I’ve been posting updates on the Provincetown Facebook group, trying to stay ahead of the villagers with pitchforks who might object to anything resembling change.
People hate differenting as much as dogs do.
It’s also a way for me to begin getting to know my neighbors, and for them to suss me out a bit. Who is this interloper who’s landed in such a prominent location? What is she doing to our town, and to a house that, though it’s literally falling down, is familiar?
As one local said in anger about the tree I removed, “Just because it’s rotting and falling apart doesn’t mean you take it down!”
Since that debacle I’ve been posting regular updates of the goings on with the house. I am not, in fact, taking it down, though if the various town boards and commissions don’t hurry up it may collapse on its own. I’m not even changing the way it looks by much—not at all in the front.
Still, I want to have a conversation with my neighbors, and with the town.
You may have noticed the excavator blocking the street. That’s taking out what remained of the giant stump, so that I can replace that old tree with a new shade tree.
Look! The masons are starting to build my bluestone wall, where before a broken, concrete curb lined the property.
It’s been fun posting the updates, and people have been receptive and for the most part kind and encouraging.
I also like playing Flip the Troll, wherein with the right tone, the right words, and a deft hand with heart and happy face emojis, one can change a repeat commenter’s outlook. It’s satisfying to watch withering criticism shift to grudging confusion, then acceptance, then positivity.
God, I’m such a sadist.
Anyway, after I took the puppy out at around 3:30 this morning, I was too awake from the drenching rain to fall back to sleep. That doesn’t happen til she’s ready to go out again.
I started scrolling Facebook. A woman named Beth, a member of the Provincetown page, had been very friendly. During a “what tree will I plant” discussion she’d suggested I get a persimmon tree, one of my favorite fruits. I’d sent her a friend request. She accepted, and wrote on my post.
“Thanks for the friend request. I’ve gotta ask… are you THE MARJIE ALONSO from Paved Country?”
Of all the things a person could be outed for in Provincetown, I marveled, writing had not been on the list.
I was flattered. Mortified. Touched. Bewildered.
I was all the words.
“I cover several songs from those CDs,” she continued.
She then posted Youtube links to some of our songs. CD Baby had uploaded them, but I never knew they were there.
Floored. I was floored. I’d left that world so long ago, but someone remembered.
“I’d love to hear you!” I wrote back.
Then she tagged me in a post to someone else I didn’t know:
“Ann, a writer is coming to town. Marjie Alonso.”
It was 3:30 am. I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating, dreaming, or misreading the entire thing, so I put away the phone. Today it was all still there.
Beth can’t know about the abrupt turn I had to make in life a year ago. She can’t know how I miss many parts of the many lives I’ve left behind, and many of the people that filled them.
And while she is lovely, I wonder if she knows what kindness she gave, and what a plank she pushed me out on.
A writer is coming to town.
The wind and rain are sheeting today here in Boston, and Provincetown is being hit harder still. I spent the morning reworking my proposal for the historic commission, which I’ll present on Wednesday. Then comes the zoning board, then the building permits.
Assuming the house makes it through this and subsequent storms with enough structure to build from, work might be able to begin in February.
And maybe, come summer, I’ll be sitting in a little house, once a painter’s studio, now destined for a woman with a beagle and a keyboard, her next life started long ago; a typewriter ribbon of recipes and songs, guidelines and lessons, mission statements and essays tying the decades together and leading to a small town in the middle of Massachusetts Bay.
A writer is coming to town.
All of this occurred in the early morning hours before my new friend and colleague Heidi Croot published a wonderful piece in Brevity Blog, link to the article there, that included the following:
This brief story contains everything I want to say to you—you who share your circle with a writer, whether child, partner, parent, cousin, friend.
And it is this: that you have the power to change your writer’s life. That with holidays coming, and birthdays always upon us, the time is now. That your gift list couldn’t be easier.
You can offer your inborn curiosity. Ask: how’s the writing going? What are you working on? Got anything ready for reading? Writers who aren’t quite ready will say so. With gentle respect, keep asking. But many of us write out of a deep yearning to share our hardest truths. We write from the white light of trauma, others from irrepressible ideas, still others from whimsy and imagination.
Thank you all for your ongoing encouragement and kindness. It means more to me than you can possibly know.
Now that I’m a writer I probably won’t do any writing for the next couple of weeks as the Things and She Things will be coming and going and other visitors will be here and I’m likely to wander away from the computer for too long.
If I don’t make it back before then, I wish you all happy holidays past, impending, and new year!
Morning Teaistisms
I don’t love rooibos tea. It generally satisfies none of the things I want in tea, and I have a hard time understanding why, exactly, but I think it’s for the same reason I don’t like Grey Goose vodka. It’s annoyingly floral without having any real personality. If you’re going to be floral, at least be a queen about it.
Tea Forte, however, has a tea tasting assortment that includes African Solstice, a mix of rooibos tea “layered with sweet berries and rose.”
Oookay.
It’s less bad than plain rooibos tea. Which, I’m guessing, is why Tea Forte has not hired me to write tea reviews for them.
Still, on a very rainy, swampy day, it’s not a bad cup to drink. Plus I’m kind of glad it’s gone.
Marjie, I LOVE this post! Reading it lifted my spirits in every way. I love the variety of topics, and your recording! I’ll be searching out more songs, but probably not rooiboos tea. Thank you and bonito dia.
Gotta add some adjectives:
A delightful, talented writer is coming to town!
They have no idea…. 😉
You always seem to have just the right wee lift of humor in your writing that makes me smile, or chuckle, or even allow me to annoy my family with a laugh-out-loud! Thank you. Keep at it, please!