already have a lot going on in my life. My husband and I blended our families almost ten years ago, and together we have seven children, the youngest being 12, whom you have met, the oldest 24 and in her first year as a teacher. I call them my bookends. In between, there are 2 high school students and three college students.

 

And yesterday, I accepted a new job. I know, crazy.

 

Walking out the front door of their office, I knew I had the job if I wanted it. And I knew I would accept, after taking the requisite day to think about it. With three in college, I need this income. I wanted to celebrate. Kids are all in school. Husband at work. I considered going shopping, but I couldn't think of a thing I wanted to do. Except one.

I wanted to write.

I drove to the Panera down the street. I ordered tea and an egg souffle. And I sat there for three hours copying pages from Anna Karenina. I had missed her over the weekend. I am on page 26, and still Anna hasn't shown up on the page, but I know she is on her way. If Tolstoy had workshoped his novel in a writing class today, they would have trashed him. Throat clearing, I have heard it called by someone I knew in my Masters Program. Tolstoy's colleagues would have urged him to cut liberally, also known as "killing your darlings." It means to be willing to cut even your most preciously loved words in order to make the story better. I have whole computer files full of sentences I loved too much to delete completely, even though I knew did not have a place in the final draft.

 

Life is like this too, I think. We have people or experiences that are important to our story. Maybe they end up getting cut somewhere along the way. Still, they stay with us; we know they had a hand in getting us all the way to the end.

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A Message from Sofia

So far, my posts seem to be fairly light-hearted. And that is a reflection of how I have felt writing them. The first week, I chatted with my husband each evening about my progress, about comments from friends who have read along, and it buoyed me up. This week, I feel more contemplative about the project. I thought at first that this was the excitement of the first days wearing off, like when one of my kids woke up Monday morning of the SECOND week of Kindergarten and said, You mean I have to go back? I didn't have the heart to tell her that this was only the beginning.

 

And I'm sure there was some of that for me. The realization that I have committed to something that is much harder than I imagined, that I will have to find the willpower within myself to keep after, day after day, week after week, and yes, even month after month. But there is something else. A darker side to this project.

 

I have been reading a book about Sophia Tolstoy by Leah Bendavid-Val called Songs Without Words. The book is an in-depth look at Sophia's creative work, her photography, alongside entries from her and her husband's diaries. Sophia took a great number of self-portraits (I think of them as some of the first Selfies), some close-up, some far away, some artsy (there is one of her standing inside the hollow of a great tree that I particularly like), but the best ones, the most tender and revealing one, show her in her daily routine: making jam with children and the housekeeper, washing at a basin, and arranging flowers. Her original plan had been to photograph Leo Tolstoy for posterity, and she did until their later years, when Leo became quite close to his assistant Vladimir Grigoryevitch Chertkov. It is clear from the written documents of the time that Chertkov displaced Sophia as Leo closest confidante, and I have to wonder how much this contributed to reports of her hysteria. She had devoted her entire life to Leo and his work. Yesterday, I read this passage from her diary:

 

"For a genius one has to create a peaceful, cheerful, comfortable home; a genius must be fed, washed and dressed, must have his works copied out innumerable times, must be loved and spared all cause for jealousy, so that he can be calm; then one must feed and educate the innumerable children fathered by this genius, whom he cannot be bothered to care for himself...And when the members of his family circle have sacrificed their youth, beauty--everything--to serve this genius, they are then blamed for not understanding the geniuses properly--and they never get a word of thanks from the geniueses themselves of course, for sacrificing their pure young lives to him, and atrophying all their spiritual and intellectual capacities, which they are unable to nourish and develop due to lack of peace, leisure and energy." 13 March 1902

 

Not to go all feminist on you, but as a mother-wife-artist, I can relate. When I read that Sophia Tolstoy had recopied War and Peace more than seven times, when I saw the photograph of her handwriting, marked through, whole lines crossed out by her husband, ready for yet another recopying, my heart hurt for her. I thought, no wonder she took self-portraits. She had to find some way of not feeling completely invisible. And I was taken back to my own younger self, a twenty-five-year-old who sat at a computer for eight hours and cobbled together a philosophy paper for the man with whom I was in a relationship, so he wouldn't fail the class. I managed to earn a C+, and he passed the class. I know what this says about me as a woman. It is all true, or was then. I saw his success as necessary to my own happiness. In my mind, if he failed, I failed. It has taken me many years to unravel the shame of that day. It took a long, painful divorce, many years of therapy, and attempts undo the damage I did to my own daughters, and my son.

 

So somehow, I will find the time to complete this work, even if I have to work late into the night, the way Sophia did. She deserves to be heard, even if I am the only one listening.

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A Day Of Rest?

Monday morning, after the kids took off for school, and my husband left, pulling his suitcase behind for an overnight business trip, I decided to give myself the day off from writing. After a quick trip to the laundromat and a walk with a friend, I lay down on the couch and turned on the television. I flipped to one of my favorite guilty pleasures: The Food Network. I should mention that since beginning to copy AK, I have watched very little TV, but hey, this was my day off, so I indulged in a couple of episodes of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. And since I was relaxing, I opened up Hooked On Words on my phone and played a few games. Okay, maybe I did run the battery down. By the end of the day, I had done more "relaxing" than I had done over the previous seven days combined. I fell asleep on the couch, waking at 11:30 to go up to bed. I slept fitfully, waking up every couple of hours. Gone was the wonderful feeling of sinking into my bed at night. Gone were the vivid dreams of the past week. Still present, however, were the pains in my hands and wrists. Honestly, I felt like crap, not at all like I expected to feel after a day off.

 

At 5am, tired of my restless night, I got up and headed down to make tea. I turned on the kitchen light and opened my big black binder. I pulled out page 15 from AK, thinking I could get an early start on the first page for the day. By the time 12 left for the bus, I had finished two pages. I made a second cup of tea and sat back down to finish another, putting me at a grand total of seventeen pages so far.

 

Just as I was closing the binder, my sister sent me a text asking if I wanted to go the State Fair. I responded, in all caps, Yes!

 

As it turned out, today was my day of rest, even though technically I wrote three pages. I met my sister and her daughter. Together we made our way through the fairgrounds, stopping first for a freshly made corndog. We watched baby Clydesdale ponies in the Coliseum then headed back outside for roasted corn. From there we went into the Cattle Barn. I passed rows of cows, organized by farm. A little girl of about 10 lay napping in the straw right beside a sleeping cow. A toddler sat inside a playpen, scribbling on a Fair Program with an inkpen while a group of men sat in fold-out camp chairs under a canopy. At the end of the barn, I found the petting area which held five babies of different breed. One, a Swiss Brown, was standing right in front of me. When I reached my hand down, its long purplish-gray tongue slipped across my palm. It stood about three feet tall and its hip bones poked out one each side of its hind end. But its ears were like taupe-colored velvet and its nose was pinkish and wet. It continued to lick me, even when I turned to pet another baby, until finally, the animal walked around behind me (by now I was inside the pen) and tugged at a strand of my hair. When I turned around, it was right there. I laughed. I pulled out my phone and took a picture of the baby peering over my shoulder. It got up even closer, nosing me out of the selfie.

 

We stayed a while longer, checking out the poultry barn, a giant cheese sculpture and finally the Wine and Beer Tasting, where I met the employees of a local used bookstore with a microbrewery attached. Phillip let me take his picture next to the quote at the Books & Brews tasting booth. He even asked about my blog when I told him what I was doing. I think on my next Day of Rest, I will check out their shop.

 

Rest for me seems to be more a state of mind than of body. I'd like to say I will remember that from now on, but I know I won't. I start. I stop. I start up again.

 

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That Oh Shit moment

I remember the moment when I realized the end result of being pregnant. Not havin a baby, but giving birth to a baby. I had that feeling again this weekend, staring at the eight bags of pears on my kitchen table. What had seemed exciting and possible while Beth's son, easily a foot taller than us, shook the tree branches while we stood beneath gathering fruit, now seemed an unsurmountable task.

So I copied pages of Anna Karenina as a way to procrasitinate the job of sorting, washing and cooking the fruit into pear butter, which I would have to ladle into sterilized jars, boil in a water bath and let cool until the lids vacuum-sealed with that telltale POP. After that I would have to label the jars and find a place to store them for the winter.

Instead I write out another three pages, putting my total so far at fourteen. Only 786 to go. But one week ago, I had not even begun. Sophie Speaks was still in my head, an idea that kept nagging for my attention. One week ago, I sat down at a table with my 21-year-old niece who was helping me set up the blog site.

"What should we do first?" I asked.

"I'm not sure," she said.

"Well, how long can you work with me today?"

"However long it takes."

We sat there, upgrading my operating system, looking up tech support, until we knew what to do. And by the end of the day, I had made my first blog post.

This is on my mind today as I write, whenever I feel my mind slipping into that Oh Shit What Was I Thinking place, realizing how long this will take, worrying that no one will even care. But sometimes, for just a few minutes, I am paying close attention to my handwriting, the smoothness with which my hand moves through the word, the way a b hooks and swings upward into an r. A moment later I am wondering if Darya Alexandrovna will forgive her husband or go to stay with her mother. I hear the carriage door slam and pull away with her husband inside. I am lost in another world; time moves slowly. I hear my daughter calling me as if I am in the bathtub with my head underwater, but then I hear my husband answer, tell her that her mom is working, ask if he can help with anything, and I know I am still here, still above the surface, the table before me laden with pears.

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A Day's Work

I got a bit overzealous yesterday, wrote out four pages by hand and had no energy left to write anymore. This has me thinking about the idea of work. What makes work valuable? I have spent the last three years writing a short story collection inspired by my three great-aunts, nuns in different orders, all of whom took a vow of poverty and worked their entire lives without seeing a paycheck with their names on it. And yet when I called the Daughters of Charity to find out about my Aunt Helen (Sister Laura Stricker), the woman on the phone knew her by name.

 

"You are her great-neice? You will need at least a week to go through our archives about Sister Laura. She worked for more than sixty years at our Leprosorium in Louisana."

 

 

I also found letters from former students of my Aunt Margaret, and notes about how her teaching helped them work through difficult points in their lives. One woman continued to write a letter each Christmas until my aunt's death in the 80s.

 

I come from a long line of hard-workers: parents who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II; a grandmother who could have appeared in a Rosie the Riveter Sign; great-grandparents who immigrated from Germany to settle farmland in Southern Indiana. My parents moved to the "country" themselves, taking my four siblings and me along with them, to settle their own 3/4 acre farm. We collected eggs from our chickens, picked blackberries and apples which were canned for jelly, woke at 7am to weed the garden every morning during summer break, donning wide-brimmed straw hats that my father purchased for us. My dad worked more than 35 years in the maintenance department of the hospital, and my mother worked both inside and outside the home, doing whatever job she could get until she finally opened her own business training and supporting home childcare providers.

 

So this morning, while poaching an egg that I collected from my one of my four hens (If you have never lifted an egg warm from the nesting box, you really should try it. If it is still damp from being laid, all the better.), I am reflecting on a conversation with my youngest child last night. Conversation may be a bit too pleasant of a word; it was more one-sided than that. She was writing her weekly Current Events assignment for Humanties, on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. I was sitting at the kitchen table, writing my final page of Anna Karenina. My almost seventeen-year-old was washing the dinner dishes at the sink.

 

"Mom, when did the outbreak start?" asks 12.

"I'm don't know. You'll have to look it up," I say, my hands and eyes still on the page.

"Why can't you just tell me?"

"Because I'm working."

"You're not working. You're just writing some dumb book."

 

At this point, Almost 17 stops her work and looks over, silent.

 

I don't remember the words spoken after that. I'm not sure there were any until, after I have taken away her iPod (yes, I let her listen to music while sitting at the computer; don't judge.), 12 spews forth a variety of insults about what I am doing wrong. She is not a bad kid, just a kid who doesn't want to work any harder than she has to. Not to sound like the parent who walked to school both ways, in the snow, uphill, but she, and others of her generation, have not had to work hard, actually physically labor, at many things. She settled down, apologized and finished her work. And I did too. I closed by binder, shut off all the lights and went straight to bed. I was exhausted.

 

Today, I am going to pick pears at a friend's house. Tomorrow I will be canning, another form of labor that my mother, thank goodness, taught me. I won't get paid for that work, just as I won't get paid for this project, but I will see the fruits of my labor, in jars of food lining a basement shelf, and clean white page after page filled with words that I have written by hand, and in the sight of my bed at the end of a long day. I will sigh as I lay my body down on it, my shoulder against the sheet, my arm wrapped around extra pillow to ease the ache. And I will sleep until morning, when I get up to do it again.

 

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Day 3, In Which I Learn to Spell Arkadyavitch

My hand hurts. The right one, as I am right-handed. (I have one left-handed child, and I remember noticing her preference, not when she picked up a crayon but her toothbrush, the fork beside her plate, a spoon to stir soup on the stove). I can feel tightness all the way up to and through my right shoulder blade. When I finally stop writing this afternoon, having completed three hand-written pages, my fingers stay gripped around their fine-point gel pen. I extend and stretch the fingers; pain runs to the tips of each one.

 

I have not handwritten this many pages in cursive since college, taking in-class essay exams and filling up the infamous blue books (Do they still use those? My guess is no.). I have written five pages so far, one printed page equaling, approximately, one notebook page, front and back. In those five pages, Stepan Arkadyavitch (whose full name I must write out numerous times, at least twenty so far) wakes on the couch in his studio, kicked out of his wife's bed when she discovers he has been has sleeping with the governess, an act for which he is unwilling to repent, because, he does not love his wife.

 

Arkadyavitch does not roll off the fingertips. Decisively, however, feels smooth and lovely as I write it, as does happened, possibly, cruel, and upper lip. I had forgotten the pleasure I used to take in evenly spacing the words, maintaining a constant motion until I reach that last letter, and only then, going back to dot my i's and cross my t's. In high school, we hand wrote everything. Laura P and I competed for the neatest handwriting; I confess that I have kept my frog dissection lab report from Freshman Biology out of pride for my penmanship. Years later, after my first child, is born, I am tutoring kids with dyslexia and dysgraphia, and I learn why handwriting is important: our ideas are lost if the person with whom we want to share our thoughts cannot even read the words. Later, my son's fifth grade teacher requests that we respond to classroom papers in cursive, so students can practice reading the unfamiliar shapes. Now, of course, handwriting is being phased out. I wonder how this will change the way this generation of students sees and handles words. Handwriting is a skill that has served us well.

 

In my own fiction writing, I often rewrite or retype stories as one step in the revision process. I consider each word carefully, punctuation too, an often overlooked and powerful tool in storytelling. I can change the meaning of an entire scene by removing quotation marks from dialogue, or writing a series of words without any commas or semicolons or dashes to break them apart.

 

But I am not revising. I am only copying, looking up to grab onto a few words, four or five if possible, and then moving my eyes back down, watching letters form, hearing the smooth scritching of pen on paper as the ink leaves its black stain on white pages. I don't think too much about what I am writing, just put word after word after word, capitalizing at the beginning of sentences, crossing out and rewriting when I make a mistake. Kids come in and out of the kitchen, can I have a popsicle, why do I have to change out of my school clothes, what's for dinner, mingling in my head with converstions between Stepan Arkadyavitch and his valet and and his barber, and finally, in the last few lines, the nurse, who encourages to Stepan Arkadyavitch to seek out his wife and beg forgiveness.

 

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Making My Case

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

-Carl Sagan

 

This morning I wake alone in our bed, Bob and Tom playing on the radio, our alarm setting since the beginning our of life together. My husband is already up and moving around. My daughter too; she walks into my bedroom.

"Mom, does this look okay?" she asks, turning on the light, so I can assess her second-day-of-school outfit.

"It looks great," I say, still lying in the bed but holding up my head to see.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure."

My younger daughter is staying home. Yes, this is a record: a sick kid on the second day of school. I don't even bother to rethink that decision. She was in bed by six last night, never woke up to eat dinner, only to swallow two ibuprofen and two sips of blue Gatorade. For me, this means that once I get my early birds off, I can begin my own work.

I am already sitting at the kitchen table when my husband walks in at 7am dressed for work. In front of me are a black binder full of notebook paper, an old typing book with a cover that can be opened to stand the book upright, and my copy of Anna Karenina. While he stands at the counter making his lunch, I rip out the first page of the novel and clip it to the top of the typing manual.

"I should probably use a pen and not a pencil," I say. "She would have used a pen."

"I think you should use a real fountain pen," my husband says. "That would make it authentic."

We have already had a discussion about how painful it is going to be copy out 800 pages by hand. "What about your carpal tunnel? You can't jeopardize your own health to do this?" After I explained that the whole point of this project is to get inside the experience from the perspective of Sophia Tolstoy, he nodded his head.

But now he is taking my idea a little too far.

"If that is what she would have used, you have to also. Otherwise, it won't be historically accurate."

When I disagree, he continues to encourage me to reconsider. Have I mentioned that my husband is a lawyer? And a scientist? He knows how to prove a point. I do too: I don't care. This is my project, and I am going to do what I want.

 

Yes, it is true that I am retyping someone else's novel. And yes, I am trying to get inside the experience of the wife of an artistic genius, a person with her own creative passions and a large family to care for. And yes, I want to actually feel what it felt like to do the work of hand-copying an eight-hundred page novel, which I can already tell you, after copying only the first two pages, will work muscles that been have never been flexed in a Jazzersize class.

But I am not a historian. I am not an academic expert or an authority on Tolstoy or Russian History or Feminism. My goal is not become any one of those. My goal is to read Anna Karenina, because it has been on my reading list for years and I can never find the time to tackle it, and because I am a writer, and I want to be a better writer, and that means reading the works of many different writers. It is true that I write short stories, not epic novels, but it is also true, and I know this too after only the first two pages, that Tolstoy's writing is amazing. And I will be a better writer after this project is complete. I might be a better wife, and mother, and maybe even a better human being. I can see that Tolstoy understood things about human nature and had the ability to put those ideas into words that have lived well beyond his lifetime. As a writer, I can only hope to write something that powerful.

 

And yet, it is still just a novel. Just words on a page, words that I recopy onto loose-leaf paper and place inside my plain black binder. When I am finished, I unclip the pages from my makeshift stand, rip them into pieces and put them in the compost bin outside my back door.

 

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Hearing Voices

The first day of school seems, at first thought, a bad time to begin a new project. And if it were any other project, I would agree. Given that I am channeling the voice of a woman who juggled her own artistic pursuits with those of a successful writer-husband and the needs of a large family and working estate, I wonder if I am already hearing her voice from the past.

If you want to get into my head, you have to do it in the midst of family life.

And so it begins.

I wake at 5:30am to get my 17-year-old daughter off to school. I make a bagel and pack a lunch for her. The dog wakes and lumbers into the kitchen. I feed him too, three scoops of dry food. After the carpool picks her up, I give my husband a haircut. He had surgery on his knee last Wednesday and this is his first day back at work; I have added nursemaid to responsibilities the past five days.

At 7:30, he heads out. My 12-year-old enters the kitchen, complaining of a sore throat. I give her ibuprofen and send her back upstairs to get dressed. She returns, a toasted bagel with peanut butter waiting at the table, her lunch packed and ready. She is riding the bus this morning, but because she has to carry all her supplies for the first day, my 19-year-old stepson drives her to the stop before leaving for his summer nanny job.

It is 8:30.

I wash the breakfast dishes by hand, because the dishwasher had been broken since February. I call the Vet to make an appointment for the dog, who has had pneumonia. I feed the chickens.

At 9:00, I have tended to all the voices except Sophie's.

The plan is to enter Sophie Tolstoy's head by retyping the Anna Karenina manuscript, as she did for her husband. What must it have been like to be a woman, struggling to manage all the duties of married life and also crave some passion of her own? I don't know what I am going to find as I embark on this project. I know I will have to type 2 to 3 pages every day to finish the job in a year. How long did it take her to complete each draft? How many times did she have to repeat the process? What was going on in her own head as she typed the words?

And the biggest question of all: How did she hold on to some sense of her own identity?