sea salt

Last week our marriage certificate finally arrived, which means that I could begin the process of legally changing my name.  To me, the issue of whether or not a woman takes her husband's name is far too interesting to far too many people, and I have found myself annoyed at the explanations, considerations, and opinions of people who feel very strongly one way or another. I honestly never cared much, but the final decision was to take my husband's name legally while continuing to write, submit and (hopefully) publish under my given name, the name I've been for 27 years, the name that I have spelled out infinite times because it is how the world recognizes me: Dianna Calareso.  On the way to the office I called my sister and complained.  I didn't want to fill out forms, didn't want to change my written identity as if I am no longer the same person, didn't want to wait in line at the mercy of federal employees.  Of course, I am thrilled to be married to a p...

I spoke with a woman who wants my help as she begins writing short stories. "I've never written a story before, never in my life!  I'm a songwriter, but I've never written anything else before." "Look," I said, "in order for anyone to do anything, you have to have never done it before." She didn't respond, so I took a different approach.  "Before you wrote your first song, you'd never written a song before, right?  At one time, Johnny Cash had never written a song before, and then he became Johnny Cash." "Yes, that makes sense..."  My limited knowledge of the language of music helped us get one step closer together.  I speak writing and she speaks music, but somehow we had to communicate if we were going to successfully work together to create something new.  I asked her what she had written so far. "I have the idea for the beginning and the end, but nothing in between.  I don't know what ya...

( Photo courtesy of lenayoga.com)  (published in Her Nashville) While I am in half moon pose, my DVD yoga instructor says, "Notice how even the slightest movement, even breath, affects the balance." I am balanced on my left leg, my left arm on the ground in front of me; my right leg and right arm are in the air. If I look up, my balance is shaky, and I must look down to steady myself. If I lean to the left and start to wobble, I pull my weight to the right to even things out. When I first began practicing yoga a month ago, I was convinced it was all about learning to achieve perfect balance - in my mind, you were either completely still, breathing calmly, or you were in a heap on the floor. Anyone who practices yoga knows this is not the case, and now I do, too. The goal of the poses is not only to learn balance, but to learn what balance is. True balance, in my experience, is not standing statue-still. It starts out a little shaky, a little tiring, and a little...

We arrived in Nashville a week ago. This time it was a one-way flight, a permanent move, a plan to stay. He has been living here, and now I live here, and so we will live here. Here is where we are. The list of things to do grows every day. I am used to changing my address (I had four addresses in the five years I lived in Massachusetts), but this is a new geographical identity. The first order of business is the car that brought me here. Beyond the obvious changes (Tennessee license plate, Tennessee license, local car insurance), there are the minor adjustments: remove at least one ice scraper from the trunk, store the shovel, snow brush, and insulated gloves, and peel off the parking stickers that have become a part of my peripheral vision while driving. Like all major cities, Boston and its surrounding neighborhoods have limited space for parking. People move to the cities faster than the cities can create more space, so the solution is to zone off streets for resident park...

(Photo courtesy of: Marie Gabrielle ) My parents didn't remember under which weeping willow my father proposed to my mother, forty years ago on the Public Garden in Boston.  To prove that he's not a jerk, my dad listed off several of their early dates: to the movies to see The Graduate , dinner at the top of the Prudential Center, a day trip to Cape Cod.  "Do you remember when you said 'I love you'?" I asked. "Yeah, three or four times a day," my father replied. "No, but when?  Where?  The first time?" "I don't remember." "Mom?" She laughed.  "I don't remember, either.  One of those things you think you'll always remember." I was disheartened.  I remember the proposal like it was yesterday.  The jeans, the red striped shirt, the Styrofoam cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee, the cold sand under our feet because April in Boston is still not beach weather.  I remember the "I love you...

In geometry, there are families of shapes considered special.  Special quadrilaterals: parallelogram, rectangle, rhombus, square, trapezoid, and kite. Special triangles: 3-4-5 (and other Pythagorean triples), 30-60-90, 45-45-90, and Fibonacci. The heart is a tilted square with two semicircles on top; the star is a pentagon with five triangles attached. We see with rods and cones, we walk erect because we have a long tubular spine, and the artist has long praised the geometrical symmetry of the female form.  Geometry may graphically represent the sterile, analytical, and exact nature of mathematics, but it also helps us connect.  We combine regular shapes to create special shapes, we connect lines at points so we can reach each other, and we use our physical shapes to wholly interact.  We are a sum of our shapes, and our unique shape-ness is special. This afternoon we picked out our wedding bands, and mine will be made out of go...

The past few days have been overcast. Boston has been gloomy, rainy, and grey. It is May, but there is a little bit of winter in every month in New England, and this month I am having a rough time. I have just completed five weeks’ worth of training for two different part-time online jobs, crammed for and taken the GRE, and adopted a dog for nine days while my friend and her husband are out of town. The dog and my two cats tolerated each other, but all three animals were on edge in my small apartment. I was stressed about their stress, guilty about leaving the dog in his pen at night so he wouldn’t scuffle with the cats, and overwhelmed by the major tasks still to complete: the wedding, the move, and the job(s) I’ll need to support us while my fiancé is in graduate school. Usually upbeat, my attitude was floating in a puddle of rainwater. I arrived home last night after spending some time with my fiancé, most of which I spent coughing and complaining about the new dog allergy I t...

This morning I kept repeating the dreams to myself so I wouldn't forget them: sharks and wedding, sharks and wedding, sharks and wedding... I wanted to remember the dreams so I could ask a friend at school what they meant. She is an amateur dream interpreter, a businesswoman, teacher, mother, and wife. I trust her opinion. It was a restless night, and I never slept for more than an hour at a time. Each time I fell back asleep, I re-entered the dream I'd been having, one of two vivid dreams that I'd never had before. Dream 1: We are in a boathouse at the end of a dock leading back to a house. The boathouse and dock are surrounded by choppy water rising up in angry waves around us and splashing the dock. We hold hands and run from the boathouse to the new house, but as we run along the dock we are attacked by sharks. The sharks are everywhere, and there seem to be millions of them - they jump up and snap at us, they land on the dock and thrash their bodies, they b...

(Photo courtesy of: Aram Terchunian, Geotimes.org) I said yes on a sandy beach on April 10. The sand was smooth and soft under our feet, the tide was calm, the sun shone. It was an easy beach day, and an easy decision. Yes. Every day requires a new decision, even though my mother is handling most of the arrangements, so I am constantly in a state of answering, "I don't know," or "No," or, "Yes." I like Yes; a decision made, an item checked off the list, a step closer to the day, to every day after that. I said yes on April 10, but I'd been saying it for 730 days. Yes when things were new, easy, and carefree. Yes when things were familiar, tough, and unpredictable. Yes when we fell, yes when we stood again, tired and sore, yes as our wounds healed, yes when the Spring made everything new again. I said no on April 12 when my students asked me to read what I'd been writing. It was a warm, sunny day, and I took my English Composition...

< Photo courtesy of Kristine Kainer Art > We walked the beach on Saturday.  Spring was tangible as the sun beat down, warming our skin, and we smiled at the other Bostonians who had crawled out of their winter caves.  For the first time in many months, the city was cheerful, and the people happily shed their coats for new layers of sweat, t-shirts, and sunscreen.  We were our real selves again, ready to grow and adapt to the coming season. * We picked up shells.  Each shell had to be considered carefully; we didn't want any that were broken, or stained, or had any traces of the organism that had lived in the shell.  We compared them side by side, left most on the sand, and held onto the ones that were smooth, white, and clean.  One we threw back into the ocean, a broken shell with the organism spilling out, covered in flies.  We felt it should die in the ocean; the empty shell would wash back onto the beach in its own time. * Pity...

A few weeks ago on the train, I tried not to read over the shoulder of the young woman next to me.  I couldn't help it, though - she was reading the glossary of her book, and I had to know the words she was trying to learn. I saw one word and stopped reading.  I stopped because after one word I knew she was reading a book about music, and I stopped because the definition was so arresting I spent the rest of the train ride thinking about it: Monophony: a musical style employing a single melodic line without accompaniment. A single melodic line.  Without accompaniment.  Single.  Accompany.  Melody.  This concept was beautiful to me, as it defines both a musical style and a style of life.  Can one person - one single melodic line - create a melody?  Is it always necessary to be accompanied to give life to musical notes, bars, rests, and melodies?  Can a single melodic line resonate as powerfully as harmony?  As melodic li...

I arrived early for my appointment at Porter Square Veterinarian, so I checked in and sat next to my cat Lucca, who was crying from his little blue carrier.  The vet came out to see me, apologized for the fact that I'd have to wait, and said, "I'd see him early, but I'm about to euthanize." Suddenly I wasn't grateful that there'd been no traffic, that I'd managed to get Lucca in the carrier in just a few minutes, and that for once I wasn't rushing into the vet five minutes after my appointment.  I didn't want to be around for this, and I didn't want to be the next appointment after the vet had just euthanized somebody's pet.  Dr. Champagne rushed into the back room with the swinging door, and came out a few minutes later carrying a white, medium-sized dog.  The dog's legs dangled from the vet's arms, and despite the fact that he was too big of a dog to be carried on a regular basis, he didn't put up a fight.  He swun...

"She's been discharged.  And all she wants now is a steak." - my mother, referring to my grandmother, who was recently hospitalized Over the weekend, my grandmother was admitted to the hospital with chest pains.  Tests were run, blood pressure was monitored, and she was released two nights later with a clean bill of health.  However, she was disappointed with the hospital food.  So when I called my mother last night for an update, she told me that she, my father, and my grandparents had just left the hospital and were headed straight to The Outback to get Grammy a steak.  She didn't want to go home first, didn't want to freshen up.  She wanted that steak. I laughed at this news, which is objectively funny but not at all surprising.  My grandmother loves food, and loves all different kinds.  She's the adventurous one, the one who isn't afraid to order a new item every time she goes out to dinner, the one who wants a bite of everythi...

 (published in word~river literary review) "What I love about our students is that there is so much to mine out of them.  They're not used to valuing education, or thinking that they have intelligent things to say, but it's in there..." This is my answer to the question I hear a lot these days: "What do you like about teaching?" It's true.  Our students are at a wonderful crossroads in their education, where they can decide to complete an associate's degree and begin careers, or they can transfer to a 4-year college and earn a bachelor's degree.  No matter what they choose, they are very often accomplishing more than they, their parents, and many of their teachers thought possible.  I'm not sure when I first compared teaching to mining, but I can't think of a more apt way to describe it.  What makes mining unique is that it's not a guaranteed success - you can fail.  This doesn't mean the precious metals or diamonds ...

On this day, five years ago, my grandfather finally passed into peace after a long and painful battle with Alzheimer's.  Grampy has been the inspiration for much of my writing, including my memoir, At Ease.   To honor the memory of his life, struggle, and death, I've copied below a few scenes from my memoir. I love you, Grampy.  I still miss you... The Motorcycle My head was hot under the red helmet and I held my breath as Grandpa leaned in to secure the chin strap, the plastic clasp burning with summer heat. He bought the helmet for the grandkids to share, but while I was riding I pretended it was all mine. It was my turn to ride. My older sisters, Christine and Angie, had already ridden, and Julie had to wait in the driveway until I got back, since she was only eight and I was ten. I hoped Grandpa wouldn’t shorten my ride because she was waiting. As he lifted me onto the motorcycle, I stretched my legs to keep from touching the hot chrome of the exhaus...