the new house

hey folks, the new house is here. or if you need a clearer address:

https://www.andreacorronajenkins.com/b-l-o-g

it's not so much a new house as a new addition, built onto a pre-existing structure. it was just easier that way. are you weary of the house analogy? me too. anyway, I suppose I'll leave this house standing for a little while, along with all the things in it. at least until I figure out what to do with it. seventeen years! seventeen years. it's the end of a personal era. if you read here for any amount of time, I thank you. and I hope you'll say hi over at the new place.

p.s. nablopomo shall continue over on ye new blog.

p.p.s. ava and ezra, if you are reading this, if you have read through any portions of this blog at all, thank you and I'm sorry and you're welcome and I love you.

resurrections

this morning, I woke up thinking my bed was a magic cloud and that I should really only leave it for things like bike rides and trips to foreign countries. 

and then I remembered when we first moved back here from portland, how we did not actually have a bed. that, in the throes of moving (and in a moment of blind optimism), we ditched our old one in hopes it might force the mattress gods to smile down on us. but there was no smiling and for months, we slept on an old air mattress, one with multiple tiny holes in it. what this meant, dear reader, is that it had to be re-inflated two or three times during the night, and that most times we woke up millimeters from the floor, felt our backs and hips and shoulders press into what were surely hateful plywood planks beneath renters beige carpet. and so then ward would reach over in the dark, in that drunken sleepy clumsy way I will always remember, to plug the air pump back in. we'd hear the high-pitched whir of electric air and feel our bodies slowly rise upwards, as if supernatural forces were at play. in the wee dark hours of the night I thought, someday we will laugh about this. not now, but someday. but it went on like this for months-- the two of us and that ridiculous situation, every night, with netflix and bowls of cereal and the slow hiss of the mattress, the sound of air slowly escaping, our bodies gradually sinking, ultimately rolling in towards each other.

but someday is finally now and I am in my magic cloud bed and I am laughing, nary an air pump in sight. 

gold, I tell you

I am holding the idea of that extra hour tonight like a willy wonka golden ticket wrapped around a chocolate bar. I am thinking about that part in the story when it seems all hope is lost and then charlie finds fifty pence in the gutter and his mind runs wild with possibility. how he goes straight to the newspaper shop that sells sweets and cigars and buys one whipple-scrumptious fudgemallow delight and wolfs it down so fast the shopkeeper says hey sonny boy, slow down, you'll make yourself sick. I'm thinking about how he decides to buy one more candy bar, just because, even though he thinks all the golden tickets have already been found. I am of course thinking about the moment he unwraps that bar-- the slight crinkle of paper, that glimmer of gold. 

I no longer care about losing light. I now find the argument around daylight savings time cumbersome and pointless. I treat that extra hour like what it feels like: a whipple-scrumptious fudgemallow delight with a golden ticket inside. 

so I'm building a new house

and I don't exactly know what it will look like (though I have a pretty good idea) and I'm no coder or anything (I do not have that kind of brain) but a fresh new house for words and pictures, with figurative space for figurative breathing and figurative moving is the (literal) plan. fresh. fresh is a word I love. 

it really seems like I should have more words, more substance to show for seventeen minutes of writing but, here we are. I will admit to googling a few things while the timer was running, things like 'thermal baths in budapest' and 'what does blood sausage' taste like' but the brain works in mysterious ways and I am in no particular place to question it. 

I need a new house

I can't keep living in this blogspot house. I've been here since 2005. I can't keep living here. renovations are possible, I've certainly considered them. frankly, I think it's a little punk rock to operate via blogspot in 2022. there's something openly defiant about it, which I love. but this house here, this blogspot house is a shell.

seventeen minutes

(the timer is running) 

thinking about:

a new coat

early blogger days

tina modotti

a teeny tiny list project

boiled peanuts

substack

the year 2023

the word meraviglioso

blood orange lipstick

joan didion's things

sunrise grocery store

goldenrod along the highway

the invasion of the joro spiders

cherry cobbler moonshine jam

florence, italy

a new timer

(with eleven minutes to spare)

november is my thursday night

start easy, they say. or maybe that's just what I say. maybe it's the thing I tell myself in the beginning, when I just need to get out of my own way and on with it already. at some point (during this last hour of the first day of november) I had the idea to set a timer for seventeen minutes and just write. and then hit publish, no matter what, which is something I've never done before. and maybe this is a really bad idea but I think it just might be the thing. 

as it turns out

I significantly underestimated the sacredness of this space. though quite frankly, my underestimation looks more like forgetting and then remembering, forgetting and then remembering. back in may, the night before ezra graduated from high school, the subject of the butter came up. that is, the infamous tub of butter that went missing when ezra was just three years-old and mysteriously showed up a few days later inside a lidded pot (which was nestled behind a mess of many lidded pots in the very back of a kitchen cabinet so high up I needed a small step stool myself to reach it). surely ezra was the culprit, though it still seems impossible. we were never able to prove it or explain it and he doesn't remember (or, says he doesn't) and anyway, now it's as embedded in the family folklore as both birth stories, the time I put fake toilet paper in the bathroom and the crazy magic christmas of 2010. 

I remembered writing about the butter here and went looking for it in my archives that night. something else I underestimated: the unmitigated joy of reading old posts out loud to the humans you wrote about. one post led to another and before long, we were swimming in stories and details I had long since forgotten. I cannot explain what it felt like to read these pieces out loud to the kids for the first time. the kids, who are now 18 and 22. I cannot explain what it felt like in the room that night-- story after story, their joy, my joy. I cannot overstate this. and in writing this right now, I can feel how much I want to get it right, how tempted I am to overthink it, to leave this draft open and unpublished, to get up and do something else-- to check stupid dumb instagram, to reorganize the book shelves, to wash the three dishes in the sink-- something/anything to keep from thinking through/writing through this thing that happened that was so wonderfully deep and joyful though also strangely (inexplicably, ever so slightly) painful. I want to get it right and I don't think I can.

in a year, five years, maybe ten, I'll read this and remember. what I know now, after nearly eighteen years of blogging, is that this is all that really matters.

like I said

mike's

we are not thinking about tomorrow yet. we are not thinking about how sunday will give way to monday and monday to tuesday and so on and so forth. we are not thinking about the hard things yet. not thinking about the things we did not finish. the things we should have said but didn't or maybe should not have said but did. we are not thinking about these things, these broken things. 

instead we are thinking about leftover birthday cake and christmas trees. about the avocado that might (might) be ripe in the morning. about the story the security guard at the high museum told us, the one about mick jagger. we are thinking about neon yellow ginkgo leaves and the click of the canonet, the last of the mashed potatoes in the bonne maman jar in the back of the fridge and how good it felt to sit in a dark theatre and let c'mon c'mon swallow us whole. we are thinking about the christmas tree farm that was barely a christmas tree farm, more a junkyard than anything, how that seemed to make us love it even more, how a guy named mike handed us a saw and said, any tree, any size, 35 dollars. we are thinking about the sun like honey and the smell of pine on our fingertips and the tree we cut down and tied to the roof of our car with twine that mike gave us. we are thinking about the long shadow of our car on the way home, christmas tree on top and the way we pointed at it: hey look! it's us! it's our tree, we said. tree sap high, sugar high, thanksgiving break high, finally enough sleep high, everyone is home high.

these are the things we are thinking about.

this is a picture I did not take

first written seven years ago on november 5, 2014 and when I read through it again just now (on a whim, while revisiting the archives) I thought, this is why I write here. this is why.

this is a picture I did not take

I read with ezra each night at bedtime. as in, he reads his book, I read mine. gone are the days of reading out loud. have I told you? one of my greatest joys in life has been reading roald dahl books out loud to my children. a few months ago, I begged ezra to let me read danny the champion of the world out loud to him one last time. reluctantly, he agreed and then, I should add, barely tolerated the nightly reading. so, that was that. the last time, the very very last time and now our reading together looks completely different but that's okay. I'll take what I can get.

after our twenty minutes or so of silent reading (which I have actually grown to love very much), he tossed his book in the general direction of the nightstand and turned to sleep on his left side, just like he always does. and then I turned out the light, said the prayers and sang the two favorite songs, just like I always do. and then, usually, I am quick to get up and out of there because, you know, netflix. big green couch, adult quiet time. I am ashamed to admit just how quick I am to sing those two songs and slip out of the room. I am ashamed but I am still quick.

but tonight, as I felt myself rushing through the prayer, the two favorite songs, I felt that wistful thing, that bittersweet thing, that thing that sometimes overtakes me and I lay there for a little while and I willed myself to memorize every detail. the deep green glow of the alien nightlight, arm slung over a dingy sock monkey, slight curve of a still-small shoulder, the hum and hiss of the humidifier, the sound of his breathing. sandy hair in perfect waves, pencil-drawn waves.

as if I can hold on to any of this, as if any of us can hold on to anything, or any of what happens to us. and I wondered how many times my own mother tried to memorize details like these, if she was able to hold onto any of them, if she felt the way I did tonight. I would give anything to know. but I won't know, I can't know. and it's not okay, it will never be okay but the wondering is all I have. the imagining  and the memorizing is all that's left and I'll take what I can get.

your moon is my moon is our moon

are you looking at the moon right now? get up, walk outside and look at that thing. that giant, luminous thing. take five deep breaths, take five hundred deep breaths if you need to, then let that crazy bright moon swallow you whole for a few minutes.

then march yourself back inside and sleep the sleep of a thousand babies because goodness, there's work to do.

november the nineteenth

"I insist on being shocked. I am never going to become immune. I think that's a kind of failure to see so much of it that you die inside. I want to be surprised and shocked every time."

-toni morrison

addendum

re: when the world is too much-- 

in addition to finding solace in moments written on paper (things for remembering)-- I might also recommend a spoonful of brie. just one. eaten slowly, mindfully. not that this is news, but I have come to the conclusion that brie is like if butter and cheese had a beautiful baby and I swear I felt my knees buckle in the kitchen just now, felt the weight of the world lift for just a second. 

the secret lives of secret lives

look, I don't have all the answers and certainly my finger is on no particular pulse, but I know a poem when I see one. and I know I'm partial to the back stories and the back sides of things. I once stood in the shadow of the formidable flatiron building in new york but was more taken with the nearby happenstance of a canary yellow shovel against a dirty brick wall. my proclivities are my proclivities.