hey yall! happy spring, more or less. i’m just back from my latest visit writing and teaching at the university of chicago. while i am loving my colleagues, students, and getting to know the south side, i also missed being at home in western massachusetts for the start of the best times of year: mud season. in honor, i wanted to revisit one of my favorite episodes of Fax of Life which aired on april 20, 2022. enjoy again, or for the first time.
ps - there’s a fresh set of ¡ME GUSTA! recommendations at the end of this post, plus new carl content, of course.
this month’s audio begins with my version of the old-time standard “mole in the ground”. as you can hear, my violin playing is proceeding apace. i’ve had 9 lessons! i’m feeling good. so i decided to make a little track to practice along with. as you’ll see in the following newsletter, i picked this song with dirt in mind.
i first learned “mole in the ground” while teaching string band at my childhood summer camp. they have a fantastic adult session, and i go back every few years to help out and teach. old-time music is like water to me, a natural stream i have been wading in my whole life. it feels refreshing to experience it anew from the prospect of the instrument it was written for. i picked a few of the more weird verses to sing.
for those keeping track, i now feel comfortable adding violin to the list of instruments i play. guitar, bass, mandolin, reed family (albeit last time was middle school), keyboard family, drum family. give me a few more pandemics, and i’ll get some brass going. sometimes playing multiple instruments feels like presenting a clever card trick at a cocktail party. it’s a bit of a game, a bit of a brag, and ultimately is of no consequence. i hope you like today’s card trick.
though i didn’t grow up a new englander, i have come to treasure the few weeks a year folks here call mud season. it usually begins in mid-march and stretches into april. the onset of mud season means the true end of winter, the return of the song birds, and a light misting of green enlivening the drab brown fields and trees. we have made it through!
and yet the combination of rain and thaw leaves anything made of dirt a sloppy, slippery, gooey mess of indeterminate depth. the mud sticks to everything - your shoes, your car, your dog. carl, who delights in being toweled off, has especially loved his first mud season for the uptick in the fun game of “eat the towel while #dogdaddy tries to clean me off”.
there are quite a few dirt roads in my life, a pleasure that is one of the chief selling points of my long tenure in my small town. you must drive them slowly, and they are great for long runs and off leash dog walking. but it is these dirt roads that bear the brunt of mud season, becoming unpredictable, nearly impassible by car, treacherous on foot, and the source of a year’s worth of tow-truck calls. during mud season, savvy new englanders will avoid a dirt road in an area without cell service at all costs.
hey yall! isn’t time amazing?? you were just listening to me in 2022, and now here i am in 2023. whoaaaaaa! just popping in to remind folks that you can now find Fax of Life on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. please tell a friend! and if you’re so inclined, rate, review, and subscribe.
the best way to support me and this podcast continues to be by subscribing to this substack. it’s easy, affordable, and makes a real difference in my ability to keep making these episodes, which i absolutely love doing.
thank you for listening and reading! and now back to… 2022…
the other week, a friend brought their orange dog over from albany for a hike. my big van trundled its way in relative safety on the dirt road to the hiking spot, but their smaller, lighter compact didn’t fare so well, sinking almost immediately up to its bumpers. as we waited for the tow truck, i noticed something that struck even this experienced new englander as new.
20 feet away from the car, stepping onto the dirt road from the paved, i watched a ripple visibly travel towards the car. another step, another mud wave, slow and steady. was this really happening? i jumped up in down in place to test it, more waves emanating out from my boots. to the naked eye, the road itself seemed consistent enough, despite the trapped car, but something was shifting and reacting underneath. it was wild to see and definitely disconcerting.
when the tow truck arrived, the driver skillfully extricated the car. noticing the same curious wave and bounce of the road with his steps, he casually mentioned that this road would likely become a sinkhole of unknown size shortly. the deepest layers of dirt had yet to thaw, and trapped in between them and the dirt surface was likely a layer of clay holding all the water. like a waterbed, but definitely not as fun.
i myself, and i daresay many of you, have been in a collective mud season. the pandemic has frozen us, we are only partially thawed, and there are pockets of instability that lurk just below our surfaces.
in conversation after conversation with friends and colleagues these past few weeks, there is a palpable sense of disorientation, of weariness, of tentative steps on roads that may or may not hold.
i have not been able to engage, let alone, process the horror of the russian invasion of ukraine. it just seems too much. i can much more easily connect to my anger that people aren’t putting up mexican or honduran flags, holding benefit concerts, and welcoming migrants from the violence and terror on our same continent. mud.
here we are two years later, and i am still worried about gigs being cancelled because someone is sick. “let it not be me,” i pray often. so i’ve put my mask on again and become careful. mud.
some of you are returning to work or school routines that perhaps seem outdated or no longer appropriate. more mud.
and yet summer plans are made. dear friends are getting married. i will get to the ocean at some point. carl turned six months old and tried to kill his first chicken. he did not succeed, but the result looked like a barnyard pillow fight. life is moving forward. we want to be changed by something like a winter or a pandemic, but as spring comes, again, it’s fair to wonder, are we changed enough?
and so the mud remains. we are not free of it yet. after my friend’s car was towed out of the morass, i still had to get my van back over this stretch of road. i put carl in the back, built speed as i approached the difficult section, and plowed through, bucking and sliding from side to side as i did my best to surf a 2 ton vehicle across a big waterbed.
i made it through, but it seemed to me my van was worse for the wear. a touring musician has a symbiotic relationship with their van. it is like another limb, and it is everything. you notice the smallest difference. after this excursion, my van wasn’t quite right. it shimmied and knocked at high speeds, where it’s usually a graceful ride. i knew i had to get it looked at, a prospect already complex that is now more so with carl in the picture. i’d need to arrange care for him for at least a day. god forbid the car needed more than a day’s work, i’d have to figure out how to get home from the big town. there’s no ubers or lyfts where i live, and i am loathe to ask a friend to spend the hour that it would take to get me and take me home, let alone come back to get my car the next day or whenever. my mind spun out.
i decided to take it one step at a time. i arranged for carl to hang with his best friend for the day, and i headed to town and the car place. i did my errands on foot while my car got looked at. when i returned in the late afternoon, the guy behind the counter asked me if had been worried about the car because it was shaking at high speeds.
“yes,” i said.
“you should be all sorted now,” he replied. “we removed about 5 pounds of mud from each of your wheels.”
alright yall! that’s it for this encore presentation of “mud season”. i hope april of 2023 treats you right, and i’ll be back with a fresh episode at the end of the month.
x erin
ps - your requisite #carlcontent
young man is fully recovered from his quilling
¡ME GUSTA! : SOME OF MY FAVORITE THINGS!
plants get stressed just like us. and you can hear it.
this photo is almost surely fake, but i love it anyway.
the “two man out-field” has arrived, or as we call it in rec-league softball: “not enough people showed up to play, so we’re gonna use a short-fielder”.
a beautiful essay on finding love for your body by one of my favorites, J wortham.
a short, accurate description of how artists should be supported.
more baseball: a fantastic home run call in japanese!
people are doing racism around angel reese taunting caitlin clark in yesterday’s epic women’s ncaa championship game. for the record: (white) caitlin clark did a taunting gesture a few days ago to an opponent and was praised. when (black) angel reese did the same gesture to clark, she was vilified. here’s a short collection of people (including lebron) calling this double standard out. and here’s a great op-ed from teen vogue (of all places) defending angel reese. praise!
UPCOMING SHOWS
August 12 - Dalton MA
Scenic Songs Hike + Concert at Notchview
Save The Date!
Oct 14 - Nov 11 - Seattle WA
Miss You Like Hell at Strawberry Theatre
MORE INFO
If you have further questions or concerns about COVID protocols, please contact the venues directly.
Reminder, Erin does not appear in productions of Miss You Like Hell
encore: mud season