
A little Weather Report
The cabin is in a vortex. My sister first noticed that. As we are utterly at the mercy of this vortex we don’t have the perspective to see it. When we are in residence at the cabin we begrudge all time away. When can we leave whatever we are doing out in the world? When is the meeting over? When is the drive done? Many dinners are…shall we call them…imaginative. Desperation only sends me to the store. As long as the refrigerator has eggs, as long as there is a piece of bread or a bit of rice or spaghetti, dinner is no problem.
I spent a little time my senior year of college at an apartment in New York City. The signator on the lease and all the roommates except my college roommate were students at Columbia University. The times were turbulent. The politics were fraught. One friend had left college to sit in with her friends at the Columbia Administration building. Poughkeepsie was not where we wanted to be. The bucolic campus, still all women, either.
My roommate and I weren’t so political. The unrest just made us restless. My roommate and I left Vassar Thursday after our last class and hopped in her mother's little 2 seater Triumph. We drove down Route 9, enjoying the Hudson River and river towns. We pulled into the city. We parked the car on Dyckman Street. We took the subway down to 116th Street. We walked down to 114th Street and then over by Amsterdam Avenue. We passed bodegas with smells of rich coffee, counters of little cups, of rolls, sounds of crisp busy Dominican Spanish all around us.
(I just have to break in here with a sky report. The deep blue of the sky with still the faintest sign of a star is turning Maxfield Parrish right in front of me. A puffy bright white cumulus cloud speeds.)
We walked up the 4 floors of the old apartment building. We put our things in our rooms. My roommate went off with her friend. Another resident invited me to have a Spanish tortilla with him. I was hungry. His Cuban accent made the invitation even more entrancing. Of course I said yes.
(The clouds are high and wispy now. The sky has become an eggshell blue. Oh! the sunrise is hitting a cloud with a true Vassar pink…then grey behind it.)
We went into the kitchen and turned on the light. The cockroaches in the sink fled somewhere I don’t want to think about. The Cuban ex-pat took a potato and cubed it, salted it, peppered it. He started some oil heating in a big old frying pan. When the oil was hot he put in the potato cubes and let them sizzle till they were tender. He scooped them out and moved them to a paper plate. He broke 5 eggs into a bowl and salted and peppered them. He mixed them up. He emptied the frying pan of some of the oil. He put the eggs in and stirred and lifted them gently off the frying pan. When they had begun coagulating he put in the potatoes and let the omelet solidify. He flopped it out onto a platter, cut me a wedge and put it on a paper plate for me. Indeed, it was a great tortilla, rich and smooth.
(All the clouds are pink now, in a blue sky over our green pond and tree saucer.)
I met the downstairs neighbor, also a Columbia student. A wonderful dutch name. He was from Idaho, studying philosophy. A Shell-shocked sophomore. I understood. I understood. I really wasn’t used to being around the number of people, of the number of cars, the noise, the smells, the choices, the demands for attention, the sense that gravity didn’t operate the same way in New York. He knew what was in each store, where everyone worked, who was friendly, who hated who. His little Idaho town was smaller than my little New York town.
Classes were no refuge, great arguments of people who could wind themselves up to a roar and then look at their watches. In his small town, in mine, an argument is the preliminary to 20 years of enmity and silence, not to a handshake and see you Thursday. The tallest human construction was the silo with sky and wind and work. No one lived above you. No one lived below you. Going uptown was a decisive act, not a hit you as you go out the door experience.
And people could tell he wasn’t from around here. It wasn’t his broad pink and white face or shock of white blond hair. It was the way he walked in the street. “Don’t look up,” he told me. “When you keep looking up they know you aren’t from around here.” He wasn’t used to slivers of sky, bits of sun, snatches of cloud. He was so homesick.
I went out for coffee, cafe con leche. I was homesick too, for Ecuador, for Portugal, for a boy I had met in Portugal, where we called café con leche ‘Galão,’ and it was served in a glass and a long spoon to stir the sugar with. When I was in Portugal I was homesick for country, for trees and sun and watching clouds from shady places.
(The sky is fully bright now. The mist is rising off the pond. The sun is hitting the trees.)
My first cup of coffee is drunk. That boy I met in Portugal is drinking and working at his computer. Judge is at his knee, waiting for a walk. I am not homesick. I am home!