Cold Frame

This week we missed Portland.

T. was invited to a poetry reading. I heard a friend had an art show, and saw an email about the last shindig of the season at our old favorite, the Hollywood Farmer’s Market. Subsequent horrors included Facebook photos of fall hikes in the Gorge and, most heart-rending, one afternoon a slim, forwarded flier advertising the second half of an OPB documentary on wild horses. Now, we would never know what had become of Cloud. Finally for me, everything culminated in a dream: a bus moving around a downtown square, not in Portland but some dreamland city. Waking, I flashbacked to my youth. So many friends’ mothers had professed unabashedly, even proudly, the inability to “drive in a city.” (Luckily, not my own mother, who’d back a flat-bed down an aircraft carrier’s runway, just to see if she could.) But it could happen to me one day—this Midwestern-woman’s fate. I saw myself trapped in a center lane, white-knuckling a steering wheel, totally bereft of my once legendary ability to parallel park.

In my experience, the bottom of any midnight cycle of self-loathing and regret, the nadir of its swirling waters, returns one always to the same place: craigslist. And just as the post-break-up haircut is contra-advised, neither should one scour the postings of a longed-for city. Look away from the vintage furniture, upcoming micro-brew festivals, and shelter kittens.

Near the end of the horrible week, my parents called. “What are you guys up to this weekend?”

Not much. T. was attempting a dish with turnips. He’d been given a free bunch, greens included, which in Portland would have been like being given a glove slap to the face: a challenge to which one rose, or buckled in shame. But as I’d reported apple pies the previous week, a second culinary experiment as highlight seemed depressing even to me. Not only did my boomer parents have cooler music and hair in their teens than me, their social lives as retirees put T’s and mine to shame.

But on Saturday morning, the actual dawn of the weekend, we surprised ourselves with a plan. Today was the day we could make the cold frame.

In Portland, we’d lived in a third floor apartment and our garden was a pot of Basil on a sill. Here, moving into a house with a yard, we built a raised bed before we unpacked all our boxes. It was August, and the locals, with their pristine acres of fiercely-tended lawn grass, doubted we’d get anything going—but we did: radishes, spinach, lettuce, arugula, kale. Only the beets didn’t make it. As of November 15th, our garden is still blooming. T. thought we could keep it past Christmas if we built a cold frame, an enclosure with clear top panes sloping toward the south.

We just needed an old set of windows. But what we needed for that was a place like Portland’s Rebuilding Center. What was the equivalent here? In an antique shop in a town nearby, T. thought he’d seen a basement supply of old windows and doors, and so we headed there first—not realizing the odyssey upon which we’d set ourselves.

The path to the antique store took us first past an auction.

I’d seen a few advertised in the paper here—and I know that auctions occur all over the country and are not indigenous to the Midwest; there’s just something about them that feels like they are. Perhaps it’s all the old men in coveralls, the collective and public process of coming to consensus on the worth of a neighbor’s household of things—thing by thing.



The auction was much like a yard sale crossed with a tent revival. (Between the auctions and the yard sales, on a summer Saturday in one of these small towns it’s as if there’s been a community disaster, all that furniture out on lawns.) Two large groups of people moved with two jabbering auctioneers, one circling carefully organized tables in the back yard and one in the front. Were there any storm windows? No. But there were twenty plastic garbage cans, eighteen rakes, exercise bikes and end tables, quilts and cake pans and then boxes of things like handsaws, sewing patterns, glass lanterns, Christmas table runners, and half-used jugs of laundry detergent T. began fondling a cast iron pan. We could really make a pork chop, he began to murmur. I counted the cash in my purse. We were getting a number.

The auctioneer rattled off roasting pans, pitchers, mixing bowls, moving quickly down to single digit prices for first choice, then down to whole groups of items. T. and I tried not to look at each other, our eyes the same size as when we heard the price to rent an entire house. When the auctioneer announced the furniture, we slipped inside the house for a peek.

And there they were: a nubby, curving, three-piece sectional couch, a velour chair, a Wurlitzer, Murphy bed (working, the sign proclaimed), mod dressers and credenzas. The house could have served as a set from Mad Men. In the thin air around my thudding heart arose the wails of urban hipsters, choir invisible. And though I’d scoffed at those kids in their skinny jeans and body art back when I’d lived in PDX, I came charging out of that house with my number, freak flag, flying.

And I won that gold velour parlor chair for $2.



Do you want the sectional too ma’am? The auctioneer teased. The audience laughed, this joke being repeated for me. No one had wanted that couch, not even for a dollar.

We picked up a cast iron pot for $5, and then a granite roasting pan for $4. Now how will the windows fit in the car? T. said, the first to recall the day’s intended project as we struggled down the street with our purchases.

We would eventually find our materials—but not before an afternoon of rabbit trails from Antique stores to a glass shops, to random dumpsters by the railroad tracks, various yard sales, and a junk shop run by a little old man, a World War II vet, who held forth on aging, wives, Idaho, and school buses all while standing in front of a barn of used storm windows—but, oh, no, he didn’t have anything for sale. All those windows he was using. It was finally a tip from a employee at Rural King—a warehouse store deserving of its own entry—who frowned, shook his head, frowned, shook his head, and finally admitted he had almost backed his truck over someone’s discarded stack of used windows the other night, and where had that been? Finally, he remembered: his daughter’s neighbors. What street did she live on? He shook his head. Oh, no. But, he could describe how to get there—and we braced ourselves for another set of local directions: turn right by the new fence, left where the big tree used to be…

By the time we began building our cold frame, the sun was slipping behind the neighbor’s house. In the past few weeks, with most of the corn suddenly vanished, shorn down to its stubby stalks, our town’s true land formations have revealed themselves. The world is flat and bare here, even the leaves flying away, sometimes spinning straight up into the sky. I am aware fully of how different is this landscape from the one I knew in New Mexico, and in Oregon; at the same time, with all these stick-figure trees and burr-ish bushes, the great white-washed slate of sky, I feel so weirdly at home.

So how was our Saturday? How would we have spent this day if we were in Portland?

I knew enough not to ask T. directly—not after the week we’d had.

We surveyed our work and cracked two Stags, a brand we’ve begun drinking because it comes in aluminum. Our new town doesn’t recycle glass.

Now that we’re here—either exemplified in contrast, or exaggerated in holdout—we’re such Portlanders.

Then T. says he thinks we can plant another row of lettuce yet. We’ve still got all those seeds.

Zombie Night

Yesterday, working the door at my school’s trick or treat event, I greeted some 2,000 of my fellow citizens while dressed as the bride of Frankenstein. Attendance estimates ran indeed as high as my white-and-black-striped beehive wig. But even if overestimated by half, the figure’s enough for bafflement. Barely does the entire county boast 20,000 souls. Apparently, from transformers to T-Rexes, from Hannah Montana to Hanna-Barbera, we all love our Halloween. Picture it: a small town and a dark October night (given, a year when the World Series involves two other teams) where a community event can actually draw the community.

I came home bushed. The librarians built a spooky maze through the stacks. The chemistry teacher, a former monk, wore a cowled robe as he passed, purple smoke brewing in a test-tube. Students in 70’s platforms or 80s rocker skirts, dressed as nerds, Geishas, cowboys, or news anchors helped direct traffic. One of my co-workers had lit upon the trick of inserting a balloon into the top of my sagging wig, but still, I’d left exhausted by all that hair. How were there so many people in this town? Who were they? Most had no idea who I was, but they’d smiled at me as I bent to smile at their children, my black lipstick cracking.

I’ll to add it to my list of things to do when new in a town: go out in a disguise. It’s nice to be where no one is very sure of every name; where all of us are in zombie make-up.

Luckily, back home, there was a frozen pizza in the fridge (no energy tonight for quinoa, not to mention squash curry or pumpkin gnocchi—most recent, grasping attempts to retain foodie-status so hard cultivated as Portlanders).

Luckily, too, an episode of 30 Rock, T. already in place on the couch.

Two months ago, T. and I forswore cable, snobbing it up for the guy from Mediacom, whom we weren’t averse to letting assume more noble pastimes on our part. Or, so we’d assumed. Instead, he’d looked around our barren rental, its piles of flimsy boxes of flimsy books, and, as if reading right through to our barren souls, said, “Oh, you’ll want cable soon.”

“We’re going to try it first and see,” T. squeaked in response, already suspecting he would indeed come to wish we’d sprung for cable. I’d have been more scared, too, but was busy sweating out a previous prediction, delivered moments earlier by our Mediacom oracle as he’d run a cable to my second floor office: it could take “a few hours” for our Internet to activate. What was I supposed to do for two hours offline? Learn to knit? (But how!)

The big secret—don’t tell the cable guy—most nights do find T. and the cat and I flopped on our beleaguered, well-traveled couch griping about Jay Leno, and his show that now dominates one-third of our channel options. How can that idiot be so popular? How can any majorly-produced, “mainstream” program derive so much humor from seventh-grade homophobia, with so little remark? How does any respectable actor agree to appear on this circus of dog tricks and fake tans?

But, on Thursday nights we get 30 Rock.

I began peeling the layers of my Wal-Mart Halloween-aisle nail polish. This season’s first few episodes have taken up my material, invoking the divide of urban and rural, blue and red, the coasts and the heartland. At the end of the season opener, fictional New York network executive Jack (Alec Baldwin) leans in to glare at the home audience while reciting, “Give the people what they want,” as the show cuts directly to, yes, Jay Leno’s. What else does America want? Country, answers the blond star Jenna, donning white boots and vamping to the Monday Night Football theme.

In tonight’s episode, Jack and Liz (Tina Fey) drive south, leaving their urban island for a rural outpost in search of a new cast member to whom “the people” will respond. “There is no ‘real’ America,” Liz insists, directly countering a distinction drawn by Sarah Palin (as well as recalling Fey’s impersonation). Jack—the Republican, a romantic cynic, nostalgic for the good old days of the good old boys—maintains there is more heart in the heartland, and that it can be brought back to Manhattan for profit. Before they leave, his aide attaches a fake (lesser) label over the real label on the underside of his tie, effecting Jack’s “country” disguise.

The joke of the episode turns on Liz’s assertion coming true: the rural inhabitants of Stone Mountain are just as mean-spirited, foul-mouthed, and clubbish as the New Yorkers. “We’re all the same. We’re all Americans,” Liz taunts Jack.

Beyond the gore-splattered surgical masks tonight, I didn’t see much that was, truly, evidence of the one all-encompassing ugly American. An overheard exchange confusing a student dressed as a Geisha (yes, a Japanese figure) with “the real Chinese students,” referring to actual Asian International students, not Chinese (and who were dressed as monsters, and naughty nurses), would have stopped the heart of my Study-Abroad-Administrator sister. But I fear this is a mistake made often in New York too.

It’s always the lesson: it’s too easy to lump black and white—or, red and blue. This small town in Illiana is not interchangeable with any other; it’s not like the one where T. grew up, 200 miles away, and it’s not like the one I’m from, 300 miles further. One “heartland” town isn’t the same as any other, just as Seattle is not Houston, Boston not San Diego.

Tonight, hundreds of fellow citizens came out to a cornfield for free candy, for a family event with neighbors. This is in a community with a major chocolate brand as a major factory employer, with so many acres of that corn grown for snack chips. Less than a mile from the school, a state prison houses a population nearly one-third of the town's, and at night its tower lights glow over the corn like a moon. The clown shoes, bloody butcher aprons, and Disney princesses only fit amidst this weirdness.

I am told that when we give away groceries for holiday meals later in the year, the lines will stretch out the door.

But even as the categories, urban and rural, feint and dance from the claimed corners of their distinctions—in wealth, opportunity, power, values—they dissolve.

One of my students was giving away carved pumpkins—these from the garden, where two weeks ago I’d been on the team rescuing the last produce from the frost. A green, un-ripened pumpkin can be cut early and brought indoors to keep turning as long as its “intake” stem is put into a vat of water.

“I didn’t think you’d be in to that sort of thing,” he commented as I loaded my car with my prize.

A pumpkin? A community garden? Wearing a beehive wig (lilting to the left now) and black nail polish?

“Small children?” I joked as trick-or-treaters came and went. “Only once a year.”

The pumpkins he’d carved were beautiful, each with a panel cut away, flipped around, carved with a ghoul’s face, and re-inserted deep within the pumpkin. I’d never seen the trick before. He’d researched it online.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, embarrassed. Then, “it’s cool. Never mind.”

And we laughed. And went home, probably, to eat our same candy giveaways in front of the same TV shows.

Unless he has cable.