1,000 words of summer (twos-01)

Roxane Gay, in her newsletter The Audacious Round Up, mentioned the writer, Jami Attenberg, who started this #1000wordsofsummer project. This year's project ends today so, of course, I'm going to start today. 1,000 words/day for 14 days. A kick start for something I've been wanting to do and because I have this fundamental belief that I ought to cobble my own shoes and be my own coach (and since that is ridiculous) I say thank you Roxane Gay for helping to motivate me.

So much has happened since I posted here regularly that I am tempted to do the gargantuan recap. But I won't. Except for this: I now have a grandchild and I retired 6 months ago. 

The grandchild, named Asteroid, has transformed me into the utter cliché of grandmotherhood. It is good and right. They live in the Netherlands, which makes exercising that cliché a tad bit challenging (particularly since they were born three months before the pandemic). The child's name is a testament to the concept that 1) I don't get a vote in what name is chosen for my grandchild and 2) any name that symbolizes your beloved offspring's offspring will become magical to you. Please note the use of the gender neutral pronouns. Asteroid will get to decide if and what gender they prefer. Again, I don't get a vote but I support diminishing gender expectations wholeheartedly.

The retirement has been an extraordinary, all-that-I-hoped for explosion of happiness. I was born for this. I am obnoxiously splashing around in my joie de vivre.

The prevailing theme of my life is that I am a maker. Of things. Fiber. Wood. Metal. Words. Food. This is what I want to do, all of the time. If you ask me what I am excited about, I will gush over the shortbread dough waiting to be made into checkerboard cookies. I will wax effusive over preparing to make Asteroid's first Halloween costume (a tiny chef--A TINY CHEF! How could that not be amazing and fun?). I will furrow my brow in seriousness while I talk about filling the natural pecan wood crevices in my dining room table with green/blue resin. I will go on enthusiastically about making sun-blocking roman shades for the blindingly sunny windows in my house. I will bore you. I will tell you as fast as I can because I want to spare you as much boredom as possible. But I am irrepressible.

Since retiring my outer world has shrunk and my inner world has expanded. Exploded may be more accurate. So much blissful time to think and dream and plot my next move. I grew up in a small house that, at one point, had 7 humans sharing one small bathroom. I shared a room with a sibling for 16 of my 17 years there. I was a child that craved solitude like nourishment. It never happened. I left for college. Spent one year in a dorm room with a friend from church that I didn't really know very well. I was married at the end of my freshman year because good Mormon girls don't fuck before marriage. Good Mormon girls don't call it fucking. Good Mormon girls don't talk about "it" at all. Married at 18, pregnant by 19. Divorced by 25. To say that I never had time to myself is an understatement.

I am nothing if not patient (with my goals, I mean. In general, I am not very patient with myself or others). At 62, I finally satiated this lifelong need for space and time.

Godhelp anyone who tries to part me from it.

In addition to retiring, we just completed a 13-month (really, a 25-years in the making) renovation of our 101-year old bungalow. So much planning and decision-making and physical work. Then, I spent the first four months of retirement unpacking, re-purging (I really thought I had done a good job pre-renovation. I was wrong.) and organizing everything. It was a test of dueling with perfection and not getting so overwhelmed by the forest of bins that I gave up. I am not an outdoorsy, hiking sort of person. This was my Mt. Everest and I was my own Sherpa.

One of the many categories of the great purge of '21 was sifting through 20 30 40 years of writing. There was terrible poetry, of course. But there were also some gems that I saved from the shred pile. Of all this stuff, I was amused to learn that my habit of keeping lists of words has followed me all of my life. Lists of interesting rhymes. Lists of words to describe unique things. Lists of homonyms. Lists of terrible corporate jargon documented during tedious work meetings.

The other rediscovery was the endless paperwork from a custody battle that my ex-husband waged for our two children. A custody battle that leveraged my being poor and queer with his being a monied white man. It was terrible and terrifying. Ultimately, it was a war of attrition and my heels were dug in so deep, he finally gave up. The documentation of all this seemed a mountain of awful. But I ended up keeping more of it than I originally thought healthy. Why? Because it was not only the hardest thing I'd ever experienced but it was the bravest I'd ever been. It was a testament to my will and my courage and I didn't want to erase the history of such triumph.

I spent last week in Cancún with a dear friend (sorry I must skip this story to finish another). When I got there I felt like my Spanish was about toddler level and that I would not make much headway with the language in the short time I'd be there. But by the end of the 5 days I managed a simple conversation, woven together by horrendous grammar, with the van driver on my way to the airport. This may seem disconnected but it's not. Like my Spanish, I trust that through practice, my writing will also get easier and better. 

Here's to my first 1,000 words. I am loquacious so it surprised me that this was harder than I'd expected. But being able to expound on a subject is surprisingly freeing. Except that I fear I will meander the reader right off the page, so thank you for making it this far.