April 29, 2005
five kinds of happy
(for the Stonesoup Friday theme)
Effervescent Happiness is the bubbly feeling you get when you wake up and it’s your 5th birthday and you just know that there will be frost on the ground, and a cake the shape of a volcano, and a bright new bicycle with a real bell.
Happiness Mash is that warm contented kind of happiness you experience in the comfortable company of good friend and hearty food. Take some mates along to Cordoba Nights (where the Purple Onion used to be) and try the pure de papas – potatoes mashed with béchamel and nutmeg. The friendly service (complimentary home-made pâté and Spanish lessons) will enhance this variety of happiness.
Tidy Happiness is when everything is in its place. When you’ve been living out of bags for months, and finally you have your own house, and you have shelves, and storage bins, and everything belongs somewhere, and is easily found. And you’ve just bought new spice racks. I should have made something, but don’t really have the space or energy for carpentry. But bought spice storage systems are so pathetic, most only hold 6-8 spices, 16 at best. Huh. Who can survive on 16 spices in this day and age? And afford to pay a couple of hundred bucks for the little rack and jars? I found some cheap ones that hold 14 spices each. So if you put three racks in a row that’s 42 spices, which is livable. And now there’s bench space for chopping things up and making cups of tea. Hurrah! Also new (actually old) bookshelves that are customisable. Sapphy is very pleased with them.
Scentual Happiness is the kind that can only be triggered by smell. When you open a packet of aniseed and it smell like Christmas. Or when you cut open an orange...
Ginkgoes
I read a poem today, with recurring ginkgoes,
after Eduardo quoted the poet on his blog
saying that recurring motifs are all about
childhood trauma. So I’m wondering,
what’s up with the ginkgo?
I have decided to defy logic and claim
a new motif. Maybe oranges, because I remember
the scent on Colette’s hands.
*
My mother planted a ginkgo tree
outside our house in Windsor Street.
In autumn I pressed the yellow leaves
between the pages of Britannica.
(The newsreader tells me the surface of Titan
is like Crème Brûlée, with tangerine rivers
and marmalade skies. I dip bread in eggs and wonder
if orange scented shampoo would change anything,
and what do crushed orange leaves smell like?)
Years later I found a leaf between Fauvism
and favela. It was split up the middle like a hoof print,
still so yellow. In a dish on the dresser I let it gather dust
until the colour left it.
*
There were days when it seemed I would
burst. I made small incisions, a way of letting the juice
flow out slowly. Bright splashes that fell
on the ground like rose petals.
The scars on my arms
are fading, now they merely keep track
like stamps in a passport.
*
I remember Colette cutting the oranges
into segments, sun on her black hair,
the scent of beeswax candles, the silver
candle snuffer like a bell.
Outside the window
a wooden horse swung
under the ginkgo tree.
I’m struggling to come up with a fifth kind of happiness. I’m impressed that I’ve managed to come up with four. Though two of them are really just memories of happiness in the past. And all of them are related to food, which is ironic, given that I am struggling with an eating disorder, and food is making me miserable and destroying my life. Huh.
But...
maybe number five is that little fluttering that stirs in your chest every so often when you dare to hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be happiness waiting, just around the next corner.