June 25, 2023 by Amy
Summer, summer, summertime
I haven’t been writing a lot lately, or rather, I haven’t been writing at all, really, but it’s ok. May is hell at work, absolute hell, for both me and my team and most everybody else who works at a school where children from ages four through 18 are cherished and celebrated. It’s all good stuff, but there’s an absolute fuckton of it and at the end, most of us are damn near comatose with exhaustion. By the time I left on vacation, I could hardly think straight and my motivation was subterranean. At the last moment, I remembered that I hadn’t fulfilled my goal of writing in a different library every month and I was nearly out of time. On the last day of May, I spent my lunch hour in the Upper School library, writing frantically for myself, which I hadn’t done all month. I had written so very much in May but it was all for work, which is fine, ‘tis the season and all that, but I was happy to squeak in that checkmark and not completely hose that particular 2023 goal in the fifth month.
“I’ll do better in June,” I told myself. And now, here I am, on June 25, nearly out of time again. Our vacation to an all-inclusive in Mexico was ten days of bliss filled with reading. I got through five books:
- Red Bishop by Robin T.W. Yuan (recommend)
- Finding Me by Viola Davis (recommend)
- Unfollow by Megan Phelps-Roper (HIGHLY recommend)
- Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (loosely based on Sophocles’ Antigone, and another HIGHLY recommend)
- My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (meh)
Right before I left I banged out The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (my go-to recommendation for this summer; seriously, it’s so, so good) and A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan, which is about the rise of the KKK in the 1920s: informative and positively frightening by how much of it is happening today, namely, preying upon fear of the other to sow discontent.
Since vacation, I also finished Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, an excellent overview of The Troubles in Northern Ireland that I was compelled to read based on feeling like I don’t know enough about Northern Ireland politics and I should since it’s the Motherland. Well, my family hails from the Republic, County Tipperary to be exact, but still, it’s all my island. (And the British can get the hell off already, thankyouverymuch.) Anyway, I now have a much firmer grasp on the IRA and its factions and Sinn Fein and their relationship. It’s all fascinating and I’ll probably look for more books to read. Right now I’m deep into Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. I read an interview with Desmond in The Atlantic and thought that the book sounded interesting, and then the very next day I was in an Upper School history teacher’s classroom chatting and I’ll be damned if he didn’t have that exact book sitting there by his computer, because he was reading it. He enthusiastically recommended it and that cemented it and I have started and all I can say is that if you read it, be prepared to be utterly infuriated by not only how little our country does to combat poverty but how many systems are set up to actively work against helping people climb out. It’s a hard read, but necessary.
All this is to say that I have been steadily refilling my word tank over these past few weeks, and am finally feeling as though I can start producing again. Producing what remains to be seen…so far it’s simply this book report, but here I am, writing.
When I realized Friday night that I hadn’t written this month, I started poking around on the internet, trying to find a decently close library to which I hadn’t been—my goal in 2023, as a reminder, is to write in a new library each month of the year. I found one and was surprised to see it has Sunday hours (so many don’t any more, unfortunately). I decided I’d go on Saturday, lining out my day to include my morning walk and then a shower, then some time at the library. I got the walk in, and then M announced he was fixing the doors on the shed and he’d need help, and I grudgingly agreed even though the last time we attempted to fix something together it damn near ended in divorce and so I’m a little gun shy. Turns out he only needed me for a few minutes to get the doors off, which went smoothly, and then I was turned loose. So what did I do? I did not take a shower and get in my car and drive to the library.
I went inside and thought, well, I’m already disgusting so I might as well clean Zoe’s shower, since we have guests arriving late Friday and her standard of clean is most definitely not my standard of clean. It’s always a process that results in gagging after pulling enough hair out of her drain to fashion two more children but I was sweaty and gross so why not. After cleaning her shower (and instructing M and his father to get a hair catcher from the hardware store, where they were running for lumber to fix the shed) I noticed that the lights over her vanity were pretty dusty. Pull out the vacuum and the ladder. Once up there, Zoe pointed out that her exhaust fan was covered in lint (so helpful, that child), so that got cleaned, too, and since I had the ladder out, I might as well do the two exhaust fans in our bathroom. And the door frames. And the transom windows. Well, then, since the showers and the sinks were clean I might as well do the toilets.
After that, I got sucked into Zoe’s project, her annual purge where she goes through all her clothes and removes what doesn’t fit or she doesn’t wear and then cleans out her closet and her desk. It’s a pretty big project and it takes her a few days. It could go faster but she’s easily distracted by things like ukulele tuning and rearranging the stuffed animals on the shelves in the top of her closet. I’m the person who brings in the giant trash bag for the clothes she’s going to donate and the paper bag for her paper recycling, and who runs art supplies out to our family art supply bin and trash out to the trash can and takes the ukulele out of her hands while promising to find a battery for the tuner LATER, after the room is finished…anything to keep forward momentum. She and her father had daddy-daughter date night at the Muny so I knew I’d have the evening to myself, and I was already looking forward to becoming a blob on the couch while reading and maybe watching a show or two. So the library didn’t fit into yesterday.
This morning, after yoga practice and tending to my plants and birds (I have plants, some which are growing tomatoes, and the sweetest birds who flock to my feeder and my bird bath this year!) I made my weekly meal plan and grocery list, then Zoe and I hit the store. Maybe I’d make it to the library later. Maybe not. It wasn’t looking good. Over lunch, with all the veggies out on the counter to make gazpacho (a favorite for all three of us that I don’t make enough because it’s truly a pain in the ass) and the water boiling in the big pot to dunk the tomatoes to make them easier to peel, M asked what I was doing the rest of the day. Oh, I’m working on laundry, and I have to make the gazpacho, that sort of stuff. Zoe said, “She’s supposed to go to the library.” M asked, “What’s at the library?” I reminded him of my goal and he said, “Ok, look, it’s already the 25th. Put the gazpacho on hold and go to the library. Make that the priority. Do this for you.” Reader, I fell in love with him all over again.
I turned off the big pot and left all the veggies sitting there with the knife and the cutting board, threw the laptop in my bag, refilled my iced tea, and walked out the door. The laundry is on hold. The gazpacho is on hold. It’ll all get done later and tonight I can go to bed content in the knowledge that I hit my goal for the month and I wrote and I did this thing for me, with the full support of my family. This is relatively rare, I think, based on some posts I saw on literary Twitter about asshole spouses who don’t support their writers. My guy may not get what I do, understand what motivates me to put words on the page, but he knows it’s important to me and therefore it’s important to him. I can’t ask for anything more.
I’m still working on what, exactly, I’m going to write, so that may be some brainstorming time here at the library today. I could go back to my novel, stalled for months now, but I think some more blog posts and essays are probably more likely. It has been a while since I’ve had time to just stop and think about topics, and it’s nice to know I have that bandwidth. Here’s to a great summer, full of work, yes, but at a slower pace, and books and words and tomatoes and flowers and birds.
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