The Furious Spinner

Tuesday, April 20, 2004: I slept 11 hours. Needed it. Did a load of laundry. Ate. It was pouring down rain. I read a biography of Lafayette. The stuff about the French Revolution was...revolting. Those people were crazy. Lafayette was determined to bring an American style democracy to France, although Washington and others warned him that the French were not the Americans. I would have wondered what that meant, too, but basically the white pre-Americans lived fairly free lives. They weren’t that poor, they weren’t starving, they weren’t under the yoke of a religion that kept telling them they were “less than” a religious and royal hierarchy. The French common people were poor, many were starving, they did live under the rules of the Catholic Church and the dominion of the King. No Magna Carta for them. When someone finally suggested they were equal to nobility at the same time that they were starving because of the excesses of the upper class—well, let’s just say the cork came off a very steamy bottle. Chaos broke out. And bloodlust ruled.

Citizens disemboweled people in the street. Killed them by cutting pieces of them off their bodies. They didn’t have bread so they beheaded a baker who had stayed up all night trying to bake more bread. It wasn’t logical. And it was horrific. In the end, they killed about 40,000 of their own.

I got some more information from Ed Lawler about the President's House in Philadelphia. He’s been so helpful. Every time I learn something new I have to undo something I’ve already written. I hope that ends soon.

I wrote on my yellow pad today, sitting by the heater and eating frozen bananas. This felt much less stressful. No phone calls. No saving the world (besides a couple of email letters).

I wrote: Oney heard a noise and looked up. The young Lafayette stood a few feet from her....

Wednesday, April 21, 2004: Up part of the night. Mario woke me up at 8:30 a.m. He’d made me breakfast. He left for work, and I left soon after for a job in Goldendale where I used to live. Mario found me the book on tape of The Negro President by Garry Wills. It’s about President Jefferson, the election of 1800, and how the 3/5th assessment of slaves came into being. I listened to that while I wound down State Route 14. As I got closer to Goldendale, the huge hills which turn gold in summer were purple with lupines and dotted yellow with balsamroot.

My work at the Goldendale library was physically more difficult than I had anticipated, plus my allergies got worse and worse. I had lived in Goldendale for a year in 1987. It was here that I had developed asthma. I had no good memories of this place. After school, teenagers filled the library. A group of girls kept looking at me and laughing. I knew I looked grotesque—my nose was swollen, my eyes red and watery, bodily fluids flowing. I told the girls it was not nice to laugh at people. I wondered if this was how children felt when their classmates made fun of them. I had always been one of those kids defending the unpopular children. No one had ever made fun of me—at least not to my face.

I was glad when I finally got to leave, five hours later.

Thursday, April 22, 2004: Terrible allergies. Beautiful sunny warm day. Depressed. Stayed on the couch. Read slave narratives. Rewrote bits of the novel while lying on the couch. I got an email from someone in my peace group who had seen my article in the Earth First! Journal, which was interesting since I hadn’t seen it yet.

Friday, April 23, 2004: Mario worked. I called my naturopath and tried to figure out what to do about my allergies. Didn’t feel like working on anything.

Saturday, April 24, 2004: We had the county Democratic convention this morning. Another beautiful day. The convention took place at Rock Creek, down at the fair grounds which is a few blocks from where I live. At the convention delegates and seated alternates voted on the platform to send to the state convention and on delegates to send to the state convention. I was nominated but not chosen. They picked a young sweet soft-spoken women with two children. They would never elect a mouthy broad like me.

At home again, I worked in my vegetable garden. Fava beans, beets, kale, and carrots had overwintered. My rosemary and lavender bushes were doing well, along with the strawberry patch. Today I was planting new vegetables—planting by the moon as any good farmer does. I put our compost onto the garden and worked it into the soil. Then I planted sage, carrots, peas, and lettuce.

I felt better than I had in a long while. I walked over to the Kuan Yin Peace Garden I had created below the pine tree. Several wildflowers and the hostas I had planted last spring were coming up again this year. A spider with legs that stretched out to about the size of a dime sat on the right cheek of the great goddess, Kuan Yin.

I wrote a little on the novel. Oney and Lafayette talked in the kitchen late at night.

I wrote: “The girls loved the French dolls and doll house. The dolls and house were so beautiful. I never touched them, of course. Sometimes I stared at that house, imagining that I could have something like that—not a real house. Just this beautiful little house. It was so perfect. Breakable. I remember Mrs. Washington asked me not to touch it because I might leave fingerprints. I thought she didn’t want me to touch it because I was brown and the house was white. I thought if I touched it, my color would come off on the walls of this doll house. I would bleed brown. I was only a few years older than the girls, still a child myself. When I told my mother she laughed and said, ‘Yep, you used to be black, honey, like ol’ Mr. Lee, but you kept touchin’ stuff wasn’t yours, leaving your mark. That’s why you almost white. That’s why white people is white. They always touchin’ what’s not theirs.’”

Sunday, August 25, 2004: Over a million women Marched for Choice in Washington, D.C. I watched the speakers on C-Span and wept. I don’t know why. I was inspired and afraid. The misogyny is so insidious, and the Bush administration is the worst of any I have seen. Mario and I drove to Hood River for our local march in support of women’s reproductive rights. A group of about 110 of us walked around town with our signs, some singing chants. The leaders walked too quickly and left behind the elderly and medically challenged—Hood River has steep hills. I think maybe they were afraid of being out in the streets, afraid of being targets. I understood their fear, but our purpose was to be seen. We listened to a couple of speeches and then went home.

I lay on the couch, covered by a quilt my father made me with the hepa fan on and the television murmuring something to me while Mario stroked my face and read until I fell to sleep.

Monday, April 26, 2004: We drove to Falling Creek and walked amongst the Standing Ones, the Old Ones. Home, home, home. I am most at home amongst the wild things, playing the short guy to the tall ones. We counted deer’s head orchid this morning: 168. There were about 18 more than last week. At the falls I wrote a couple of sentences on the novel; then I leaned against a huge rock next to Mario and we gazed at the falls and the mist as if rose and fell, rose and fell, sprinkling us like a light summer rain.

Tuesday, April 27, 2004: I always have Mario withdrawal on Tuesday. Today was no exception, especially since I decided to take it easy for a couple of days. I took it easy by cleaning the house, doing laundry, watering the garden, writing a 1,200 word essay, taking care of library business, and working on the novel.

Mario called to tell me the city was not going to spray! I was so happy that I almost crawled out of my depression. As we walked around town on Mario’s break, I said, “I don’t think I’m going to be an activist for a while. I’ll be the opposite. What’s the opposite of active? Passive. I’ll be a passifist.”

Mario laughed.

“You know, I used to have a soul, spirit, a center,” I said. “I don’t feel that any more. I don’t have anything to hang on to.”

I studied with shamans and healers for over ten years. Then I stopped. Because I didn’t get well.

“When did that happen, losing that center?" Mario asked. "When you got sick in February?”

I looked over at Mario. I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh. “February? No, this has been years, darlin’, just years.”

I went home and wrote. The teenaged Lafayette was feeling smothered by his tutor, Frestel.

I wrote: Lafayette knew it was useless to try and argue with Frestel; he would not leave him alone. Once he had said to Frestel, “If I had been born a girl, you would leave me be!”

“If you had been born a girl you would be rotting away in a prison with your father and mother,” Frestel said. “Fortunately, you need to remain alive for the sake of the family fortune.”

Lafayette had had no answer to that reply that would not have sounded very selfish, so he had said nothing...

When Mario got home from work, we made apple pie. Then we drove to Hood River for ice cream. (Soy Dream actually.) We discussed trickster stories. We had been invited to write stories for an anthology of stories about tricksters for young adults. I was thinking about writing about Coyote (female) or Baubo, who made Demeter laugh (and the world bloom again) when she lifted her dress to reveal her beautiful bare vulva.

The setting sun gilded the green forest that covered both sides of the gorge. Above, the wind shaped huge black thunderclouds into fantastical shapes.

“Look,” I said, “it’s a dragon.” I watched the dragon until it shapechanged into something else. 0 comments

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