truth
Notice to Quit
Form JDF-97. That is what I researched and printed, ready to post on the door today. The door of the house my husband and I bought at the ripe old age of 23, thank you Air Force and VA loan. Thank you for giving us this house that somehow sits under a dark cloud since we bought it, with every fixer-upper problem that ever existed, from an ever-flooding main drain to an ever-flooding basement to hail damage as thick and broken as my heart right now.
The house my second child was born in. The only house my children knew until we packed up everything and moved to Spain eleven years ago.
The house with the huge and expensive yard.
The house with the lilac bushes and the playground clubhouse.
The house with the two-car garage, the covered patio, the jetted tub.
The house Bruce thought we’d live in till we died, his Tennesseean tendencies so hard to break down.
It’s so hard to break down, this life, this shattered siding we “invested” in, this roof we’ve replaced once, this dumpster full of junk that isn’t ours, this tire swing that’s still there.
In my Subaru, sitting across the street with my youngest daughter and her forever friend, I had the “Notice to Quit” form next to me in the passenger seat; she had the tape; I had their phone numbers.
Instead, I took this picture. I saw them throwing things into the dumpster and loading things into the truck and never noticing us. I saw my life walk in and out, in and out of the empty garage, the giant spruce next door, the giant ash still growing in our backyard.
And I couldn’t get out of the car. I couldn’t confront the man with the arsenal of guns, the daughter and her girlfriend who’d lived there for years though she wasn’t on the lease, the broken siding, the unanswered insurance calls, the probably-leaking roof, the definitely-flooding basement we scraped everything together to finish… the loss.
The loss that is so profound when you quit. When someone gives you a Notice to Quit, the first step in the eviction process. The Life Eviction that is my second child moving out, barely 18, still that baby born in this room of THIS HOUSE, and wanting to live there now instead of living with us.
Look how proud we were, holding that baby in that tiny garden-level bedroom, Izzy just a bit apprehensive about her loss of “I’m the center-of-the-world status”, us in our twenties, in our home, our home, our home…
Her home.
There was no Notice to Quit. I didn’t get out of the car. Made a phone call instead. Quietly pleaded for the keys, the vacancy, the lease to end.
If you didn’t notice, I almost never quit.
And neither will she.
Scene Five from a Marriage
scene five from a marriage:
a broken spring equals a broken toaster
but not just any toaster
my bake-everything toaster
my savior to a shitty oven
my air fryer
my baker of brownies and pies
my upper-class kitchen in my middle-class house
i asked if he *thought*
it could be opened up and fixed
and before i’d moved the laundry
from the washer to the dryer,
he had the drill out.
you’ll never find this
i want to tell the world
my daughters
my soul at age nineteen when he walked
so uncertainly
into Pete’s Kitchen
but i did.
i found the man who’d drill a toaster
on a hellish Thursday
a Thursday dripping with tears and self-doubt
just another scene
from a marriage that works.
Shoot Photos
Bites and Pieces
There isn’t a photo today, unless my mantra-cup, “Bless This Hot Mess” can be my actual mantra. There is a meal, a beautiful meal that New York Times Cooking thinks a regular person can make in forty-five minutes. A meal that involves chopping then roasting cashews, skinning then mincing fresh ginger, garlic, chopping a bell pepper into bits, washing rice, slicing two-inch sections of green onions, and preparing cilantro. Also cutting and cooking chicken before the oven part. I don’t have a photo of my youngest and my husband and me, making a mess of this kitchen before I cleaned it, trying to make this meal in forty-five minutes between the three of us.
I just have this. This meal to eat while we listen to and argue about Bruce Springsteen (The BOSS) and discuss our days.
Oh, our days. Bruce was under pressure to change a card (a card as big as a board game and twice as heavy), Rio was under pressure to meet her social and familial weekend obligations, me under the pressure of society to not tell a student’s caseworkers that her foster mother isn’t good enough because.
Because there are no more foster mothers available. Because it isn’t horrible enough that her mother was murdered by the Taliban, and that she’s living in a home that doesn’t recognize or celebrate her culture or speak her language, because she may never see her brothers and father and baby sister again.
It isn’t enough. It is never enough. The crying, the screaming, the desire to be perfect, the accusations, the pain that seeps through every word, the trauma that breathes through every breath.
I wish I could just change a too-heavy card, or balance my sleepover with my obligation to my grandparents, or just be a kid or just be a human who doesn’t have to carry the weight of all these humans.
But I can’t. I can’t cook this meal in forty-five minutes, NYT Cooking, and you should stop lying to people. You can’t bring your mother back, and you should stop lying to people. You shouldn’t make false accusations, and you should stop lying to people.
People who could lose their jobs, their lives, and all the love they’ve given in twenty years of carrying the weight of these kids. People who put on a musical rehearsal of Beauty and the Beast just so my poor kids could see it. People who spend half of their summer taking your kids to every place they could ever imagine because they couldn’t see those places otherwise. People who love your kids as fiercely as you do and for some reason you can’t see it,
You can’t see me.
What does it mean to be a teacher in the twenty-first century? It carries a weight that you can’t imagine carrying because nothing, nothing is more enticing than a 24/7 entertainment device that every kid carries in their pocket. Nothing is more enduring than teenage love or parental defense. Nothing matters more than a grade. Nothing compares to the TikTok video or Instagram caption–not a cultural connection, a passion for language, or a pile of free clothes.
It is like this meal. Sticky rice coconut chicken. It has everything: cilantro, ginger, coconut milk, basmati rice, a yellow bell pepper, garlic minced to perfection, chicken broth, scallions, hot sauce, a dutch oven pan that fits into the best-ever toaster oven, a bubbling bite with perfect spice… Everything.
But it’s a lie. It’s not a Wednesday night meal. It does not take forty-five minutes to prepare.
It takes years, twenty years of patience and a pinch of forgiveness to make this possible.
And you can taste it in every bite. Every bite that you put in your mouth and every bite that bites you back.
Taste it. The creamy coconut, the sriracha, the beauty of the world swirling in the rice.
And bite back.
Soft Cat, Calm Night
As Bright As Snow
The Scrapping-Together-Book
so different from your sister's when i spent many joyful hours piecing together the photos of her youth your youth is marred, robbed, broken and i don't know why i don't know why and it might be the not knowing that will take us both
Not Here.
If you had another job, you would be so annoyed by the coworker who couldn’t piece together fiber or the project manager who doesn’t know how to manage, and your day might be temporarily ruined. You would miss your lunch hour redoing someone’s work or you wouldn’t be able to tell your boss your exact opinion of his golf vacation in the midst of your short-staffing issue.
If you had another job, you would spend your lunch hour cutting fibers or sending emails or catching up on a spreadsheet, hoping for a break or a promotion or … anything else.
Anything but this.
If you had another job, you wouldn’t stop in your tracks in the middle of a lesson to let a severe-needs child work his way to his seat, an admin begging you to give him a pencil and a blank piece of paper because maybe if he could draw a basketball, he would stop rocking on his heels and shouting the word across the room for all the world, all your classroom of recent immigrants, to witness.
If you had another job, when the siren makes your phone and the PA system and the whole world bleep and vibrate, you wouldn’t be thinking about the announcement (seeking the nurse) at lunch. You wouldn’t be sending your middle daughter to investigate the health of your colleague whose life was already threatened more times than the number of weeks in this school year, only to hear this report: “There were people everywhere and a kid on the floor. The security guards were surrounding the whole scene. We couldn’t see anything.”
If you had another job, you’d see everything. The botched fibers. The boss’s vacation. The spreadsheet that tells you exactly what you’ve done right and exactly why you don’t belong here.
But you don’t have that job.
You have this one. And despite the pull of this dog lying on your calves with the persistence of a love so divine you couldn’t measure it, this morning or in any other moment, you are here now.
And you look at your refugees and think about the Afghan girl and the Afghan para, who both stood on that tarmac eleven months back in a country that will no longer allow them to attend school, let alone show their faces, and are up in the tech office trying to get a new computer while you stand here, trying to explain without Dari or Pashto words,
“It’s a lock… out. There is a problem outside of the school. Not here. Do you understand me?”
And all the while you are thinking about your colleague whose student yesterday held a girl at her throat and sprayed her with dry erase cleaner, now imagining that at lunch that kid was under the security guards’ hands, and that he escaped, and that he “is a suspect in the perimeter.”
And that your colleague could be gone. And that your daughter was braver than you, walking down there to report on truths that can’t be reported.
And that you have to teach a lesson about the BE verb and all its uses and “Yes/No” questions such as,
“Are you happy?”
Yes, I am.
No, I’m not.
And the boy who can’t read or write or take total control of his body won’t stop talking about basketball, and then soccer, and then eating, and his paraprofessionals finally come, and the Afghan para and the Afghan girl return unscathed, and when you look into her young and beautiful eyes and ask her to say, in Dari and Pashto, “Please tell the students that the danger isn’t here. It’s a danger outside of the school,” they all shout, “We understand you, MISS!”, and even after her translation, her reassuring interpretation of your words,
You’re. Still. Not. Sure.
And let’s make contractions out of these “Be” verb conjugations, my students! (He + is = He’s. You + are = You’re.)
If you had another job, you wouldn’t have to wait until the passing period to see the text from your threatened colleague.
“I’m OK. A kid passed out in my room during lunch. I don’t know about the lockout.”
You wouldn’t have to wait. You’d be sending emails, repairing fibers, or working your way through a mountain of paperwork.
You wouldn’t be standing in front of these kids who are trying to piece together the parts of a sentence and the parts of their lives that were left in another country.
You wouldn’t be you.
If you had another job.
Road Trip 2022, Day Six: Sincerely Cincinnati
i can’t capture this:
the words, the joy, the city
it’s all in this swing
i can’t capture them
filled with adolescent angst
yet so forgiving
a summer road trip
(there’s not without one)
they live it, breathe it
i can’t capture stress
it won’t fit in this market
nor on this road home
Step Write Up 