Asheville Je T'aime

We were sitting in the Asheville Brewing Company when the doubts began to set in. A man with ear plugs and an easy friendliness had just served us a cast iron skillet balanced with samples of foamy beer and Mr. V was talking about possibilities but I couldn't hear a word he had to say. I was trying not to cry.

I had the Rockies on my mind. My people were prairie and mountain raised, pioneers moving ever westward and it's not a thing you soon forget. Your ancestral landscape gets into your blood and like it or not, in some ways you will always be the place you came from. Brevard was beautiful but it was a shock to my sensibilities and sitting in a bright, artsy city, I remembered where I was made. Craving one place and longing for the other, I never know where I might land.

We'd crossed the French Broad river, which I will never say without seeing a smoky-eyed woman pulling up her stockings, and made a right on a corner where The Thirsty Monk faced Jack In The Woods Public House. I might as well have been in Avalon or Paris. The Monk was a bright purple building, packed wall to wall on a string of similar tall facades, the streets loose brick that shifted beneath our feet and meandered around courtyards and bright alleyways, each one brimming with drinking, dining folk facing streetward, a la Parisienne. Plenty of bookstores, plenty of earthy chicks with scarves in their hair like me and legs that go a long time between shavings, also like me. (Sorry, my Californian sisters, but it's true). There were specialty stores for everything from pastries to wine to cured meats to dog biscuits, and this is exactly what I love about Edinburgh and Manhattan and all the great old cities. Asheville is known as the Paris of the south, and now I know why.

In Asheville it seems that the culture is the counter-culture, but no one's feeling smug about it like they are in Boulder. Perhaps because you get the sense that Asheville isn't a place where rich pseudo-hippies have settled because it's beautiful and has a Whole Foods, but a place where eclectic people, people normally on the fringe, have congregated and they ain't smug but so damn happy to have found each other in all this mess, and who woulda thunk but they've made a home.

Driving in to Asheville we'd spotted an old man waving a confederate flag from a bridge, but inside the city there was no such nonsense. The brewery was running over with young families. Mr. V was talking mortgages and I was craving babies, the surest sign of trouble I know. I shook myself back into the present and shifted towards sunny as we walked up Patton, past traveling musicians to Hayward and Battery Park Avenue, where I was reminded that there is history in the south, history involving names like Grant and Lee and Stonewall Jackson. After standing quietly taking in the view of the hills from the portico of St. Lawrence Basilica, my husband decided to take me out for a French dinner and we found Bouchon almost by accident. "This city should be a good place to get French," I said to Mr. V. "Asheville has a lot of French influence." Since this is my blog and we're into being honest here, I'll admit that this is one of those things I say more by instinct than by actual knowledge. But steering by instinct is what landed us here in the first place, so I went with it.

Bouchon was at the end of hill where we'd spotted a Japanese chef plucking herbs from his garden to use in whatever culinary mischief he was up to. We sat in the cobblestoned alley, filled with greenery and umbrellas and summer soiree lights. I ordered my first pate and my first Kir Royal and thought, if I can't have Paris yet, at least I have this. Mr. V ordered the canard a l'orange rubbed with cocoa nibs and I stuck to moules-frites. They tasted of the ocean and I sucked them down, happy as any sea star nestled in its proper bed.

We left Bouchon and were headed up the hill when the skies just broke right open, faster than a prairie thunderstorm. Look at that cute little cloud, I thought, and then suddenly the rain was too torrential to see in. We were standing just in front of a brewery, so having one more drink was the only thing to do. There was a deep covered patio, perfect for sipping and breathing in the scent of rain, the bright light on the art deco buildings just across the street, and smiling like we'd won the lottery. This is my favorite thing about traveling. You're just going along in your life and suddenly serendipity blesses you so certain you know there is good in all this limping, stuttering earth. I grinned wildy at Mr. V over a salty margarita and told him how I loved it when this happens. That's when it struck me that I've always said I want to live in a lively city and in the middle of nowhere, and that maybe in this part of North Carolina I could have both.

There are things I haven't told you: there is a Starbucks in Brevard, but it's inside a grocery store and while the local coffee spot makes a creamy, nutty latte, it has the ambiance of a Furr's in foreclosure. Mr. V says that when I saw his first paycheck from the brewery, I cried. I have no memory of this but I don't doubt it. What I know is that in the end, anywhere I go is going to become one more place I want to leave.

The next day it was time to head home. We traveled over four hours in the rain from Brevard back to Atlanta and when we got to the gate at 2:35, after running faster and farther than I have since college, our 2:40 departure had already left. We sat half the day in the Atlanta airport, so overstimulating I curled up on the floor with headphones in my ears and closed my eyes. I stayed that way until Mr. V brought me a frozen yogurt and it was time to board the plane and fly west, west over prarie, west toward home. We passed over a spectacular lightnight storm and watched great thunderheads light up rhythmically from the top side, clearer now than ever the way those clouds answer each other, a nebular call and response. Departure was at the tail-end of evening and a strip of electric blue sunset hung stubborn in the sky. We chased that last light of sun all the way home. We never did catch it.

Milk and Honey

Things That Are Contagious:

1) Bees

Our landlord came over the other day with some college guys to aerate the lawn and get flustered because we use our back gate as a gate (apparently the hinged, swinging gate was intended to be more of a wall). A thought occurred to me and I said "You're not going to fertilize, are you?" The bees weren't there yet, but I know now that chemicals are killing off the bees and I didn't want them on my lawn. The landlord ignored me but the college boys took pity on me, a young and attractive and buxom housewife (just go with me, here, ok? It's been a week) and said they didn't have to, no. The landlord was mad that crab grass had overrun the front yard, which honestly confused me: what the hell were we supposed to do about it? I may not know anything about lawn care. Anyway, he argued that he'd have to put chemicals on the front yard, Noah and I exchanged heated words in our kitchen, Noah went back out to firmly ask the Lord of Land not to unleash a chemical holocaust upon our lawn, and he grudgingly acquiesced.

Since I posted about the bees on Tuesday, lots of people have emailed or texted or pulled me aside to ask about the bees and almost all of them tell me that they want to keep bees, too. I think this is wonderful. I have a dream of a beehive in every backyard and honey in every home. It occurred to me that if everyone did keep bees, maybe everyone, even the Chem Green fanatics, would finally see the dangers of pesticides and herbicides (a good sign that something is bad is if it has the root word 'cide' in it) and Round Up and stand up to their Lords of Land and HOA's, and maybe the bees and the cows and goats would thrive, the flowers would grow, and we would recreate the land of milk and honey.

2) Doubt

I felt bad after I posted about my doubtful slump last week. I had put something out there that wasn't helpful to others. Later that week, Blood Sister A and I had a conversation along the same demoralized lines of that blog, and I only know that it got us nowhere. I have hopeful thoughts to write, but I'm not ready to, yet. For now, suffice it to say I have doubts about the usefulness of doubts. All they've done is knocked me into a slump, which may be part of the natural rhythms of life, but it isn't best practices to encourage these doubts, or to voice them, or maybe to even hear them. I've done a lot of work the last few years at stopping certain negative tracks that I am given to playing on repeat in my mind, and I think these doubts may need to be added to the list of things my mind say that aren't true.

 I'm sorry if my doubt caused similar doubts in you. I want to try to offer more encouragement and hope. Maybe everyone can try, and maybe, like the bees, we can support one another's work and create a new community for artists, a happy hive. One that doesn't rate our work on how much money it can earn, press it can drum up, or copies it can sell. Maybe we can create a new place that has room and love for everyone's gifts, and maybe we can forge new ground. Milk and honey for the bees and for our souls. Let's do this together. Ok?

3)Bad Moods

Noah came home from work this morning while I was getting the girls ready for school. His shift started at 3 am, he was home to make some lunch before eight in the morning. I was not my best self. If I was Oprah, Gale would be shouting that I had lost my pleasing personality (really I love this coping strategy of theirs). Noah was in a good mood, but I was stressed and useless and feeling pathetic. I don't see my husband much these days, and my moodiness lasted the entirety of his visit. The opportunity to have a moment of peace and love, of complicity between us, was lost.

I have dreamed a hopeful vision for the bees, and for the artists who really, are so much like the bees, working and working all our lives to produce scant spoons of precious golden honey, so let me dream a vision for my husband and I: we can get ourselves out of this rut, this stretched-thin place. We can have Saturday mornings together again, and picnics in the sun. I will pack blankets and chocolate cake into the trunk and when my husband leaves before dawn and returns to me, sleepy and messy-haired in the morning light, offering a simple espresso, or a fresh-mown lawn or a breakfast of cantaloupe, I will sigh content and together, we will adore.

But, I swear it guys, one day we're going to do this in Paris.

So, J'adore.

PS: Let's be facebook friends, ok? I deleted my high school principal (weird) and I want to add you. Out with the old, in with the new.

https://www.facebook.com/b.e.tuttle

(if there's a better way to link to my facebook profile, I don't know it).

(After posting, this quote found me:


Doubt Not, Go Forward--If though doubt'st, The Beasts will tear thee piecemeal. ~ Tennyson)

You Want To Read This Book

If you are at all interested in Hemingway.

Or the Lost Generation.

Or Paris.

Or the roaring 20's as viewed from abroad.

If you are into literary history.

Or if stories about the lives of people whom history has generally overlooked interest you.



THE PARIS WIFE is the story of Hadley Richardson Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's first wife. I'd read a little bit about her in Hemingway's own "A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition", which I also loved. McLain starts the book in Oak Park, Illinois, when Hemingway was just a young buck, injured and dashing and damaged from the war, and Hadley was practically an old maid in those days, unmarried at 29. The story is fiction, of course, but McLain draws heavily from "A Moveable Feast", and also from "The Sun Also Rises", imagining that book as a highly autobiographical account of Hemingway's own life in Europe in the 20's, and I don't know but maybe it was.

It would have been easy for a writer to make old Ernest look like a self-absorbed, misogynistic monster, but that doesn't happen here. I imagine McLain is a fan of Hemingway, while at the same time realizing that the guy did cheat on his wife and went on to have three more. One of those three was journalist Martha Gellhorn, who was rather more than Hemmy bargained for. Famous during World War II, it was easy for old Hem to get a press pass to go cover stories overseas. He refused to help cub journalist Martha get one--"Are you a war correspondent or a wife in my bed?", he wrote her--and she subsequently found passage on a ship loaded with explosives. When she arrived in war-torn London, she promptly dumped him. Seriously, Hem. Get a girl a press pass, can't you?

I like that story.

And did you know that even though Hem was having an affair while finishing up "The Sun Also Rises", he gave Hadley all the royalties for that work--forever. The royalties from the 1957 movie version of the book also went to Hadley. These things are never black and white.

But the book isn't about any of that, it's about Hadley, and a young ambitious writer desperate to make history, and a generation of people tattered and bruised by war, trying their best to live the champagne and oysters life in Paris and Switzerland and Italy. F. Scott and Zelda make appearances, along with old Gertrude and Alice. Hadley makes a charming, engaging character as told by McLain--absolutely smitten with Hemingway, but gently and quietly unwilling to compromise herself. It was just delicious all the way through, and when we got to the end, I cried.

So there you have it.

I am Vesuvius and I'm a wife at war and a correspondent in bed.

PS--We are at mom-ology today.

Wander Lust

In case you didn't know, the spring always wants to make me travel.

I typed it that way on purpose. It doesn't "make me want", it "wants to make" me, and I say that because the desire to pack up my bags and leave is palpable and unignorable in the spring. It's like April, the greening-up grass, the fragrant soil, is purposely releasing a chemical it knows works as a travel aphrodisiac to me. The month hooks its unfurling, viney claws--fertile tentacles, if you will--into my flesh and brains and bones, it pulls and aches and yearns; it's a terrible, terrible feeling and I don't wish it on anybody.

It makes me cranky and uneasy in my own skin. It's a hedged in, trapped feeling. It threatens to make the everyday routine feel less like a routine and more like a prison.

Then I think about my parents, who have never been to Europe, and how at least I've been twice--once in high school and once in college--and I think about people who can go whenever they want, who hop a jet to Paris like it's the A train to midtown, and sometimes that all just seems too painful, you know?

For a long time I was trying to figure out how to be grateful for what I had, and sometimes that felt like giving in. I felt like I had to be one or the other: grateful or yearning. But you know what? I'm both. I am grateful for what I have.

And I really, really want to go to Europe.

So there it is. It's a Thursday in April. Dewy and cool. The sky seems bluer than it did last month, doesn't it? The flowers coming up make my heart happy. This October I will plant bulbs, and next April I will watch my own flowers grow. And maybe I can plant the travel seeds now, too.

And maybe next spring, my travel-buds will blossom with the tulips.

You never know.

I am Vesuvius and will you forgive me for being sentimental in the spring?

Bad Croissants and Melatonin

Indy crawled into bed with me before my alarm went off at 6:15.

She's been having bad dreams about strangers. I feel really bad about that. When I was little I used to have nightmares about strangers--strangers in my closet, strangers crawling in my window, and every time I'd jump up to tell my mom and dad, the stranger under my bed would grab my ankles.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had that dream.

Anyway, I feel guilty that little Indy is having stress about strangers but I don't know what can be done about it. You have to talk to them about these things, right?

So this is the sad, sad truth: Some days I just need to feel a little bit French. Avec je nai sais quoi, if you get my drift. On these days I wear black and I buy Perrier and tulips and I drive to Wal-mart. (Here's the sad part). Wal-mart has the best croissants I've found so far in Longmont, and they also have affordable brie and chevre., I don't know if you can comprehend the profound tragedy of this moment in my life: I hear Paris call, I get in my mini-van, I drive to Wal-mart.

Leaving Wal-mart, I was so tired I almost took a melatonin at 8:45 in the morning. I'm not sleeping well. Most nights I'm lying in bed a step away from wide awake when Noah comes home at 1 am. So into my blue Wal-mart basket went croissants, brie, Perrier, sleep meds. What is more French than sleep meds? Possibly absinthe, but they don't sell that at the W. In my haze, I reached down and started unscrewing the bottle of melatonin I had bought to help with my sleep problems. Because I was sleepy. And melatonin would help, right?

Good god woman. Pour yourself a cup of cafe creme, already.

Dear Paris: I love you.

Please send for me soon.

Combien de temps dois-je attendre?



I am Vesuvius and ou est la boulangerie?

In Which I Develop Inexplicable Anger Toward A Dead American Icon

"Roses are red, violets are orange," said Indy. "That can't be true."

That's how I feel, Indy. None of this can be true.

I haven't managed to wake up on time once since the time change.

I hate this time change so hard. This time change is worse than the whole "Kara Thrace is really an angel" thing. That's how hard I hate it. I don't care what Benjamin Franklin said. I don't like his willfully oblivious, optimistic chirpings and I don't like his time change. Why are we all still doing what Benjamin told us to? He got our hundred dollar bills, isn't that enough? He even has a rap song about him. Now we have to let him in to our sleep schedules? Into our bedrooms? Isn't this one step away from Benjamin Franklin telling us how to have sex? Did Benjamin Franklin ever have sex? Listen, I wouldn't take his advice on 'bedroom stuff', and I don't like taking it on my beta rhythms either.

I used to wake up two hours before the Bird was due at school and now I wake up one. And can I just say that getting up at 5:30 am and going to work was a lot easier than getting up at 6:15 and getting the Bird ready for school? This is the Faustian I have made. In exchange for being a Kept Woman, one who works at coffee shops, confounding and annoying baristas all over Longmont, and not for pay, I am in charge of off to school duties. At Operation: Bookstore, you know what I did? I got up. Saw to my own needs which are infinitesimal in comparison to the needs of a 6 and 4-year-old. I drank my coffee while reading my blogs. Then I drove to work where I generally drank a lot more coffee, bought with my sweet discount thank you, listened to my ipod, and played with books by myself for three hours. Sort the books, alphabetize the books, put back the books. When that was done I would chat with my co-workers about Buffy and Mad Men and hate on Twilight. It was a sweet job. Why did I leave this job????

I miss you, Ira Glass. And I'm sorry.

Now I get up and immediately the goblins are haunting. They have needs they can't see to. They need juice, they need milk, but their cups are dirty, they can't find their cups. They need cereal, or bread toasted and buttered and jellied, they need lunches made. They need to fight over the tv, the remote, the blanket, the pillows, the names of the characters, the name of the show, who is Angelica and who is Sarah, what is the nature of the soul, can humankind ever really do 'good'? They need to cry over having their hair brushed, fuss over the toothpaste. They don't want to get dressed, getting dressed is for suckers, why can't we wear our underwear and cowgirl boots to school?

Did I mention that during all this I am trying to conceal my true nature as a Daywalker? I am sloughing off my identity as Mistress of the Night, and it's not easy nor pretty. I'm in a between state, my shape not fully shifted, and my 'Medusa is hungry for the life blood of children' voice is a lot more likely to slip out.

Listen, I just looked it up and you know what I read? Benjamin Franklin didn't "invent" daylight savings. Apparently, out of typical early American petty jealousy of the French, he satirically suggested waking Parisians up with cannons an hour earlier to conserve Parisian candle wax.

Seriously, what a cad.

What an enormous douche. Can't Benjamin Franklin keep his nose in his own candle wax? What's it to him, what the Parisians do with their candles? As long as they keep making chocolat escargot, they can do whatever the hell they want. Have you ever tasted the Parisian version of hot chocolate? I believe in God only because I have. These people know their shit. Benjamin Franklin was like the eariliest Felicity. Always sticking his nose in other people's business. Always making bad decisions with the hair. I don't care if he said something cute once about beer. He probably said it right before he turned around and told everyone else that they should really cut back on their consumption, they were getting a little fat.

Have you looked in the mirror, Benjamin?

I am Vesuvius and I satirically suggest that Benjamin Franklin can suck it.

I am Vesuvius and chocolat escargot is not chocolate snails. It is this:



I am Vesuvius and chocolat chaud is not something you give as a joke at a bachelorette party. It is this:

Alias Vesuvius

So I'm at work and they're calling for backup to the cafe through my earpiece.

And let me just say this: all you people with your 'business' and your 'engineering' and your 'computer' 'science' degrees that come with 'actual paychecks'--do you get to look like an Undercover Super Spy when you're at work?

Yeah. Didn't think so.

So my friend is calling me--'Mountaineer, Mountaineer, do you copy? Come in Mountaineer' (I make them call me Mountaineer at work). And I don't know about you, but I didn't get into this line of work because I was willing to just abandon my sisters and brothers in arms in their times of need. 'No person left behind' is my motto and my creed. And I will be your sword and your shield. . .

. . . wait, where was I? Ok so it's a member of my Band of Siblings, if you will (note the gender neutral language? You like?) (I like). I can't let her down. So I rush to answer this call for 'back up' to the 'cafe' even though I've been working here for 20 months and still have no idea what a cafe 'is'.

Turns out in this cafe, every drink you might order--every drink imaginable, my friends, it's like Willy Wonka married the Starbucks siren and they popped out whipped cream children who will lure you with their glucose songs--every drink has a number that corresponds to them that you type into the register. This is how we force people to pay for their frenetic sugar babies.

Not gonna lie: we were really in the thick of things. Foam was flying, the queue was rumbling with mutinous energy, dishes were clattering into the sink like the clean-up after the Mad Hatter's tea party. Because I aim to be a hero I reminded myself that a hero keeps up morale and never says never. So while my comrade was calling out to me the drink numbers, I kept shouting things like: 'They cannot take our freedom!" and "We are just too pretty for God to let us die!" and 'For Frodo!" which was working really well until one of the customers was like "I said my name was Susan!".

Anyway.

Things quiet down. From the ruins of the battlefield I can hear a few fallen muttering and sipping and groaning but for the most part the bullet is dodged. So the last customer approacheth. He's being very patient about the fact that it's taking us so long to save his life--a British person maybe, quite all right and all that--so he observes me scanning the epically long list of numbers to find the one that corresponds perfectly to his drink order so that I might type it in, speak "Copy that" into my Black Ops gear and thus save the day, and he says: There must be a lot of numbers for you all to memorize.

Yeah, I say. And then I say:

It's my first time. Be gentle with me.

Wait--what??

The words are out before I even have time to think. There was never any time to stop them.

This, this moment--this was always going to happen.

What to do? I glance around to see if anyone has overheard, by my comrade--bless her--is running the blender. No one else can hear us, which somehow serves to make this moment seem--intimate? There is nothing, nothing else in this world but me, this unsuspecting stranger, and the fact that I have just made a reference to us. Having First Time. Together.

Then--the blender goes quiet. The world is still. The battlefield sits scattered with the frail remnants of war. Crushed paper cups, disfigured straw wrappers all accordioned and rendered nearly unrecognizable, paper napkins fluttering in the steamer mist like children's hair in the snow. My comrade hunches, shoulders drooped and weary, over one final creation, her eyes glazed with the now-familiar milk lust I've seen on too many soldiers before. So many citizens. So many endless demands. It's changed us in ways we can't tell of. We aren't ready to, or maybe we don't even know. Not yet.

I collect my tiny microphone and into it I hear myself utter: I've been made.

What? he says.

Nothing.

What is left the survivors? A measly 43 cents. I reach out, my hand waiting to drop cold metal into his palm but somehow, this day, I'm reaching for so much more. I consider friendly replies. "Boy do you sure like your whipped cream!" I might say, or, "Sorry about the sex joke!". But this is one of those moments between two human beings in which no words feel right and so, none are necessary.

His hand is ready to receive my paltry offering. The change jingles in his palm, the sound strangely cheery, jarring now after everything we've been through, everything we've seen. He nods a little, eyes cast down, but--am I imagining it? A little something in his eyes, a certain knowing glow? We were two strangers, but yet. Something: fate, God, the desperate, random actions of man--I don't know what, I'm not willing to speculate, but something has brought us both here, to this place, on this day. We are knit together now, in a way I wasn't prepared for.

Something has changed, this day. I have been rendered into a thing made new. Made new by one double entendre, muttered in the heat of war.

I may never see him again. But I will always remember. That 43 cents, that inadvertent innuendo, the lusty smacking of the satiated lips and the air heady with espresso and cream all around us. The man with the medium quad, extra whip, 8 pump sugar fairy deluxaccino.

*********

Hello. I am going to spend the weekend not worrying about what the hell I am supposed to do and instead nudging myself gently and lovingly in the way of positivity.

In short I intend to cowgirl up.

I would like to sincerely thank all of you who come here and read my blog. It means a great deal to me, and aw shucks. But I love you.

The Royal We are also re-opening the comments section because We think it just feels friendlier.

*********
I am Vesuvius and So Say We All.

Blasted Pumpkin Fest of Damnation and Rain

I keep trying to figure out a way to not have birthday parties for my kids without getting handed the worst mother of time and all eternity award.

There is not one aspect of birthday parties that don't send me into basic paralytic shock. Just the mere thought of 'party games' or 'invitations' is enough to knock me fetal. Do French people do birthday parties the way they do Christmas? When their daughters turn six, do they simply breeze down the rue to the local patisserie and select a chocolate torte or a plum and honey galette? Do they gift her a tragically vogue bottle of rum raisin nail polish, a darling pair of tights, a sweet little tutu, and smile mildly as their daughters declare it bien fait, mama, and suggest you adjourn to the cafe for chocolat chauds?

Because that is how I want to do it.



We took her to Whole Foods to pick out her birthday dinner, because she had requested fish. And while I know that money does not buy happiness, I hold firm to the belief that if I could afford to shop at Whole Foods every week instead of twice a year and even then only for seafood, I would be happier. She selected a red snapper. Ayla wanted a fish with the head for her birthday dinner, and when you know your daughter is going to be putting the fish head in her mouth and sucking it, you buy that fish at Whole Foods because of the belief, however illusory, that their meat and seafood is less toxic and your daughter is only going to be eating fish brains, and not brain tumors.

So Noah fried the snapper and served our girl the head. Our girl popped the eyeball out with her fork and stuck it in her mouth. And this is how we know that red snapper eyeballs are not as tasty as trout eyeballs: she made a face and began to laugh in this delightedly disgusted way. We asked her if it was gross and she nodded vigorously, laughing. "Uh-huh, uh-huh!" Everyone laughing. We told her she could spit it out and she did.

She loved every minute of it.

Happy Birthday Ayla. Six years ago you were born in the morning. You had a dainty cry. You looked like your dad. Outside our hospital room window the trees were changing. You were hardly ever any trouble. Except those times when you were a whole lot of it.


Noah and I were snapping at each other when this photo was taken.


I am Vesuvius and I would rather get a pap smear than plan a party.