we had a time, didn't we?

reading old diary entries, those penned before I had given much of a thought to ever posting personal sentiments in this wild west we call the internet, i am struck by all that has happened in the past 10 years. phrases like "y2k" bring me crashing back to 1999, before i had graduated high school, before morocco and falling in love and waving hands out car windows as i drove in my rusting honda from pennsylvania to wyoming. before ani difranco concerts and chocolate on trains to chicago and spilling secrets in long dark corridors with cold green tiles. how do you describe a decade? it was a melange of moments, of dirt streaked on cheeks, collapsing in fields after chasing geese in illinois, milkshakes and talk of those Big Ideas, some now laughable, in wisconsin - but then, how Big everything was then. it was Where In This World Do I Fit and often still is. this decade, well it was: the summer of saying goodbye; college and all that goes with it - the pretentiousness of academia and the genuine love of learning, the late nights writing about the Rwandan genocide and Marxist feminists and whatever is in between Dostoevsky and Frank O'Hara; falling in and out of love and in love again (and again. and again); my mother's cancer; too many deaths - my best friend, the girl with the beautiful red hair who will forever inspire me to never stop seeking and always drink lemonade on cliff tops and skydive in the czech republic and find my own way in subsaharan africa, and my uncle and my two grandmothers; my love for helene cixous and simone de beauvoir and a million other authors; all the hellos and goodbyes to so many friends who forever changed me with talks in the south of morocco, over indian food, in A Room of One's Own bookstore in Madison, on the floors of kitchens in Wyoming; getting married to my best friend; Morocco, a country i still ache for, a country i still pen love letters to(a country where rooftops were my home, where i wandered, drunk on red wine, through the medinas and spoke of LifeLifeLife in the back of a tiny shop while drinking mint tea always mint tea); the debacle of course that was george w. bush and the overwhelming relief of barack obama; Wyoming, where, while drinking coronas in dark bars and cross country skiing and hiking red cliffs and in the back of cars while listening to patty griffin near fremont lake, i met some of the most amazing people in my life; learning, time and again, what it means to seek out that elusive and unattainable truth as a journalist. It was friends and laughter and sobbing and teetering on the edge and finding myself over and over and warm oceans and freezing lakes and love and writing and.

as usual we're having ourselves one hell of a time

a classic. i will never tire of this song.

and when we leave the landlord will come and paint over it all

pumpkin cheesecake crumbs dot the kitchen counter, smeared gently onto a wooden tabletop bought somewhere off a connecticut highway. i easily brush these remnants of thanksgiving into the trash as i listened to a cd i haven't played for years (ani difranco - living in clip). it all plays out so seamlessly: i watch the lights of manhattan dot the horizon once again, we fall deeper into night, i sip tea and i marvel at how easily everything is given and everything is taken away. how long we take to build our stories and where those sentences eventually land. what becomes of our commas, our semi-colons, our ellipses. what will i remember of this night years and years from now? maybe nothing. and maybe that's alright.

but I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now

I tread quietly these days, watching planes cover the moon, sipping tea. Sometimes there are outbursts, laughter at night in the small crevices of New York City bars. I read (yet another) article about the fall of newspapers and I continue to brace for an end that never quite comes.
This quietness these days, I save my words for letters and e-mails and phone calls. I'm exhausted by small talk and I crave my best friends who are scattered across this world that I'm dying to see.
Tonight, amidst cranberry sauce and Sangiovese wine and too much talk of real estate for my liking, I wrote smallish notes to myself: It's time to leave. But first, the waiting.

the autumn leaves

The leaves are red and mid-departure, elections are over, a lone striped sock sits sans partner on my living room floor. I am drinking pumpkin beer, candles burn, and I need to write many letters and make many phone calls.
I read about a communal living space in Brooklyn in the new issue of New York Magazine today as I drowned my sleepy self in coffee and I so want to live there. I'm trying to persuade Emile to live in some communal-type living place at some point in our lives - lots of people making Thai food together, reading stories out loud by the fire, watching cold waves crash on rocky shores (well, that's not Brooklyn so much- but maybe Maine?).
My friend showed me pictures of his trip to Portland, and now I have such an urge to live there. So many bookstores (especially Powell's!), little Cuban cafes with yellow walls, bus rides to volcanoes.
p.s. Anais Nin was in my dream last night!

Tonight: free tickets to "The 39 Steps;" being asked if we wanted to hear someone make chicken sounds as we were en route to McSorley's; free beer at McSorley's; talked about Canada, Chicago, Ireland, and Alaska at McSorley's; asked repeatedly where I am from (people usually guess Germany for some reason); ate a nutella and peanut butter crepe prepared by a guy from Israel and a guy from Egypt, more talk of travel was had; read "Empire Falls" on the subway. Now, spinning in a yellow dress and drinking cherry beer. It is a good night.

changing of the seasons

There's been an Indian summer these days, the nights warm with clear skies, everyone outside drinking pumpkin beer before the leaves make their final exit. People wore t-shirts today, lots of them, and there was a man singing opera at Grand Central. Tonight, I'm sipping pomegranate tea and watching Northern Exposure and reading Joseph Mitchell's "The Old Hotel." Everything is beautifully small, and I find myself sad and appreciative of the sadness.
It's strange, when someone dies, and I find myself face to face with that ultimate finality of everything. These constant beginnings and endings, I've thought about them my whole life and they make me want to dance with one hand waving free, waving goodbye to a summer that should have already gone.
"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
-The Sheltering Sky
For those who read this blog, I miss you all and I promise to become better at keeping in touch. (Especially Elaine - I'm going to be writing you a very, very long e-mail soon. I promise!)
love,
Anna

memories of my grandmother

I'm not sure what my first memory of my grandmother is. I know she was there, weeks after I was born, helping to take care of me in Palmyra, Virginia, where our neighbors would shoot squirrels and give them to us, leaving us to dry them on our clothes line.
The memories of my grandmother are many and often wrapped in music and art and laughter. She was the one who tried to teach me to play the piano, who encouraged me to pursue art, or whatever the equivalent was to me, who spoke to me of her world travels, of Italy and Sweden and Germany. She was one of the few people who would listen to me when I was a self-righteous teenager; she was the one who woke at 4 a.m., just before we would pull out of the driveway of my grandparents' home in Illinois, to stuff us with toast and cheese and salami. She and my grandfather would stand in the doorway, wave goodbye, and I would cry, even then, even when I was five, because I knew how long it would be until we saw them again.
Waving goodbye to my grandmother now is even harder, because I will never see her again. My grandmother died Tuesday, and I can't really grasp that when I fly into Chicago O'Hare next weekend, she will not be there, waiting for me, ready to tell me about her newest painting or a new rosemalling partner.
I love you, Grandma. I miss you.

to ohio

this is the Low Anthem song I can't stop listening to...

also this one is beautiful - makes me want to be traveling by train to nowhere in particular.

Jackson

Kim and I; the Sugar Shack, which was right down the street from my house and where I definitely ate one too many mozzarella sticks and drank one too many shakes!; the line between winter and fall.

Fremont Lake

Fremont Lake during the first snow of the year.

Pinedale's cow wall, the relatively new visitor's center that incited many meltdowns while I covered tourism board, and more Pinedale...

All of these are pretty self explanatory - the last one is the building where I worked while at the Roundup.

In order: the house in Pinedale where I once lived; Faler's (now called Ridley's?) General Store, where I bought many a frozen pizza; and more Sacred Rim.

Kate pretty much always had a camera in her face...

Kim, her daughter Kate, and Andrew on a hike to Sacred Rim in Wyoming.