Greenstorm's Journal

Spring is still springing. I'm vibrating too hard to sleep, though when Tucker is here it helps. A shocking amount of water is running down the gentle south slope of the pigfield under the packed snow -- snow which is invisible under the winter's manure, but which hasn't entirely disappeared. The rivulets are the size of my wrist, nearly streams in their own right during the height of the afternoon.

My blue muscovy is sneaking off at night, undoubtedly to sit on a nest. I can't find it. The americaunas are coming in to lay and my eggbasket is a mix of the lovely pinkish buff tinted chantecler eggs and a gentle palette of blues and blue-greens and aquas. Downstairs there are goose and duck eggs on every available surface, waiting for me to make pasta dough and refill the freezer.

I try not to spend energy going against my nature. Fighting myself never works. Instead I channel who I am into behaviours aligned with my values and see where I end up. It works for me but it requires me to pay close attention, both to many levels of myself and to what the opportunities in front of me really mean. I have many paths laid out in front of me right now.

Sarah Manguso wrote "Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little." I accept that I will drown a little.

Right now I'm canning marmalade. Our little grocery store is surprisingly lovely. The manager makes a point of bringing in things I'm used to from Vancouver but that are probably (?) exotic up here: starfruit, bitter melon, tapioca starch, okra, and, in season, seville oranges. I bought proper oranges, ugly and pithy and seedy, and sliced them up while watching The Flash with Tucker. It's a bit of a process: juicing them, taking out the pith and seeds, cooking the pith and seeds in water, slicing and simmering the peel, adding in the juice and the water strained from the seeds, adding in more sugar than really seems proper, ladling into sterilized jars (I need a one-cup ladle), then water-bathing.

There was a moment when I was leaning over the candy thermometer when I realized I've made so much jam in my life. I did big batches for Urban Digs farm, that was the same year I did my project to can one jar for every day of the upcoming winter at home. Every year since then I've canned jam or preserves. Even before that I remember canning peaches or nectarines with Ellen. Honestly I still have one jar of nectarines from that day, it sealed itself shut with sugar and no one has been able to open it since. That must have been ten years ago or more?

Sometimes when I go through the same action at the same time of year I can remember myself doing something similar previously. Today I could feel... it was a connection, not just to one moment, but to a series of similar moments over the years. I connected to a continuity of self I've rarely experienced.

I've been thinking back over the past a lot in the last few weeks. I was... I want to say almost driven by dreams and portents to reach out to Graydon more meaningfully again. We've known each other something like twelve years and been casually close for the recent many. The connection is lovely; he's always been ridiculously appealing to me on many levels. My memory is a black hole though, so I've been sifting through his memories about what happened, through my emails, and through my old journal entries. It seems we've done this twice before.

There are two sayings.

One is, "the third time's a charm"

The second is, "once is chance, second time's coincidence, third time is [enemy action/a pattern]".

We will see.

In any case both contemplating a new relationship and looking back at myself in those days, I'm grateful for so many of the people who have been in my life. I'm well-anchored right now in part because of the integrity and shared values of my current partners. I've been well-supported by friends, among others Adrian and Ellen who may eventually form a little intentional community with me were awfully present back in those days too. And most of all I have myself, and can trust myself to a level that seems uncommon for many folks.

I'm tired. My marmalade is done in the water bath. I'll take it out and either snuggle up with a book or write about interiority, the gaze of the oppressor, and autism. Maybe I'll be sucked fully into the past instead of peering at it through a window. I guess we'll see which shortly.

Manguso's poem finishes:

"Arvol Looking Horse, a Sioux leader, called Devils Tower the heart of everything that is. Very large objects remind us of the possibility of the infinite, which has no size at all. But we understand it as something very, very large.

What the lover seeks is the possibility of return, the strange heart beating under every stone."

Well.

Mom's moving, and I got some stuff from the old boat that won't fit in the new boat to take home. Among them are things I'd thought were lost from childhood; grandma's stand mixer, a chair, odds and ends. I also got a rug for the front of the fireplace, and some rugs for the rabbit run and for by the door or something, and a coffee grinder for spices. A bathroom cabinet my brother made in grade 10. Homey things. Then I went to the hardware store to get hooks for my pretty skirts to put them on the wall (I was asked what art I had on my walls the other day, where the answer is really 'between books and hangings and windows, what walls?') and some snips to break down the rat cage that now the lady who was going to buy it does not want. I was so looking forward to having it out of my hair, too.

I was gone for two overnights; I left lateish Friday night, returned early Sunday morning. It was too long to be away; I'm learning these things now, through trial and error. Taoshi was angry at me, she'd jumped the 3-food enclosure right before I got home (no cords damaged) and rattled the bars for hours after I got here. I laid down my carpet and ate, but have yet to start any of my projects. I'd quite like to

o clear off and move the coffee table so I can get the soft chair from Kelsey
o clean the corner by the deep freeze and throw out basically everything
o hang the oak shelves
o hang the new bathroom cabinet
o disassemble the giant Martins' cage
o wash the kitchen and near-kitchen livingroom walls
o wash the bathroom walls
o polish the bathroom light fixture and arrange the light bulbs in it

It's not a terrible amount of work to do, but I'm disinclined to do it just now. Instead I'm listening to Loscil's Plume and watching the trees dance in the wind and toasting myself at the fireplace.

I spent both nights and the intervening day with crushy architect okcupid boy (let's just call him Dave) brewing beer and cooking roast chicken and sourdough biscuits and fucking in his pretty awesome but sometimes overwhelming communal home. Two nights in a row, which a whole day between, is a LOT of time to spend with someone. It was too much for both of us, I think, which is definitely for the best. I don't really have that kind of time to give up out of my life.

I'm given to wonder, though-- what is it that made it so sticky for me, so hard to just leave the final evening before bed? It felt so very good to get home, feels so good to be in my house, and although I like him very much I wasn't feeling that body-longing to be close to him the second night, you know where it feels your soul is tearing itself in two to leave? Is it just habit? Is it the fear of losing the thing forever when I walk out the door, because although he enjoys my company he clearly does not need or love me and I don't trust liking to be enough? I need to watch that. I need to practice leaving, often, so I can teach myself that people are there when I return.

Though of course, he's a mono boy in-between big things, so one day he won't be there when I return.

His household was a very special kind of beautiful, too. One of his housemates was a father with a seven-year-old, one of the sweeter men I've ever met. Sitting in the breakfast nook listening to the two of them talk out in the kitchen in the morning was... I felt like a shrivelled winter plant with the first rays of spring sunshine on me. I absolutely have no words.

Turn a hundred eighty degrees and there's Graydon, opposite in every way to Dave: loving, reassuring, unconfident, living in a spare tidy nest in the sky and so isolated he might as well be a star. Recently he's uprooted from his well of pain and given himself permission to connect, and in responding to that I've found a love of play that is surprising and exhilarating. He's so private that I find myself closing up around him just through mirrored behaviour. These words here don't come easy.

So many things are new and dangerous. I'm playing with all kinds of fire at once. This is a very good set of fires.

Another hundred and eighty degrees (because how many aspects of a human are there, after all?) and there's Andrew like a small sun, constant, open, communicative, loving-- not a romantic relationship at all but kindred, family, reliable. And, yes, there's sex; he takes care of me, and loves it. I feel like, for the first time, I can participate in this incredibly unconventional exchange without guilt or hesitancy. Autonomy is pretty great.

So I guess that's a rundown of, maybe, the three anchors in my dating constellation right now. There are other people but I am holding back on all those, nervous of some things, avoidant of others. They are not where my energy runs. My friend constellation is huger and looser -- there's no one way to define a friend, so I'm so excited about seeing Trevor (it's been so many years) soon, and happy and content to know that Kynnin cares for me in the background, or that I can gossip with Sofia or hash stuff out with Kelsey and/or...

I'm running out of steam here and accomplishing very little household stuff, so I'll leave you with this semi-incoherent mishmash and go do something else, productive or no.

Be well.