You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 3rd, 2008.
or real live kid. I had a telephone psychic ask me What? Were you found under a cabbage leaf or something? after I responded to the requisite Birth Date Q & A with I don’t know my birth date. That was many years ago but it took me a few more to make the connection with Cabbage Patch Dolls, which were a rage when my daughter was little. I bought her one and helped her take the oath of motherhood, never once making the correlation between the idea of a cabbage patch where the dolls were grown to be picked and sold, to my own adopted status.
Sang-Shil over at Land-of-the-Not-So Calm (I don’t know how to link yet), recently wrote about her personal quandry over not knowing her true birth date. Since it turns out that our respective acknowledged birth dates fall within days of each other, reading her post was serendipitous. I, too, have felt incomplete not knowing the date I was born. Without that date, one cannot have an astrological reading prepared or a telephonic psychic reading. Without that date, I have felt less legitimate as a child, an adolescent, a young woman, and now a woman stepping into her wisdom years.
This weight that we non-knowers of birth dates give this not knowing may seem silly or foolish or too serious (my personal favorite) to those who know their dates of birth or to those who do not consider it a big deal. and maybe in the big cosmic universe, these folks are right. A million years from now, who will care that junemoon or Sang-Shil did not know their birth dates. Will anyone know our death dates? But for now in this year of my 51st year on Planet Earth, I care.
Birth dates are a piece of an individual’s history that help anchor them in this life time. I was not a cabbage patch doll. I was not grown to be sold. I am a human being. I was born on a specific day in a specific year.
I imagine there are new folks living in our Berkeley Attic, having just moved there from somewhere else. I awoke this morning with this firm announcement in my head ~ new folks. For any of you who are familiar with the children’s book Rabbit Hill, you will remember the refrain of new folks that traveled lightening fast through the rabbit burrows and valley when the new owners of the farm arrived. And just like the animals in that story, I too hope that the Attic’s new folks are good folk.
If I sound a bit nostalgic for the Attic, I am. That space holds a special rental place in my psyche. Although the time was right to move on, the special-ness of the time and place remain.
I now live at the Compound. Jill’s (pseudonyms used to protect the guilty and innocent alike) Compound to be semi-exact. The SO lives here when he is not living with me in what Alaskans fondly call the Lower 48 (neverminding that there are 49 states lower than us). And I live here in the summers and winter holidays. We moved to this space 3.5 years ago.
The Compound consists of the main house that we share with Jill, a three bedroom rental downstairs, two cabins occupied by renters, and Jill’s work shop. We have a private space within the main house consisting of a large room, a smaller room, a bathroom and a walk in closet and we are free to share the rest of the home with Jill and her dog. Did I mention that there are 3-4 dogs on the property as well?
The people who live here (ourselves included) all seem to share a common thread ~ we seem to be a little off the center. What this means is that some of us fall within the a bit eccentric to more eccentric and others are just off the grid. I will leave it to you to assign me to the proper category. Yes, we are an interesting lot hunkered down in the Land of the Midnight Sun.
Take for example our downstairs neighbors, a young man and his wife and their dog, who summer before last asked Jill’s permission to smoke salmon in one of their bedrooms. Jill gave him the thumbs up and casually mentioned it to the SO and me as our large room is directly above the downstairs bedroom turned smokehouse. She just as casually added that she didn’t think it would be a problem as who doesn’t love the yummy fragrance of fish being smoked. The recipe that the dude used required 10 days of smoking. Steady smoking. as in do not, ever, let the smoking smells stop. not once. not ever in 10 days. Okay, in that instance I don’t know who was weirder, urrrrr I mean more eccentric, the smoker dude for coming up with the bedroom smoking idea or Jill for giving permission. So when last summer’s salmon smoking time came around, we put in our mild mannered request to the downstairs neighbor to please smoke his catch outside.
Okay. Okay. It is afterall Alaska. The place where people come to be Frontier Folk. or to hide from the law.
