Tired Summer

Ode to the kitchen table.

We need trash bags Tavi says, sweetly, as if this statement is a revelation and not a conversation that we’ve been having daily for a week. I don’t respond (what more is there to say?) but at the grocery store I slip down the plastic for your home aisle and suss out a selection fitting for our tiny under the sink bin. Back home Tavi unloads them from the nylon bags we’ve schlepped upstairs. She tucks the trash bags in the cupboard where they belong, then settles in at her desk to tackle statistics while I start dinner. We have begun cleaning the kitchen each night before bed and it helps so much in the morning. This, too, feels revelatory, even though it’s common sense and has been modeled for us by a slew of elders and accountable peers. I get up early now, in the small hours when the light is still orange and slanted from sunrise. Tavi gets up with me and makes the coffee, one eye barely open, before crawling back into bed. I’m a night owl with an anxious stomach- in the mornings I feel it all and it makes me frantic. The steaming chemex grounds me, the scent of hot coffee filling the kitchen like the thousands of leisurely mornings we’ve spent together before. If there’s time I knit a little, or read a page from my book. Between eating breakfast and packing lunch I hold the stones from the windowsill and peer out the window into the garden to breathe in the day.

When homophobia and transphobia blossom in the news or crop up in my inbox I often think: I should write about this or that domestic insight; show them the two of us bumping hips while we wash the dishes and wipe down the counter and sweep the floor. Homos, they’re just like you! But I know, in my heart of hearts, that this is not a valid reason to document our days. I know because pleading with anyone about your own humanity is like trying to swim in quicksand. You might not drown, but you’re not jumping up to run any time soon either. Is it optimism to hope that a well placed please might change someone’s fossilized beliefs? Will my hardswept floors ever be virtuous enough for my love and me to exist alongside them? I’m not sure it works that way. I can perfect the stitches in my quilts until they mirror those made by my ancestors but that will never allow some folks to accept that they come into this world through my capable, woman loving, hands.

While it’s the overt homo/transphobia that has me up and wanting to sing and dance a wholesome rendition of my days, those bills, that violence, they’re just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the small everyday encounters below the surface that weigh on me. Microaggressions are ruining my posture! I say that lightheartedly, but I see it in the mirror- erosion in the slopes of my shoulders. Especially since moving from Chicago to Milwaukee. Here I spend the majority of my time around folks who are not dykes, and that’s okay, you know? It’s even good most of the time. Many of the non-dykes in my life are queer and/or allies. Some aren’t and we manage to find common ground just the same. Quilts, plants, and food do a lot of heavy lifting in my life. I don’t let hurtful statements or ignorance go by unchecked and to balance that unwavering commitment I cultivate a generous practice of forgiveness. The truth is that I’d be very lonely if I limited my world to people who reflect my self. Still, as I climb the stairs to our apartment I feel my spine unkinking with each slight elevation. I step into the warm, bright kitchen, still coffee scented from the morning, and lean into Tavi with a sigh of relief. To be seen and known is a weightless feeling, euphoric. 

It is exactly this feeling that has me devoted to the world we cultivate around our kitchen table. Teak topped and orange legged, this surface has held it all. For years and years it has been the center of our home and the place where we gather our people. Our people. I’m not sure if they sensed that we needed them, or if they needed us, but this summer saw a steady stream of beloveds through our doors. They’ve come to us from Minneapolis, Chicago, and Ypsilanti. By train and by Subaru. For weekend after weekend our front hall has been tangled with canvas shoes and wide strapped sandals. The fridge has been bursting with carefully tended produce grown in the soil of other places that we still call home. Our mirrors have been full of wide grins and flushed cheeks and hair shoved back off of sweaty foreheads. The house warms quickly when it’s full of bodies. After months of gathering around it the table fairly glows. I feel brighter too, shored up by the love, the firm yesses, the strong hands, the clear voices of far flung community. Bolstered, too, by the occasional appreciative glance at my dad-jeans clad butt. 

After our last guest left I shoved all of my to-do piles aside and pieced together a doll out of pale green, garage sale placemats. I gave her tired posture and long legs. Wide shoulders and a shimmering blonde rattail. She looks like this summer, to me. Bright and exhausted. She has rested on the shelf, elbows on knees, while I’ve tackled the studio. A few hours spent tidying and knocking out projects in the early evening feels akin to cleaning the kitchen at night. I wake up clear minded, with more ease. From the shelf her butch posture reminds me to write with love, for my beloved community, the haters be damned. In the end there will be a record of us, our clean floors and our tender care for one another. 

Links

Unrelated, but related: Dyke Domesticity on Our Vexed Affection for "Lesbian Connection"

Butch Closet // Phranc in Ann Arbor

Do you… qwirkle?

<3
Grace