community supported

if someone asked me to describe my evolving relationship with food, the story would be long—-like anna karenina long—-or ben hur director’s cut long.  there would be many chapters, and each would be full of amazing twists and turns.  you would laugh and you would cry, but mostly you’d be hungry—insatiably hungry.   i am an overeater; i am a foodie; i am a person whose life story can be told in terms of what was eaten and why.

remember when playgrounds used to be terrifying and amazing?

when i was a child, i ate a good diet of home-cooked meals laced with what had to have been (judging by the box of happy meal toys that i found and got rid of when i went to college) an impressive amount of mcdonald’s food.  there were three of us, me, my brother jeff, and my sister randi, and the lure of little plastic toys hidden under deliciously greasy fries and burgers must have made us a formidable spokesforce  for fast food. (“buuuut moooooooooooooooom!”).  mcdonald’s hamburgers were like crack—-crack that came with a playground unlike anything in the backyards of my friends.  i mean, who in their right mind could pass up golden rows of fries cooked in beef fat (this was changed when vegetarians complained some years later), and slides and tunnels that, though hot as the center of the sun (they were metal back then) provided what felt like eons of amusement?  i still remember how my hands smelled after touching the metal and playing in the dusty playground pebbles.  magic.

when i got older, years of overeating and of overindulgence in sweets had wrecked my weight.  i was pudgy as a child, but as an adolescent, the problem only magnified.  i tried all manner of diets—we did low cal, low fat, turkey instead of beef, diet coke instead of full cal soda, you name it.  nothing really worked for me, but it all succeeded in making me more miserable.  i hadn’t found the  right combination—and it was a shame, because god knows life is hard to live as a fat teen.   i was reminded of this sad truth when a friend of mine posted on facebook about not wanting his daughter to grow up with body image issues—-i chuckled ironically to myself, since this same person made several nasty remarks to me about my weight when we were in middle school.  no matter how wise and protective we feel as adults, we all know that at one point in our lives we either were different or had the capacity to help make someone’s life a living hell for being different.  probably a little of both.

i powered through anyway because i was smart and had the best friends a person could have, but college had another surprise waiting for me.  living on my own (or with friends) and having complete autonomy over my eating choices (combined with a serious lack of cash) meant that, for my 6 years of undergrad, i ate mostly crap.  ramen noodles were a staple, and since we had tons of mandatory dining dollars as students, the local vendors who accepted the college currency (dominos, blimpie, burger king, etc.) got fat right along with me.  i got into the bad habit of eating nothing all day and then coming home and stuffing myself until i went to bed.  combine this with weekend nights at the club (seriously, do you know how many calories are in your favorite mixed drinks?) and i topped out at a whopping 265 pounds.  congratulations miss hall; here are your two bachelor’s degrees—and your hover-round.

that 10 pounds you lose in 2 days? 80% water, 20% soul

during college, my weight had gone up and down in grand yo-yo fashion.  i tried weight watchers, curves exercise club, the hollywood diet, fasting, spending four hours a day at the rec center, journaling my meals, diet pills—i even took a trip to the kirklin clinic in birmingham to see an endocrinologist about my thyroid.  nothing much came of that (besides the fact that i found out my horribly swollen thyroid was not cancerous), and i stopped taking the pills they put me on because i was going to have to wear a medic-alert bracelet; the metformin listed blackouts as a possible side-effect.

life after college was an interesting mix of things wonderful and terrible.  the terrible was that, for some reason, random drive-by taunts of my weight seemed eerily commonplace, even now that both i and the taunters had “grown up.”  gems included being told, out a car window, that i was so fat that i should just go kill myself.  i’d never before wished harder for a big rock and a sure aim.   the wonderful was that i met my husband to be, stephen, who even now reminds me that i shouldn’t worry about my weight because he fell it love with me when i was the heaviest i’d ever been.  we jokingly instituted a 300 pound rule for each other, and he constantly made me feel beautiful, no matter my weight (still does!).

my battle for weight loss continued during our courtship and engagement (which coincided with a very sedentary stint in graduate school), but this time—perhaps for the first time ever—i felt like i could lose weight for myself and not so that i would be attractive and desirable to other people.  even that wasn’t easy though.  stephen and i had found a little apartment just off campus.  this was a plus for me, since i could walk to work and save on gas, but it also meant that we were close to pizza, the dreaded tut’s calzone, mexican food, thai food, chinese food, and ice cream.  because we were so busy at first, and later just because it had become habit, we ate out all the time.  the bliss of living happily had taken its toll, and a year before the wedding, we knew that something had to be done.

...but man, starvation gets things done!

enter bariatrics.  i still to this day don’t know how i did that terrible program—i suppose because it, unlike everything else i’d ever tried, was tremendously effective.  a year before the wedding, stephen and i both got into a program where you eat five “supplements” a day, plus 5 saltines, a pickle, light ‘n fit yogurt, and unlimited sugar-free jello.  you also had to drink about a gallon of water a day (don’t know how i still have kidneys).  we figured out that to maintain sanity, we’d also need a dressing-free salad every day and one cheat day a week.  this helped keep us from eating one another.  as part of the program, we had to go in once a week and pay $25 dollars to be weighed and have our blood pressure taken.  labs were done every 6 weeks to check cholesterol.  weight loss was tremendous at first (sure as hell better have been for 900 calories a day!) and then tapered off to 2-3 pounds a week.  we stayed on bariatrics for about a year (lapses included) and lost 160 pounds between us.   on my wedding day, i had lovely arms, the hint of a collarbone, and my dress had been taken down from a 20 to a 12.

yay cruise!

needless to say, the 24-hour eat-fest that was the carnival cruise honeymoon signaled the start of a return to old habits.  coupled with the happiness of marriage, falling off the bariatrics wagon put the weight back on faster than it came off.  it didn’t work precisely because it starved the weight off without teaching you how to eat.  i still can’t believe that i ate that horrid, packaged bullshit for so long.  i literally starved myself until my hair started breaking and falling out (not to worry, said the doctor—all normal side effects).  i had ignored the pitiful science behind the program, all for the sake of losing a few pounds.  once, when i had expressed to the doctor that i was worried about the possibility of becoming pregnant on such a limited diet, he just laughed and noted that the diet actually “made people more fertile,” and that lots of his patients had gotten pregnant “as a result of” bariatrics.  i didn’t see the point in letting him know that he was partially right and partially wrong—under-eating doesn’t make you fertile (it does the opposite), but certainly dramatic weight-loss increased the sex that most of his patients were having.  nothing makes a big girl randier than losing five dress sizes—and nothing excites a man like an excited woman.

so 265 became 180 became 250—all in the blink of an eye.  whatever.  so it goes.  over the past two years, i’ve seen all of the beautiful clothes that i bought post-bariatrics go from snug to holy-shit-i-used-to-wear-this-? status.  in that time, i tried nutrisystem, but the expense was overwhelming and i just couldn’t take the overload of processed foods.  while falling off of the bariatrics death-wagon, i’d really gotten into writers like michael pollan, and documentaries about how our food is made had slowly built up a new soapbox for me.  although it’s taken me a long time to actually DO anything with the information, i learned that low-cal, low-fat, no-carb, approaches to dieting are damaging to health, and that our entire food chain, from the ground up, is made of crap—-pure crap.

buy it----you'll like it 🙂

one of pollan’s books, food rules, contains some of the most profound advice for avoiding the crap.  it was all so simple—no huge, complicated formulas; no overly complex and expensive menu; no outlandish ideas.  it’s all intuitive, and its essence is simplicity.  he says eat food, not too much, mostly plants.  bam!  that simple.  the difficulty with the simplicity for most of us though is in the definition of “food.”  pollan’s pocket-sized book further illuminates his command with a string of short and sweet maxims like: don’t eat food that your grandmother wouldn’t recognize, avoid foods containing ingredients that no human would keep in their pantry, avoid foods containing ingredients that a third grader can’t pronounce, and avoid the middle of the grocery store in favor of the periphery.  the book contains 64 food rules, the last of which is “break the rules once in a while.”

lovely farm!

even though i taught an entire college writing class based on pollan’s work, it was hard for me, in the life and routine that i’d created for myself, to follow his rules—even if i knew with every fiber of my being that they were the key to health.  for me, it took a change of venue, in the biggest sense of the word, to be able to over-haul my dietary life.  since my move to maine, i’ve come to realize what an enormous influence our surroundings have on our health.  in tuscaloosa, i had everything at my fingertips—easy access to food and a steady influx of cash.  i was like an alcoholic living in a liquor store—or an ex-smoker working on the set of mad men.  since coming to maine and adjusting to an entirely new way of life in the country, two farms, summit springs and rippling waters (auspicious names, given my watery constitution), have helped me establish an entirely new way of eating and living.

carefully tended farm rows

i’ve known for a long time that i’d love to be part of a csa (community supported agriculture) group.  i had tried in tuscaloosa, but all i accomplished was getting on and staying on snow’s bend farm’s csa share waiting list for a whopping two and a half years.  csas are pretty interesting creatures.  to participate, you pay a farmer a lump sum up front in exchange for a weekly box of seasonal produce all throughout the growing year.  unlike a farmer’s market, csa boxes mean that you get what you get—no choices.  you get what’s ready when it’s ready, and there’s a great deal of variety throughout the spring, summer, and fall.  unlike the produce at a chain grocery store, you know your food was grown locally, sustainably, and organically.  you know that your asparagus wasn’t flown in from chile and that your spring mix isn’t from china.  you know that you’re supporting a local family and that a portion of your money is going toward the meager stipend received by eager apprentices who are busy learning how to start their own organic farms.  you know that you’re not just buying veggies—you’re investing in your community and in the health of your family.

my farm 🙂

usually when you join a csa, you pay for your shares in the winter.  that way, the farm has the money that they need for start-up, planting, and growing expenses.  we were in an interesting situation in that stephen and i moved up to maine halfway through the season.  thankfully, i was able to hook up with a farm in poland, maine called summit spring that had some shares left and was willing to prorate our fee and stick us on the list.  every tuesday, we drive over with a bag and pick up whatever has been harvested.  it’s enough to last us through the whole week, and the variety has forced me to expand my cooking repertoire quite a bit.   so far, we’ve gotten garlic, potatoes, summer squash, zucchini, tomatoes, lettuce, beets, cucumbers, basil, eggplant, kale, onion, green beans, and cauliflower.  since today is tuesday, stephen will be going back to get more.  i can’t wait to see what he brings home!

rippling waters store front

i have no intention of becoming a slave to the scales again with all the daily weigh-ins and number-worship, but i have to say that, so far, i feel absolutely amazing since i’ve cut the crap out of my diet.  i’m eating healthy, but at the same time, the glutton inside is satisfied by the fact that we actually have to work diligently to be able to eat as much food as we’re bringing home.  i’m eating a lot and often, but when it’s fresh squash, it doesn’t matter.  more is actually better.  for the first time ever, i know where my food is coming from, i know who’s growing it, and i know what their agricultural practices are.  for the first time ever, i have a positive and beneficial relationship with food—what a mind-blowing thing!

burdock growing wild by the barn

the experience has become even sweeter now that i’ve started my august job—i decided to apprentice on an organic farm.  about the same time that i contacted summit springs about a half-share in their csa, i came across the facebook page for another local organic farm, rippling waters.  the last wall post mentioned that they were looking for august help three days a week, and i jumped on it.  i contacted the farm manager, julee, and told her that i was looking for something to do between the time that i moved in and the time that school started.  she said that she’d love to sign me on as an apprentice, and that i’d receive a small stipend in addition to any produce that i wanted to glean from the fields.

tons of tomatoes

the farm is amazing!  there are dozens of varieties of veggies and herbs in both traditional fields and mandala-type gardens, there are greenhouses, and the central hub is comprised of a barn for processing and storing and a house where apprentices cook and sleep.  there are around five acres of cultivated fields, there’s a permaculture garden, and there are many more plans in farm manager julee’s head.  there’s also a store where folks can stop and buy plants and veggies, and the whole operation is run be some fantastically nice folks.

so i started my apprenticeship two weeks ago, and i can honestly say that i’ve never had to work so hard (or been so sore and tired) in my entire life!  you really can’t know what goes into running a farm until you jump into it head first, and boy did i ever.  the first day that i was there, i picked pattypan squash (which is like reaching three feet through velcro made of needles), i weeded a bed and planted lettuce plugs (very fun up here in maine where there are no fire ants, poisonous spiders, redbugs, or poisonous snakes!), i picked hornworms off of tomatoes (which was disgusting—hornworms are alice in wonderland monsters that click and spit at you), i harvested beebalm (while enjoying the intoxicating smell and discovering strange new bugs like the hummingbird moth), i bagged calendula blossoms (and received an offer from julee to grow any herbs that i’m interested in!,) and i helped prepare garlic bulbs for curing.

of course it is.....what else could it be?

on my second day, the real work started.  fridays are harvest days, and everyone is scooting around busily preparing for the big farmer’s markets in portland and bridgton.  i harvested more squash, eggplant, four varieties of chard (hard to do since the bugs had first pick of the leaves!), four varieties of kale (which soaked me from the waist down since they were waist-high and drenched in dew), four types of potatoes (washed and sorted by size), a dozen or so pints of sungold cherry tomatoes (which get even my tomato-hating seal of approval), three types of onions, and 12 bunches of basil.  after the harvest, things had to be weighed, counted, and packed off for market.  having come from a life of reading, typing, and general ass-sitting, i found myself rather ill-prepared for toting heavy crates of veggies across a farm and spending hours bent over and stooping to pick.   when i came home that night, i thought i might die.

field A

lest the magic end, i spent almost the entirety of my third day weeding, hoeing, and pulling stray roots from about 200 square feet of permaculture garden.  luckily i had good company—a volunteer named patty—but hoeing in sunny, 85-degree weather for four hours straight almost got the best of me.  when i thought i might collapse into an out-of-shape pile of goo, one thought kept me going—ok, you’ve overhauled your food, now overhaul your body!  i was sustained by the thought that all the hard work that i was doing was going to help transform me into a strong and resilient being.  the pain of the end of the day was a sign that i’d pushed my body, and the relief i felt each morning was a sign that my body was healing and establishing a new baseline of strength and wellness.  although i hurt, i was, for the first time, on a path to wellness—-real wellness, not an artificially created and unsustainable imitation of wellness.  hard work on the farm is going to allow me to shed some of the weight that is holding me back.

bee balm and a hummingbird moth

so right now i’m sitting in front of my computer, anticipating the start of another three-day week of farm work.  i’ll go in again tomorrow, and hopefully i’ll be a little less sore and tired than i was the week before.  i’m working my body and i’m eating the earth’s bounty, and for the first time ever, i feel as though i’ve found not a diet, but a sustainable, healthy lifestyle.  i am able to benefit from my community but also to put back into it.  if you buy a squash at the bridgton farmer’s market, i may have picked it.  if you buy kale from whole foods, i might have weighed and bunched it.  i truly feel a sense of community when i think about things like that as compared to my life in tuscaloosa.

garlic curing

i’m also waiting on stephen to get back from  summit springs farm with our weekly csa share.  when he does, i’ll carefully plan our week so that nothing will go to waste.  our only problem so far is that, between the csa and the farm, there’s an overabundance of food.  for this reason, i really feel that my next move is to experiment with food preservation.  i know that, while food is overabundant right now, pickings will be slim throughout the long winter.  i don’t want to ruin all of my progress when the shares stop coming in.  likewise, i’ll only be working on the farm through the end of august.  i’ve got to use my time wisely and think of ways to move and work once my time on the farm is over.  as of right now, my biggest challenge is going to be discovering how to live locally, sustainably, and actively throughout all seasons of the year—not just in the abundance of harvest time.

as has rarely been the case with regard to my diet and lifestyle, for once, i’m excited about the challenge.

to be continued….

tomato plants for sale

eat your colors!

echinacea for sale

purple onions for sale

herblings in the greenhouse

mmmmmmmmmmaaaaAAaaiiinnne????

for about the past year, stephen and i have had a frustrated running joke.  it seems like 80 or so percent of people who we told that we were moving to maine responded with something like utter, surprised disgust.   them:  “where ya movin’?”  us:  “maine!”   them: “mmmmmmmmaaaaAAaaiiinne??!?” (to get the intonation right here, you have to channel that old 80s commercial for raid roach spray—where the cartoon bugs look aghast at the deadly can and shout “raaaaaAAAAAAiddd?!?”  before being blasted to their little deaths).  i have no clue why we kept getting this reaction.  two best guesses are that most folks know absolutely nothing about maine or that the universe was testing our resolve to move.  to these folks i say SO LONG, SUCKAS!

our driveway---yes, it's plowed in the winter 🙂

we pulled up to our apartment at about dinner time, and we were instantly in love.  stable road is an easy-to-miss gravel road off of the main drag.  it goes from the highway about a quarter of a mile through the woods down to the water.  when you pull onto the drive, it’s like entering a tunnel of trees—everything is so green and shady!  about half-way down the road, you come to a little clearing with a four-unit cabin—it looks like it used to belong to a camp.  the outside of the building is gray wood, and there are four little screen doors in a row.  we’re number 3, tucked neatly in the middle.

we met all of our neighbors almost right away.  unit one is sandra, an ex-nurse who is bright and cheerful.  she has a strong maine accent and was delighted that we, like one of her good friends, were from alabama.  unit two is ricky, a muscly, tattooed painter who rides a motorcycle.  he has a girlfriend—can’t remember her name—who, when i said “goodmorning!” the next day, simply admonished “actually, it’s afternoon” and then walked away.  we have a special name for her.

unit four is aaron.  he’s the kramer-esque resident handy man, and he may be the most verbose person i’ve ever met.  he sits at a picnic table near the parking area smoking, reading, and drinking beer, so if you have plans to leave while he’s out there, you have to factor in at least 20 minutes for smile-and-nod conversation about whatever.  bless ‘im.

welcome home!

so back to #3.  when we first checked out our new home, my first thought was “god, i’m glad we culled the hoard!”  i’m talkin this place is seriously small.  i had no earthly idea how we were going to fit our stuff inside.  since it was getting late, we just drug in essentials plus our bed frame, mattress, box spring, and that crucial roll of toilet paper.  i think i spent the rest of the night scratching my head and in-my-mind-autocad-ing our furniture around to figure out where everything could go.  it wasn’t one of those “what’s the feng shui-iest way to arrange the furniture” places—it was more like “ok, there’s ONE way everything will fit—we’ve got to find it!”

the difficulties were that a) we have an insane number of books and shelves, b) we didn’t want to cover the built-in bookshelves with anything, c) the living room is a shotgun, and we needed to be able to see the tv from the couch, d) our tv is old and WAY too big, e) the long wall is lined with baseboard heating and therefore could not be covered by bookcases. and f) nothing but the bed would fit in the bedroom.

it fits!!

despite our worries, we unloaded the next morning with help from one of my future classmates, andrianna.  the unpacking went swiftly, and by some act of god, we were able to figure everything out.  we turned my desk into a potting table out back, we took the entertainment center and the tv to the goodwill, and we bought a flatscreen, which stephen wired into one of the bookshelves.  the table lined up nicely with the built-ins, and there are boxes hidden everywhere that will hold them.  there’s tons of space under kitchen and bathroom counters, and magically, our clothes fit in the teeny tiny closets (after we evicted the spiders—-no worries though; no poisonous spiders in maine!).  we got a lot put up in the first two days, and then my sister randi came to stay with us and help with the fine-tuning.

the next week was spent enjoying my sister’s company, picking and poking about the house, enjoying massively wonderful food from summit springs farm csa, getting to know what’s where around town, and (especially for stephen) enjoying some much deserved time off.  we took a walk down to the water (my herbie friends will be interested to know that i found sumac, queen anne’s lace, white pine, plantain, lobelia, new england aster, goldenrod, sorrel, horsetail, and hemlock!) but mostly we just basked in the glow of hey-it’s-not-110-degrees-ness.

our kitchen, sans dishwasher and microwave

seriously, i think that’s my favorite thing so far about maine (ask me again in february)—the temperature.  no one has a/c up here (an unimaginable reality to most southerners), but they really don’t need it.  it was pretty damned hot the first two days we were here (hey, 85 can feel hot when there’s no air moving through your house!) but it quickly cooled off, and we acquired a box fan.  our daily routine now involves opening the doors (the windows stay open) and placing the fan at the front door.  at night, we close the door and point the fan in the bedroom.  it’s been in the 70s pretty much the whole time, and it smells fantastic in the woods—a huge change from tuscaloosa, where it was 110 with 500% humidity and it always smelled faintly of burning tires and natty light.

wall-o-books

the area around our house is just stunning (pictures to come).  we’re on the residential east side of long lake, but on the west side there’s a marina and a shop-lined causeway where long lake and brandy pond meet.  choppy, dark blue water with green hills behind and mountains even further away—just lovely!  10 miles uproad is bridgton, where i’ll be going to school.  we ventured there one day to peruse the shops and eat at ricky’s diner.  40 miles downroad is portland, the booming metropolis on the atlantic coast.

kitchen table with built-ins. herb books, midwifin' books, and herb cabinets above.

and speaking of booming metropoli, i think living in naples is going to be good for my spending habits if for no other reason than any place you’d buy anything is quite a drive away.  20 minutes to walmart (blegh!).  an hour to target.  an hour to whole foods.  there’s a health food store of sorts in bridgton, but you have to go into portland for almost anything else.  i did stop into reny’s, bridgton’s department store, but i ran screaming from racks covered in hot pink corduroy, floral blouses, and elastic-waisted pants.  it was a little twilight zone-y.  there’s also an odd little grocery right down the road from our house, but the prices are so incredibly high that i’ll be shopping at the hannaford in bridgton (very publix-y) when i have the chance.  luckily, the bulk of our food is coming from the farm at this point, so all i’ll need to get from the store are staple items.

so there’s plenty more to tell, but it’s insanely late, so i’ll leave you folks to your own devices and save more for later.

kitchen window still life (sill life?)

to be continued…….

i’ve been ev-ery-where man….

so now that i’m finally settled in and unpacked, time to play catch-up on our exciting cross-country move!

this post is dedicated to penske trucks, for their un-break-down-able-ness and to time warner cable, for not being comcast-y tools and for getting our internet hooked up one day after we called 🙂  i rarely show corporate love—enjoy it!

ahhhhhhhh!!!!!

so about a month after i started packing, we were finally done.  well—most of the way.  how is it that every time you pack to move, there’s inevitably that huge pile of crap on the kitchen table that there either isn’t a box for or that you think you’re going to need access to before you move?  so we were down to that—boxes and piles.  i was really proud of our progress.  i’ve moved a whopping 8 times in the past 11 years, and somehow, each time, i’ve always been up until about 4am frantically shoving things willy-nilly into bags and boxes, only to have to muster more strength four hours later and haul it all to a truck in 100+ degree weather.  this time was different.  we’d spent weeks culling the hoard, organizing, and packing, so we spend a leisurely last day in tuscaloosa having lunch with stephen’s ex-boss and seeing harry potter (ohmigodUHmazing!).   i also  had time to get coffee with my first doula momma, april (who i’m going to miss and who has to bring billie and sweet baby ming to maine some time in the future!!).

after our relaxing last day and a good night’s sleep, we started our moving day—july 29, 2011.  since i’ve had such terrible luck with u-haul (ever had to unload a broken-down truck and re-load everything backwards into a new one on the side of the road??) we decided to go with penske.  our rep was super nice.  he yapped our ears off for about 35 minutes, but hey, i’ll listen to anyone’s life story for a $100 discount 🙂 (he said he was thankful for passionate educators like us—i think we got an honorary aaa discount).

after picking up the truck (which we found courtesy of our lovely new magellan gps, nicknamed “madge”) we headed back home to load.  many, many props to our super team of truck loaders: james luca, nic helms, and marybeth smith.  we got everything loaded in about an hour—it would have taken the two of us AGES by ourselves—-mostly because i’m a weakling 🙂  and the timing was perfect;  as soon as we were done, it started to rain.  i went to one final chiropractor appointment (i’ll miss you, dr. pate!), and then i took a minute to say goodbye to tuscaloosa.

i’ve always been big on personal ritual—taking the time to manifest thought into action can really help you process something more thoroughly, no matter what it is.  i needed a ritual for saying goodbye, and i wanted it to include leaving a piece of me in the city that has taken such good care of me for the past decade.  in my packing, i had come across three personal items that had meaning to me but that didn’t seem to need to come with me.  i’m terrible at hanging on to things that have sentimental value, and these things (a foot-long lock of hair from high school, dried roses from one of mine and stephen’s first dates, and a handful of quartz crystals that i picked up at powwows when i used to do traditional shawl dance) had been around for a while.  i decided that, rain and all, i would go down to the river to leave my things there—to leave some of my dna and some of my memories on the muddy banks of the black warrior.

after spending a day incredibly hot and sweaty, the rain felt great.  it wasn’t really pouring—just a steady sprinkle.  i pulled into river road park, a place that i’d gone with april to walk all summer, and walked down to the concrete landing.  the river was beautiful in the rain—all gray and speckled with the sprinkling drizzle.  there wasn’t anyone else there (thank you, rain!) so i had a lovely, peaceful moment to myself.  one by one, i dropped my quartz into the river, quietly giving thanks for all that tuscaloosa had given and taught me.  then i walked down to a little beach on the shore to deposit the rest.  i buried a lock of hair in the river mud (a fossil in a million years?) and then walked into the woods at the shore to leave more.  i dropped a lock of hair and some roses into the shore greenery, and when i did, a flock (crash?  herd?) of butterflies flew up and away.  i tossed the rest into the foliage, and it landed by a sun-bleached snapping turtle shell that had to have been a foot and a half long.  i had no clue that things that size lived in the black warrior!  an auspicious offering-place indeed!  when i’d finished saying my goodbyes, i headed back to the car and drove home to begin the first leg of our journey.

we had decided to get a hotel in tuscaloosa that first night so that we could get an early start the next morning.  our trip was going to be 9.5 hours to columbus, ohio; 9.5 hours to albany, ny; and then 5.5 hours to naples—there was no way we could start that trip after a hard day of truck-loading!  it turned out though that rooms were cheaper in birmingham, so we dropped off the apartment keys, loaded up the kia on a tow dolly, and headed to the ‘ham under the watchful eye of madge the  locutus.  (leave it to stephen to make a gps sound like it came out of a game of d&d!)

we stayed at an econolodge on oxford road for a few hours (an ok place if you don’t count the car that had wrecked into the bollard out front and then been left to die a crunched and bumperless death in the parking lot).  i think we made it to bed by about 7 (easy to do when you’ve worked your ass off all day!) and the plan was to get up at 2am and head out.  my car didn’t have a/c, and we wanted to avoid as much traffic as possible (thank you, girl scout traveling experience!), so we decided to set out in the dark.  although it was 3:30 by the time we were actually gassed up and ready (it takes a long time to fill up a penske truck and an explorer on one debit card!), we got a lot of good dark driving time in.

over the next three days, here are some things that i learned:

july 29

tennessee:  lovely.  nothing to report.  same old same old.

kentucky:  beautiful state.  smells like sweetgrass.  bought a patriotic energy drink there called “ol’ glory”—tasted like fresca and FREEDOM!

i mean, sorta, right? hey cut me some slack---i was looking for something positive

ohio:  smelled bad.  crazy roads and intersections in the cities. wicked hot.  drove over the cuyahoga, a river that was once so polluted that it caught fire on thirteen separate occasions.  smog alert in cincinnati may have scarred my lungs.  barns with rebel flag roofs and farm fields with scriptural billboards (alabama…is that you?).  killer fog.  two redeeming qualities:  great gen x radio station, state silhouette on road signs is shaped like the decepticons logo.

july 30

pennsylvania:  just clipped the corner.  amazing stretch of road on lake erie—water for miles and vineyards as far as the eye could see.

new york:  ONE HUNDRED TEN DOLLARS IN TOLLS!  one hundred…..ten…..dollars.  more farms than i expected (that’s about all there was actually).  flipped the bird three times for only going 5mph over the speed limit.  mean people and crazy roads in buffalo.  bangin rest stops! (since you can’t get off the toll road, there are these huge food-court-gas-station-coffee-shop-farmer’s-market dealies everywhere).  beautiful adirondack mountains.  passed exits for rome, carthage, ithaca, troy, amsterdam, rotterdam, london, norwich, and my favorite—coxsackie.

july 31

massachusettes:  reasonable tolls.  drove under the appalachian trail.  amazingly beautiful drive through the berkshires (made me think of james taylor!).  stopped in framingham to see mom and randi!

new hampshire:  very proud of their liquor stores—they advertise them with state signs on the interstate because they are tax-free.  adults don’t have to wear seat belts.  no one has to wear helmets (and they weren’t wearing them).  “live free or die” is the state motto—seems they’ve taken this too far.

maine:  not going to spoil this one—-you’ll have to keep reading!

to be continued……..