[Editor’s Note: Hey, y’all. Got inspired to write porch emails again after re-watching You’ve Got Mail and helping inspire Erik to send a letter about all that he’s publishing and doing (!) with his press, Drum Machine Editions. You can subscribe to his newsletters here.]
“It’s the season for novels.” I wrote that on a to-do list in late 2020. I also wrote “flu shot,” “request vote by mail,” and “ballot track.” 2020 and 2021 were also a season, for me, of getting things together: moving to North Carolina, doing everything in my power to get a job as soon as possible, registering my car and waiting months for the DMV appointment, buying a kitchen table. Only just now am I finally establishing care with Asheville doctors, an accomplishment that makes me feel grounded here, like making plans with new friends, and finally writing again.
Settling into a place we are happy to be living has been full of anxiety, and (I can finally say) the greatest relief. I can see in every new project that I am climbing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: car registration, cooking healthy meals, reading the Neapolitan novels in a frenzy, growing tomatoes, writing. Up, up, and up. And it all started with having a job. What a gift it is to have a secure job. What a subtle hurricane it was to not have a sustainable income for so many years.
The story I tell about these tomato plants is that our new, kind friends gave me the starters, they were incredibly successful, there are 4 huge jars of homegrown tomato sauce in the freezer, and I finally grew something on my own.
They fell over in some strong winds, an occasional phenomenon in Asheville’s climate. I cursed the flimsy, overpriced tomato cages I bought in a hurry on the Saturday that I had urgently deemed planting day. After they fell, I had the idea to secure them with twine and tent stakes, which looked sturdy, but fell again the next week. Erik pointed out I’d put the stakes in backward—the sharp ends should point inward, toward the plants. Placing them in the correct direction, it worked. I have only used tent stakes two or three times in the past 5 years, a sobering figure, but also fine and forgivable, because I have been doing other things besides camping, which is very high on Maslow’s pyramid.
We are trying to teach Doug persistence. He knows that, “Where’s your ball?” means that he should grab the toy, because we’re about to play. But he doesn’t always try very hard to find the ball, just looks in the immediate vicinity, then looks to us to locate a ball for him if none is nearby. He knows we have a kitty of his toys above the refrigerator.
Now we are training him to find the ball by means of hide-and-seek. The ability to check each room, every surface, is something new for him to be proud of. Something for us to talk to our friends about for minutes on end. We do that to everyone, talk on and on about Dougie, Douglas, Dougie PG. People smile, lovingly, only because they are such kind friends, and he is an objectively cute dog. At long last, we have some kind of sovereignty that is a refuge for our kind: anyone not ready to hear about Doug and tomatoes and lacto-fermentation and (as it were) skincare products wouldn’t last long here.