winter garden aglow

eggs i have known

some of the best thrift stores in boise are found on state street, or just off of it. it’s a straight shot from salvation army to st. vinnie’s to idaho youth ranch; and, if on your way to thrift row you hang a right just after the parcel post, there’s the “good samaritan,” a hidden treasure on the corner of washington and 19th.

i had four hours to kill on state street today—some part of my fiendish car was needing to be fixed, so i left it at tune tech on 12th and plodded along the slushy sidewalk, thinking it would only take an hour and a half. not enough time to make it to salvation army and browse for a significant amount of time, not that i would want to make the trip on foot in the winter anyway. so i stopped in at the good samaritan. i hadn’t visited that thrift in years. it’s still the same quirky little neighborhood shop, totally absent of hipsters, with some of the best prices of any thrift store i’ve ever been to (with the exception of dollar duds and the 94-cent salvation army outlet, both of which are now, sadly, defunct.)

today my main score was in books. i found an anthology of short stories, an anthology of short creative nonfiction stories, an old copy of "the dialectic of sex: the case for feminist revolution," and a few other miscellaneous titles, a couple of which i might write about in detail later. but i’m burying the lede: "eggs i have known," by corinne griffith.

it’s a little yellow cookbook from 1955. perhaps the best title for a cookbook ever. it starts with a quote from joseph conrad:

The intention of every other piece of prose
may be discussed and even mistrusted; but
the purpose of a cookery books is one and unmistakable.
Its object can conceivably
be no other than to increase the happiness
of mankind.

i’m burying the lede again. i’m not too interested in the book itself, aside from its cute cover and title. tucked into the middle of “a chapter on meats,” between pages 76 and 77, i found this:

transcription:

To A Dear House

When I have gone from here someone will sit
In this same chair beside the fire & knit,
In this same bed where I have slept, someone
Will sleep, unknown to me, and see the sun,
Rise through my window-pane & then unfold
Dark meadows until they turn to shining gold.
Someone will turn her key in this front door,--
And it will be her home, & mine, no more.
I know this but I hope who comes to stay,
Will know how much I loved you—yesterday.

Kitty Parsons
Rockport, Mass.

finding this was a little incredible. i just finished writing a poetry/essay piece about women and houses. when i started i was going to make a chapbook of poems about people who have made an impact on my life, with a poem for each person focused on their house in some way. then the project evolved, and i decided to write all the poems about women and their houses; each poem became a mini-biography of each woman, and i alternated them with prose that informed the poems, and collectively the piece tells a portion of my own autobiography. i think i need to write an entirely new piece centered around “to a dear house.”

i just looked up kitty parsons online, and i continue to be amazed. here’s a link to some information about her poetry:
http://myweb.northshore.edu/users/ccarlsen/poetry/gloucester/parsons_dogtown_common.htm

i’m really excited about this—there’s a lot of information about kitty online, i’ll have to go deeper into it when i don’t have an article to write that was due last thursday. i wonder if “to a dear house” was ever published. i wonder what happened to her house in rockport and who lives there now. i wonder how the hell her copy of “eggs i have known” made its way to the good samaritan thrift store on the corner of 19th and washington in boise, idaho, of all places.

that’s assuming she hand-wrote this page and owned the book. it’s too cool not to assume those things.

from http://cowhampshire.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2006/9/25/2265198.html:

Richard Henry Recchia, born Ricardo Recchia, son of Frank and Rosa Louisa (Dondero) Rocchia, was b. 20 November 1885 in Quincy MA and d. 17 Aug 1983 in Rockport Massachusetts, at the age of 98. He was a sculptor, mural painter, and illustrator. He married 1st) by 1915 to Anita D. "Ana" ---. She b. abt 1890 in Chile, South America. He married 2d) abt 1917 to Mary Catherine "Kitty" Parsons, dau of Henry Chapman & Catherine Davis (Leavitt) Parsons. She b. 19 Aug 1899 in Stratford, Fairfield Co CT, and d. July 1976 in Gloucester MA. She was a watercolor artist, especially of floral still life and marine painting, and poet. In 1942 Richard and Kitty were living in Rockport MA at 6 Summer Street. Richard Recchia was buried at the Beech Grove Cemetery in Rockport MA.

toss intern

i passed my internship! oh happy day, thank goodness it’s over. what a miserable experience it’s been, at least the BSU side of things…they basically made it as unbearably difficult to get started as possible, with more handouts and paperwork and hoops to jump through than could possibly be necessary. i have to assume all the bureaucracy was an intentional challenge, because if i don’t assume that i will choke to death on the inefficiency.

the internship coordinator guy seemed not so great—i guess i only really talked to him once, and that wasn’t fun. he comes off as kind of a jerk in all his writing, like all the assignment sheets and emails and things, but sometimes people have sort of a nasty personality in their writing and then turn out to be perfectly nice in person. i’ll never know for sure because i’m certainly never taking one of his classes.

one of the things that got under my skin was his severe and emphatic insistence that we CANNOT make ANY errors in any written materials we turn in to him. then of course he throws in a peppering of typos, grammatical mistakes, punctuation errors and whathaveyou in his own written materials. i found at least one mistake in every mass email he sent. (example: “I will send you supervisor an email with the details and the link (which is different than the one above in item 2).”) …so how about not being a hypocrite? everyone makes mistakes. perfection is a fine goal but there’s no need to be all feisty about it…doing so is just going to make people like me search for and expose your errors retributively.

i filled out my post-internship survey last week, with plenty of suggestions for improvement. it was silly, i actually started crying as i was filling out the survey. it felt so good to get all that crap off my chest and feel some hope that what i wrote might affect change before any other students have to go through the experience. but who knows, it might just be ignored. at least i got the catharsis.

fun with glowing edges