It's starting to feel like home

I spend the day pulling nails, removing plank after plank from the barn board on the walls in the living room and foyer. I wear leather work gloves, old pink corduroys, and a dust mask. Particles float in the air like plankton. Each piece of wood is old and feels light and brittle. Some splinter when I pry the nails out, but I am trying to keep as many pieces intact as I can. This is good wood: probably a hundred years old. I know this much: it comes from Addison County, and on one plank I found “KS + BC, ‘29” scratched into the wood.

Every time I arrive at our after being in our crowded little apartment I feel like my heart is going to burst with longing and giddy glee. Invariably, I leap from the car and must go straight out into the fields where I walk along the old stone walls, taking inventory of all the small things I hardly know and already love: mossy covered logs, mule deer tracks, coyote scat, seed pods rattling empty in the wind.

Last week the fields were covered with snow—nearly a foot in the low places—and zig zagged with tracks. Now the road dirt road leading to our house is thick with mud, and except in the shady wooded valley where sunlight barely creeps and the stream runs, the snow has melted. Brown grasses lie limp and pummeled against the sloping earth, but below the dead stalks, I can new green.

The robins arrived this week. I always know that spring is for keeps when they come. It might still snow, but the relentless turning of the earth means longer days and warmer air. Today as I’m prying the boards loose from crumbling gypsum, I feel spring fever, plain and simple.

I open the windows, and notice flies (I think must have been dormant) are now buzzing with irritating stupidity in the space between the window glass and the screen. Fresh air rushes in, and I’m warm enough in my faded red t-shirt. All I want is to get outdoors, when I’ve gotten every plank off the wall, pulling bent nails from each piece, and stacking it neatly, I give in.

The sun is falling towards the west, and in the east a gibbous moon is rising just above the trees.

I sit on the lawn and watch it rise.

I can’t remember the last time I watched the moon slowly climb the sky, moving between the branches of the beeches as though it were climbing the rungs of a ladder. The sky is a perfect deep blue, and the tree tops are stained golden in the setting sun.

I listen. The neighbor’s sheep are coming in from the fields and I can hear them bah-ing plaintively. Then I hear an early owl call from the woods, it’s whoo-whooing echoing around our land like a marble rolling in a glass bowl.

I hear mourning doves, flickers, chickadees and red winged blackbirds. I try to focus, drawing my eyes to where my ears pick up each bird’s individual call; and I see them on the tops of trees, serenading the setting sun. I can’t bring myself to move. In the field below me, I watch small red squirrels run up and down tree trunks.

The moon is above the tallest tree now, and the sun just below the twiggy edge of the woods. Sitting here like this, with my face drenched in evening sunlight nand my arms wrapped around my knees, reminds me why we’re here.

Why we struggle on so many days to put together cohesive and civil sentences with each other, exhaustion stretching us so far and we forget to do anything else. Why we’re living in a too-small apartment, in a neighborhood full of college kids whose whooping wakes us up at 2am, where we’ve grown used to seeing the spinning red lights of the ambulance, called again and again to the house across the street as a woman screams and a man yells and then things get too quiet too fast.

Sitting on now on the lawn looking at the mountains and the tiny houses dotting the valley below like toy figurines, feels just like finding one of those store directories in the mall with the little red arrow that says “YOU ARE HERE.”

We’re making a home. Making it with our hands and our longing; with our fights, our silences, our love making, our laughter, our work.

It didn’t even take a month after Bean was born to realize that we wanted to move away from the congested tangle of Southern Connecticut with its perpetually snarled Highway 95, and it’s disproportionate emphasis on money and belongings. Holding him when he was still small enough to fit along the length of DH’s forearm, his little eyes shut tight in slumber, we knew it was not even a choice. We had to move: to risk everything and start new.

I can’t help but wonder if we would have moved at that time—or ever—if we hadn’t had Bean. A part of me pictures the fragments of our lives would have been like: sharp little pieces of worry poking up through our busy days. Commuting everywhere, so much time in the car. And another part of me imagines the excuses we would have: the unknowns, the cost, the labor, the risk all would have weighed too greatly when put in the scale along side our comfortable, if not stifled life.

How grateful I am for the wild unplanned joy of Bean, and for the fierce bugle call of our dreams that sounded as a result.

My feet sink into the muddy ground, and I rest my chin casually on a knee as I watch the bright scarlet wing patch of a blackbird dip and dive across the tree line. Here I am, I think.

Snow & sky: pictures from our land

Waxing moon

Fence post at the tree line

Tracks in the woods.

Our uplowed snowy driveway.

Field weeds.

Winding road.

Mt. Mansfield at sunset.

It's March

It’s March, and like clockwork all the maples and hickories, oaks and beeches along the sidewalks have swollen nubbins of buds. The air is just that much warmer. The sunlight lasts just that little bit longer. And it makes all the difference.

It’s been one of those weeks that has zipped by in a blur: moments scattering like a flock of grackles. Now as I sit down to write with a steaming cup of tea, it takes me a moment to gather up the memories, to locate myself in the present of this flutter of action.

A few things that have happened this week:

DH and I got to work on the house together for a few days in a row(we’ve stuck gold with the baby sitter. Bean adores her!) and this made a huge difference for us. Not only are we finally making what feels like significant progress, but we also feel like we're on the same page for the first time in weeks.

Another good thing on the homefront: 0ur kitchen cabinets were delivered on Monday, each Shaker style piece in its own cardboard box, nestling together like some extraterrestrial cityscape.

It felt like Christmas, opening them. Drawers with pneumatic buffers, a pantry with folding out storage shelves, a sink base wide enough for this kind sink; SPACE, finally for all our serving dishes, utensils, measuring cups. Progress feels like it is finally being made, and we’re moving now more rapidly towards laying flooring and building the remaining walls.

Yesterday, DH took over the evening routine with Bean and I took the night off. Time at the gym, and then to Barnes & Noble where I spent the rest of the night organizing notes for the manuscript I’m working on. It felt so good not to be rushing. To have the time to run a full seven miles (in just over an hour), and to linger reading the latest Elle magazine on the stretching mat. And then to finally sink into my writing long enough to gather up all the loose threads and get a hold of the big-picture tapestry again.

Today, I got this project underway. I'm really excited about this (and I hope you are too!)

And tonight walking to my intaglio print making class all the bells from church towers around the city were chiming—dinner hour. It was so beautiful---the sun just set, and the sky awash with rosy pinks. Then to spend three solid hours with a bunch of other artist women getting printing ink and whiting under our nails: heaven.

Decisively NOT spring, but still good

Did I say something about spring? Right. It snowed ALL DAY yesterday. Beautiful, sparkling snow, but snow none the less. I actually am not complaining. I like things to be decisive. It’s the waffling that gets me: almost winter and almost not. Cold enough to see your breath, but not cold enough to tell the crocuses to wait. So now we have snow, and I’m fine with that. At least it really feels like winter. We went to the Mardi Gras parade downtown. The streets were choked with foot traffic. Revelers in gloves and mittens screamed for beads. Bean napped the entire time—even when a float impersonating a barge went by, blaring a barge horn.

Later, one my favorite people in the whole world drove four hours through the snow to come see us. She is the same amazing human being who arrived on day four after Bean was born when everyone had left and all the excitement had supposedly died down---but really I was too sore to walk or do laundry, DH had a fever of 101 and was vomiting with the same evil stomach virus that I’d had before going into labor, and I was a mess of tears and exhaustion. She came from Boston and took one look at us and started cleaning. THIS is the kind of friend you want in your life. The kind that takes one look at your exhausted face and instead of ogling uselessly at your baby during the five minutes he’s asleep, does your dishes instead. Oh how I adore her.

So, she arrived in the middle of the snowstorm and we drank many, many cups of spicy chai tea with milk and ate oodles of cookies. Life is good.

Progress

All day the thermometer hovered in the single digits. So cold, the air cuts at bare skin like a razor. The sky was pale, and the slight dusting of snow on the ground, kicked up with every gust of wind. The stream in the field on the way to the house was frozen today: a channel of blue ice bisecting an expanse of choppy ocher grass stalks. It was my first time at the house in a week. DH has gone every day, often hiring a neighbor who needs to support his snowboard habit, to help out with drywall removal and framing. I was amazed by how much they had accomplished. The difference in the space was palpable. Sunlight flooded in through the windows of the to-be dining room, filling the kitchen with light.

Seeing it made me want fast forward. I want to be there with my coffee and a croissant at the table, watching nuthatches and starlings fight for seed at the feeder, or my dog ferret out squirrels.

Instead, I spent the afternoon with a crowbar and hammer laboriously chipping the remaining linoleum from the floor. In the basement below me DH was finishing installing radiant heating, and as I sat chiseling fragment after fragment of adhesive and vinyl from the floor, I felt a little tickle of pride sneaking up my spine.

My guy can do this stuff: remove load bearing walls. Install radiant heat. We make a great team, and when I can, I’m there along side him wielding a hammer or heat gun—but this time he’s done it mostly himself, and I’m impressed.

He is fearless when it comes to tackling these projects (which are things he’s never done), and I like watching him: hair mussed, in a workworn sweatshirt and a tool belt. And watching him like this today, I started to understand his unswerving (obsessive) focus on this project.

For him, this is art. The zing of the table saw, the report of the pneumatic nailer, these are the soundtrack of his creative process. TodayI finally started to understand how for me it’s work and it’s fun, but for him it’s even more than that. For him it is a form of self expression—like my paint and the endless notebook pages I fill, DH finds himself in the process of making this space new.

The kitchen, as it was.

Almost the same view as the pic above, after the wall was removed.

Looking through from the kitchen to our future dining room.

Apple tree silhouettes against a winter sunset out the to-be dining room window.

Meeting the neighbors

We went to the house around noon today, with plans to walk the boundaries of our property—and discovered an entire field that is ours, that we didn’t know about. It is an old meadow, grown tall with hickory and crab apple saplings. The week has been warm, as though a chinook wind were blowing from the east, already bringing spring. Almost all the snow has melted, and the mud is thick along the road approaching our house. Only on the shadiest slopes of the hill snow still lingers in white patches like an Andrew Wyeth painting. Shelf fungus and moss grows thickly on the fallen branches—ripped from trunks in the ice storm last October.

Already I am itching to keep field notes in a new moleskine where I can press beech leaves and wild grasses into the pages, or sketch the deer tracks and raccoon turds I found today along one of the old stone walls that skirt the property. Today I brought my camera and clambered up the quartz and granite boulders at the back edge of the woods, and then down to the splashing creek. It sounded deeper than it is—the ground is so satturated from recent rains, the water echoes off it like a drum.

The stream meanders down a channel of mud and rocks towards the road and the neighbor's land. We walk there next to say hello—something both of us are kind of hesitant to do. But, as is generally the case, those first encounters are more awkward in our heads than they are in person and when we knock at the neighbor’s door they both answer, soot on their hands.

“Come on in,” she says, without asking us who we are or why we’re there.

So there we are, crossing over the threshold into their snug living room, and mumbling about how we just bought the house on the hill.

He is cleaning their wood burning stove, but stops, brushes off his hands, and shakes ours. He has big limpid blue eyes, graying hair, and a dark smudge over one shaggy eyebrow.

As I say the words, “the house on the hill,” her eyes immediately tear up. I ask, “Did you know the woman who lived there?”

“I was with her when she died,” she says. “We were very close. She was the nicest lady in the world.” Then she tells us about the flowers she’s planted in our yard that will surprise us in the spring—and all about our other neighbors.

He stands there grinning, adding tidbits to the story. Egging her on when she leaves the juicy details out. “You’ve got to know about Crazy Bob,” he says. And also about kooky Kay, whose husband died years ago and her floor hasn’t been cleaned since, or so the story goes.

But they also tell us about our immediate neighbors—a doctor, a mechanic, a vet—who throw a sugaring off party each spring and go cross country skiing together, and who’ve known each other for years.

We can’t help but feel young—most of our neighbors have kids our age. But they put us at ease—extending an invitation already to the sugaring party, where, they promise, we’ll meet everyone. Before we leave she promises to help me with my garden in the spring, then blows Bean kisses in the drive as we walk back to our house.

Inside, the house is warm. The air is dusty, the floors stripped down to the plywood. DH has been going over after work, ripping down walls and reframing, and already the difference is huge. Like any renovation project things are unexpected: the set of oak stairs masked beneath hideous carpet—but also the furnace so old it will need replacing before next winter. We stand together—the three of us—eating hot pastrami sandwiches and planning out where walls will go. Bean takes bites of the bread with his new teeth and squirms in my arms. Soon we will be able to come here and let him run around on the grass. Soon, this will be home.

House work

In a new book by William Stafford that I picked up on my artist date last week I read: “…The process of writing is kind of a trusting to the nowness, to the immediacy of the experience. And if you enter into the artistic endeavor with standards, already arrived-at ideas of what you want to do, you’re not entering creatively into the immediacy of encountering the materials.” Tonight, using a crowbar to pull up section after section of linoleum, I thought about how this is true for work and art both. Always, when I work with my hands, I find myself right here, in the moment. My mind grows steady, in tandem with my hands.

When I let it, the work becomes a meditation. I find the right question in the nowness of the experience. The bare simplicity of wood and wall, of metal and adhesive define a narrative; clarify the answer.

When I was a teenager my father taught me how to use sledge hammer and ax; and also how to true a line, plumb a sink, and wire an outlet. Now, when I am working with my hands, he always feels nearby. He was the kind of man who could fix carburetor or a motherboard. He understood electrical wiring, and architecture; these were the hobbies he chose to stay grounded in a life full of spiritual pondering.

I feel lucky to be able to share this kind of work with the men of my life. Then, with my father. Now, with my husband, who is in every way exactly opposite from the exacting craftsman that my father was, but just as able with his hands.

Where words sometimes leave DH and I tangled when we try to talk about what we imagine for the house, working side by side is something we do well. This is our second renovation project, and together we own many tools.

We destroyed the last of the old kitchen cabinets today, throwing them into the huge metal dumpster we’ve rented. DH leaned up against the garage door, cheering as I swung the sledge hammer into the wood. The each crack echoed a little in of our quiet valley, where the only sounds were a few nuthatches calling from the tops of birch trees.

It felt good to wield an 8lb hammer. The hear the crack of the wood, to make it splinter. And it felt good to look up and see DH smiling, his face framed in dark tousled hair, backlit by the setting sun slipping over the edge of the hill the is now ours.

seed heads in a snowy meadow

ice from the spring water cistern in the field below the house

the woods at the edge of the upper field

the branches of an heirloom apple tree

spring cistern

our house, seen from the meadow below

The lack of blogging is a direct result of this:

With some graph paper and the kind cabinet guy at Home Depot all sanity has been restored. I was actually making sense, it seems and it took all my willpower to refrain from doing the "I told you so" dance."

Our first project is the kitchen, because it is the center of our lives. Ours is a house where people always hang out by the stove, poking spoons into pots, nibbling samples of dinner, sipping wine---so we want this kitchen to be big enough to allow for this.

We started by gutting the kitchen and removing massive amounts of wallpaper. Every wall in the house that was not covered in barn board was covered in wallpaper. High quality vinyl wall paper with bold designs that made me dizzy just looking at it, but gleeful ripping it off: each piece came off in a perfect strip, no ripping, no sticking.

Last night DH and I went back to the house ourselves and just sat in each room on the floor, imagining. It is so facinating to be at this point of BEFORE. Before new paint. Before floors. Before daily life fills the spaces with laughter and talk and running feet. Before we've grown accustomed to living with those stairs and those windows.

It was snowing gently, and we ate jelly beans, and did other unsayably lovely things. I'm still smiling as a result.

I was warned about this

Things feel fierce when you try to talk in three dimensionand cannot wrap your words around something that is not yet there the square foot depth of real things: soapstone traveling the surface of the counter walls, this thick cupboards here.

Somehow because you can’t explain that which you can barely see in your minds eye everything feels like a soda bottle after it’s been shaken up.

You talk and talk and then walk away the plans spread out the table the lines and measurements in graphite, easily erasable, unlike the tone you use to say the things you’re not quite sure of.

Every hardware store clerk will nod and say he’s seen it all before. The disconnect between two minds trying to see the same thing from different angles. If geometry were a language, it would be easier.

Starting in

The Pleiades were rising above our house when we came up the long drive after dusk. The night air was cold and dark. Our house. Such a different feeling than the house we owned in Connecticut, in a jam-packed neighborhood with dogs yapping right next door, and dog poop in our flower beds. Here, the wide expanse of sky spreads out above like the dome of some great church, huge and indigo in the starlight. Here, the silence tucks itself around the corners of the house, wind rushing between the tall poplars and maples on the hill.

We began the process of removing the outdated cabinets, circa the 1970s, and were reminded again (we renovated our last house too) that every project takes twice as long. They used nails with screw-points to install the cabinets, leaving us no way to take them down gracefully. There we were, three of us with crow bars, trying to let our minds slip back in time to imagine what the workmen had thought of, nearly thirty years before. Like a puzzle, each cabinet connected to the next.

Tomorrow we’ll go back with better tools and leather gloves. Tomorrow maybe it will sink in: months of work before the place is home. But tonight in the driveway before piling into the car an hour before midnight, I couldn’t help but twirl a couple of times under the stars, my arms out-stretched. Across the valley the nearly full wedge of a waning moon was rising, like a white teacup, against the tablecloth of night.

Home.

Say Yes

He sits on the lawn amidst heaps of brown oak leaves giggling wildly at the dog. Tomorrow we leave before the sun comes up. Today, his Nonna scoops him up, and carries him off for a nap. Such sweetness. Such sheer delight. It's been good to be here where the December sun is mellow and warm, and someone's always ready with open arms to play with Bean. But we're ready to go home to a house waiting with late-arrival packages, tivoed Project Runway shows, and the simple routine of just us.

Yesterday, after many phone calls, it was confirmed: the house will close---later rather than sooner---but it will. The mortgage rate will stay the same for another month (big exhale), and in the meantime we'll have a chance to ski a couple times, gather paint samples, and visit kitchen showrooms.

Yesterday Marilyn reminded me to visualize the positive, and last night I read this post, and decided simply to say YES. To trust, to breathe, to be thankful. Looking at Bean, his entire face dancing with grins, how can I not?

Bittersweet market

The bitter sweetness of the day began while parking the car in at the Italian market in Philadelphia. DH got a call from the real estate agent. The house closing which was slated for next week has been put off—for weeks possibly---because the sellers don’t want to be inconvenienced. I tried to let the news settle as I looked out the window at people passing: a lady with strawberry blonde hair and a boy in a baby stroller; an old black woman with beautiful eyes, burgundy lipstick and misconfigured teeth; two Italian men both wearing dark wool coats and laughing. And it all seemed suddenly bland. A hard pit of disappointment pressed up against my solar plexus. I unbuckled Bean and scooped him out of his car seat. I walked a block back and forth waiting for DH to call the sellers to try and renegotiate the date, but came back negative. The seller said she doesn’t want to be inconvenienced. SHE DOESN’T WANT TO BE INCONVENIENCED. Really. Who says that when they’re trying to sell a house? Who? Tense and deflated I snapped at DH in front of the in laws right inside the door of a bustling café where everyone was ordering up lattes and cannolis. With even poorer form, I passed Bean to DH and walked out of the café. I hate it when I’m like that. But sometimes all the racket of this little clan of concerned family makes this worse, not better.

Again I walked up and down the block, past pigs heads hanging in the window with their eyeballs stuck open, the upside down pheasants with their feathers still intact, and the crates full of chard and tomatoes and fava beans. I couldn’t quite get a grip on myself. I wanted to be angry at DH for being tense—but I knew I was being just as tense. I wanted to be angry at DH for having a strained interaction in front of his parents, but I knew I’d caused the interaction. Feeling belly up and angry I sat outside the café with my camera trying to find the color and vibrancy I had expected from the day. Within minutes joined me, and after batting words around for awhile I was able to articulate my fear: what if we loose the house entirely? He heard me and cupped his fingers over mine.

Trying to soak up a city in a leisurely manner with seven people is a ludicrous expectation. Just finding a restaurant took walking back and forth the length of the same block several times and much hemming and hawing. Finally we ate at bistro where the waiter also seemed to be the cook and the host. The pepper and sausage sandwiches were fair at best, but the mood loosened as Bean sucked down linguini and rubbed sauce onto the tablecloth. After the meal we walked the length of the market, poking into spice shops and cheese shops, laughing with shopkeepers and eating aged balsamic vinegar with ricotta salata cheese, and espresso.

On the way back the sky broke open just above the city, gold against gray. So beautiful it took my breath away. And yet I couldn’t get a picture through the rearview window because Bean kept grabbing at my lens. I’m still trying to get the hang of this photography stuff. Sometimes the lens picks up something more exquisite than I notice with my bare eye, and other times the image that I see—the whirling of school children playing in a park, or the fire of the sun melting down around the dark silhouettes of buildings—looks washed-out and brittle compared with the way they really are.

Girl on bike.

Looking for upbeat.

Phasants in the window.

Mural of a faroff place.

Self portrait in the car.

Click here for a flickr slideshow of more pictures from today.

pieces of my soul

I spend the late afternoon as darkness falls with headphones in my ears. The upstairs neighbor’s music makes me restless. The incessant beat raps a staccato in my head. I long for the quiet of open winter fields. For wind. Bean is finally napping with DH after crying for awhile, tired enough to protest the nap but too tired to skip it. I find solace in Stan Getz on my iPod, and follow the random branching network of links answering my search: “tips for keeping chickens in winter.”

I know it will take years to evolve from my greenhorn self into someone who knows what to do to keep the frost from killing sleeping bees or roosting chickens. It will require trial and error, and lots of talk with locals, to understand the true art of the perennial garden, or to know which animals leave tracks along the snowy paths in the woods.

It’s not that I want to suddenly slip onto a farmstead and never return. I’m to much of a girly-girl with a penchant for expensive jeans to want to be far from the city forever. Yet this much is also true: I am someone who is most centered when I am connected to the land on which I live.

I’m not waxing bucolic. I’ve just always had a profound love for nature. I think I must have gotten this from my mother, who always notices the most exquisite little things on walks we take: a newt on a log, orange and wet, or the feather of a wild turkey stuck in some briers. I have a deep sense of self when I connect to a place. The outline of my position in the universe, small and unique, is most apparent when I am able to see how I am connected to my immediate surroundings. I like to see the fields being used; like knowing where my food comes from---and I take some sort of satisfaction when it comes from a local farm rather than from Argentina or Brazil or trekked across the country in a big rig.

I am far too much of a voluptuary to uproot entirely and live ruggedly off the grid. It was my mother’s story and not mine to boil cloth diapers in a pot and then line dry them in the middle of January in the Rocky Mountains, until they hung stiff and frozen like boards. I’m too academic, too soft around the edges to be that wholesome or self-sacrificing. I like my frothy chai from the local café. I have a penchant for expensive outdoor gear. I love the ease of eating out, the pleasure of savoring food without the preparation or washing up. But I am also someone who strives to live consciously, aware of my impact on this earth.

Everyone struggles, I think, with these things. It is the side effect of living in our world today, with technology folding in around the edges, media pushing it’s way through the chinks of our souls. I think each of us must experience this push---pull: heart and mind narrating different stories. I want to know, what scattered pieces make you whole?

exhaling

The morning light was flecked with falling snow, and few inches of powder already covered roofs and sidewalks when we woke up. I’ve been waiting for snow, and felt like I could finally exhale, my breath lingering whitely in the air. After a long week of fun-house ups and downs, things felt mostly even today. Bean is has gone and started doing adorable things like waving, and offering me his crackers or orange slices, and my heart starts flapping about all wild and goofy when I watch him trying to stand on his own. I catch myself trying to pin point the exact moment he's gone and gotten older, but I can't quite. It's just a blur of almost toothy grins, as he boogies to the music or chases the cats around.

Finally DH and I had a few moments together too, that didn't involve discussing future house projects, our finances, or our son. We sat around covered in icing and listening to Sinatra’s Christmas classics, decorating gingerbread cookies for the people in our lives with kids in theirs, for the better part of yesterday evening.

Today we bought garlands of balsam and spruce to string up around the apartment, and a wreath for the door, and spontaneously, on our way to pick up the greenery, drove out to the house. The road looked like a storybook, with white frosted trees leaning in on each side and lights gleaming from under a layer of snow, on eaves and barns and tall evergreens. It felt good to just drive by and look. To imagine next year, but to be happy right now, with our car load of greens and our drooly, grinning boy.

self portrait in the car

at the christmas tree lot

on the way to our house

my juicy little guy

gingerbread

lights

Check out more pictures from our day here

looking inside

It is starting to be long john weather here. The red line on the thermometer never crept past 30 degees today, and the air bites at exposed cheeks. The light at dusk strikes the buildings with sharpness. There is no depth to it like in the summer, or even in the autumn when the rays seem to fall in long angles. Now, the light is filterless and bright; shadows spilling onto the streets in dark contrast. Winter has a way of making me look at my life starkly, as though I were seeing my soul in series of x-rays. Like the fields of corn stalks tilled into frozen soil or the rocky hilltops exposed below the silhouettes of trunks and branches, when I look in on myself I see mostly skeletons. I go back over the writing I have done in years past, and am stunned at my own depth, yet feel incapable of duplicating it. The voice of my shadow that always whispers “failure,” harps louder now.

I have new canvasses and the longing to paint, but a terror to pick up the brush. Everything I make might be ugly. Words stalk me at indecent times when I have no notebook, no means of record. But when I sit at the computer with an hour of quiet stolen from other tasks, nothing comes except mouthfuls of hesitation.

Natalie Goldberg says it doesn’t matter. She says “One of the main aims in writing practice is to learn to trust your own mind and body; to grow patient and nonaggressive.” I try to come back to this. To simply write. To get out my paints and follow the movement of my hand. To trust that I will once again feel the divine moving through the branches of my soul like wind.

But like the flock of startled crows I saw today, whirling black specks against the grey sky above the rooftops, I become easily scattered. I know this is to be expected in this time: this collision of moments when we are making choices about our future happen now. Buying this house isn’t just buying a house for me. It’s about fulfilling a dream that has been a part of my mental geography for as long as I can remember.

I am like that. When I loose myself in my thoughts, I am lost in a specific geography. I have always been someone who has felt closely tied to the land. I have worked on farms, milked cows, grown gardens, and I know that these things provide a rich soil for my creative life. I long to put down roots in this place. Keep bees, learn to ride horses.

So I am here in the midst of making something I’ve always imagined a reality, and it feels awkward like I’m trying to help hatch a baby bird. They are so fragile and ugly and gawky when they first peck their way out of the shell they’ve lived inside for weeks. Then they just sit there in the nest, all beak, squawking.

It’s cold out. The mud is frozen solid and our apartment is too small. I can’t help squawking, doubting that flight will ever be possible. The pessimist in me chokes at the stir-crazy feeling I know I’ll have we finally close the deal after the new year and start to rip down walls. It will take months of effort before anything resembles anything I imagine. This process should be familiar. It is the one I face every day when I come to the blank screen or the empty canvass and struggle with a mess of words or lines. I should know. The good stuff only happens when I’m patient.

Sundog, snowbelt and other compound words that mean home

We spent four hours at the house yesterday, with the inspector. We peered into every dusty corner, poked every possibly leaky length of copper pipe, tested spots on the ceiling and floor for moisture, pushed through heaps of insulation, and came up with nothing. This is one of the few times when nothing is good in life. Nothing at a house inspection is the opposite of disappointment.

Of course, there were small things: the house is exactly as old as I am—-built the year I was born—and neither of us are entirely dent free. But I like to think we’ve both aged gracefully. The house is in a snowbelt—-it snows up in that particular little mountain valley more than in the surrounding areas—-and was built to withstand the wind and snow, with it’s stone front facing the open valley. The roof will need replacing in a year or two, and the odd window latch needs fixing, but overall it’s in excellent shape. Which is about how I feel.

Since having Bean I’ve started to notice that I look older in the mirror in the morning. I have a small scattering of smiling lines, delicate and barely there, spreading out at the corners of my eyes. And the dark circles under my eyes—that I’m genetically disposed to (my father always had them), seem to have gotten darker, and more permanent with each short night of interrupted sleep. But I’m also leaner than I’ve ever been and stronger. I can run out in the cold for miles, and love it. And I’m not obsessed with being young forever. I’m grateful to finally be old enough to know better: to not always run bull-headed into things, putting my foot in my mouth. Old enough to finally have a smidgen of experience under my belt about this house business.

It is the second house we will have owned, and I’m hopeful that it will be the last for a long while. Long enough to put up a tree swing, and figure out which kinds of heirloom apples grow on the sunny slope outside the kitchen window. Longer. Of course, nothing is set in stone yet—the closing won’t happen for another month or so, and until then things are always up to the universe. But the day we signed the contract I saw a bright gleaming sun dog in the sky, and just when I saw it, DH walked into the room and the two of us just stood their grinning at the rainbow smudge at the edge of the snow clouds.

We grinned because with every significant move we have made, we’ve seen some form of rainbow. When we decided to rent an apartment together in Manhattan for the summer while I was still in school, we saw a rainbow—huge and bright in a stormy early summer sky. When we singed the lease on a little beach side cottage—which took us away from the humdrumness of our suburban second floor apartment in Connecticut, we saw a rainbow. And when we signed the contract on our first home, again, we saw a rainbow. The timing has been uncanny. Just in the moment of committing, the universe moves to respond.

So we’re all bubbly tonight because we walked the isles of Home Depot for an hour, talking cabinets and soapstone and appliances. Sometimes, I want nothing more than to be able to STOP talking about our plans. Sometimes it seems it’s all we talk about of late. But tonight it was fun. We were on the same page: imagining sap maple floors and the kitchen open to the sunny dining room.

This is where we picture Bean growing up: spitting water melon seeds, building tree forts, climbing trees. It will be home to him, and it will be where DH and I will reach middle age. It feels silly and magical and solid to picture us there, older. I try to do the fast forward thing in my head that nature shows do, to demonstrate a plant’s life cycle or the changing of seasons. There we are, on the front deck we have yet to build, looking at the mountains with our morning coffee.

Till then, we’ve got months of renovations. Months of demolition and salvage and drywalling, and we’re bound to go crazy more than once. But tonight when I think of the sundog house in the snowbelt, I feel giddy and peaceful the way I feel after a long journey. I am imagining home.

Buisness as usual: finding magic even there

We came back late Sunday amidst rain falling warm against a crust of snow, and spent the first hours at home unpacking and sorting through mail. By the following evening, we finally felt caught up on all the little things that make a home run: the floor was vacuumed, the plants watered, bills paid, phone calls returned, and we had a moment to step out into the early falling darkness of evening. The air was cold and the night slightly windy as we made our way downtown. As we turned the corner between tall buildings, we saw it: the cobble stone pedestrian walk bordered on either by trees and shops was lit with thousands of little white lights. Every tree, twinkling softly. It was so beautiful, we just stood there, our mouths open.

Then we made our way for toasty slices of chees pizza and hot chocolate and sat in front of the gigantic spruce at the top of the block, sparkling in a myriad of colors. Bean's eyes were huge and round like small deep inkwells reflecting the lights. He grinned wide when the wind blew the branches. And from somewhere, Carol of the Bells was playing softly.

We need...

We're making a run for it: leaving for Princeton early to visit DH's parents--TOMORROW instead of on Wednesday. We need a break: from house hunting, from teething, from early darkness in our too-small apartment, from neighbors. We need some time alone---together. We need some time to poke through shops for presents, to linger over coffee without having it nearly pulled into our laps, to canoodle without whispering. We can't wait to see our dog---who's been on long term vacation with DH's parents because our apartment is too small, and their yard is big and grassy. We can't wait to watch Bean with his grandparents who love him more than breath itself. And of course we're looking forward to stuffing with chestnuts and fresh cranberries and sausage; maple squash; arugula salad with walnuts and apples; turkey; garlicky mashed potatoes; and of course pie. We are big lovers of pie. Tomorrow we will put our final offer in on the house that has a corner of my heart with the frightful wall paper and the land where I can picture abundant gardens and a tree swing for Bean, and then we'll throw our hands up. We'll get snow tires put on the car, and buy snacks for the seven hour drive, and then we'll be off.

Blogging may or may not be limited for the next week. In the meantime, I leave you with a wee photo documentary from today:

Snowsuit weather.

Love is...(taken by DH.)

Up above us.

Still fountain.

Take off, then landing.

Waiting.

In between.

This one I took accidentally. I don't know what it is of, but it fits exactly how I felt all day today.

First frost

Walking home I glanced skyward, and way, way up was the biggest V of geese I've ever seen, flying silently, deliberately South against a backdrop of grey. I stood still in the parking lot of the market, just watching them. People around me gave me looks. I couldn't help but think:how small we are, bustling about with our carts and our lunches. I couldn't help but think, what matters, really? Later our house offer was counter offered at a still too high price. More waiting. And talking. So much talking. I try to be patient, to think clearly. But my thoughts feel fractured like broken ice.