Hello, everybody. My name is Julia, and I am becoming an Internet genealogy addict. I don’t believe in higher powers, except, like, the NSA and the IRS. So I must rely on my failing willpower. Unless you find a rich uncle, Internet genealogy is hard to justify as useful. Why should I care that four hundred years ago, some remote ancestor was a rabbi in Moravia? Geni.com, where I listed my family tree, says it has 74,346,170 people on its site. I’m already up to 1,820 blood relatives.
We met friends north of Seattle, then drove to catch the ferry to Orcas Island and talked about Washington’s bikini baristas. It would be another three hours before the ferry left, so we walked through cars and trucks parked in lanes straight as garden rows to the snack shop and overpaid for sandwiches, a banana, soda. You sat on the asphalt behind a Chevy Tahoe, petting a pit bull someone had tied to the trailer hitch, and I took your picture.
Conversation and knowing there was no option but to wait made time pass easily. When the boat departed, we sat on the observation deck and cruised west into the pale sun and gray gauzy clouds, toward forested islands rising black from the sea. It was cold.
As I approached the corner of Throop Avenue and Van Buren Street in early summer 2013, I couldn’t help but notice the giant “Murder – $50,000 Reward” sign that loomed over the intersection, emblazoned with the photo of a dead businessman. The New York City neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, I’d heard, was still a little “rough,” but the sign was unlike anything I’d seen outside of Wild West movies. Almost comically, the image was plastered with a blood-red ‘Solved’ caption, as though calling out a fatuous warning: attention, would-be Bed-Stuy murderers – you might, eventually, be caught.
Ground fog hovers out the back kitchen window, warm air over snow. We set out to walk before coffee. From the home of dear friends, we make our way down the dead-end road to the muddy grass path that leads us to the turn (right) down the rough-cleared way (duck under the fallen tree) to the fields owned by the nearby church and leased to the farmers. In a pair of borrowed rain boots and hooded sweatshirt (in late December), I feel a warm sweat rising.
It is Red Cup season! Under halogen lights, red metal tumblers gleam and pinken plastic to-go mugs. Swirled teacups shine like candy canes. Behind the café counter, whipped-cream ski hills top the menu of seasonal drinks with a flurry of diamonds and snowflakes. In sizes tall, grande, and venti, towers of patterned coffee cups are plucked by red-aproned baristas, like ornaments off a tree.
It’s late afternoon on the beach in North Florida. It’s October, the end of a season, and the world is in motion. Monarchs cloud through the sunlight in orange swarms; blooms of jellyfish float along the shoreline; and schools of grouper leap in flustered succession, tails suspended above the ocean, bodies flapping. The air is just cold enough to make us duck our shoulders under water and lift our faces toward the sun, not shivering but not warm.
By HELEN HOOPER
Sometimes I have to leave the house, get out in the world and write among other people. Not that I want anything to do with any of them. I just want to set up among them, the better to hunker down. I’m looking to be anonymous. I’m looking for a place where I can concentrate on my characters while ignoring people. A place where the rest of humanity provides a soothing backdrop, a therapeutic white noise.
When you’re a carpenter’s son there are things you don’t tell your mother. The old asbestos siding Dad had you driving nails into, for instance. Or the ceiling fan he wired without first shutting off the power. Or how you close your eyes when you bring the round whirling blade of the chop saw down on a length of spouting so you won’t get any flecks of aluminum in your eyes. How it just seems safer that way.
When I see handmade cloth, with its uneven selvedges and irregularities, I feel a kinship. My mother was a weaver. I would come home from school and find my mother weaving, warping, or winding yarn. She wove on traditional four- or eight-harness looms, wooden frames the size of a grand piano. I grew up with the household sounds (and vocabulary) of the 1700s—the whizz of a shuttle, the thump of the beater, the rattle of heddles, and the shunk of harnesses.
My mother made suitings, dress fabrics, coverlets, upholstery, shawls, tablecloths—hundreds of yards. Now eighty-nine, she wove into her late seventies when the physical labor became too strenuous. But her creations will last forever, as handwoven cloth does. The oldest known textile fibers, twisted flaxen cords from the Caucasus, are 34,000 years old. I am pretty sure that 34,000 years from now archaeologists will be baffled by evidence of a mid-twentieth century handweaving culture in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.
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