New Writings

for a writing group of older lesbians that I recently joined:

I have always dreamed of having a library of my own, with built-in bookcases and a ladder. Last year, I moved downstairs into a new flat and had my carpenter friend build it for me. The room has a ten-foot ceiling, and he put four bookcases side by side, built them up to the ceiling, bolted them to each other and the wall, and installed a custom-built sliding library ladder. I bought a fancy recliner and placed it with the ceilling light falling over my shoulder, and my view out the window to the street in front of the house.

Even though I gave away a quarter of my books before the move, I still have too many of them to fit on the shelves in a single layer. This excess makes it less satisfying than I'd hoped, and has helped me neglect putting all the books in order. I did separate fiction from non-fiction, and Judaica has its own shelves, and science fiction is partly sorted out, but there it stays. Mostly because I read very few dead tree books these days. I read on my ipod touch and Kindle nearly all the time.

But also because the books are my friends; I don't so much need to read them as to simply know that they are there. Childrens' literature and juvenile sci fi are talismans of a simpler time in my life, and they were there to take me away from new cities and new homes, and let me rest and gather myself in worlds where everything worked out in the end.

I cannot, to this day, leave the house without something to read. As my mother used to say, "when I'm alone, I'm in bad company." I need to always have a book with me, to lure my mind from dark alleys and self-absorption into other worlds, other places, and the possibility of change.

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I spent last weekend at the Bishop's Ranch, an Episcopal retreat center outside of Healdsburg. It includes an old ranch house, and is surrounded by dairy farms. This I know both because someone told me so, and because of the cow stench that is painfully evident when the wind is wrong.

The place is beautifully situated on a hilltop with a sweeping view of the valley below and Mount Helena in the distance. Birds of all sorts frequent the skies - I saw big black raptors of some sort, and heard woodpeckers and hummingbirds that I could identify by their sounds.

There were also huge black bumblebees that noisily haunted a wisteria-covered walkway between my cottage and the main buildings. When I first became aware of their buzzing, it felt ominous, like I was about to become the victim in a sci fi movie; I worried that I would be bitten. But then it became clear to me that they weren't interested in me at all, just the flowers. So their menace melted away.

Little lizards skittered across the paths, and there were trees that bloomed with bougainvillia-colored flowers.

When the cow stench was in abeyance, just breathing the air of that quiet, hallowed place brought me peace.

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As a young girl, I used to hate the color pink. It was too girly, precious, and feminine, and it too easily showed stains and dirt. I was quite the tomboy, and pink conflicted with my self-image. Blue was my favorite color then, the boys' color, the color of strength and activity, and school notebooks and gym clothes.

When I was in law school, a mentor told me that pink blouses would look good with the blue clothes that I usually wore. I tried it, and they did. Then I started wearing purples, and lilacs, and burgundies. I'm a fairly butch lesbian, so my favorite pink blouse is flannel and plaid, but it is pink.

This past weekend I was at a music camp that featured a lot of ukulele playing. I had played uke as a little girl, before my hands got big enough for guitar. The last couple of years, one of my recorder teachers has been playing ukulele at recorder camp during open mike nights. And I started wanting a uke again. But the ones I looked at in music stores either sounded awful or cost more than I wanted to pay. In the camp store this weekend, though, my fancy was tickled by cheap, plastic-covered ukuleles in a rainbow of colors that actually sounded pretty good. After I tuned and fiddled around with one - while other campers said how well its color coordinated with my flannel shirt, I bought it.

It's pink.