White River Junction is where I live, and work, and eat. It is also where I yoga and latte and gossip and discover treasures. It is where I mail letters & where I show off my extensive hat collection. Joe Brainard passed through here on a bus once (probably more than once), and he wrote about it, and these days I’m reading Joe Brainard again because I think of him as a pick-me-up, even though he was mostly sad and worried about being too skinny and anxious about the concept of being a “painter” and the concept of love lasting. Then how does he make me so happy? Because he enjoyed being alive and wrote a lot just to do it and he drew pictures of things on tables and hung out with James Schuyler, one of my gay dead loves. And he had a good attitude, he did his exercises and illustrated books and drove places with friends. He was one of those charmers, I think. Here’s some of him.
*top image is from The Best American Poetry blog and the bottom image is from my phone’s camera, taken while drinking black tea with milk & honey.
Can you tell what that is? It’s a teensy tiny PURPLE cauliflower! Leaves and all! Like, OHMYGOSH!
This tiny cauliflower (the variety is called “purple graffiti”) is currently on display with some other small things, in front of the microwave, which we do not use. Oh, and Heather made me that oven mitt! Don’t you want to buy one for your best friend for Hannukah?!?
On the night before Thanksgiving, I am thankful for friends. Thankful for the emails I get from friends like Chase, with this enclosed:
because I’M LAUGHING and because that video is so much like my life, my life is so much of making up songs about loving the things I’m cooking, picking, making, seeing. Thankful for friends who have and will come visit, and thankful for new friends in the making, thankful to be back east nearby closefriends I felt so far away from and thankful for the busestrainsandautomobiles which transport me and them to and from the country where I live. I’m thankful for my family members who are my friends in the deepest sense, the friends I haven’t picked but who have made me and it continues:
Thankful for
winter sun and
a grownup rooster fluffed with feathers (his name is Claude!) and
the shoes on my feet and
good soup and a fire and
the ever-discovery of poems and
the way lighting a candle makes me feel sacred no matter the time of day I do it and thankful
and apologetic to the mice we’ve killed in the basement who did not deserve to die and
thankful for free health insurance from the state of Vermont!
and emoticons and
thankful for sage and sweetgrass and cedar incense and
for the pond that I hopehopehope will turn to ice and hopeful
for finding ice skates at the thrift store for our pond and
thankful for nice thick socks
thankful for nice coworkers and kind customers and a wall of windows
thankful for how cheap a stamp remains and
for letters and packages and our big box from “fungi perfecti”
which means we’ll grow mushrooms underneath the sink throughout the winter and
thankful for the boldness of 2012 and all the good change it’s wrought and brought and
thankful for mittens
and a yellow hat from my sister
and a red hat from the country store which makes me look like a hipster which I am a little bit I guess but mostly I’m just a farmer who likes clothes and colors and thankful for
a grey hat from amsterdam
and thankful for all the things that weren’t stolen from our truck
like eachother and my gorgeous blue rounded piece of sodalite
which a woman at the stone store told me to select
because she said the purple of my aura was sagging that day
and it was
I was sagging that day
I’m thankful for people who help me unsag
like that cosmic lady who made me buy a very dark sodalite and also for my family and friends and
now I’m back to where I began which is thankfulness and
Sara and I eating breakfast in the sunny square of window in downtown White River Junction before she drove the five hours back to New York
Walking into work having just been with someone who has known more than one of my lives
Running after work in new sneakers up a hill I’ve never walked and scaring a group of long-necked wild turkeys, finding oyster mushrooms on the side of the road and the sun that flashed on the leaves
A date with Misha, wine tasting at my new restaurant, then him rushing around the country store with a new long-handled rake in his hand and me grabbing paint chips (free colors!) before the store closes at 9pm plus some Vermont dark chocolate at the checkout
I didn’t meet Allen Ginsberg; he’s dead and likely never visited White River Junction. The man I did meet recommended that I read Joanne Kyger. As it turns out, she’s great! She’s beautiful!
Then the other day I got in the truck and there were four pumpkins sitting shotgun. I put one out by the mailbox and two along the driveway and one is still riding shotgun.
It’s autumn and the mums are on display. I’ve been reading The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard and oh I love it so much I love it so much. Also, we’ve been drying sliced tomatoes, storing them in oil, stacking them in the cupboards where they’ll wait until they’re given as gifts. Here’s a painting by Joe Brainard, of a tomato.
panache, perhaps 