16 Wednesday Jul 2014
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On the 4th of July we had steady rain for over twenty-four hours, and I took the opportunity to catch up on some computer work while Hanna napped. The cats were super helpful as they always are. Continue reading
08 Tuesday Jul 2014
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Image: Redwoods; Stout Memorial Grove, Jedediah Smith State Park (September 2013)
As some of you know, my maternal grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer about a month ago, at the age of ninety-two. After a short, precipitous downhill slide, he passed away in the wee small hours of this morning at his home in Bend, Oregon. It’s exactly a month since his diagnosis which was, in turn, exactly a year after the death of my grandmother, his wife of over fifty years.
My thoughts are going to be with my mother and aunt today, as they make sense of the present. Though he was born and raised in Michigan, and in turn raised his daughters there, I’m glad my grandfather was able to die in the high desert country where he and my grandmother made their home in early marriage and returned in the 1980s upon his retirement.
07 Monday Jul 2014
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It’s been roughly five years since Hanna and I started snogging one another.
And, well, other things. It all happened in a bit of a rush; I never was a very patient person once I’d finally determined it was time to do something new. And for us, apparently, the time for sexytimes was late June 2009.
So yay anniversary!
Image via.
This weekend I was reading The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes, and Good Intentions are Sabotaging Gay Equality by Susanna Danuta Walters (New York Univ. Press, 2014) and was reminded of the now anachronistic corollary to “coming out,” that of being “brought out” into the queer community by one’s first same-sex partner. Walters writes:
Being ‘brought out’ has within it that dual sense of sexuality and community. One is ‘brought out’ by another queer person and simultaneously brought into the queer community … coming out in these earlier and sometimes explicitly political iterations was understood as both a process personal and social, both confessional and performative, narrating a ‘shared fate’ but also an ‘imagined community .'(70)
This got me thinking about my own experience of coming out / being brought out into self-awareness and visible queer sexuality. My attitudes toward coming out as a helpful narrative (for myself; for others) have fluctuated a lot over the years. On the one hand, I definitely experienced the silencing pressure of presumptive heterosexuality, experienced the feeling of being closeted. People assumed I was straight and I mostly didn’t correct them.
For twenty-eight years. Continue reading
30 Wednesday Apr 2014
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Time for Wednesday cat blogging!
I had the camera out on Sunday and Teazle was very interested.
This is her EEEEVIL CAT impression! (aka the time I accidentally took a photo with the flash on)
Little Miss Flirtypants.
The Joan Crawford look.
The “why have the petting hands gone away?” look.
Gerry maintained a stolid indifference to the proceedings…
But later settled down on the top edge of the book I was attempting to read.
(You can see that the petting hand returned to scratch Teazle beneath the chin.)
14 Monday Apr 2014
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(Yes, I went with the oxford comma in that blog post title. What can I say? I’m a fan.)
So after a fairly quiet, stable year in the Clutterbuck-Cook household, the year 2014 has decided to whup us in the ass. As regular readers know, the first four months of the year have seen us trapped by the polar vortex, making the decision to move this summer, blindsided by the sudden death of my grandmother, the spraining of Hanna’s ankle, the death of my in-law’s elderly cat … not to mention a particularly busy winter/spring at the MHS, the Countway, and all of our regular life activities.
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| Golden retrievers Addie & Josie swimming in Lake Michigan (photo by Mark Cook) |
We’re ready for a vacation!
Thankfully, we have one coming up next weekend in Brattleboro, Vermont — we’re already looking forward to the darkness and the quiet and the tasty foods to be found at the Brattleboro Co-op … not to mention the maple lattes from Mocha Joe’s and the popcorn from the self-service popcorn machine at Sam’s.
Meanwhile, here are some life updates from our recent adventures in what I like to call “adulting.” You know. That thing where you have to get up in the morning and leave the house to complete a series of tasks, some of which you look forward to and some of which you don’t.
20 Thursday Mar 2014
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My grandmother’s funeral is today, and of course what can you possibly say about a person who — until late Monday afternoon — has always been a part of the world while you were alive within it? The earliest memory I have that can be attached to a specific period in time is of staying with Grandma Cook while my mother was in labor for the birth of my brother, Brian. I was just shy of three years old.
So there are any number of stories I could tell about my growing up in relationship to her, grandmother and granddaughter, two people who didn’t always agree. The story I want to share today, though, is one that can be told in her own words. For, like a good historian and archivist, I saved the document (in an archival box!) and was able to locate it on Friday as Hanna and I were packing to leave on this journey.
This is the letter my grandmother wrote me when she learned that Hanna and I were together as a couple — the event that was, for most people in my life, my coming out moment as a person with bisexual desires. Reading it over, my political-critical self notices limitations, but I will refrain in the here and now from pointing them out. What I hope comes through in this very human document is its author’s overwhelming impulse to “only connect.”
17 Monday Mar 2014
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On our drive to Michigan, I kept thinking about what I could do besides be here with my grandmother, as we gathered to help her through the final days of her life. And what I kept coming back to was reading aloud.
Ours has long been a family of reading together, and there is something about the experience of being read to that I think cues being cared for in a very deep part of our psyche or soul. It is also something that Hanna and I share; one of the most effective ways for us to help her back down from a bad spell of anxiety is to put on old cassette-tape recordings of her father reading aloud, like he used to do when she was small.
So when I got to Holland on Sunday morning, I stopped off at my parents’ house before going to Grandma’s and picked up an armful of books. Here is what I have read so far:
Springtime in Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren
The Sailor Dog by Margaret Wise Brown
Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban
Miss Rumphuis by Barbara Cooney
half a dozen chapters from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
and the opening chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader also by C.S. Lewis
The text probably isn’t that important, though I’ve been conscious as I’ve been reading about themes of exploration and home-coming, of journeys into the unknown, and of familiar family tales. The act being read to has helped calm everyone through the ups and downs of this process.
It’s made me think about what stories I will want for myself, someday, to help with the journey on.
16 Sunday Mar 2014
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| moon + venus. norridgewock, maine. |
Hanna and I are back in Michigan.
My grandmother had a stroke on Tuesday afternoon and at first they thought it was minor, but internal bleeding developed at the hospital and she slipped into a coma on Tuesday night. My family was able to bring her home Wednesday evening, so that she can die in the home she and my grandfather shared during the majority of their marriage, until his death in 2007. It is a space that has been the hub in the wheel of the paternal side of my family for my entire life.
As I type this, I am sitting next to her bed in the living room. All the children and grandchildren and their spouses have gathered, along with a few close friends, and my grandmother’s golden retriever who circles around everyone, keeping track.
It is cold here, with ice still on the lake that we can see out the front windows. Snow banks are deep alongside the steep drive that leads from the road to my grandmother’s house, which stands on a small rise. Out behind the house is a once-landscaped gulch with a creek running through it that, in the spring, will become carpeted with daffodils.
We are entangled with our own watchful waiting right now, but I know others among you are also wrestling with life transitions and trauma. My thoughts are also with all of you, whatever your life-changes and stressors may be.
It is good to be here, and I am grateful to all of those in my life who made it possible for Hanna and I to travel on such short notice. Thank you all.
05 Wednesday Mar 2014
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Teazle’s latest favored place to sleep is in the box where Hanna keeps her knickers. She has to jump up onto the shelf above and then worm her way into the box. It’s a process we shamelessly mock her for.
Gerry, meanwhile, clearly feels relaxed enough these days to do a dead bunny impression. She slept this way for a good half hour on Sunday, effectively trapping me on the couch!
Sunday was definitely a day for snoozing.
Hope everyone’s week is going well and that y’all are staying warm. We’re definitely ready for spring!
16 Thursday Jan 2014
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Hanna and I finally made it back to Boston on an uneventful Saturday-afternoon flight through Cleveland. We sort of didn’t believe it was happening until we actually hit the runway at Logan, but yay! We’re home.
the feminist librarian 
