Travel Writing by Women

Today is the launch of Vela, a beautiful experiment in literary travel writing by six emerging writers who don’t just happen to be women. As you probably know, Vela is the sails of the ship constellation Argo: there is no aiming low here.

The brainchild of Sarah Menkedick (Glimpse, Matador, Harper’s), this site was conceived as a place where women writers can develop their craft and grow their readership in a space that does not require a “a major overhaul of self and world views,” as climbing into the echelons of the heavily male-dominated and male-conceived publishing industry arguably does.

I can’t really begin to say how excited I am to contribute to Vela. For me, writing is sacred, but formal publishing has had to give. I have two small children, a teaching job (!!), and all of the dueling responsibilities that go with being a working mother. Sure, I still submit to literary journals, a process that requires months if not years to place a piece of writing, by which point any timeliness a work had has expired, not that that matters because the inevitable fate of the literary journal is to molder away in the storage closet of a third-floor women’s bathroom (don’t ask me how I know this). Publications in literary journals might win prizes, assuming the editors have the time to nominate work. If the piece is honored, some agent might take notice. If nothing else, work published in a literary journal pads one’s resume and slowly that adds up.

Lest one assume I’m simply bemoaning my own failures (not to suggest that I’m above moaning–far from it), here are the numbers:

Last spring, VIDA – an organization “founded in August 2009 to address the need for female writers of literature to engage in conversations regarding the critical reception of women’s creative writing in our current culture” – tallied male and female bylines in the country’s top magazines, concluding that men are published at dramatically higher rates than women (in 2010, at The New Yorker, there were 449 male bylines and 163 female; at Harper’s, 94 male and 25 female; at The New York Review of Books, 306 male and 59 female; at The London Review of Books, 343 male and 74 female).

In her “Written by Women” manifesto announcing the new site, editor Sarah Menkedick collects her own data:

Try this with The Best Articles of 2010: Go down the list, and say out loud to yourself the gender of each writer as you go. You’ll say: man, man, man, man, man, woman, man, woman, woman, man, man, man, man.

Try it with Give Me Something to Read‘s Best Magazine Articles of 2010: woman, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man.

Try it with the front page of longform.org: man, woman, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, woman and two men, woman.

Try it with the table of contents of The Best American Magazine Writing 2010: woman, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, woman, man, man, two men and a woman, man, man, man.

Try it with the table of contents of The Best American Travel Writing 2011: man, man, man, man, man, woman, man, man, man, man, woman, woman, man, woman, woman, man, man, woman.

You get the picture.

For me, that resume has added up to an academic job. (Academics, unlike publishing, has to account for its biases with more than the publishing world’s limp assertions that “women don’t pitch enough; women don’t want to write the tough, research-heavy cover stories men will write; women are too timid; women simply don’t submit as much; women don’t write as much.”) For the time being–one year–I am freed slightly from the pressure to publish (yes, “to perish” academically is not the same thing as “to starve”). And so I am writing a book. I am writing forward, leaving in my wake one hundred homeless orphans.

Someday, I say to those orphans. But I know I’m lying. There is no time, no triage tent. There is nothing but the blank page, the current work-in-progress. I’m a writer, a mother, a traveler, a teacher, a wife, a colleague, a scholar; I am not a business woman. I write my way forward. By next year the orphans will be dead to me. Even the words I have published, on this site, on paper, even the paperback version of my book, due out this November, are the past. By next year, or the year after if I keep sneaking back to the blogosphere, such will be the fate of the work I tide to today.

I am excited to be a part of Vela, part of a team of talented women that intends to break in, collaboratively, guerrilla-style, to a readership. If, as women, we are less inclined to self-promote than our male counterpart, we are prepared to promote each other.

It’s a new model. And it just might work.

Follow us to find out: www.VelaMag.com

The Culture Shock of Coming Home

From Old Mexico to New.

If I got in my car this too-hot afternoon, I could be in Juarez in time for dinner.

When we drive across the Rio Grande for Sunday lunch with his grandparents, I tell my son that if we built a raft we could ride the river all the way back to Mexico.

Twice I have slipped across the border linguistically: once with a birthday girl who gave my son a party favor bag when we extricated him, sobbing, from the princess piñata party he was attempting to crash, and once with the pizza delivery man.

And every night, when my husband dials in from Mexico for his bedtime story duty via Skype, I see our old tile-and-arch house, a little piñata still hanging in the window. He ran into A’s teacher, Anita. Pati, the secretary next door gave him a hard time for leaving his gueritos on the other side, as people say. Raúl has been giving him pointers on how to sell our VW Pointer at Morelia’s Sunday car market.

There are still stray threads bridging the rift, but the tearing is done. I am here, in New Mexico instead of Old. And the divide feels insurmountable.

*

Self-portrait in a VW Pointer.

Three weeks ago I was riding shotgun in that old Pointer, my hair blowing wild out the window, past volcanoes and hillsides covered with cactus. Now I’m an urban mom fresh from my air-conditioned Subaru getting slightly annoyed at Whole Foods for being out of size 3 diapers. Now, after nearly a year of being forced to forsake deadlines for holidays, I get a casual, pre-holiday weekend email from my editors who want all changes for paperback release Tuesday-by-the-latest; without missing a beat, my internal egg-timer begins to tick.

It isn’t distance; it’s differences. And it isn’t Old v. New Mexico: it’s me. Crossing that border, I became a different person: I am the hostess, not the guest. I am running the show, not blithely observing. I am responsible for what happens, not merely responsive to it. I am an American in America. Nobody, everybody, myself.

*

“I want Albuquerque to be in Mexico and Mexico to be in Albuquerque,” my three-year-old tells me.

He likes it here with the dog and the yard and the sandbox (a redundancy in New Mexico), and our too-late-for-hope garden. But he misses “my friend the doctor” (our landlord and the boogie man we invoked whenever crayons were applied to walls or furniture), and Alice his babysitter, and Juan Fe his best friend.

I like the dog and yard and garden too. But I feel unable to miss anyone. The people we left behind already feel like characters in a book I read, characters in a life I inhabited only through imagination. I realize that I was always in Albuquerque in Mexico (and I know there are plenty of people who are in Mexico in Albuquerque).

It takes an abstracted person to wholly inhabit the place in which they are at any given moment. And on this side of the border, it is almost impossible to just be.

*

Mexico's art of ambiguity.

In light of my failure to cross over without canceling out what came between, I seek proof: the pretty Capula red-clay platter, the hammered copper vase from Santa Clara de Cobre, the bag of dulces de leche that I escape into to fight the sadness of change, the Spanish words my son accesses first—“Look mama, ¡uvas!”

Everyone says coming home is the hardest part, that the steps of culture shock are more tedious in reverse. There are even those who insist “going home” is impossible. My problem seems to be hanging on to the part of myself that went away in the first place, keeping the sense of a single, on-going journey in spite of the thick, bookending gravity of return.

But I know that most of the residue of my Mexico self will wash off in the slip of days. When my husband returns in a few weeks he will spring my diamond ring from the safe deposit box. I will cut my too-long hair. The baby will learn to eat foods other than avocados.

The woman I am behind the wheel of my sleek white Subaru is not the girl—girl!—I was three weeks ago kicking the bumper of that Pointer back into place. The woman I am in Whole Foods is not just 1,200 miles removed from the man making plans for the Sunday car market.

The me that was in Mexico has become vestigial. In spite of how little actual time or space has come between us.

And I cannot wait to go away again.

©2011

All rights reserved.

Mexico’s March for Peace with Justice and Dignity

                  

In March, the son of Mexico’s prize-winning poet, Javier Sicilia, was found murdered. The poet’s response was two-fold: one final poem and two feet on the ground. Sicilia has led several marches now, from his home in Cuernavaca to President Calderón’s door in Mexico City. The poet’s followers chant ¡Hasta la madre!–enough already.

Sicilia is currently leading a march called La Caravana Nacional Ciudadana por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad, or The National Citizens’ Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity. It began on the 4th of June in Sicilia’s home city of Cuernavaca and then set forth upon “la Ruta del Terror”: Cuernavaca to Mexico City to Toluca, Morelia, Guadalajara, León, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, Durango, Saltillo, Monterrey, Torreón, Camargo, Chihuahua, and ending on June 10th in the city called “most visible face of the national destruction” of Mexico, Ciudad Juarez.

Saturday night, La Caravana por Paz came through Morelia. The photographs below are images of the march to the city center, followed by speeches in front of Michoacán’s seat of government.

Many of the speeches voiced solidarity with the indigenous community of Cherán, which is facing off with the criminal organization that has disappeared members of the community and murdered others (see my earlier post on Grassroots Resistance Movements). A representative from Cherán was welcomed to the podium by the chant “No estan solos”–you are not alone.

But the hero of the night was the grief-stricken poet Sicilia.

Welcome Caravan for Peace with Dignity and Justice, Here We Are Also Hasta la Madre!

"We want to see justice"

"For a Culture that Respects Human Rights"

"Juan Jesús Ortiz Chávez, disappeared in Acapulco on September 30, 2010"

No more (blood)!

"We demand the truth: 2 Michoacanos are still missing"

There were political parties represented in the march (and pamphlets being passed around), although the movement, while opposing the government strategy, claims to be non-partisan

In Cherán, the pueblo shall overcome

Cherán is present, demands security, peace, and justice

Javier Sicilia (applauding)

Javier Sicilia in Morelia

ÚLTIMO POEMA

Javier Sicilia

El mundo ya no es digno de la palabra

Nos la ahogaron adentro

Como te (asfixiaron),

Como te desgarraron a ti los pulmones

Y el dolor no se me aparta sólo queda un mundo

Por el silencio de los justos

Sólo por tu silencio y por mi silencio, Juanelo

~

LAST POEM 

Javier Sicilia

The world today is not worthy of the word

That they drowned within us

As they did you (asphyxiated)

As they tore from you your lungs

And the pain does not leave me

A world is silenced

By the silence of the just

By your silence and by my silence, Juanelo

(translation mine, with all apologies to the poet)

Adiós to Mexico

My keyboard looks like a pirate’s maw, gaping holes that were once keys, stains on others, and my hard drive is jammed full of photographs: pyramids, pink stone, parades, fireworks behind cathedral spires, and hundreds of hotel rooms I could never afford on a hotel reviewer’s income. My clothes are ragged (who knew clothing in Mexico was so expensive?!), and so is this body that still shows of pregnancy and has not been for a jog, ridden a bike, or seen the inside of a yoga studio in so many months. My son picks up the phone and says ¿bueno?, calls tanker trucks pipas, and prefers chongos over all other flavors of ice cream. My husband is pulling out his eyebrow hairs, one by one, frustrated that the product of his fieldwork looks so different from the proposal that won him so many fancy grants a year ago. And the baby, fat and giggly and so eager to be cooed over and pinched by señoras in the streets, at last has all of the paperwork he’ll need to enter the U.S., his newborn eyes crossed in the picture in his crisp, blue American passport.

Which is all to say that, it is time to leave Mexico. To go home, I’d say, but “home” doesn’t really exist anymore for academics under forty. Mexico is one of four countries we’ve lived in since my husband and I aligned our itineraries: if getting tenure means we have to outsource ourselves to universities in Dubai or Tel Aviv or São Paolo, we will. Next up: I’ve been granted a one-year writer-in-residency at a university in the northeast. I’ll write a book and teach. My husband will write his dissertation. My kids will learn to live with cows and snow.

Goodbye loveinmexico, hello love(ideally)inthelandofperpetualgrayness.

We are fortunate for this future, but it is hard to remember this because what is to come can’t actually be known. What is more poignant is the gratitude I feel for the recent past.

If I were a better poet, I would write an ode, but since I’m not, I can only say goodbye to Mexico. Goodbye to the workers building the hotel across the street—painting it a rich brick orange and then butter-cream and then orange again, and laughing off the owner’s fickleness as the opportunity for more work. Goodbye to the smiling baker rolling dough all day in the panaderia. Goodbye to the trash man ringing his bell and asking, for the third time this week, if my children are still growing, reminding me that we still falta la niña, lack the girl. Goodbye to Juan, who teaches me about fruit, and his boss, Don Pepe, who throws in a free cucumber or jicama para el niño. Goodbye to the grumpy man who sells the long loafs of yeasty bread in the market and never lets my husband buy the wrong kind. Goodbye to the old woman who runs the restaurant on my street where no one ever eats, myself included, and goodbye to the family who run the almost identical restaurant across the street where everyone eats. Goodbye to the writer’s widow who invites us over and explains to us the why of things. Goodbye to the roof dogs, the long-faced hound on one side, the two humping Great Danes on the other. Goodbye to the night stench that wafts in on the breeze. Goodbye to the kinglets who live in the bougainvillea in our garden. Goodbye to hanging laundry on the roof. Goodbye to the quinceañera girls posing in the park and the exchange student selling ice cream. Goodbye to the secretary in the doctor’s office next door who approves (or doesn’t) my infant’s outfit before I leave home. Goodbye to combis and Gas de Lago trucks. Goodbye to Victoria beer, chiles peron, and blue corn tortillas. Goodbye to mangos and limes. Goodbye to pay de queso and sweet hibiscus water. Goodbye to our bumper-dragging VW Pointer. Goodbye butterflies and hummingbirds. Goodbye to Alice’s smiling face at my door, and goodbye to Alfredo’s sorrows. Goodbye to so many holidays, to parades, to balloons and bubbles in the plazas. And goodbye to the teachers at my son’s Montessori whose holistic approach does not stop at the child when his parents are so clearly inept. Goodbye to Dr. O. who delivered my too-soon baby and looked a bit like a matador doing it. Goodbye to that baby’s birthplace. Goodbye to Spanish in my mouth like a handful of marbles. Goodbye to the soldiers and goodbye to their guns. Goodbye to the musicians who sing in the taqueria, and goodbye to the viejitos who dance by the cathedral, and goodbye to the fairy mime, my son’s first love…

Today, I will prepare a despedida for my son at his little school: ice cream and crepes. On Tuesday, his grandmother will fete him welcome: belated birthday cake and a new bike. Transitions are important, I think. And I know there will be sadness between these celebrations. Every day this week my son has packed a box with toys and books and his red shoes.

He’s only three yet he knows how leaving works. But I don’t think he knows that the best of this life we can’t take with us.

Real Mexican Food: Gaspacho Moreliano

Morelia, Michoacán

            Surprisingly few people know about Morelia, the beautiful city in the center of Mexico. I admit that, even if it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the capital of Michoacán, I had never heard of it when my husband won a fellowship to come here. I have lived in Morelia for ten months now, peeking into old colonial buildings and wandering through the vast covered markets with my toddler. I have sipped micheladas[1] in cafes, gobbled more than a few tacos al pastor[2] in simple brasseries frequented by cruising musicians, and, when we’re out for a red-meat treat, (delicately!) devoured many succulent arracheras.[3] (I won’t even begin to confess to the damage my son and I have done with Morelia’s dulces de leche–that is another story.) Yet it all pales in comparison to the exquisite gaspacho moreliano.

If the word “gaspacho” has you thinking chilled tomato soup (“gazpacho”), stop it.

If you are thinking of something you might sit down to in a restaurant, wrong again.

Gaspachos morelianos are salads of finely chopped fresh tropical fruit dressed to taste that are sold—like ice cream—from windows and stands wherever people go to stroll and sit on park benches. They were once touted as “resucita muertos” or “vuelve a la vida”—able to bring back the dead—but while the health in eating enormous helpings of fresh fruit is incontrovertible, health is hardly the reason everyone in Morelia is addicted to gaspachos.

Gaspachos del Bosque, Morelia’s original gaspacho stand

The original gaspacho was concocted by a man named Alfredo Ferrer, who ran a little stand in Bosque Cuauhtémoc, Morelia’s Central Park. It was 1976, and Ferrer served diced fresh jicama with grated onion and cheese, vinegar, and lime juice, all sprinkled salt with slivers of jalapeño. The students from the nearby universities got hooked on the mix of sour-sweetness and heat and Ferrer kept chopping.

By 1990, there were gaspacho stands all around Morelia. And the recipe had evolved. Customers preferred fresh-squeezed orange juice to vinegar, and they wanted more fruits as well. Now, Gaspachos del Bosque, the stand where gaspachos morelianos were born, prepares two bases of diced fruit to choose from, with some seasonal variation. Tradicional consists of jicama, mango, and pineapple, and  todas frutas contains the above as well as watermelon, cantaloupe, and cucumber. From this point, servers will ask customers about condiments. Onions? Salt? Cheese? Vinegar? Chile? A squeeze of lime?

Fortunately, the servers are rocket fast because gaspachos are still popular with the university students, and each prefers hers her own way. And when one does have to wait, the prep team chopping mountains of fruit with very large knives makes for a good show.

Mexicans love chile on fruit. Orange halves dusted with chile are served at children’s parties, even fruit candy comes coated in chile. And an American friend of mine who lives here in Morelia complains that her daughter can’t even look at a slice of watermelon if it doesn’t have chile on it.

But I’m a simple girl (and I share my gaspachos with my small son whose taste for chile, while impressive, is still nascent)—so I usually order todas frutas straight up with orange juice and a tiny pinch—¡poquit-it-ito!—of salt (even fruit popsicles are salty in Mexico). But when I don’t have to share, I go in for the tradicional, with orange juice, lime, and smoky, dark chile que no pica—chile that doesn’t bite.

Todas frutas en jugo

Tradicional con chile en polvo (que no pica)

In a few months, we will leave Morelia, and I don’t want my son to forget this beautiful place where he spent his early childhood, even though I know he will. In many ways. But memory is trainable. Doors can close leaving entire events sealed away from our consciousness, and events that are accessible can be overwritten, altered. But there are ways to travel back, ways to lay bread crumbs along the trail so as not to lose what is precious. The smell of a ripe mango might be guide enough. But it is my hope that the taste of gaspacho will be enought to safekeep a city, even a whole country, in my child’s mind.

 

---

[1] Every café has its signature michelada recipe, and these are secret. If you order one you are served a half a salt-rimmed stein of anything from straight lemon juice to clamato—a tomato and clam broth, often served with a spear of cucumber and, of course, chile. (Some bars advertise mango or papaya micheladas, but I have to confess I haven’t gone there.) Thi smixer is served with a bottle of beer, which you pour into the stein and drink.

[2] Small corn tortillas topped with thin slices of spit-roasted chicken and pineapple, topped with chopped onions and cilantro which you then dress to taste with fresh lime juice, spicy avocado sauce, pico de gallo (heavy on the jalapeños), or roasted chile sauce.

[3] Arrachera is a platter of nopales (de-thorned cactus), whole sweet onions and jalapeños, and surprisingly juicy Mexican skirt steaks, all cooked on the grill and served, of course, with a scorching assortment of house chile sauces.

Hasta la madre: Grassroots Resistance in Mexico

I am trying to write this from my temporary home in Morelia, Michoacán, one of the places red alerted for travelers, to sum up Mexico’s War on Drugs so I can write about some of the things (extra)ordinary people are doing about it, but it is Sunday night, and while nearly 35,000 people have died in the U.S. and Mexico’s war, the number that everyone is interested in is 3. Yes, Morelia’s Monarcas just crushed Mexico City’s Cruz Azul (3-0) and the noise—car horns, whistles, whoops, bottles breaking—has been at top volume on for almost an hour. This is the disconnect that has baffled me ever since I arrived in Mexico ten months ago, that has made it impossible for me to reconcile what I read–35,000–with what I see and hear around me–¡Viva Morelia!

But there are three events—all of them grassroots, two of them all but spontaneous—in my inbox this week that make more sense of this conflict and this country for me. Or at least they appeal to the idealist in me that stubbornly believes that the power of the people’s will is ultimately unmatchable.

Resistance Blockades in Indigenous Community

The first is local, and it’s a bit of a David-and-Goliath situation. I heard about it through a letter calling for people to take notice of events in the indigenous Purhépechan community of Cherán, here in Michoacán, and desseminating an Amnesty International Urgent Alert. Apparently, because of collusion between criminal organizations (a.k.a. “cartels,” a misnomer, or narcotraficantes, a reductive term that doesn’t quite get at the scope of these organizations) and local authorities–yes, Cherán’s own municipal police, the community forests around Cherán have been logged illegally. The logging is the last straw, but it is not the only abuse the community has suffered. More than a dozen of this community’s 16,000 citizens have been killed or disappeared in events linked to Michoacán’s currently unnamed organization. (La Familia disbanded–or splintered, or who-knows-what–in Deceber.)

As the story has come out, the community’s patience snapped about a month ago when townspeople began throwing rocks at logging trucks. Then the community blockaded the road and captured five of the loggers (later turning them over to federal authorities). There has been violence—two members of the community have been killed in confrontations between narcos (accompanied by local police, rumor would have it). Cherán will no longer stand to have its forests or its community plundered.

Oh, and they’d like some justice, please.

more info:

http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/estados/80308.html

http://amnistia.org.mx/nuevo/2011/05/06/mexico-ataques-contra-miembros-de-una-comunidad-indigena-en-mexico/

Paso a Paso Hacia la Paz: Human Rights Demonstration and Father Solalinde

The second event is international, and it has yet to take place. It is an invitation to participate in a peace march/freedom ride that promises to be monumental, whatever numbers actually turn out. To my great frustration (do you know what it costs to change plane tickets these days?!), but I’m trying to convince my workaholic husband that his research can spare a few days to march for what organizers are calling the civil rights struggle of our time.

Paso a Paso Hacia la Paz is tracing the deadly route that migrants travel to get to el otro lado, the other side, a few states at a time. In January, the first Paso a Paso crossed Chiapas through to Ixtepec, Oaxaca. This summer, Paso a Paso will begin in Ixtepec on June 20^th and travel to Orizaba by train and by bus, arriving June 24^th. Family members of disappeared migrants presumed to be among the dead recently uncovered in Tamaulipas state will be among the demonstrators (this group will actually be making the entire journey from their homes in Central America, to a rendezvous in Guatemala, and then joining Paso a Paso before completing the journey to the U.S. border.

Leading the march will be Father Alejandro Solalinde, a priest whose name is known throughout Mexico and, gradually, internationally as well for his work for human rights. I’m a little starstruck, but it is my opinion that Father Solalinde is the Dr. King, the Archbishop Romero, fighting for the oppressed in Mexico.

 The Paso a Paso movement is gaining momentum, albeit not in time for so many migrants whose travels have subjected them to extortion, rape, kidnapping, even execution. But if you are in Mexico, or are inclined to be in Mexico this June, try to be a part of this. (Find Casa Migrante Ixtepec on Facebook to get hooked up.)

A Poet for Peace

            In March, seven university students were killed in Cuernavaca. One of them was a young man named Juan Francisco, who just happened to be the son of Javier Sicilia, one of Mexico’s most prestigious contemporary poets. Sicilia promptly put down his pen—making his son’s death essentially a double murder—and took to the street and people followed, rallying to the line “hasta la madre,” the rough equivalent of “we’ve had it up to here.” Even President Calderón, who clearly sees the threat in an angry poet, keeps tweeting his solidarity with the people who march with Sicilia, and, according to the poet, the president has even conceded that there are flaws in his combative approach.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/world/americas/14sicilia.html

 *

Peace demonstrations that I’ve seen here in Morelia do not privilege one side over the other–the government or the criminal organizations–in the ostensible War on Drugs. Peace demonstrations simply call for peace, and neither side—the criminal organizations that claim to bring security to the region and even provide some services (see William Finnegan’s 2010 “Silver or Lead” in the New Yorker), or the U.S. funded federal forces that patrol the streets in pickup trucks with machine guns manned by masked troops. Most of Mexico seems to feel caught in the crossfire and futility. To hear people talk about it, the current strategy of taking out kingpins is a little like bowling: knock some down and the system coolly re-racks.

And these events—Cherán’s spontaneous resistance which now has the roads in and out of the community blockaded while the community awaits backup from anyone, anywhere, who will help them escape the exploitation and abuses of their current subjugation, Sicilia’s grief-powered marches, and Paso a Paso’s sweeping gesture of solidarity with another subjugated people—these events are grassroots resistance movements. Rather than machine guns, these movements apply the force of pride, patriotism, and connected sense of community—like that of this city that is honking so wildly tonight—against the status quo of abject violence and political posturing.

I know it is limp idealism that thinks that much can come from gestures. But I grew up on the legend of “We Shall Overcome”–so much so that Pete Seeger wrote the preface of my first book–and I still believe that when enough people say “ya, basta,” enough already, peace is possible.

Now we wait for the call for peace to cross the border, both ways, as the violence crosses, as the drugs and guns cross, as the migrants cross, coming and going.

Roots and Wings and the Story (for Mother’s Day)

I grew up on a farm in your quintessential middle-of-nowhere. While my dad cursed his cows and tractors and broken down trucks—“peckerhead” should have been my first word, my mom nursed a vast  vegetable garden, a flock of Thanksgiving turkeys that were notoriously too large for anyone’s oven, and us three kids.

It was an idyll and it wasn’t. My memories are steeped in the scent of boiling maple sap, river mint, and new hay. But anyone who knows anything about dairy farming in the 1980s knows how low we kept our heads during tax season when my father did his books. And anyone who knows anything about how one gets a dairy farmer’s attention can guess at the volume of two things: my mother’s tractor whistle, and the way she could slam a front door. On those latter nights I remember nesting down with my sister and brother in the chaff pile below the loft ladder, drifting off to the constant sound of chewing and the tsk-tsk of a milking machine.

But my mother let me know her in ways that made those stranded nights make sense. People didn’t speak about transparency in government then the way they do now, but my mother practiced it as a parent.

I knew she worked hard—chopping, shoveling, hoeing, canning, freezing, slaughtering, mothering. And I knew she was lonely living on the outskirts—and I don’t mean merely geographical—of a very small town. She made sure I knew, as an elementary school feminist-in-training, that undervaluing a homemaker was nothing short of sinful. When my father forgot himself, she took herself out to the movies. Forty miles away. Alone.

And it wasn’t just current events that my mother let me in on; she isn’t much for surprises or secrets. Like me, she errs on the side of too much information. So I knew her old flames by name and how each fizzled out, and I knew what it was she buried in the parking lot of the Bombay airport when she left India for the last time.

Indeed, my mother wasn’t raised on a farm herself; her childhood memories take place at the country club. And I don’t mean that figuratively. Weekends and summers, her mother dropped her off in the morning and picked her up in the evenings. Swimming lessons. Tennis lessons. Lunch at the clubhouse. Her childhood housekeeper still sends us all Christmas cookies.

My mother was just home from wandering around India and Afghanistan, looking for that great alternative her generation once sought, when she met my father. She says that near the end of her traveling days overpasses made her sad: below her she saw the headlights of people who were headed home, who would get there in time for dinner, who were not passing through. When she met a man applying a sweeping intellect to working a ramshackle farm, she exited the highway. It was the 1970s, late for some trends and early for others, when they went back-to-the-land, local, organic, free-range.

Farming was not an inheritance for either of my parents, but a lifestyle choice. It was idealistic, unrealistic, romantic, but my parents don’t fail at things they set out to do. Although they do sometimes switch-out the end goal. Cows gave way to crops and now they sell garden-fresh prepared food at farmers’ markets.

But this was their path. We kids were charged with finding our own. I know my way around a Ball Blue Book and a John Deere and I’m not half bad with a hammer and nails. But my mother didn’t raise me to be a farmer or even a farmer’s wife. Rather, she raised me to adapt to my circumstances. Hungry? Buy ten pounds each of potatoes, carrots, and onions: you won’t starve. Stuck in a blizzard? Shelter yourself in snow. At the Plaza? Order tea.

My mother expected us to run wild, to experiment, to take chances. We were allowed to do almost anything but “hang out.” Still, I admit, I resisted. When I was sixteen, my mother enrolled me in summer school in Madrid, Spain. I fought to stay home, hoping to ride some horses, help my dad with the haying. But I lost. Round two, she remained unfazed when I tossed my high school diploma in a box and went to work on a farm. My mother knows that some seeds planted have to winter over. After a year of farm work, I went to Italy for my first college semester and, once my travels gained momentum, I hardly looked back.

My siblings’ stories are different, but we are all facets of our mother writ large. My sister is a corporate climber, a little like a chainsaw in high heels. She can play polo, shoot up beer cans, and throw a smitten man out on his ass. My brother, a ship without a compass but blessed with favorable winds, longs to go to Africa, to do hard work in hard places, but keeps getting waylaid because he is too practical not to know that he accomplishes more engineering the Bigger Picture for government agencies and international organizations. Of us three, I am both the dreamer and the one who most knows what I want, a writer and a wanderer and a mother myself. Most of this is only possible because my mother sees my will-o-wisp path as viable.

“Do what you love, the money will follow,” she says, and sends me a check—not for material things, or even to get me by, she expects me to manage that, potatoes-carrots-and-onions style—but so I can do something decadent with my passport. So far, not much money follows, but my mother’s faith is unflagging.

Together, my siblings and I tootle around on bicycles in the Dutch countryside, eat steak on Capitol Hill, pickle ourselves in gin while we can dill beans, hitchhike through South America, sidestep rattlesnakes and bear in the backcountry. Together, we rake hay, throw it up in the loft, stack it tight, cut-end up. The way our parents want it.

From my perspective, it all comes down to this: my mother teaches me to write my own story, and to make it a doozy. This is something one does forward, making plans and choices, buying the ticket, as well as backwards, seeing the meaning in experiences had, however fleeting. Frankly, I hardly remember my mother’s oversized turkeys, and I never met her ex-flames, but the stories have stuck and I read in it a life that is well-lived. These days I write my own life in this vein. I know that my days are like anyone’s, dirty dishes and mundane frustrations—whether we curse cows or sip  tea at the Plaza—but if my story is going to be anywhere near as resonant to my children as my mother’s is to me, I must drive my life hard, mine deep, and tell it well.

FYI: Dia de la Madre is observed on May 10th in Mexico, so this is NOT late (really, Mom!).