The day was chilly and grey and it seemed like a good time to try out the woodstove on my boat.

Those of you who know me in real life are probably worried that I set myself on fire.

This is a valid concern. But before I started the adventure I made sure that the fire extinguisher was close to hand and the hatch was unlatched in case I needed an escape route.

I was a Bluebird and went to Campfire Girl sleepaway summer camp for years. During the rest of the year, whenever I was not busy with the whole cancer thing (and often when I was fairly ill), my family went camping.

We went to the forests, the rivers, the coast. We even planned to camp at the farm when the family convened for my uncles funeral, though on the way a drunk driver hit the side of our vehicle. I was in the back of the truck but the tent and sleeping bags contracted around me, keeping me safely off the highway.

But unfortunately, throughout these adventures, I was not paying attention. I was reading a book. I do not know how to build or tend a fire.

Lucky me the previous owner left the stove in good condition with paper, kindling, and coal already prepared. In theory all I had to do was strike a match and it would all beautifully ignite and merrily twinkle as the cabin filled with heat.

But this is my life, and instead of fire I mostly got lots and lots of smoke. I rushed about opening windows, paced and pondered, trying to remember all of those camping skills I should have picked up. Finally I started to blow at the mess, because this once worked to start a VW with a locked engine. Which might seem inconsequential, but somehow was connected in my brain with managing flames.

The fire ignited and started to burn and the kindling lit the coals and for the next several hours I sat next to the stove reading about the evolution of curiosity cabinets and natural history museums.

There are many advantages to living in this new pedestrian way. Picking up the younger child at school is not on the list.

I used to feel awkward around other parents because I was young (and looked even younger). It was difficult to communicate with people who waited until their thirties or forties to have kids. We simply did not have much in common.

Even when I had some kind of organizational status this was a problem. During the Co-Op years I participated in governance (and was drafted to be a co-President). But I hung out with Polly and Julia and their collective dozens of children in part because we had the fundamental connection of being teen parents. They were vastly more socially skilled than me and capable of ignoring the things that made me uncomfortable.

Eventually I found Gabriel and we sat in the halls with our heads down, scrawling in our journals. It was like having all the good parts of an adolescent friendship again, and I started to think about my own education. I realized that one of the things I did not enjoy about waiting in the halls was the fact that it was a school.

I’ve now tested this hypothesis and it appears to be true that if people had a bad time at school they do not enjoy visiting schools. Kind of a simple idea.

Now I am by no means the youngest parent in any given group. I am something like average in terms of age, and in this town the strangest thing about my appearance is my spectacles.

It’s not even a problem that we have the wrong accent; there is a steady turnover of people from all around the world and the kids go to schools that are dramatically more diverse than anything they encountered back home.

Yet I still feel just as awkward as I did a decade ago. The problem is apparently me. I do wish that I had the ability to chat.

I also wish that Gabriel could be here.

The visit with Jen was far too brief. We walked around various colleges and checked out the Wren Library. We biked to Grantchester for tea at the Orchard and later went punting on the Cam.

We made dinner and stayed up late talking. It has been sixteen years since we met at Governors’ School but the intervening time has not changed either of us as much as I might have predicted. We share a commitment to ethical behavior that can be exacting, but this makes it easy to continue talking to each other.

On Saturday we took the train to London and visited the British Museum and the Tate Modern. I thought the children might be bored but the girl was pleased to see canvases and objects by Dali and Magritte. She liked the David Goldblatt photographs, especially Miss Lovely Legs Competition at the Pick ‘n’ Play Hypermarket Boksburg 1980. The boy was amazed by the Gerhard Richter Two Greys Juxtaposed, and intrigued by the Cy Twombly sculptures.

They nodded over the Anselm Kiefer canvasses Parsifal and Lilith but neither thought much of the Beuys Lightning with Stag in its Glare.

On the train ride home we played hangman and the children amused people with their antics over the game. Neither guessed the solution when I plotted my surname.

Upon seeing L – A – my son guessed lachrymose.

We all got up early to wave goodbye as Jen departed for her conference. It was strange and lovely to wander around with a friend from home.

My new book will be featured on the Brian Lehrer Show on NYC’s NPR station WNYC 93.9 tomorrow at 10:30 AM.

Jen K showed up late last night and the kids adore her. They swarmed around, competing for her attention, rattling off theories about various subjects. We stayed up past midnight talking about philosophy, and history, and the vicissitudes of medical science. The children interrupted each other and talked in bursts of words, sentences, ideas tumbling so fast I could barely keep up.

Now the kids are off to school and the day is bright and chilly. I wonder what parts of Cambridge I should show a visiting academic? I haven’t figured out much except grocery stores and bicycle repairs.

Good thing I have a guidebook!

When we first visited Cambridge I was nervous about riding a bicycle. I have too many broken pieces to stand much jiggling; the fractured tailbone, the shredded arms, the phantom flashes of accidents, all conspire to keep my feet firmly on the ground.

But I have a beautiful old Triumph, chopped and rebuilt in Portland by Erin Scarum and slowly improved by Eli and Bob to accommodate my various injuries. And this is a cycling city; it is just easier to get around using a bicycle. I started slowly, with little excursions to the grocery store, walking the bike when I got nervous.

I had an accident the second day out – because I was overly cautious. I slowed down to let a pram pass and listed over too far, toppling over and hitting a pedestrian. He laughed and dusted me off and put me back on the bicycle. But other than that, the injuries are generally sustained by my tights, which get caught on my wicked grip pedals.

The children complained at first. The boy said he could not, would not, not everlearn to ride his tiny vintage bicycle. But over the course of a weekend he picked up the skill and turned into a cycling fiend, weaving in and out of large crowds of tourists with nary a scratch. He asks to ride every day, several times a day, at night, at any available moment.

One day he woke up two inches taller than the day before and we went to see Ric at the bike stall in the market square. He reckoned he could find a stylish replacement and the next day my son owned a miniature version of the bike that all the elderly academics ride.

Old men in the park stop and exclaim I say, chap! That is quite a bicycle!

Now we ride everywhere possible, and when the children are in school I go places they find boring. This week I’ve been all round the city, from Romsey town to the far end of the Stourbridge common. I have gone to Fen Ditton, Coton, and had tea in Grantchester.

Riding bicycles in Cambridge is brilliant and officially one of my favorite experiences ever.

Several months ago, as I herded the family toward our flight to Barcelona, we stumbled across Rich Jensen arriving home from a trip to New York. We stopped and chatted for a few minutes and I told him that we were moving to England later in the year.

Even though I neglected to tell almost everyone about the move, Rich remembered and tracked me down to send along the newest Clear Cut Press book. This one is called Core Sample: Portland Art Now and it includes a disk of “work involving moving images / parts / bodies.”

Holding this object in my hands, I feel overwhelmed with sadness. The intangibles of Portland made up the value. I do not miss the grubby flat boring city but I feel an intense longing for the place. The factors that allow the art scene and underground communities in Portland to flourish were in some sense the same reasons I had to leave. But that doesn’t make me miss it any less.

When I left Portland I really did not care. I was happy to have enough room to think and work, separate from the demands of my friends. I wanted to move on, I wanted to be back with the mountains and water of my youth.

Now I want to be in England.

This nostalgia for what I left behind is a puzzle. I suppose it is like an optical illusion, a refraction of experience. Now I remember only the parts of that life that are worth missing.

But whenever I go to the market and pick out apples I feel a wrench. I do not want to buy food from strangers. If I go to the store I want Meadow or Patrice be on the other side of the counter. I want to see Erin Yanke in the aisles of the co-op. I want to go back to Lynn’s house and our vegetable buying club, and that guy who brought scales on his bicycle, and thirty pound boxes of apples and flats of strawberries and endless delicious vegetables divvied up from the back of an ancient Volvo station wagon.

I’ve been moaning about the fact that I cannot cook for countless years.

People have attempted to teach me — Polly and Moe both made good progress and showed me essential skills like how to chop garlic. 

I picked up occasional tricks but until this summer managed to poke along just fine with a limited repertoire of four or five simple things. The rest of the time we ate out. Given the fact that we did not know how to prepare food, it was less stressful to pay $2.85 for a bowl of pho. Or $2.50 for a burrito. Or $1.50 for a tofu sandwich with pickled vegetables and fresh cilantro.

England has a terrible reputation when it comes to food. While I reserved judgment at first, I can now say with some certainty that the stereotype is true. Most restaurant food is mediocre at best, and it is all terribly expensive. The good restaurants are exorbitant – or in London. I’ve had what people swear is the best of this-or-that variety of food and it just doesn’t rate.

But the cost of food in general is actually quite low, even after I mentally calculate the exchange rate, and all stores have an abundance of organic options. I can buy high quality non-GMO food for a fraction of what I used to spend in Seattle, and I don’t have to drive for an hour to find it. Just one example: a half pound of fresh organic butter costs 90p at the local grocer. The same item would have been $4.00 (or more) in Seattle, if I could get it at all without a vast commitment of time.

However, though staples are cheap, many items I relied on back home are not available. How can a person survive without a daily dose of fresh salsa? I don’t need the corn chips – forget the tortillas – I just want the sauce! So, inevitably, it happened.

I have started to cook. Pico de gallo was the first and most essential thing to learn. Then an assortment of rice and veggie dishes. Then salmon, and chicken, and eventually a soup involving carrots and coriander. I can make apple crumble, and cookies, and chopped up a chocolate bar for chips when the stores did not have what I needed.

I bought a basil plant for the window sill.

Several years ago Stella gave me The Joy of Cooking and I have mostly read it for enjoyment. Now I am using it like a map to sort out what to learn next.

I’ve been a parent since 1990.

In all that time I have never once left my children with a babysitter — at least not the random teenage stranger version. There have been occasions when the children have been watched by trusted and vetted friends for a few hours at a time, but my inclination has been to keep them with me.

If I’m not with them, Byron takes over. This was necessary to protect them from danger but also because the children are not exactly average in their needs or behavior. When I decided to have kids my fundamental belief was that they were my own responsibility, and that I would make a good life for them.

When they started nursery school I was very careful to select programs that would work with their individual eccentricities, even if that meant an extraordinary commitment of travel time. They were always enrolled in special programs, alternative schools with substantial commitment to specific philosophical ideas.

Beyond that, I’ve never forced my children to go to school; if they were unhappy I moved on to the next solution. Mostly this meant letting them stay home.

Why? Because I know that I will not live forever and need to do well with the time left. Because children are only small for a little while. Because my kids are the most interesting people I have ever met. Because it is fun to hang out with my family.

But mostly because I did not have societal permission to produce children. I was young, and poor, and sick. Things that people in other situations take for granted were never part of my daily existence. It was a political act to have children – and I had to be good, the best. It was necessary to excel at every aspect of parenting. There was no acceptable alternative.

So here we are on the other side of the world, proper adults with careers. These children I have nurtured for half a lifetime are sturdy, healthy, loquacious.

Moving here was a choice, and accepting the differences in the educational system is part of living in a new country.

Today I sent them to school. Regular, normal, state-funded British schools, with religious education and PE kits and a dress code and conduct rules.

I find this shocking.

The children do not appear to mind.

Somewhere in the years of our late adolescence, when I still knew the people I grew up with, I gave a friend a ride from his parents house to the ferry terminal.

I was a mixed up kid, still living at home even though I was already a mother. My friend was the music snob of our teen social scene and he was living what had always seemed like the unattainable dream, with an apartment across the water in the city.

When the car started he flinched and said You like Tom Waits? in a surprised voice, then added Of course, this is the album true fans hate.

His opinion was that the album was maudlin, sentimental, and thus annoying. It should not be in the discography, it should have been issued under another name. The tape didn’t belong to me, so I just laughed and turned up the volume to listen to Martha.

I like songs that tell a story. I like songs that use cheap narrative tricks to solicit an emotional response. Maybe because nothing else can, I like songs that make me cry.

This morning I opened the files and started to work on the next book. I am still puzzled by the audience reaction to some of the stories; it honestly did not occur to me that the tales were sad as I lived the reality.

The thing I fear most in finishing the manuscript is losing the fun of it all, the exhilarating edge, the hilarious side of the horror. I do not want this book to be like the story songs that make me cry.

I do not want to allow any reader — not even one — to come away from the book feeling inspired in the way they would be after listening to a John Denver album.

I had a clear and compelling fantasy of working in a luscious back garden, seated at a table with a pot of tea and a fat manuscript. And while it is true that the garden is lovely, the roses newly bloomed, the working reality is that I cannot sit outside during a thunder storm.

Retreating indoors is not tempting, given the fact that my house is waist-deep in stacks of books and I have to edge past towers of boxes to get to the computer. Oh, and musn’t forget the small detail of bored children.

Once again I am editing a book on the fly, scurrying from cafe to bookstore to pub, buying work time with 50p rounds of video games and promises of ice cream cones and fill-in-the-blank-whatever if they will just help and be patient, just for a few more minutes, please.

But I did it – without the benefit of childcare, relatives, friends, television, or any of the other boons of modern civilization. I’m walking out the door right now to put the final copyedited version of Mamaphonic in the mail.

This is what I miss today:

Sushi.

Vietnamese tofu sandwiches with pickled vegetables from that shop on Jackson.

The burrito bus down in the Rainier Valley.

Champagne breakfasts with Stella and Al.