“Six objects I can’t seem to get rid of though I don’t like them all that much” by M. Talu
The box with the frog
After I left home, my mother would mail me the tiniest of flower buds every so often from her home altar. She opened and closed each day at that altar, which housed pictures and statuettes of select deities of the Hindu pantheon. She had different altar rituals depending on the day of the week and the time of day, but each day included laying out water and a little fruit, and a flower or two. Gifts of nature to say thank you to the beings who ostensibly brought it all forth, or perhaps, to ask them to keep it all going despite all that humanity tries to do to burn it all down. Her time at that altar never seemed to do much good for the anger and depression she carries with her even now into her almost-eightieth year. But I never threw the flowers she sent away. They held some of her authority even at a distance; they were evidence of a touch of kindness from a generally severe person.
I had forgotten that I had stashed them all in a little wooden box a friend from college had given me. The box is rectangular and very colorful – red with gold leaf stars all over the base. The top has a wooden frog covering the length to use as a handle to lift up the top and reveal the shallow space underneath. It is not really to my taste, but it reminds me of a long-ago friend.
It had been so long since I interacted with the frog box, I had forgotten that it could actually open. I was rearranging some things and grabbed at the frog, unintentionally allowing its contents to spill out in an arc, and dozens of tiny dried flower buds went tumbling across the floor, each one sending up a little silver note of good thoughts from my tiny mother from years ago.
The lamp that, once I realized that it kind of resembles a giant cigarette, I started to dislike even though I loved it in the showroom
I dislike most of the intense TV programs that are so popular, the kind where everyone is angry or high or both and there are car crashes and sometimes people are being tortured, and always the air is hazy with cigarette smoke even if no one is actually smoking. It is all too hard on the nerves.
I generally limit myself to BBC mysteries set in bucolic English villages where the murders always seem to leave the victims just slightly more rumpled than they were before. There is only ever a respectably tidy bullet wound or a nearby dagger that is so sharp it barely interrupts all the tweed.
I assume there is racism and chauvinism in that little village and that I would not actually be welcome in such a place, because of course. If it weren’t for all that, I think I would be happy in the kind of English villages I have learned about from the BBC and Masterpiece Theatre. Until the murder took place, it would be a quiet life of growing peas and tending to a small apple tree that hangs just one perfect branch over a short stone fence built by hand centuries before, the wall standing as true now as it ever did.
I would put up muslin curtains and sweep the front steps. I would wish the pert little bird swinging on the wisteria a good morning. These would be quiet days. There would be no line of coworkers or friends wanting some piece of my soul.
Instead, kindly Mrs. Peabody from down the lane will bicycle up with a pie balanced on the handlebars. “All for me?” I will ask, and she will nod. I will invite her in for a cup of tea and to share a piece of the pie, and she will say “Only a taste,” because she has a date at the pub and does not want to spoil her appetite. She and Michael O’Nailly plan to share a kidney pie and a few pints of stout.
“Nothing wrong with having a little dessert first, though, you know, dearie,” she will say with a twinkle in her bifocaled eyes. Just because she is already married, Mrs. Peabody does not feel that should get in the way of her dating life. This is one of her many mottos. Though she will eventually be murdered in a future episode, it will not be due to her philandering ways as we will all at first think. Instead, it will turn out she is a Romanov-hunter who may have found the last Romanov, and such secrets will inevitably find their way to the grave.
In this village, I will have a nemesis. He will hate my apple tree, and I will think his roses are a disreputable shade of pink, and we will sniff and avoid eye contact whenever we happen upon each other. But that is as far as it will go, because we are not the ones destined to die in this series, at least not for the foreseeable future.
I will have a hound named Seamus Caesar Humperdink, and he will sport a jaunty scarf at the holiday season but will otherwise be allowed to simply exist as a dog despite his rather heavy name.
After Mrs. Peabody goes on her way, I will have another piece of the lovely pie with more tea out in the backyard under a weeping willow tree, and I will admire my garden, my little labor of love, which will include cosmos and zinnia fluttering around and a mossy greenhouse that has seen better days but still provides a comfortable place to pot-up plants in the cold and rain that usher in the heady days of spring.
That monstera plant that a neighbor gave me that I do not really enjoy growing but feel too guilty to throw away because the neighbor lives right across the street
I do not really enjoy houseplants. I prefer outside plants, like roses and olive trees. The twisting turns of an olive tree are a particular favorite, the pressures of life manifested into beauty.
That silver green color of olive tree leaves seems impossible, but there it is, it exists. My materialistic side wishes to capture it into cloth to be woven into gossamer gowns and scarves as light as whispers. It is wrong that the military refers to the color of some of its uniforms as olive – that pedestrian flat monotone color they use has none of the poetry of an olive tree.
Something about the way sunlight plays through a grove of olive trees makes me believe in magic. I can almost hear the laughter of elvish creatures when the wind blows through the leaves, flipping them from silver green to silver white and then back again.
I went to an olive oil tasting in Sonoma once. It was a little silly and more than a little precious, sitting out in a courtyard lined by perfectly shaped bougainvillea, the tables full of people who had clearly spent the afternoon sipping on things with a bit more punch than the thimblefuls of olive oil currently in front of us. But the person running the tasting was a grizzled gentleman tanned from what I imagined were years in the sunshine tying up olive branches and shaking down their fruit. His eyes danced as he described the way his favorite grove of trees produced olives of such clarity that he would know the oil from that grove by sight without having to be told. For a moment, I blinked and saw him as the personification of one of those trees himself, begging us to understand beauty from a face of bark, his mouth a slash through the wood. I blinked again, and he was back to being a somewhat over-the-top orator under a beatific California sun, and I wondered about my imagination as I dipped a bit of bread into the first thimbleful of oil, glancing back at the man every so often to see if a branch had appeared out of his head.
The lamp my sister gave me that is more about giving ambiance than useful light
I saw a picture once of a caterpillar walking around with two tiny wings tucked inside its body. Mid-transformation. Or, perhaps, transformation placed on hold.
Sometimes the process of transformation can be a bit intense, and it is nice to take a break from it all, even just for a time, even when you know the transformation is good, is needed, is a biological imperative.
Sometimes it feels like all my nerve endings are on fire. I can take no further input, field no more questions, experience the world for no longer, because it is an exquisite torture, all that feeling.
Retreating into solitude is often my go-to move, to gain some distance from all that intense brightness, all that “here”-ness. That is the only time that a light with no useful illumination is actually, in fact, useful. It allows me to avoid stubbing my toe while I shuffle around trying to get all those nerve endings to settle down already.
The danger is that this muffled solitary state is a little too familiar, a little too comfortable. I have lost weeks, years to that place, my face turned away from truths I did not want to see.
The funky little stapler I won in a contest held by a shop I followed on social media that primarily focused on selling all kinds of pencils
I thought I had already had my midlife crisis. I got a new job after 15 years at the same place. I got a dog. I cut off ties with people who had once had an outsize part of my attention given how little I had of theirs.
But I am realizing that the crisis has only now begun. I feel this is all a bit unfair. The world is falling down. Why do I need to be as well?
There have been stories I have been telling myself, solid truths that now I realize were nothing but sandcastles, fanciful things, elaborately made, full of turrets and ramparts and drawbridges, now all sweeping out to sea.
And it is all so trite and so cliché, and why am I even spending this ink, these pixels, writing about it?
Except that I can’t seem to gain clarity until I stumble through some words, until I use up some paper and then some more, until I meander back and forth along these thoughts that are probably interesting only to myself and only barely so at that.
What I had thought was single-minded purpose-driven effort turns out to have only been the always-doomed striving of an under-loved kid trying to make all these other people like her more. And it turns out they never cared enough to really even notice.
I visited my family and learned my dad has been getting blisters from the ancient shoes he wears on his walks. I offered to take him to get new ones, but immediately my mother said, “Oh, you can’t go by yourself, you need to take your sister. Wait until she gets back.”
I was surprised at this edict. Did she think I did not know how to drive? Or buy things?
“You won’t be able to handle it. Wait for your sister,” she reiterated. Dutiful child of hers that I have always been, I waited, seething in my 50-something year old rage, which I was embarrassed to realize resembled the rages of my adolescence to a startling degree.
And what ended up enraging me even more was that my mother was right. I could not have handled it.
My sister had the exact right mix of bossiness and not-caring. She knew exactly when to help my father and when to let him deal with the salesperson on his own. I would have hovered and over-helped, and we would have ended up leaving, shoeless and frustrated.
As I watched my sister throw my father’s old shoes away with a sassy look in the face of his protests, I felt the sands of what I thought was my role in this family shift under me a bit more.
And now I don’t know what to do with myself, where I fit, what to pursue. I had followed others’ rules for too long. Now that I see that there is no return on that effort, where do I turn my efforts toward now?
The abacus-inspired calendar thing from a thrift store in Woodinville, Washington, that actually has a design flaw such that you can never indicate the 30th or the 31st.
There is a point when I am traveling where my sense of self becomes untethered and wispy, as if I am partially earth-bound and partially floating.
It is not a comfortable situation, this there-but-not-quite-all-the-way kind of existence. I struggle against it, wanting to be more present, to be in the moment, whatever that may mean. Until I realize this discombobulation is me in the moment, and I may as well accept that or fritter away my time worrying about it.
Sometimes this discombobulated feeling results in the purchase of a piece of not-quite-art that I often regret but rarely throw away once it has taken up position in my home.
Sometimes I come home from a trip without even having taken a picture, and I must rely on any journaling I may have done during my travels to remember how things had been.
Someone I recently met texted over a picture she had taken of me at an alpaca farm in the English village where our mutual friends got married.
Dissociation upon dissociation. I am there but I am here. And the me that was there was not fully there, I remember, as I look at my windswept hair and wonder at my choice of clothing. I also remember being surprised at how out of place I felt among my friends’ other friends. I had known them for a decade but had only heard about their in-England friends. Discombobulated current me looking at discombobulated past me, both of us wondering if we will ever just be able to be.
I never enjoy pictures of myself, and this one was no exception. But she had captured a few of our favorite alpaca in the shot as well.
It turns out that alpaca don’t necessarily like to be pet, despite their delightful wooliness that seems to be begging for a nice scritch.
One of the owners of the farm (a recovering former hater of all animals and current doting alpaca dad) taught us to sit quietly on the ground and allow the alpaca to approach if they wished to do so.
And the photo reminds me that on that particular day, as I sat there watching the clouds dance by in a sky so blue it looked as if it should be ringing a bell tone, a 1-year-old alpaca named Pancake sauntered over and gave me the softest feather-light kiss right on my forehead, and for that moment, in that small space of time, I was for sure all and completely right there.
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M. Talu Artist Statement:
This essay was inspired by a spring clean and is structured in the style of Ross Gay’s “Delights” and Lawrence Sutin’s “A Postcard Memoir.” It goes from material objects to memory to a refined understanding of my place within those memories.
I am a writer realizing that writing is the only constant in my life, the one touchstone in an otherwise solitary existence.
Writing is the way I understand the world, my place within it, and the events of my life. Writing is as essential as breathing, but I am currently in somewhat of a penitent’s state, because I kept placing my writer self last among all my other identities. Now that so much in my life has become upended, I am turning the bulk of my attention to the one part of myself that was always the most important, though I may not have been acting that way this entire time. Writing is everything now, as it should have been all along.
