The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Organizing, The Sequel

Friday, October 9, 2009

Organizing, The Sequel

I am in a stage of organizing to organize which means I have to get rid of the first layers in the house to see what we actually have. Emma has big plans for a yard sale - which I secretly dread since I would have to talk to my neighbors. I'm not actually sure I want to move beyond the wave stage.

I know how awful that sounds, but remember where I live, and know that these guys would fit right in at the decoy show:

Yup, we had a duck decoy show last week, sort of like a festival celebrating wooden duck decoys. The folks there made the Walmart people look glamourous.

We do have some normal neighbors. One family is really organized. They put their garbage out at 5:45 on Tuesday afternoons. We're more like, "Wait, is today Wednesday? Quick, I hear the garbage trucks. Hurry up!" Everything in their yard looks pretty much like this:

They have two little girls who play together in the yard, doing things like hanging birdfeeders and planting butterfly gardens. I was outside, trying to untangle the herb garden I started that seemed like such a great idea in May. Now I have this wild scraggle that grew like oregano on meth. I tried untangling it, but it gets really scratchy and my hands were getting all cut up.

The little girls were on their swing outside. From my house, all you could hear was Lady Gaga chanting "Poker Face" and the sounds of Philip showing his girlfriend his latest discovery: he learned in science that methane ignites. He then realized that he is a very reliable source of methane and there is a candle lighter in the kitchen drawer. His girlfriend squealed with delight as he demonstrated (yes, this is early teen romance - not exactly like Edward and Bella). Except there was, as there always is with fire, a backdraft problem and his jeans now have scorch marks on the rear.

I watched the lovely little girls help their mom put pumpkins on the stoop. We tried to grow pumpkins, but the boys and their friends quickly realized that pumpkins are amazing targets for BB guns. The splat factor is very big in the boy world.

I'm wondering if organizing is a personality type rather than a matter of habitual neatness. Maybe there are certain families who have to have everything in order or they feel kind of crazy. And maybe some families are the opposite. When I cleared off the kitchen counter, Christopher looked at it and commented, "Why does that look so weird?"

10 comments:

K.C. Shaw said...: Either you're living in the wrong neighborhood, or your neighbors are. Then again, I bet they secretly envy your life, which probably seems bohemian and exotic to them as they hang birdfeeders together and, I don't know, arrange their toothpicks by size.; Friday, 09 October, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Well, we have a birdfeeder...we didn't hang it together and it drives the cats completely bonkers. They sort of line up and shadow-stalk the birds.

Ok, I'm going to swipe your adjectives. We're no longer the weird family. We're bohemian and exotic. Sounds so much better.; Friday, 09 October, 2009
Glynis Peters said...: LOL, I have no children at home now, but my house/family in the UK used to be like yours.
Here in Cyprus, I put the pots with dying plants behind the new ones coming through. My neighbour has no dead plants in her pots.
I bath 4 dogs who go straight to loose, dusty soil to dry off. My neighbour's dog never needs a bath. Get the picture? No matter how hard I try it never works.
Loved your post!; Friday, 09 October, 2009
storyqueen said...: I hear you about the wave stage with the neighbors. It's not that I don't like my neighbors...they are great. It's just that I have to be around people allllllll the time and when I'm home, it's kind of nice to not have to see other people.

Yeah, I'm a hermit.

Shelley; Friday, 09 October, 2009
Elizabeth Bradley said...: My son is living in a condo complex. He has a twenty month old son. His wife accidently set his little sand bucket and shove atop the edge of a wall at the edge of the patio, and the over-the-top-control-freak association called them to complain! What? Hello! You've got to be kidding me. I couldn't deal with that kind of Nazi control. I don't know my neighbors at all, I've only been here four months. But they seem to be a live and let live bunch. Whew.; Friday, 09 October, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: I always come here for my morning laugh. Or my evening laugh. Sometimes I splash out and come here twice. (You'll already know this if you ever check.)

'Oregano on meth' -- that had me laughing almost as much as that photograph. (Lucky you: last semester, I had a couple of students who look like that.)

One of my dear friends has two charming daughters who keep their room neat. My friend is intelligent, beautiful and kind; her husband is all that too, and they both have great jobs. Their garden got photographed by some gardening magazine that goes around neighborhoods, looking for the best places. Their hostas look like your neighbors' hostas: not a slug nibble in sight. I love these friends, but it's tough going. Glad my girls never got into B B guns, but then your boys aren't into nail polish, are they?; Friday, 09 October, 2009
Bish Denham said...: ROFL! My mother sometimes (but only sometimes) despaired of ever having a neat home. But it could never be as one or more of us always had some kind of "project" going that occupied space in the living room or on the porch.

And my father put lovely hand lettered sign on my bedroom door. It read,
"Danger!
Disaster Area.
Three Feet Deep."

I was rather proud of it, and kept it on my door for years.; Saturday, 10 October, 2009
Adrienne said...: Hilarious contrast between the teen romance and the little girls next door.
Just last night I was thinking about doing a post on all the junk drawers in our house. One kitchen cabinet holds serving bowls, band-aids, point and shoot cameras and a bunch of undeveloped film. I have no idea how it ended up with that combination, but it's been that way for years.; Monday, 12 October, 2009
Hardygirl said...: Ah, young love.

Don't worry. Those little girls will be teenagers soon enough . . . and life will get messy (and I don't mean that as a bad thing).

sf; Wednesday, 14 October, 2009
Wooden duck decoys said...: The picture of the yard looks very pretty. Nice to know about the celebrate the festival of wooden duck decoys. I like this very much.; Monday, 02 August, 2010

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.

***