The Peonies

My father dug up my mother's peonies.

To be more precise, I should say he dug up the granddaughters, great-great-great-great (although I am not totally sure how plant lineage goes) ones of my mother's mother's peonies.  From their first seeded spot, they were uprooted, replanted and survived somehow.  My mother, though lacking tangible roots to pull from the ground, moved herself with them: from Fairfield to Oyster Bay, with minor pauses in between, to see what this great  idea of family really entailed.

I don't remember what the peonies looked like in full bloom when they were loved and tended to.  I was too young and too self-satisfied to wonder or even notice what our front garden really looked like.  I knew there were bushes, flowers alive, that I could crouch to and smell and have my mother take pictures of me smelling.

Today the front garden is a naked rectangle.  Only a few determined and resistant (even to towering, heavy, six-foot-six-skirting adversaries) growths of small weeds, pointy reaching leaves, remained.  Only the smallest patch of green, the can-survive-the-apocalypse kind of green, hints at the suburban ideal it once was and the mess it became.

"When are you going to dig up the peonies for me?" she says on the phone in her apartment ten minutes away.  Those peonies are Very Important, she said.  They are from Fairfield.

I know, I know, I said.  But I don't dig.  I wanted to help my mother, to salvage something sacred from the wreckage of divorce.  She wanted to be reminded, maybe, of who she was Then.  She needed to see proof that it existed.  And though I walked past that slowly tangling mess every day, I could not bring myself to dirty my knees, my hands digging into that malleable heart and search for something I couldn't identify by sight or touch.

In ten years, the colors grew less vibrant, the flowers died.  Skinny legs of crabgrass and those scraggly, looming peony stems persisted.  My father let the garden go, and I'm sure the neighbors who didn't know gave us names:   The Family Unable to Keep Live Things.  The Ones Who Fell Apart.  Instead of flowers, stacks of aging newspapers grew among us in the living room, sharp voids took root as my mother packed away her things.  I could hear my father come home late at night when I should have been asleep, could hear his dragging movements up the staircase to see that we were still there, breathing, under his roof, before drifting into his own dreams on the couch.

But I don't understand what prompted the events of last week - the pulling, tearing, the ripping out of earth.  Ten years ago and my father decides to do this now.

I was supposed to save the peonies, I said.  Mom will be mad.

"It was all weeds.  I threw them out."

(copyright 2008 jill capewell)

Ernest Hemingway

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."



It is potential that every other hip savvy thinks-theyre-gonna-make-it aspiring writer has this tattooed on their left forearm, but even that's okay, because I just discovered this quote today and I think it's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

I was getting disappointed because I hadn't written nearly as much as I thought I could this summer, but today after work I sat in a park, originally intending to read some of Johnathan Safran Foer's novel, Everything is Illuminated. But I thought of words and phrases and things I need to tell someone someday, and I couldn't let it slip away so I rushed to write it all down. I even got up once or twice, thinking its too hot, thinking its time to go home, but I had to sit back down because I was thinking good thoughts and I had to be ready to remember them.

Coney Island is a photo opportunity...

And, naturally, a stop at the photo booth by the Wonder Wheel was needed.

one item that will never leave my wardrobe

This afternoon, I was sitting on the couch with my dad, a third-generation union electrician, after we both got home from work. I told him that yesterday I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time with my friend Kristina and then took the D train to Coney Island.

"I was there when I was an apprentice. It was ....real depressed then." My dad's internal map of the city must be cultivated from years of commuting at ungodly hours five or more days a week, working in buildings around the boroughs at their various stages of completion. Like any time I mention the city, he told me about seven million ways I could have gotten around and back to Penn or Jamaica stations, all in his thick & stereotypical Noo Yawk accent.

He jumped back to the topic of the Brooklyn Bridge and the waterfalls that were recently installed, "They tell ya all about them, but they don't tell ya where to see them!" Apparently, the last time my father put foot to Brooklyn Bridge was in a protest ("you were four yea-uhs old,") against some company that wasn't building in Manhattan. They shut down the automobile lanes for one day and walked across. "You don't realize how much it sways when you're driving," he said. Kind of exciting for a generally straight-laced kinda guy.

And, true to his six-foot-six and equally large, lovingly and exasperatingly blue-collar personality, "I got my picture in Newsday, well, you could see my head over everyone else's. You wouldn't have known it was me, but I was in the picture."

I suddenly realized I was wearing the perfectly worn in shirt I had dug out from Grandpa's dresser years earlier and kept in heavy wearing rotation since:


My friends call it "the scary baby t-shirt." I call it the softest, best fitting t-shirt I own, one that my dad got at an electrician's apprentice picnic in the seventies or eighties, before he had a house, kids, a regular spot at the local bar...a shirt that makes me a little more closer to thinking of my dad as human.

what is those ephemera?

I'm going to ignore the gross grammar misuse in that question and tell you. Anyway, you've reached the cockeyed ramblings of a college student & writer. When I'm home, I schlep around moderately priced omelets and paninis at a quaint small-town cafe on Long Island and perfect the art of teen movie appreciation with ladies I've known since the kindergarten bus stop.

I'm Jill, and this is just another place to shamelessly plug myself on the Internet.

But wait, you say - why the hell did you choose the name those ephemera? Well, I didn't want to use my name, I liked the word (learn something new: according to that handy dictionary on my macbook, it means 'things that exist and are used or enjoyed for only a short time'...kind of like blogs) and the name "ephemera" was already taken. Don't worry, I'll probably regret the pseudo-intellectual-artsy streak that inspired this pretentious name in a month or two. We'll work through it together.