rosemary
Rosemary smells like living in a log cabin in Oregon. You've heard me talk about it; it was cold, always cold, and one day I looked up at the wall next to the front door and could see chilly sunlight through the cracks in the logs. G., my burly, six-foot roommate, was a heater fascist who thought the fireplace was plenty, and god forbid you turn on the baseboards in the bedroom. Just get under the blankets, quick, quick.
In the mornings he and T., his longtime girlfriend, would get up early and make coffee. The coffeemaker had a thermal carafe the likes of which I've never been able to find again: enough coffee for four people to have a cup, and two of us to have a second. G. would make a fire, starting it with kindling and, probably, copies of the paper I wrote for. (In the summer we'd all stand in the driveway while the boys chopped firewood.) The furniture in the living room - a giant room, the highest of high ceilings, a loft off to one side - all huddled around that huge stone fireplace, just like we did.
I have never been a morning person. J. would be up next, then me, the straggler, hoping not to have to make another pot of coffee, trying to shake off the weirdly visceral dreams I so often had. If I was really cold, I'd get coffee and stand on the stone ledge in front of the fire, turning slowly to heat all side of myself, a rotisserie girl. After my uncle died and I inherited a select handful of his musty old books, a row of green-covered classics sat along the top of the fireplace (I suppose it was a mantel, but that word seems so small), collecting dust, looking literary and perfectly in contrast with the framed cover of the Portland Mercury that hung on a nearby wall (George W. Bush's face superimposed onto the body of a little boy hugging Ronald Regan's legs).
G. cooked with a lot of rosemary. Or maybe we all did. Little pine trees, making your fingers sticky when you chopped it up. Rosemary roasted potatoes. Rosemary on dripping cuts of meat. In my tricky memory, I smell rosemary, and I see that kitchen, set against two walls of the main room, half the cupboards open, the floor a hideous linoleum. Only in Oregon country houses have I ever had a kitchen that sprawling and luxurious.
(We looked at an apartment here with a kitchen almost as big. The rent was twice what four of us paid for that log cabin.)
I was unhappy there. The three of them were old friends with old jokes, and I was a girl with one foot out the door and a great reluctance to still be in Oregon. I was supposed to be on my way back here. But I had fallen in with J. and I was willing, for a long while, to stay. I was in a certain kind of late-20s love that looks nothing like love in hindsight, but you have to trust the people you were. You have to let them have the meanings they gave to things.
He tried to break up with me once, the boy I lived in the woods with. It was half-assed, and I talked him out of it, and we stayed in the woods a while longer, playing cards with T. and G., learning to drink old-fashioneds. I learned to shoot free throws in the driveway. Two deer died in the yard, on different occasions. I spent one Thanksgiving crying under a tree, and a lot more time laughing at the coffee table, because even though I didn't fit in there, I was pretty good at having a good time anyway. I got much better at it when I stopped taking birth control pills. Then I'd only get despondent and tearful every few months, not every other week.
It all smells like rosemary. When I chop a pile of vegetables and decide, on a whim, to add rosemary to the pan, I am, for a moment, in that kitchen, in two places at once, and I have to remember that I had to be there to get here. All roads diverge. This was the right one.
In the mornings he and T., his longtime girlfriend, would get up early and make coffee. The coffeemaker had a thermal carafe the likes of which I've never been able to find again: enough coffee for four people to have a cup, and two of us to have a second. G. would make a fire, starting it with kindling and, probably, copies of the paper I wrote for. (In the summer we'd all stand in the driveway while the boys chopped firewood.) The furniture in the living room - a giant room, the highest of high ceilings, a loft off to one side - all huddled around that huge stone fireplace, just like we did.
I have never been a morning person. J. would be up next, then me, the straggler, hoping not to have to make another pot of coffee, trying to shake off the weirdly visceral dreams I so often had. If I was really cold, I'd get coffee and stand on the stone ledge in front of the fire, turning slowly to heat all side of myself, a rotisserie girl. After my uncle died and I inherited a select handful of his musty old books, a row of green-covered classics sat along the top of the fireplace (I suppose it was a mantel, but that word seems so small), collecting dust, looking literary and perfectly in contrast with the framed cover of the Portland Mercury that hung on a nearby wall (George W. Bush's face superimposed onto the body of a little boy hugging Ronald Regan's legs).
G. cooked with a lot of rosemary. Or maybe we all did. Little pine trees, making your fingers sticky when you chopped it up. Rosemary roasted potatoes. Rosemary on dripping cuts of meat. In my tricky memory, I smell rosemary, and I see that kitchen, set against two walls of the main room, half the cupboards open, the floor a hideous linoleum. Only in Oregon country houses have I ever had a kitchen that sprawling and luxurious.
(We looked at an apartment here with a kitchen almost as big. The rent was twice what four of us paid for that log cabin.)
I was unhappy there. The three of them were old friends with old jokes, and I was a girl with one foot out the door and a great reluctance to still be in Oregon. I was supposed to be on my way back here. But I had fallen in with J. and I was willing, for a long while, to stay. I was in a certain kind of late-20s love that looks nothing like love in hindsight, but you have to trust the people you were. You have to let them have the meanings they gave to things.
He tried to break up with me once, the boy I lived in the woods with. It was half-assed, and I talked him out of it, and we stayed in the woods a while longer, playing cards with T. and G., learning to drink old-fashioneds. I learned to shoot free throws in the driveway. Two deer died in the yard, on different occasions. I spent one Thanksgiving crying under a tree, and a lot more time laughing at the coffee table, because even though I didn't fit in there, I was pretty good at having a good time anyway. I got much better at it when I stopped taking birth control pills. Then I'd only get despondent and tearful every few months, not every other week.
It all smells like rosemary. When I chop a pile of vegetables and decide, on a whim, to add rosemary to the pan, I am, for a moment, in that kitchen, in two places at once, and I have to remember that I had to be there to get here. All roads diverge. This was the right one.