Ferns at Soapstone

A month has passed since we left Soapstone, and I am finally ready to say goodbye. Please forgive the lapse in posts – breaking up is hard to do. I know that even escape grows old if it is your daily life, but I hadn’t quite hit the “I’m ready to miss this” moment at Soapstone before we left. What I am (mostly) over missing -  the uninterrupted span of time to write. The daily rituals Kate and I perfected – late mornings of waking to start a fire and stoke a small pot fat with oatmeal, raisins and coconut for our lazy breakfast, trips to Bread and Ocean in Manzanita for coffee and a few good  hours of writing, nighttime in some ocean-side pub for a beer or two and a basket of oysters, and of course, more writing.

I discovered a beautiful thing I’d like to call the One Beer Wonder – poems seemed to just tumble out on their own in the time it took me to polish off a pint of porter. This amounted to 23 new poems during our three week trip, a good number even if poems shouldn’t be quantified. I miss the river and the white noise it made all day and night. I miss spotting coyotes and eagles from the deck of the cabin. I miss the green, green, green of the forest we were blessed to live in.

I know now what a good residency feels like, and I also know that Kate is the best residency mate that any fool could dream up – we got along flawlessly, and helped work each other’s poems into pleasing shapes. The only real bummer of the trip? Kate got sick (from food poisoning, the Noro Virus, or some other evil malady) and the beef stock that she had made the night before illness bore her to the bathroom was promptly put in the freezer. I was pretty excited for Kate and I to make French Onion Soup – but the food you make the night before sickness often gets relegated to the no-eat zone, and this was the case for Kate and the stock.

On a day that I was especially sad over the loss of our magical writing residency, I decided to make some stock of my own to soothe my blues. This stock is an ode to Kate, Soapstone, the coyotes and all the poems we made. Food really is the best way out of sadness, sometimes.

Bones to roast

Beef Stock

Adapted from Gourmet Magazine and Memory

• 4 pounds meaty organic grass fed beef bones (As Kate says, make sure the cow has been hugged to death)
• 2 onions, quartered and left unpeeled
• 2 medium or 1 and a half large carrots, quartered
• 4 fresh flat-leaf parsley sprigs
• 1 fresh thyme bundle (4-5 sprigs)
• 1  bay leaf
• 15 1/2 cups cold water
• 2 celery ribs
• 1 cup dry sherry
• 2 teaspoons salt

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 450°F.

Spread beef bones, onions, and carrot in a large flameproof roasting pan and roast, turning occasionally, until well browned, about 1 hour.

While shanks roast, wrap parsley, thyme, and bay leaf in kitchen string and tie to make a bouquet garni.

Transfer meat and vegetables to a 6- to 8-quart stockpot. Straddle roasting pan across 2 burners, then add 1 cup sherry and 1 cup water, and deglaze pan by boiling over high heat, stirring and scraping up brown bits, 1 minute. Add deglazing liquid to stockpot along with 14 cups water, celery, salt, and bouquet garni. Bring to a boil and skim froth. Add remaining 1/2 cup water, then bring mixture to a simmer and skim froth. Simmer gently, uncovered, 5 hours.

Pour stock through a fine-mesh sieve into a large bowl, and discard solids. Stock should measure about 8 cups – if you have more than 8 cups, boil until reduced to 8 cups; add water if stock measures less than 8 cups. If using stock right away, skim off and discard fat. If not, cool stock completely, uncovered, before skimming fat (it will be easier to remove when cool), then chill, covered.

Roasted bones

For me, writing is like traveling to multiple dimensions and accidentally coming back very pregnant. When the writing feeling happens, the interstellar me is whisked off to another universe. This wispy version of myself spends the rest of the poem tucking the geography (and iconography) of the place into her pockets so that I can transcribe them through my mostly inert real body. When these two parts of me are rejoined, I’m startled by the big pile of newness that we created. I’m almost always unable to keep writing, and whatever words were born when we got back together just need to take a nap, as far as I can tell.

Sometimes, these poems nap for years. More often, it takes 3-6 months. I check on them every once in awhile to see if they are still breathing, then silently close the nursery drawer.  They have to be able to soothe themselves. If I bring a poem out after 6 months of silence and it is just screaming for attention, I put it away again.

So when Kate misheard my suggestion that we read another person’s poem every night at Soapstone as something like “Let’s read our new poems every night” I was so mortified that I agreed and just ate another oyster. Kate and I are both hard of hearing, which means our time together in poetry group and at this residency is commonly punctuated with “What?” and “Can you say that again?” After years of smiling and nodding through unheard conversations or deftly changing the subject after the third time I’ve asked someone to speak up and I still have absolutely no idea what they are talking about, I’m prone to giving my hearing impaired friends license to re-interpret my words. Some of the best things I’ve ever heard were just the hallucinations of my damaged and dreamy ears. When considering my need to let poems rest for large amounts of time before they are allowed to see the light of day, I do get annoyed at my fussy self. What is all this nonsense about alternate universes and treating poems like breathing creatures that need to form their independence?

Not all of my talents are invested in being a total weirdo, however – I am also remarkably good at procrastinating, and inversely, at being rash. A few days ago, Kate asked if I wanted to email her a few poems so that she could print them out.  So that we could workshop them.  Days after they were written.  I made some sort of semi-plausible excuse about needing to look them over, because they really weren’t poems yet. A couple of days ago, when we were in the freezing cold café with the virgins and jazz music, I looked over one of her poems, but whoops! none of mine were printed. The night before last, I managed to get really involved in an abstract embroidery project I am working on, and we missed our window for the planned workshop. Then, yesterday morning, without having tried to make them into actual poems, I gave up. I woke a few of them up, and escorted them through the printing process.

They did look a little dazed, and one of them seemed to be fighting constipation.  I took them to the table, handed them over to Kate, and waited for the impending tantrums.

And nothing bad happened. In fact, only good things happened. The poems seemed remarkably soothed by the process. One of them came together and is finished.

I don’t know if this early showing of poems will be a practical practice when I get back to the city – perhaps it works better here in the woods. But I am pretty pleased.

And sometimes, I really love being wrong.

The 500 or so words that I do know how to spell can all be attributed to the scholarly skill of Mr. Gold at Woodinville Elementary School. Mr. Gold was consistently furious at my fifth grade class. It is probably accurate to say that Mr. Gold was furious at every fifth grade class he ever taught. In my memory, he appears as a gorgeous, malicious owl head teetering on a fit 80-year-old man’s body.

Owlman by James Todd

It is more likely that he was a normal looking 45-year-old guy with slightly bushy eyebrows (or owlbrows, as they are called in my house). I can’t imagine that Mr. Gold left twenty-eight 10-year olds alone in his classroom with any regularity, but I swear he was always exploding back into the room, screaming three words that would forever be seared into my tender brain: THE UNMITIGATED GALL.

Oh, Mr. Gold was a storm of a man. And as far as I knew, unmitigated gall was a term for the weather. In my imagination, he was basically screaming It’s raining cats and dogs! I was sure that a gall was a storm involving rain, and that unmitigated meant relentless. I knew that he was really telling us that we, as children, were pretty much unbearable and deserving of some deranged Roman form of punishment, but I couldn’t help it – I heard him yelling Unrelenting Tempest! each time he spat out that notable phrase. If I hadn’t been so helplessly impressed with him, I’m sure I would have burst out laughing. As an adult, I can’t find any dictionary mention of a gall being a term for a rainstorm, though I’m certain I’ve heard it used that way before. It only follows that if a windstorm is a gale, and rainstorm is a gall, right? I now understand that unmitigated means absolute, which isn’t so far from relentless if you really break it down.

For that one year of my life, I loved spelling. I can’t remember if I every achieved any fleeting success with it, but I do recall Mr. Gold’s unmitigated pleasure every time I stood up from my plastic chair and spelled something correctly. Though it was never directly communicated, I established that Mr. Gold’s love of language paralleled mine, with a larger desire for accuracy. Mr. Gold also taught me that, for the love of God, a zero is a ZERO, not an o. An o is a bloody letter, and you don’t find it anywhere in the numerical system unless you can only count to twenty and think that bellybutton lint is hi-larious. He might have also taught me that Velveeta is not actually cheese. At the end of the school year, I remember him placing his owl-hand on my shoulder and telling me that I was going to do just fine in Junior High School – after years of mooning away in a corner with the larger academic establishment fearfully assessing my dismal future, this was like winning the praise lottery. It turns out that Mr. Gold was more right about life than he was about my chances in Junior High School. And, as it turns out, I still can’t spell.

Luckily, I have a husband who doubles as an editor. He irons out all my ignorant decisions with his big brain and something called a Ph.D. – now if it were up to me, we’d pronounce that series of letters Phhhttd! simply to amplify the charm of their arrangement. My leanings in the arena of his fine education are not always admirable, though. When we were first dating, I accidentally told someone that he had a Ph.D. in psychology (it is really a Ph.D. in philosophy) and boy did he look peeved. After that, I would accidentally on purpose make the same mistake from time to time, always turning gleefully to see his scowl-y expression before he corrected my error. I should point out that David is not much of a scowler – when considering the variations in character among humans, David holds position firmly in the sweet, funny and smart categories. Can you really blame me for wanting to see this lighthearted chap occasionally screw his face up in contempt?

Did I also mention that he is very patient?

This is all to say that I beg your forgiveness for any and all errors that I make while I am here in the woods, away from my valiant and handsome editor. For your amusement, here is a video of David dancing.