Notes Upon Notes (or Why I Covered everything in Glitter)
It’s early morning in New Mexico and the air is cold. Yesterday I did everything and it felt good and everything took a lot of time. Here’s a list:
I watered my garden from the old, centuries maintained acequia or ditch that runs from the Embudo River diverted to the houses in this town. We are parciantes and if we don’t use the water it goes back to the river so we use it when we have it, if the river is full and high enough. The cucumbers and beans, chiles, tomatoes, lettuces, radishes and all the new flowers seem so happy this year. The beetles eat the amaranth and weeds that grow in trenches alongside and I feel good to understand something new each year I try to make anything grow.
I took the dog for a walk.
I clip the Siberian elms from around my neighbor’s house. The elms are crafty survivors those saplings and Grace is 92 and was using a big chain saw when I visited her the night before. I suggested I could probably get down and just clip or pull them if she wanted and she agreed.
I walked across our dirt road and took out what I needed to make the merbeteig dough, my great-grandmother’s recipe, for a plum küchen with the assortment of green gage and wild plums from Grace’s trees. We had picked the green gage off the steep hill where it grew wild. I saw how her body understood the slope and how balanced she was in every way. She had given me a big bag of more and too many plums, my own trees gave nothing. Anyway its always the plan to make this cake once a year when we have plums. Its a ritual celebration of enough fruit baked into a small pie my grandmothers called cake.
It’s also the time of year we all have too much and share the bounty. The smell of the dough being pressed into the pie dish, my own fingerprints, all the grandmotherly ghosts welcomed in this way. My own Oma had been gone by the time I was 11 so this kind of transport is something to welcome, to hold.
Oh and I made some ink while the cake was baking. I have a lot of Hopi amaranth in the garden, big deep crimson plants and the plan was always to make ink from it this year—it comes up on its own in my garden along with a hundred wild sunflowers, mullein, and mallow which I let do their thing. I have so much of the amaranth though and I read Jason Logan’s The Colour a few weeks ago and saw the rich dark pink he had made and all this to say, there we were simmering and pressing amaranth heads through a sieve until I could impatiently take hot spoonfuls to my table and try it (Jason’s newsletters are so rich and always inspiring. I’m always excited to see his name in my inbox which makes me hope others are as excited to see mine-hmmm).
Later I sat down at my table and drew, laid color and form down on paper, took out old work, spent time with it, experimented all afternoon, waiting for the ideas to come or at least to achieve some sort of flow. I’m out of practice.
I had the day yesterday and the back and forth between the kitchen, the garden, my studio. These places are each, all, such thoughtful home-feeling places for me, meditative, energizing, where experiments fail, succeed, almost fail, almost succeed, and a deep rootedness to something I don’t quite understand but feel deep in my body and a sudden great luxury came over me, a home I guess, which I have been hoping for, which I had been hoping for, combined with a freedom of my own making, perhaps because of this beautiful place and I guess I’m here now this morning holding the feeling and it feels luxurious.
I took a long break from sharing my writing here this summer to do what seemed like an infinite number of work-related things. So much about being an artist finding their footing in the world is the full-on too-muchness of it all sometimes. We’re out here on the periphery creating work with the hopes others will not only see what we’ve done but also understand its value. As in, hoping someone understands that the work that goes into writing and making art is a lifetime of study, practice, overthinking and sacrifice, beauty and glory.
We often sacrifice a lot to get to do this thing that we cannot not do: we let family life, rest, play fall by the wayside. We (I?) wade through judgements about our “decisions” or forgetfulness, our not enough time to write or call. We (I) sometimes forget to eat, shower, sleep.
We make and write things, we try everything, we push our imaginations to the limit in the best of moments, all while we live with the unknowns about what will happen to our work and thereby thusly these are boulders to push uphills. Yet, still we(i) dip paintbrushes into our coffee, paint the boulders, keep going.
All this to say, I wrote the piece below last summer in my small town in Northern New Mexico where we’ve been living out most of the year. A lot of the story’s true except for most of it. Maybe it’s about my secret wish for humans to see things again thusly, thereby, somehow, this attention might give the planet a bit more time.
I read a poem by a respected poet, Levi Romero, an important local from up in this valley and the former Poet Laureate of the state, the poem which I could not find again but transcribed an old dicho he used to prove a beautiful point that goes “Todos quieren la gloria, pero nadien quiere la cruz”. I suppose this might have been floating my head as I went into this piece.
I’ve been wanting to share this piece beyond the incredible group of writers I work with, the ones who tell me “Yes, I hope you publish this!” or “Glitter is NOT biodegradable…” with a laugh, but also they just get me. Happiness is having people who get you. Please direct questions to them since often I think they can explain me better than I can explain myself.
Here it is then:
The Art of Repair: Notes On My Progress
I covered everything in glitter. I mean EVERYTHING. In glitter.
Everything was calling out to everything else then. Everything was calling out to be just shining, to be glimmering back to the high heavens perhaps because Everything wanted more. Everything wanted fixing. Everything wanted to be just shining.
I covered every bit and we, all of us, all of Everything, sparkled in a kind of sparkling glittering lilac hole space. In a kind of real way, we all, of of us, became a real hole of something truly sparkling.
“Aye, Mejita? What are you doing over there?” asked Lebeo, my neighbor. His legs barely work to walk him down his dirt driveway.
“I’m covering it all with glitter Lebeo!” I shout back.
“Ohhhh yeah? Okayyyy,” he said. “Very nice!”
“I’m just getting started!” But maybe he’s already turned himself around and up his driveway.
And when Isabel came by riding her hot pink and white bike with the purple and hot-pink tassels hanging from the handlebars, her unicorn bike helmet on her little blond head, she stopped short. “Deb what are you doing? Is that glitter? Are you covering everything?” She knew what was what.
“Yes it is and yes I am Isabel.”
“Cool”, she said cooly and of course, “can I help?”
I can only offer, “I need to do this myself Izz but thank you.”
I always tell her no. She’s like a hot pink hummingbird—she’ll turn sugar water to candy floss in another feeder.
I hate to always be so straight with a 9 year old but frankly, she knows how to cover things in glitter. She’s 9. It’s just that there’s so much I need to do on my own now. So really I’m just telling her the truth.
She stared at me for a few seconds and said sternly. “Show it to me when you’re done ok? And use a lot more glitter than you think you need-I find that helpful.”
“You got it sunshine. For sure.”
“Byeeeee,” she fluttered away.
“Byeeeee,” I remained, glittering.
Now I’m thinking, maybe I have her all wrong. Maybe I have me all wrong.
The neighbor’s retaining wall fell down and slipped into the road in the downpour. In the flood.
Every afternoon is a flood and we hope we don’t have to sit on the roof of our houses at some point like our house is a boat.
Also we hope we don’t have to take up arms in a civil war. Everything keeps talking about civil war. So in response, I cover the downed cement wall with glitter and the crumbling stratified soil falling into the road with all the artifacts climbing out of it: old China, marbles, silver forks, tin cans, shell buttons, arrowheads, plastic airplane parts, manufacturers labels and rocks and dirt and the entire road and all the roads actually, with glitter. I cover these thoughts as well, in glitter.
I’ve used a lot of glitter so far. The secret is, I squeeze out long strings of glue like I’m not paying for it and then spread it like glue and then pour out as much glitter as I can on top.
I pour it on so the world is just sparkling.
The receipt for the glitter was something like, $42 billion dollars.
“I can’t believe glitter is so expensive,” I say to the Walmart cashier.
“Inflation” he says and gives me 1,000 plastic bags, one for each jar.
“Cost of doing business,” I say to Jim as he tells me, “not many people can wrap their heads around what a billion dollars even looks like,” and I glitter all 1000 plastic bags and we laugh and look at the glitter covered driveway and all the glitter covered weeds etc.
This isn't a gag. I only wanted to be good at something, one thing is enough for me these days.
And my hands go numb as I covered my words and these words and your words with pink glitter from Walmart. And I also glittered every employee’s sorry paycheck too.
You might ask if I covered words spoken in other lands, all the many languages as well and the answer is a resounding YES, I did. Lost languages, found languages, many old books, even the lost library at Ephesus and banned books in Iowa. No words were hurt, now they all just sparkle. They’re all just sparkling now behind library trash piles across the universe. Every sentence resonates with glitter, lucky things, for forever now.
I covered the lizards and the snakes and all the animals and anything that faces up. The Dahlias. (It’s dahlia season). Grasshoppers. Treetops. Hands. Kisses. Glitter.
The anthills. The coroner. The ocean.
My dog was already covered in glitter so I left him alone.
When night falls, I covered the night sky, a shimmering sky with star holes to another dimension.
Another neighbor, Isabel’s father, stands in the road wearing a t-shirt with all the Peanuts characters on it, hands me a beer, looks up at the glittering sky and comments, “stupid stars.”
We stand in the dirt road. He looks at the fallen wall and the trail of glimmering glitter in the almost moonless sky. He passes a joint. I take out the bottle, rub glue and glitter on it and pass it back and he is as awestruck as I am.
“Thank you!”
“It’s only a project. I don’t know yet if it’s useful.”
We discuss “usefulness”. We discuss discussions. We discuss the new manager of the Co-op who told me she had her heart broken at karaoke last Friday. “She sings like an angel,” I say. “Maybe the glitter will mend her broken heart. Maybe the broke will grow over with glitter. I think its an old Japanese art form. Glitter gets on everything and its beautiful again.” Then we discuss Covid times.
Before we are finished on the dark road, I cover our conversation in glitter. I give him a spoonful to bring home.
42 billion dollars worth of things looking up at the sky shining with glitter stretches not quite around the world but almost up to the moon. (Our moon, as in the planet earth’s moon.) There’s a math to all of it that I’m sure is really beautiful.
I cover these things with consistency and purpose. This is the important thing I tell myself and am now telling you.
When the sky gets gray and opens up with water, I glue glitter to the water. I glue glitter to the river. I glue glitter to the river otters who are cute but mean and the sphinx moths sucking nectar from my flooded garden, the datura who came born already with glitter for the moths, a worm who became apparent at the turn of my shovel too, I cover with glitter.
I look down at the glitter on the soles of my broken shoes.
The following day, after the rain ended in the late afternoon, when the sun was behind me, pointing its glary face to the mist, I covered the rainbow in glitter. I cover the sun and the mist. I make a path through the glow and the muddy path and it’s dazzling. We glitter like an iced lilac on fire. On fire in that way only a little light can, you know, juice Everything up and still, I must say, it’s exhausting to trust this much that everyone will be happy with this set up.
the end
This month I’ll share a few things I shared with my IdeaLab Camp because it’s a taste of our stupendous rich weird and wonderful three months we’ve had together. A few new things as well!
• Garage Sale in Denton, Texas gone right.
•This much needed craft book now released into the world: Shitty Craft Club by Sam Reece
•An old piece about the Reys, the creators of Curious George by Rivka Galchen, which I’d never read as all my New Yorkers piled up during the pandemic, pretty cover under pretty covers while I worked away trying to get a New Yorker cover.
• This beautiful interview with founder Luma Mufleh of The Fugees Academy schools for refugee children by my friend Michael Judge. I’ll be fundraising for them this year with my Folktale Weekend and Workbook!
•Soy Yo by Bomba Estero 4eva
Signing off with a picture of the cat we’re fostering. We’re calling her Peaches and we’ll miss her when she goes. There isn’t anything like a soft purr weaving around your ankles to relieve stress. I didn't need to cover her with glitter because she was already sparkling.
This story is sparklingly, exquisitely, delightful. The sentiment connects deeply to my heart, both in my yearning to set the chaos that accumulates around me right, and my hope to someday accept everything for what it is. And your moments of humor land so perfectly that I'm trying not to wake my husband with my giggling. Of course Pablo is plenty-glittered already!
Thank you for sharing this piece. Please enter it into some journals (and competitions) so more people can read it!
I love this story Deb. Such a beautiful rhythm to it, I got lost in it, and emerged at the end, I’m pretty sure, covered in glitter!! X