I don’t remember what first got the idea of pasta-making in my head, but I remember asking for a hand-cranked pasta roller on my 15th birthday. I remember the little blue pasta cookbook I picked up for a buck at Barnes & Noble, and the feel of the egg and flour becoming  smooth in my hand. I remember how thick and tough those first hand-rolled noodles were and the silken ones I made years later in the kitchen with my best friend. We hung the noodles to dry on broomsticks and invited her mother and sister to share diner with us.  My pasta machine is still one of my favourite treasures.  I like its lines, how it hooks to the table, the crank, and the dial.  It is one of the few machines a find truly elegant (the other I can think of is a bicycle).

It still is magical to me.  2 1/2 cups of semolina.  Three eggs.  A pinch of salt.  Rough, and then soft and warm like skin.  Fat and round.  Long and lovely.

Beside me are 98 pages, warm from the printer: the rough draft of the novel I am writing.  On the stove is a warm pan of lasagna.

5 Things I can make:

-noodles
-rough drafts
-messes
-people smile
-a toy for my cat

5 Things I cannot make:

-hats
-shoes
-the universe
-quick, witty remarks
-chocolates

What can you make? What can you not make?  Do you make noodles?

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Hi, everyone. i haven’t gotten around to blogging much these last couple days. Nor taking pictures. But we are in our new place, and I’m thrilled to say that we are sharing it three days of the week with one of my best friends. Living with Janelle and Adam: it’s like a dream come true. Our things are slowly finding their way out of boxes onto the shelves. Plants are being put in the windows. Futons are being assembled. Lamps are being plugged in.

I don’t know why I never liked August. It’s such a bountiful time of year. I feel nourished by the good books around me and the presence of friends. I feel nourished by the late-summer vegetables, early autumn apples, and the birds outside my window nibbling at a tree’s hard fruits.

Coffee-shop customers have been asking if I’m taking classes this fall. I usually tell them that I’m done with school, for now. I know they probably assume that I graduated, but I don’t really feel deceptive. I really feel like I finished school. I didn’t go for a degree or security or a job. I went to throw myself in the academic world, to bury myself in books and soak up knowledge like there was no tomorrow. And I did that. And I loved that. But now, I want to do something else. I want to see live from the smaller corners, from the chalk-covered overgrown sidewalks of my neighborhood, rather than the fine steps of the university.
In this sun-soaked month, I am learning to recognize a lot of things in myself. Since I was little, there were only two things that I have ever really wanted to do: write and travel. I think it’s time to enjoy that about myself, rather than suppressing and then binging on it. I can’t share what I’ve been given very well without welcoming it.

So, happy August, dear readers. Feel free to share things you’ve been recognizing in yourself or even just whether or not you like August. You know I love to hear from you.

-The book I’m working on is getting to the point where it feels like work, the point where I have to push through and sweat it out and tap my pens on my paper a lot. But I like that.

- After a hot day, I sprawled out in bed beside the fan and read late into the night. When I finished my book, I was still too captivated by it to sleep. I hovered between living and dreaming for a while, and found myself remembering smells that I had long forgotten. For a moment, they were as real to me as ever before, as were the memories around them. And in that remembering, I made a bit more sense to myself.

-The book I read was The Idiot. I don’t think I’ve read anything better.

-When it’s too hot out, I tend to feel sick and forget to eat.

-Adam is at the dentist.

-It is nice to have no internet in the summertime.

I feel like Adam and I are taking these great little steps. My writing is inching along in quite beautiful ways*, and Adam is moving in the direction of Industrial/Product Design school. Yup! I am proud and excited. Financing all this will be an adventure, so send your prayers our way, friends. It’s an adventure I’m looking forward to.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn’t for our having.
-Li-Young Lee

Amen.

*Let me know if you’d like to help me edit the first 37 pages of my next book. I need all the help I can get.

“I had always wanted to be an explorer, though I didn’t know it at the time.”

I have started typing up the first part of the novel I’m working on. This will be a longer one, so I’m doing it in chunks, rather than scribbling the whole thing out and then going back to type it up. That line, the first line, is what the whole story sprang from. This particular character has been a pleasure to work with, and an entirely good influence on me. I just know you’ll like him.

Publishing the children’s book has been going slowly, which one can expect, I suppose. But in the last week at work, I discovered I had a small wealth of a couple people at the coffee shop who have connections in the literary world and would like to help me a bit along the way. Their expressed support alone is worth gold.

In other news, the strawberries are ripe. I bought a couple quarts at the farmer’s market this morning and have great plans for some afternoon strawberry shortcake, and perhaps some jam. I also got fresh peas, cucumber, and a loaf of sourdough bread. June is such a nice time for eating!

I was looking through my photographs the other day, searching for portraits I like to put in an online gallery.  As I sorted through the files, I couldn’t help but notice how few formal portraits I have.  And how few pictures I have of big, grand things or events.  Most of my pictures are of things I might almost look over: things left behind or set out to dry, things that are too high or too low, the smaller flower.  Sometimes I feel sorry for myself because I think my place in things is so often a quieter place without much grand applause.  But I think that place is what allows me to see the other unseen places, like sitting in the far corner of the room.  Writing reminds me of that.  And I like it.

The more I write, the more it’s a life I love.  I love sitting and stitching away (or pegging away, depending on the day) at  all the small pieces of the picture for hours.  The writing world of rumpled shirts, funny walks, and imaginative trees is so rich to me compared to the academic world.  There was a time I wanted to be a professor (though I’m not sure if I ever really, really wanted it).  But I like this better.  It suits me.  Even though it seems crazy and impossible sometimes.
I started a new story last week that’s new territory for me.  It’s a grown-up story that I know nothing about, yet, but it’s thrilling (and occasionally maddening) to watch it slowly unfold.  And I think the main character is a good influence on me.  He has such a simple, easy way with things, it’s hard to let myself get too knotted up around him.

Today, I finished the rough draft of the story I have been working on this spring. It is a very skeletal version of the book I hope it will be someday, but I’m still quite pleased. I can’t wait to dive in and put some flesh on its bones.

The last chapter is very short, and like the first chapter, it is called The Beginning.

That was the last time any of us stepped inside the yellow house. It sat empty for several months, and then the “For Rent” sign fell, and the dark windows glowed with light, again. I’m not sure what those people are like or if the yellow house was as kind to them as it was to us. Maybe someday, I’ll ask it as I walk by. Maybe it will answer.

Eric Jon’s phone number is still tucked, untouched, in my cell phone. I can’t bring myself to call him. I can’t bring myself to erase it, either. His life, now, is a mystery to me, like he is, but I still love him and always will. Like the words in that old, crumpled letter, he was a friend when I needed one most.

I read, once, that love endures. I think that must be true. Your love for me has been constant as the sun, whether I’ve seen it or not. I don’t think I’ve ever fallen out of love. I still love the boy I loved that spring. I still love the one before him. I still love the friend I looked up at the sky with in high school. I still love the boy who ate apples with me on the bus. I still love the girl I sang with in the back of my parent’s car. I will always love my best friends.

This constant flow of love, that has sometimes worried me and often caused aches deep in my chest, is what I now take comfort in. It is a comfort, as the houses and cities and plane rides between us grow, that I will always love the Gorham girls. That love will change, but it will never diminish.

Sometimes, I disbelieve the miraculous. But I have witnessed transformation. I have witnessed full hearts that stir with life. I have witnessed true beauty open like a flower in eight girls one spring. I have felt your breath become mine and your love burning inside my bones, which had always been cold and quiet.

In the beginning was the word, and word was with God and word was God and the word lived inside the fingers and ribs and lips and stomachs and toes of eight girls that left one yellow house on a sunny day in August. The life they carried with them was bigger than their boxes and bags of books and beauty.

I have spent a lot of time these last months slowly stitching one of the best stories I know with some of my favourite heroes. Putting those people on paper has been a pleasure. I don’t know what this story will look like in the end, and I don’t know that it will amount to anything in the publishing world, but I believe in my work with it. It’s a daily honour to write.

I’m not near finished with my first draft yet, and everything I have down is still full of bugs and hiccups. Still, I’d like to share a bit if it with you all. The first chapter of the book (following a small prelude) is called “The Beginning.” It starts something like this:

In the beginning, the world was formless and void. Then light fell on the stirring waters and it was good. The land was pulled up from the water and trees grew and roses pressed their way through the soil. There were ants and antelope and fireflies and men and women that fought for the survival of their families. There were wars and countries and sidewalks and strip clubs and strudel and bicycles and books and bobbins and Ebola and leaves shaped like hearts, and there were eight girls living in one yellow house three stories high on the street of East Gorham in the city of Madison in the USA in the month of March. In the beginning was Brianna and Hannah, Cassie, Katrina, Joelle, Janelle, Amy, and me, Lindsey.

I thought it might be time for a long over-due update on my work, on my writing.  As usual, I have more than one thing on my plate.  I’m working on getting my first story, the children’s story about Lloyd, Eliot and the No-Good Grizzling Sminks, published.  I got my first rejection letter, which I am proudly saving, and have two other copies of the manuscript out in the world.  It’s such a sweet story.  I hope I find a good home for it.

I am also working on the rough draft of two other books, which I am equally enthused about.  One is an autobiographical grown-up love story about eight girls living together in a yellow house.   The other is an adventurous children’s book involving long-lost cousins and secret libraries.  Slowly (always slowly), I am watching the pages fill.  I love that part of writing, turning blank pages into stories.

Thanks for your support, everyone.

When Adam first suggested it, I was strongly opposed. I feel like it takes away a books individuality or something. It seemed unloving to the books. Or disrespectful. If I published a book, I wouldn’t want to see it on a colour coordinated shelf. I’d want to see it coffee-stained and jostled around in a purse or sitting by a bedside. But I figured, why not? I can always disorganize them again.

I have to say, it looks pretty neat (way neater than the picture suggests). And reorganizing the books was rather satisfying. It was like a puzzle. It got me better aquainted with my husband’s half of the books and made me see my own books in a different way.

It was a nice project. I should reorganize bookshelves more often. Any suggestions on how to arrange them the next time around?