Breadcrumb #448

JOANNA BETTELHEIM

At eight years old at ten a.m. on a Saturday morning, Stephanie slathers strawberry jam on her toast. Strawberry is her favorite, thickly frosting every whole-wheat bite. She kicks her feet under her, sitting high at the kitchen counter.

    Before she can retrieve another loaded knife full, her grandmother reaches out and pulls the jar away. “You don’t want to be turned into marmalade, do you?” Stephanie’s knife remains poised in the air, glistening with smudges of pink.

     “If you eat too much sugar, you’ll get pudgy.” Baba twists the lid back on the jar. “Boys don’t like pudgy girls. And if boys don’t like you,” she disappears behind the refrigerator door, “you’ll end up a spinster. Do you know what happens to spinsters, Stephanie?” Baba pinches the blunt blade and lifts the silver knife from Stephanie’s grasp.

“Stephanie’s knife remains poised in the air, glistening with smudges of pink.”

     “They are turned into marmalade.” The knife clanks in the sink. Stephanie’s eyes grow wide. “That’s right. Zested and mashed and put into little jars with the orange and the lime.” Stephanie’s face scrunches reflexively, remembering the bitterness of the citrus spread. She hates the little bites of skin between her teeth.

    “Exactly. And you don’t want to be turned into marmalade, do you?”

    “No,” Stephanie admits, hanging her head and hooking her feet behind the legs of the chair.

    “Good.” Stephanie’s under-jammed piece of toast sits accused between them. Leaning in close, Baba whisks the plate away, dropping the toast into the trash can. “Shall we go for a walk today?”

• • •

Breadcrumb #447

MADELINE JONES

The Interlochen Bowl was empty on Sunday mornings. Rows and rows of the mental green chairs cascade down to the wooden stage, shimmering in a wet gloss. I pulled at the zipper of my red windbreaker. The rain turned steady. Down the path, sat the cluster of individual practice cabins, S Huts we called them. Each hut built of honey stained wood, their roofs drenched in chartreuse moss, carefully placed in between tall pine trees. Flutteringly came from the harp building on the bluff to the left, but nearly all of the S Huts were empty.

This was my final summer attending Interlochen Arts Camp, college in Chicago awaited me in the fall. Months ago, I declined a seat in the wind ensemble program. I loved my two previous summers at camp, but it seemed cruel to spend my last summer at home away from my mother. And I wanted to bask in the final days of unencumbered youth by the pool. My sister would be next to me with headphones on, my brother splashing his friends in the pool. Maybe I would drink for the first time with Erin and Olivia in someone’s basement. I even lined up an internship and promised my best friend, Adri, to go to all ten nights of Summer Fest, a music festival back home in Milwaukee. Then I got a call two weeks before my high school graduation. The orchestra program had a last-minute cancelation. There was no choice, I could not turn this opportunity down.

Weaving past the S huts with pianos, I got to my favorite by the dark green cabins with red trim. The Intermediate Girls Division looked like Christmas, a welcomed sight compared to the brown cabin I called home for the summer. S Hut 12 sat there waiting for me, the door half open. I climbed the two cement stairs and shut the door behind me. The hut was moist and musty, only chairs and music stands inside. My feet shuffled the sandy cement floor, the metal feet of the chairs screeched when I rearranged their order into a U shape. Careful not to pinch my hand as I slid the sticky windows back, I opened one on the north and south walls. Regardless of rain, the air was always thick with moisture, something about the Northern Michigan air and being locked in by surrounding lakes. A dry towel was something you missed, like your dog or mom’s cooking usually around week three of camp. A cellist a few huts down worked on arpeggios and the bassoonist, in the hut next to mine, started the first measures of their Mozart concerto. The rain dripped from the roof outside one of the windows. Drop. After drop. After drop. After drop. After drop. After drop. After drop.

“A cellist a few huts down worked on arpeggios and the bassoonist, in the hut next to mine, started the first measures of their Mozart concerto.”

One of the tween-filled cabins erupted in high pitch screeches, pulling me back to the reason why I ventured out in the morning at 9 A.M. while most of the camp was sleeping in, a perk of Sundays. I arranged the extra music stands, one in front for my sheet music, two on the right flipped over like a table to hold all of my tools: reeds, pencils, water, swabs, tiny screwdrivers, cork grease, key oil, and a metronome. The two chairs on my left held my case and dripping coat. I unzipped the case, revealing my clarinet tucked under the soft polishing cloth. Folding back the cloth, I pulled out the two middle joints and pushed them together, careful to align the bridge key. Then the bell at the end, and the barrel at the top leaving just a sliver of space for tuning. Finally, I gently pushed on the mouthpiece and placed my clarinet on its stand.

In the box of reeds, I rummaged for the one with four tick marks. I removed the reed from its plastic holder and plopped it in the small cup of water, letting it soak. After a few seconds, I picked up the reed and pulled it between my lips, removing the excess water. The reed returned to the face of the mouthpiece where it had been placed four times before; the black leather ligature tightened just enough to secure the reed in place.

Slowly, noodling through low registered warm-ups, sound bounced off the thin wooden walls out through the open windows, playing with the bassoonist and cello down the way. Everything rung with freshness and warmth. My upper body swayed slowly, side to side, as my fingers and breath took control. The bell of my clarinet left the resting position on my knee and circled in the air. Scales became mediations and solos became stories of late night s’mores, a first kiss by the lake, making friends from Serbia to Detroit, and never wanting to leave the four walls that surrounded me. The only time that existed was the clicks of my metronome at 60 beats per minute.

• • •

Breadcrumb #446

MICHELLE WHITTAKER

The thought of my Grandmother’s death likes to visit
the idea of a Jesus cleaned and dressed after dying

even when the clanging of cymbals or catechisms
against prayer wheels in the brain no longer lay sick.

The thought of an oncologist sketching disorganized nodules
dislikes how sleeplessness does not return the countryside I love

or my family -- who escaped to their own islands
when consuming turned into dire consumption.

The thought of the obeying silence often interrupts
this drinking, this dunderhead, who often masks abdominal pain.

Where I was made born again crawls in-and-out bed --
certain positions seem prone to restless anger.

When loving someone depressed, dying & in self-denial,
deeper the daily routine for creating art -- like a constant

circling around my Grandmother’s bed, who sings
about the imaginary violence of disease,

thinking itself mapless -- or ageless
like a luminary obedience, or the tormented knowing,

when virtue subsumes the blade ready --
soaked clean.

• • •

Breadcrumb #445

REY ARMENTEROS

When I was reading Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, I used mental approximations for oaks and elms every time I ran up against them. I would find "oak" in a sentence, and all I knew was tree. My image for oak then was nothing more than a general tree.

Outside of pine trees and palms, I had little notion of what the different types of trees looked like. I was not aware of their seasonal changes — being from Miami, I only knew one season. Tolkien's rich environment and whatever implied meaning he was driving at was lost on a reader that could never differentiate a maple from an oak.

And yet I love trees! I take notice of them every time they call my attention by a shift of sunlight or by clusters of diverse textures in the distance. I appreciate the grace of branches, and I try to memorize the exact shapes of leaves. I take whatever haphazard details I can recollect back into my studio, and I try to paint the details that remain with me.

But was a branch dark gray or brown? Was there an order of connections that the branch had as it climbed up into the canopy? I could visualize the image, but not every correct element would make it intact. Since I draw and paint from memory, understanding what you had seen earlier provides a greater advantage than merely memorizing random details.

I went to the library one day and found a few books on botany. I took them home to go about studying the categorization of plants with seriousness. I was finally going to acquire some understanding about trees.

However, I immediately ran into walls of scientific jargon. A dry text was what I encountered. Keen specificity were the barbs I had to negotiate. The first book didn't even have a warm introduction to spur me on. Before getting into the good stuff, the general groupings of species and other foundational information was too convoluted for the novice, and forty pages in, I was convinced there was not going to be any "good stuff."

I had given up, but I had not forgotten. In another part of the country, at another library, some years later, quite by accident, I found a how-to book on painting trees. I was flipping through it, convinced it was just another book on artistic technique when I slowly realized what the author was in fact doing. He was classifying the basic types of trees, grouping each one in two-page spreads, explaining through the point of view of a watercolorist what differences to look for in each type.

Enraptured, I took it home, read each spread carefully, took notes, and committed them to memory. His descriptions of what to look for provided me with building blocks. The structures of things were being decoded for me, and I was dreaming up possibilities for how to use them with my own painting techniques. I was taking my work from memory and infusing it with a system.

However, I soon took this basic knowledge and found myself asking questions, wondering why paint trees when we have real trees all over creation? Here's a charming little painting by the symbolist Gustav Klimt I find in an art history book, and the trees look so convincing. But do I want to look at Klimt's lesser known landscapes or see the actual landscape? We assume this is what the trees looked like under such lighting and other conditions. Klimt's simple, clear landscapes are beautiful, but I feel real trees are so much more than the ones that are raised in the mind's fancy with his maneuvers in oil paint.

On the other hand, I could be wrong since I have never seen the actual paintings but only photographic reproductions of them. However, regardless of which tree tickles the mind in a more direct manner, Klimt does provide ideas by the way he composes them, the manner in which he paints them, and the colors which he chooses. And these ideas, if still present to someone who had discovered them in his paintings, would bounce off the actual landscape when the time comes to look at an actual tree. And just like how the painted tree can bring up the visual characteristics of a real tree in your head, the real tree may have a tendency of invoking the tree that was made with nothing but paint marks. I know because I have seen such trees once under the same lighting conditions and immediately thought of Klimt.

“And these ideas, if still present to someone who had discovered them in his paintings, would bounce off the actual landscape when the time comes to look at an actual tree.”

It is reassuring, but after asking why paint trees, I take a broader view. Why paint anything for that matter? An open doorway within open doorways, a face in the dark?

Here is the glow that rises out of the bedroom at this late hour in the afternoon, and the orange nature of the light is noticed when I step out of the room and find that the orange room frames the blue bathroom like a sky blue rectangle cut into the wall.

I painted this thing a couple of years ago when I was transfixed by the warm and cool tones folding into these rooms. I was recreating the moment from memory. The bedroom is not orange, and the bathroom is not blue; the walls that are merely white were caught in a sunset that turned them into something else. I enjoyed the very idea of this transformation. I painted it with the orange and blue as close as I could remember.

But then, an interesting thing happened. After it was done, I could not help looking at this painting of mine about ephemeral light without acknowledging its quiet purpose lifted and turned into a silent declaration — in my mind, with time, the rectangle of the door in my painting became a long tombstone, and the feeling was now solemn.

And these unexpected ominous overtones brought up a singular beauty that I wasn't going to get from the real situation of the room in particular lighting conditions. I would like to think that my process of roaming through the depths of memory to resurrect this moment provided the bricks that would turn my quiet experience with the room into something different, something the paint discovered, as if in this room that was a part of my home, the paint found an apparition.

• • • • • • • • • • • •

Breadcrumb #444

SENECA BASOALTO

There were fourteen different sighs in my vocabulary, he said, ten times a week. Ten times fourteen is one hundred and forty, and one plus four is five – and five is one of five numbers that doesn’t make me nauseous, like dirty four. How he’d say the number arbitrarily just to watch one of my fourteen sighs gag from my throat.

Plums and arpeggio on his tongue. Plums that were a quarter size of his whole palm. Plums that could fit two at a time inside his mouth. Making me count math like a commoner, or stagger away from him with eyes rolled double on sigh number three. Two sighs for one. Elicit one sigh, get one free.

I learned the hard way to keep individual, inconspicuous, use language to skip pentagrams around dialogue so whomever is trapped on the other side of the conversation hears everything without absorbing anything.

Philip taught me that. He memorized my fourteen different sighs and directed my speech until nothing I said made sense to anyone – not even him three quarters of the time. Not because it didn’t have substance, but because the common person was prone to dragging their train of thought through the surface of every conversation. Anything that contained more than one or two layers of consideration was instinctively dismissed. Even the term “black” when used as a fall fashion trend triggered in me the urgency to remind anyone in my vicinity that before existence itself was created, there was nothingness, and nothingness was black.

I had to wear brown and call it a day.

Of course, this backfired on me later in life when I had four husbands, three friends, two enemies, and zero people who knew what I was talking about, ever. Philip had died. The cat I named after him died. And all I had left were fourteen different sighs that allocated me into maps to create the sum of division.

• • •