Loose Leaf Notes

1. “Are you digging the snow? was my preferred line all day yesterday after 5 inches of the white stuff fell on us, here in Floyd County. I used it on everyone I spoke with, online or otherwise. It started out innocently enough in a blog comment I made to Doug, after viewing his photos of the snowfall. I tried it later on my son, when he came up the mountain from Roanoke to provide some direct-care for our foster care resident so that I could get a break. It went over his head. Maybe the question was too baby-boomer-retro for him to understand the double meaning.
Here’s what he said upon coming through my front door” “Mom, your kitchen is a mess!” It was.
“I know,” I answered. That’s because I’ve been in school all week learning new things on the computer. The problem is that I’m the teacher and I don’t know anything! And that’s why I need your help today.”
After setting him up with a Candy Lane Game and a few instructions, I collected my various stacks of books, notebooks, and loose disheveled pages from various parts of the house and went upstairs to the computer room…and locked the door.
2. All the tools of my trade collect into groups. Right now there are 4 cobalt blue mugs on my desk. Pens are scattered everywhere…one is in my pocket…a few fell on the floor. But sometimes when I really want a pen, there are none. I also have 4 pairs of reading glasses on my desk (not counting the ones on my face). 3 of them are broke at the hinges, but I save them for back-up (knowing what sometimes happens with the pens.)
I don’t even want to mention notebooks. I try to buy them in different colors, so I can tell them apart, but it seems that I start writing in one, and then prematurely go onto a newer one, until soon they all look the same.
I have scraps of paper with words scribbled on them in every room of my house. (Some people actually use file cards?) Here’s one that just says: “Things that make me have to put on extra deodorant.” An idea for a new list or a blog entry, I suppose. Below it is written, simply “105,000.” I struggle to remember that it’s probably the suggested mileage # for changing the timing belt on my CRV. Some of the various sized scraps of papers have web addresses or phone numbers written on them, and others seem to have expired, which means that I waited too long to do something with them and now I can’t read my own writing anymore.
This is the order of my disorder. But it’s not just writing. It’s writing and cooking. My kitchen isn’t any neater than my office, as my son so honestly pointed out. Something about cooking and writing seem related. This is what I wrote in a prose introduction to a group of poems in Muses Like Moonlight, titled “Job Doesn’t Work.”
When you work at home, people think you don’t work. That’s because often you don’t. Part of the writing process is avoiding doing it, because you know once you get started, it will be all-consuming. I spend a lot of time thinking about writing, getting ready to write, collecting ingredients, cleaning off a space, as though I were going to bake a cake. And speaking of cake, sometimes it seems that the bulk of my life revolves around acquiring food, preparing it, eating it, and cleaning up after eating. Multiply that by 3 times a day, add any others you cook for,throw in snacks, tea or coffee breaks…and that’s a pretty full day. I wonder how I get anything else done.
Okay, I feel better now. I think it’s safe to unlock the door and head downstairs…to clean my kitchen.
How a poem is like cake
Don’t use a mix
or stale ingredients
Don’t look in the oven
too much when it’s cooking
or eat too much at one sitting
Don’t over-sweeten
or over-stir
A baker and a poet
are both concerned with flavor
It’s all about consistency
and knowing when it’s done