The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Nature Girl Meets Her Nature

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Nature Girl Meets Her Nature

Since it’s August, most of us are thinking about vacations. We live on the Jersey Shore, so it’s not like we don’t see vacationers all around us. They are the families who look really, really stressed at the beach with little kids running around and plastic toys spilling everywhere. Since we live here, they are kind of a seasonal oddity to us along with ticks and mosquitoes.

Of course, we want to go on vacation, too. While I was teaching and working on fall syllabi, I decided the kids should have some kind of vacation until we leave for Virginia in a few days. There’s a campground a few miles from us, so I went on a mining expedition in the basement and found a brand new tent. I remember buying this tent about ten years ago while in a postpartum haze with Emma strapped to me in one of those cotton papoosey slings. I had no idea what I was thinking at the time since I can barely stand in the yard for fifteen minutes before the bugs and the humidity get to me.

“What is that?” Christopher asked as I dragged it up from the basement.

“A tent. I think we should go camping.”

“Camping.” He looked at me for a second. “Mom, do you sit around and think up these ideas for us? And don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s like you’re getting early dementia. Your ideas are getting worse and worse.”

“I don’t have dementia because I want you guys to get close to nature. It would be good for you to leave your computer and video games for a night. I think you should consider it.”

“So now, exactly why do you want us to pretend we’re homeless?”

I never looked at camping in quite that way. But I decided to put the tent up in the backyard. Maybe if they fooled around with the tent back there, they would want to go to the campgrounds.

Now I have never put up a tent before, and this slept four so it wasn’t that big. Emma had a couple of friends over and we took the box and some poles out to the backyard.

We struggled for about half an hour. One of the girls looked at the box. “There’s a door!” she exclaimed, “I don’t see a door on this tent.”

“Maybe we have to cut a door,” the other girl suggested, “you know, just cut it out.”

“Really?” I asked, “I never saw anyone do that,” I said. "They just zip them, don't they?"

“I think the door appears magically once the tent is up,” Emma suggested hopefully. "Remember the closet to Narnia?"

I looked at Emma. “I think I better see if there are directions.”

Of course there weren’t. The box was nearly ten years old, and it had been snooped in a few times and there were no directions. I stared at the box for a few minutes trying to figure out what went where.

We were still out there without a tent when Philip and a friend came into the yard.

“Oh,” Friend said, “we used to camp all the time. I love putting tents up!”

After a few minutes, Friend looked at me. “Umm, you know why this isn’t working?”

We all looked at her blankly.

“You guys are putting the tarp up. This is only the piece you put up when it rains. This isn’t a tent.”

We did find the tent in another part of the basement. Philip and his friend put it up. No one went near it. It's still out there, now being used as a trampoline for our psychotic squirrels. I am waiting for that friend to return because I have absolutely no idea how to disassemble the thing.

We have found a lovely hotel in Virginia where you slide a card into a slot to get to your room.

I think that’s a really good idea for me.

9 comments:

Rick said...: Hello Anne. This posting has such a wonderful narrative voice that I fell right into it. Unfortunately, I then saw and read the Chapter excerpt on the right hand side of your site and fell in love with that, too.

Would you mind terribly if I included your blog on my favorites list to let the other writers that drop by my site know about you if they don't already?

Thanks,
Rick; Saturday, 08 August, 2009
Elizabeth Bradley said...: Wow, that picture at the top of your post is something else. I made my kids go camping. Now they love it. But I'm over it! lol! I'd rather stay in the hotel these days, thank you very much. Where a vacation FEELS like a bloody vacation. I agree with Rick. Love your writing.; Saturday, 08 August, 2009
Glynis Peters said...: Oh lol, I remember those days. We put ours up, inside out once, so we had to grow arms to open the zip door. When the other campers told us ' your tent is inside out', we replied with ' it is to stop it fading'.
Hotel holidays are far more relaxing.
Loved your story.; Sunday, 09 August, 2009
K.C. Shaw said...: I love the idea of camping, but once I actually get out in the wilderness and pitch the tent, I always think, "What the frak was I thinking?" and wish I was at a hotel instead.

I love the pretending to be homeless part. :); Monday, 10 August, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Thanks, Rick! You can include me in just about anything. These are the kinds of comments I need to read when my story isn't going the way I had hoped and I think I have to go train to become a stock broker.

Thanks also, Elizabeth! And, yes to the hotel. The more I thought about camping, the more I knew I was just not cut out for it. The bathroom part especially.

Love that retort, Glynis! Perfect.
I told my kids that and they said it sounds exactly like something our family would do.

Right, K.C. In the age of green (and we recycle, reuse, preuse as in less consumption, hang laundry, all that) I hate to admit it: I like to LOOK at the woods, but actually being in it just makes me think I'm going to develop a terrible fever or welty rash from some kind of sucking insect like a tick or a leech. Probably not what you should be thinking about while communing with nature.; Wednesday, 12 August, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: We have a tent somewhere too. It is smelly and nasty and mildewy and full of all the bugs that got into it the last time anyone went camping. When I want to commune with nature, I go outside and garden for an hour or so. That always cures me.; Wednesday, 12 August, 2009
Carrie Harris said...: I'm not laughing at you. I swear. I'm laughing with you. Of course, if you're not laughing, then I guess we're back to option number 1.; Thursday, 13 August, 2009
Adrienne said...: I did the same thing - bought a tent and put it up in our back yard. Our yard is so small it took up the whole space. So some friends of ours (who were going on a REAL vacation) let us pitch the tent in their yard, so we could stay and look after their bunny. That's about as much roughing it as I need...; Sunday, 16 August, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: I know -- I like PICTURES of nature, guys. I really do. I might even by some paintings of lakes and stuff, but I don't actually want to go near the mud.; Tuesday, 18 August, 2009

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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