I know it is so wrong to post this but I can't help myself and besides I'm Jewish, right? so it doesn't really matter anyway...

My annual Krampus post.

Not that I don't want you to celebrate Christmas with great joy, if you do celebrate, and enjoy the heck out of the sweet warm smell of cookies baking and watch the little gleam in your loved one's eyes from the reflected light of your fragrant tree...and revel in the bittersweet holy music of midnight mass...and hold your children close...I mean all that, my friends

but,

the short cold days and long, cold, dark nights send me to a wrong place, where I think a little too long and hard on fetishes and bad behavior and the strange cruelties people act out on each other, sometimes in meanness and sometimes in delight--how my pain is his pleasure, and my pleasure is his pain--understand now that I mean "he" in a general sense, but I didn't need to tell you that did I?--how sometimes the joke that seems so wrong to one person is the funniest thing in the world to another--how my absolutist tendencies break down during the Solstice, to make room for dreadful imaginings that I admit to liking.

I'm only a little odd really. Whether it's swaddled and smothered and repressed in a cozy psychic sweater, or whether we take it out and examine it from time to time, the darkness is alive in us all I think.

A Little Push

Sometimes ghost stories happen in broad daylight. Apparitions appear in sunshine, their edges ruffled by a cold wind that springs from nowhere, on a city street.

It's happened a couple of times lately. This week, doing errands in the afternoon. I felt a push; a hand on my back, deliberately pushing. I stumbled, turned around. Not a soul in sight near me. No one anywhere, for half a block in each direction. Just me and the push. Not hostile, exactly, that push. But not exactly friendly either.

Then again, lying in bed, on my side, drifting sleep-wards. The hand on my back. All fingers against me, clearly palpable. And the push.

Who?

Liba

By the time I met Liba, she was no longer the girl with the huge dimpled smile and dark tangled hair. She was Great-Aunt Libby, teeny-tiny and very very old. Libby had always been a fine seamstress, and in her 90s, nearly blind, she continued to sew, though in the end her creations ran less to fine fitted garments. My sister and I treasured the collection of simple elastic-gathered little skirts she sent us in frequent batches. What she lacked in fine motor coordination and eyesight, she made up for in choice of fabric--wild, busy, bright and sometimes startling. My most favorite Aunt Libby skirt was of improbably plush faux-leopard skin. I study the clothes in these pictures now, see how stylish and whimsical she was once, and I can imagine that she knew, even in extreme old age, just what would bring delight.





No doubt about it, she was a grand girl. I notice now, too, how there is something about her expression: a passing shadow, a quality of secrecy, common to all the Pollack family; though possibly you wouldn't see it, unless you knew to look.





find more links to wonderful Sepia Saturday reminiscences here.

Magpie Tales

In a Clearing in the Cemetery I Found a Broken Stone

I've been wondering:
who now alive remembers
the words that told your life?


I lift the branch, look:
moondrift light, a dry light breath,
a stone set adrift
in the dry leaf-sea clearing
You were written, read, erased.




(Sarge and I wrote this together. It was fun!)
find more Magpie Tales here.

Public

I started to worry that people might think I'd shut them out of my blog, so I'm taking the block off while I figure out what to do with it.

The Weather in the Streets is stormy, literally and figuratively. You know how it goes...

I am more cheerful here, though:

Yarn Ends

xo Leah

Darkling Plain

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night

--Matthew Arnold, from "Dover Beach," 1867

visit Sarge's September 11, 2009 post here

Jew Girl

This is my Roumanian cousin; her name and story, both lost, though I believe she died in the Holocaust.

A Jew Girl, like me.

Upstate New York, at puppy class, I stood next to the corpulent, ruddy man, each of us with our dogs--his an improbable yappy "morkie." He told me with an eye roll that his wife had picked it at the puppy shop, lest, I suppose, I should believe he'd emasculated himself deliberately. I had the manly hunting dog, handsome hound Remus. I know he wished we could swap dogs.

He asked me "where in Brooklyn you from?" and told me he had been a truck driver, often delivering to Flushing, Queens. He hated, he said, to make deliveries there. Because, you know, those people ran the warehouse there, "those people of the Jewish persuasion," his lip lifted in a wet sneer, his face too close to mine.

I looked at him.

"You know," I said mildly. "I'm Jewish."

He flushed a dark, ugly red.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean anything by it. You've gotta understand, I didn't mean you anyway. I meant those ones, you know, the ones with the weird beards. But not you."

I was tempted to stomp on his foot, tempted to pull my blonde hair back from my forehead and show him my horns, tempted to curse him with a very evil Yiddish curse and spit on the ground in front of him.

But I did none of those things, thinking of Ella, and myself, and then for a moment, in an unexpectedly clear memory-flash, of the beautiful nameless Roumanian cousin...

...horned, hook-nosed, sheydl-wearing, stingy money-horder, smelling of pickles and the Old Country, praying in a language that no one understands, that keeps me separate and strange...

Jew Girl.

A Passing

our memorial garden where I sit and knit and watch the passing shadows

It never really changes in the Adirondacks, though summer concedes, early, to fall, and then all goes to cold, and snow, and howling winds...and back again. The samenesses of Julys and Augusts for all the generations I can think of and all those to come...tart blueberries dropping in a pail held by some child or other, startling fragrance of the lemon lilies, glinting sharp sun darts caught in the little ripples of a little lake...and mountains, soft and primeval, sloping from sky to water as great sleeping beasts might, in a dream of great beasts.

Late August is often a sad time for me. The crows fly low, muted. The dark, though not bitter yet, comes sooner each day, minute by lost minute. Leaves fall through the raindrops, bright and dead...

And my little girl grows up, and summer ebbs in diffuse light through ancient pines, that were here before me and will be here still, long after I'm gone.

Baby Carriage

Mom in the baby carriage, 1945

click to enlarge

I played sometimes on the fifth floor of the Castle, high above the streets of Brooklyn, in the old servants' quarters.

Sometimes I lit a ghost fire in the long-unused fireplace there, kneeling at the marble hearth to warm myself in its phantom flames.

I peeked into the bathroom, at the enormous claw-foot tub under a steeply slanting ceiling, or into the china storage room, where I liked to imagine the sound of dinner parties, the laughter and conversation, the clink of glass against glass.

I would dare myself to enter the trunk room, a dark interior closet filled with the luggage of long-ago trips--many steamer trunks, their brass fittings blinking in the sudden light.

And it was there I discovered the derelict baby carriage, and filled it with the toys of another childhood, and tended them: the celluloid-faced Humpty-Dumpty, his stripy legs uselessly dangling; the dusty Steiff dogs, a Boxer and an Airedale; the naked baby doll, its two tiny pearly teeth and eyes that opened and shut, eerily, on clever hinges...

I like cream in my coffee, and I like to sleep late on Sunday, and I like eggs over easy, with flour tortillas

Well, really I prefer whole milk in my coffee, and egg white omelets with feta cheese, and I like to wake up early on Sundays so that I can have a minute to myself before the house begins its hum all around me. But I do like warm flour tortillas, and I love Lyle Lovett.

My friend Murali, at Miscellany of Me (an aesthetically beautiful blog that is just so inspiring) has asked me to come up with 10 things I like. Simple enough, no?

1. My new blonde hair, which makes me feel sneaky, like I'm dissembling to the world. But I realized I'm just far too real a person, and I have to strive to be more false.

Frowny blonde me

2. The sight of Hedgehog, swimming in the lake, wearing homemade crowns and bracelets of watery lake ferns.

3. The prick of tears in my eyes

4. When my sister and I are chatting and we realize we sound like a scene from a Woody Allen movie.

5. When Sarge embraces me and kisses me and then Hedgehog and Remus both try to force their way in.

6. rescue dogs

7. stargazing

8. dirty jokes

9. Cannabis Rose perfume

10. ice in bed on a hot summer night




and p.s. I am sorrier than sorry that I cannot easily get out and about to visit many of you--the internet connection in the North Country really is infernally touch and go...