Wander Willow's weblog
A place for thoughts for other souls to read
July 7, 1998
My grandmother makes farina for me, warm and sweet in a bowl shaped like an open tulip. I take a photograph each time she serves this to me, which my family finds strange. They ask “Why take the same photo a hundred times?”And I’m not entirely sure. I know the images are honest and beautiful.
I see the labor and history behind the simple meal. Always, there’s longing for this moment to last, because I’m not sure how much time I have left with my grandparents. Each time could be the last and I want to hold it so that I can look down infinitely at that same tulip bowl. My blue collar still life. This delicious meal made by my grandmother’s hands. We always catch up on life while she stirs. Insisting I sit.
Lily traveled with me this time. Vice stayed home. As usual. He doesn’t enjoy my family’s company.
We all live on a commune out in the country a few hours from here. I don’t belong there, but I try. I do as they do because they are not open to new things. So, I knit, I bake, I weave, I sew, I drink. I smoke. I sit in rocking chairs while everyone talks about the bland details of their own lives.
I feel like a decoration when I’m with Vice at family get togethers. I am the tulip bowl holding everyone’s standard simple meal, a vessel or middleman for keeping up the status quo. I am Vice City’s required side dish when he appears.
When I first moved out to the country, it felt like freedom. There was so much space, and so many loving people. I felt possibilities. Now it seems like I’m meant to be kept in, to be a support for Vice’s wants and needs. No growing room. I’m slipping away. So sometimes I go back, alone, to the island to get some of the sameness I grew up with instead.
I see the tulip bowls filled the same way, with the same brown meal. And again I feel like me. I don’t knit when I’m here. I think I only do it in the country to belong and count the time passing. To put some of myself back together again with my own stirring hands.
I only like certain types of sameness. Maybe the photos I take are to bring some of me home.
Hope you are well,
oxox
wander willow
June 12, 1998
That beautiful man at 14th street station was playing black orpheus on his battered and red sunburst guitar. He plays what he knows by heart. I planned on saying hello this time but my train came quickly and I got stuck deep in the refrain. When his brows furrow my heart soars.
He isn’t angry like Vice, this frown was full of concentration inwards. Not a hint of negativity unless it were for the inversion of a pattern his fingers put across so gracefully, so full of story.
The subway door shuts, the overhead lights flicker an abrasive yellow at me, and I cloud out the screeching rails with a pair of oversized audiotechnicas and my mix tape which I’ve reserved for this part of my very long commute home.
Brooklyn bites. I want to be in the East Village, or maybe SoHo. Instead I’m stuck in Williamsburg, where the trains are slow, the streets have no lights, men busy with their full pockets follow me home sometimes. This neighborhood was what Vice wanted. Rent is cheap and so are we.
So I’ll take this train back, transcribe our moment from this notebook into my weblog for you, my lonely soul, to read. Now you were with me on this strobing, dizzy train ride back to a place I call home only in name.
Thank you for being here. Until another day.
oxox
wander willow