Topographs::5
***
Also listening to this. Have you seen/heard it? Bean and I couldn't get enough this morning over breakfast. We're both jazz lovers. The boy falls asleep to Miles' Kind of Blue album every night. I have always secretly wished I could play the sax. He wants to be on drums.
I'm working on a long post for tomorrow. Aperture. View. The way we look at this right now. This life. Is you expected it to be ten years ago the life you are living now? How is it different?
Topographs:: 4
Topographs::3
A hot shower, sun, an iced latte, David Sedaris in the New Yorker, laughing, glasses made in Italy, wind in spirals, new-to-me terra cotta bread pans, my mother's smiles, newly baked bread & butter, another latte, stacking fire wood, rain against the evening windows, bare feet.
Topographs::2
A new sandbox.
Straight-up sunshine.
Dessert to remember (lemon meringue with a flaky pate brisee.)
On our walk: splashy puddles, new lilac buds, red barns.
Topographs*::1
*top'o·graph' (tÅp'É™-grÄf') n. The surveying of the features of a place or region. The study or description of a region or part of something.
I am planning to share a photo or two at the end of every day for a while. To remember the shape of things. The texture of moments. And to practice honing my eye with the camera.
Also, this bread turned out brilliantly today. My favorite so far (I plan to start regularly blogging about my bread adventures.) Perfect for sopping up fresh olive oil with mozzarella and a little basil and tomato. It was also yummy fresh, with raspberry jam.
Ingredients: 2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast 7/8 cup warm water (I approximated this. Who has a 1/8 measuring cup?) 2 1/2 cups unbleached bread flour (I used this kind.) 1 1/2 teaspoons sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons salt cornmeal to sprinkle on baking sheet
Proof yeast and 1/2 tsp sugar in 7/8 cup warm water for 10 minutes in a warm place. I put mine near our wood stove.
In processor, mix flour, remaining 1 teaspoon sugar and salt. With processor running, (Bean was TOTALLY into being in charge of this!) pour in the yeast mixture in a continuous stream.
The dough should combine and come clean from the sides of the bowl within a few seconds. After dough combines, let processor run for a little bit more until the dough forms a ball.
Roll the dough with your hands to about 18 inches long. It was sticky at first, but then became pleasantly soft and dry. Place on sheet that has been sprinkled with corn meal (to prevent dough from sticking). Cover loosely with oiled plastic wrap. (The oil is essential!)
Allow to rise in warm place for about 45 minutes. I put mine by the stove again, on the floor, the plastic wrap covered with a tea towel. When I went back to check, the cat had found it and was contentedly kneading it and purring. No harm done. Thank god for the plastic wrap though!
Preheat oven 375. Remove plastic and diagonally slash loaf with a sharp knife at about 3-inch intervals.
Spray dough with water & bake for 20 minutes or until lightly browned. Mine needed more time. I also sprayed it a 2 more times.
Orbit
Tonight my orbit is the cat's purr; my finger's contact with the ENTER key, the space bar, alphabet twirling.
Tonight my orbit is my sick son, now asleep, before in tears simply because the day was too much.
Tonight my orbit is the roundness of my belly where kicks disrupt my thoughts, where space is at a premium now, and over which I pull new woolly sweaters.
Tonight my orbit is the circling of my thoughts, dogging each other, nose to tail; feeling like gradually I've lost touch with my creative self, allowed myself to sink deep into a dreamy no-mans land of day to day.
Tonight my orbit is the scattered disks thoughts about tomorrows plans; a thirst for fresh water, an eagerness for bed and a longing to feel right now, the warmth of my husband's skin.
And then there are days that are perfect crap.
Like today. When all I feel like doing is crying for no reason. When I come home from work and feel like I can't give anything more to anyone but I have to, because DH has guitar lessons and it's the mama show for bedtime routine and dinner tonight. It rained all day. Maybe that was it. Or maybe hormones. Or maybe I'm lonely or tired or hungry or some stupid combination of those three. Some days just suck. Even with the perfect orange leaves, wet from the rain, and the sun falling in angles, and the sound of Bean's voice rising and falling in the living room where he excitedly narrates a story to himself.
It feels like I'm submerged, but unable to swim, like a rediculous dream. Does anyone else ever have days like this: where you see how irrationally moody you're being, but cannot stop, cannot shake it off, cannot break into a grin no matter how much you know that you should?
I can't help wondering:
If we go into a depression, what will happen to artists--who base their incomes on the production of a commodity that doesn't fall into the category of "survival"? Would there still be literary magazines? Galleries? Etsy?
If we go into a depression, what will happen to private schools? Will parents still send their children—or will they opt out, out of necessity? And what will happen to public schools as a result? Will they become more overcrowded, further under-funded? Will the tax base stay the same?
If we go into a depression, will we be able walk the fine line between heart’s longing and daily need; between the unquenchable desire to create and the need for an income--the hard-scrabble talk of hungry bellies overriding the thirst for beauty, for words?
Suddenly I’m realizing that my understanding of the Great Depression is based on the vague memories of a high school reading of The Grapes of Wrath. I cannot picture life without the wanton consumerism that drives our culture.
On the radio, I hear newscasters warning that “the holiday season looks gloomy†not because people no longer love each other, or have lost their faith, but because consumers are spending less in stores. It gives me the shivers.
On one hand I think, damn right. We needed this. A shake down, a shift, a change. The bare bristling greed of Wall Street needed to be ripped open, the bandaid of oblivion and status quo ripped off abruptly, the blood loss inevitable. On one hand I think, would it really be so bad if people had to step back from the brink of unrequited want for material things? If they had to scale back, live closer to home, greener by necessity. If gardens, if local produce, if organic, if simple were a way of life necessitated by an unstable economic culture.
But on the other hand, my chest aches imagining. I’m having a baby. My son’s will grow up in this time, and whatever it holds. To be prudent, I’d keep my job, I’d focus on the paycheck, not the yearning. I’d let my view narrow so that my weekends burgeon and my week’s blur, so that need trumps the calling of my heart to write full time, to create. Because is it not unspeakably selfish in such a time for a mama to want this? To want to slip out of the workforce, into a world where word matter, where art matters, even as the world as I know it may be changing, ending, reshaping.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that I have always believed unwaveringly in the Grace that holds my life, and I have no reason to stop believing in it now.
lame excuse
Hi. I miss you. Yesterday was the worst day ever. I officially hate being pregnant. Here's to hoping today will be better. And that I'll put up a real post.
nonsense
I've been truly miserable the past few days. Drowsy and doubled over with stomach pain. It's not just the nausea, it's the discomfort, the indigestion that is always and forever there. Everything disagrees. And, I'm hormonal.
Proof?
I watched Dirty Dancing last night. It is quite possibly one of my favorite movies, although I couldn't tell you when I ever watched the entire movie in one sitting. This became evident last night when I broke down into vast hormonal sobs at the scene where Johnny leaves Baby and that song "She's Like the Wind" is playing. Yes, I sobbed.
DH thought I had lost my mind.
BUT. I discovered something then, that was rather momentous. The movie continues! That's NOT THE END. For my entire adult life I somehow have managed to never see the end of Dirty Dancy. Ever.
And so I thought it was a sad movie, and Johnny leaves and Baby is heartbroken...
Unexpected
Shit. It was way harder than I thought to say goodbye to Bean. Damn. That kid has my heart.
How do you wear this?
So, in a month we'll be heading to Spain for a friend's wedding. Have I told you that? I'm so excited. It will be my first time since 1997 being overseas. Holy shit. I was 19 when I left, after having spent a year in Germany (also the year I set my hair on fire on my birthday.)
Anyhoo, I'm trying to find a dress for a very formal, large, Spanish wedding. I like dresses like these, that are halter tops--like this one. But I can never figure out how the hell I'm supposed to wear them, really. I mean come on, only perky 19 year olds, can go without support in such a dress. And if you beg to differ, let me just say one word: breastfeeding.
Okay, so now that we're on the same page, how does one go about wearing such a dress? What secret undergarments actually work with an open backed sheer-fabric dress?
I know, not my typical post. But see, I promised, I'm going to try to post more, so this is what you get. Run-ons and random clothing questions.
Also, on an entirely other note:
Bean is cureently asleep on one of those giant beanbags in our bedroom (which, by the way, are way flatter and less poufy than they appear in the picture.) I'm trying to get him to stop sneaking into our room the minute we say goodnight and come downstairs--because, though I don't mind him coming into our room in the middle of the night, I do rather mind not being able to go to sleep spooning with DH. So my newest plan is to get him to at least sleep in his own space--in our room. He seems happy as a clam. Sound asleep, tucked under a comforter, and snoring away.
Really annoying strange stuff is happening in blogland
I don't get it. My blog has disappeared several times ENTIRELY in the past twenty-four hours. WTF?
Nearly
The beginning of spring looks like circles in the road, and ours is a mess of them. I’ve always wondered about this: how potholes form, always round like bowls, instead of square or jagged. The car groans going over the bumps. The tires gather mud, and getting in and out every day my jeans are graffitied across the calves with the tell-tale marks of rural living: mud. I walk out to the upper meadow. The snow is hard beneath my boots, and I barely break through the surface crust of ice crystals. Below I imagine nematodes and newts and other small crawly things hibernating in quiet coils waiting for the sun to make their blood stir.
I always feel like I blink, and spring has blossomed. It’s the shortest of season’s here; with everything bursting into bloom urgently, the growing season so short, autumn already nipping at summer’s heels by mid September. So I walk out to the edge of the woods along the meadow where the limbs have falling during the recent ice storms and the ground is a patchwork of melted places and white, and I sit and listen for spring.
Even before the snow melts, or any blade of green pokes up anywhere, the birds come back, and hearing them I feel like helium is being pumped into my lungs. Like my feet might just lift off the ground with the promise of someday wild strawberries and late warm evenings and supple grass.
Sometimes in the car I tune the radio to a station from Montreal, just to hear the lilt of French and listening to the birds feels like this to my untrained ear. Ornithology would give me the proper nouns and verbs for all the twittering: the ruckus chatter of a flock of dark winged birds sitting high in the branches of a tree at the opposite edge of the meadow; the repeated trilling of others. I know enough to know these birds aren’t here in winter. Not chickadees or the red sparks of cardinals that dart through the snow to the bird feeder, but birds with songs that come from the south, where the sun has already warmed the ground and the daffodils are up.
It’s a long month, March. It tries my patience, and I feel myself picking fights simply because I’m restless. In bed I can’t sleep and I can’t shake the off-kilter feeling of whatever we’ve left unsaid. I sigh in the darkness, “I’m sad,†I murmur.
He’s asleep, barely, almost, and is annoyed. He was annoyed before bed too—at the cat for dogging him around the house, meowing, wanting something, catnip maybe or fresh water... spring.
“Shut the hell up,†he growled, turning on her abruptly. Her tail twitched like rope. She backed up to a safe distance. I backed up too, still as permeable as I’ve always been. I can’t seem to stop him from soaking into my pores. Even when it’s not a big deal like tonight, when he wasn’t even talking to me, just somewhere near me, blowing off steam.
In bed I’m still percolating and I can feel him sigh, the covers shifting slightly. “What?†he says. “What’s wrong?â€
But what I want aren’t words now, this late. Really, I’m not sure what I want, more than spring, more than warmth, more than maybe his arms around me unbidden, reassuring.
“Can you tell me what’s wrong?â€
The room is dark. So dark I cannot see the opposite wall. The wooden shades are turned so the moonlight is blocked, and under the flannel I feel my heart beating. My mouth is hot. “No.â€
I really want to be tucked up against him and I know I’m the one who started this. I’m like those damn dime store carnations that soak up dye, turning unnaturally bright blue or fuchsia at the slightest suggestion. I can’t shake the feeling something’s off. It could be anything. A hundred things. Likely nothing. I do this, waiting for spring; waiting to be able to inhale air that doesn’t cling in my lungs, thermal and dry.
“I felt like you were mad at me before we came to bed. We didn’t spend any time together today. I feel like we never got a chance to talk, and now you just turned away from me, pulled the covers and went to sleep.â€
In the hall the cat moves towards our room on silent paws, her purring announcing her approach. She chirps, an eccentric little meow of greeting, then circles the bed, purring, wide eyed in the dark, tail jerking back and forth.
I lunge for her just as she’s slinking under my side of the bed. My fingers graze her fur. She’s doing this on purpose. The cat should have been named Loki. I bite my lip. I want her out, to fix whatever angst is zinging back and forth between us like static, making the hairs on my arms stand up.
It takes both of us hurling things under the bed for her to give up her antagonizing perch just out of reach and make a run for the door.
He’s impatient with me and it’s past midnight. I follow the cat out the door and slip into my small boy’s double bed, but cannot sleep. Before I left he said, “Why do you always have to drag things out?†Like I am doing it all on purpose, this restlessness, this sabotage of sleep and tenderness.
I had no answer and so I went, but craved his arms even while smelling the sleep-sweet scent of my three year old, arms flung wide across the bed.
His room is filled with light when I come in, bare feet crossing the wood floor, avoiding the places that creak. I switch off the starshaped light above him, then lie in the semi dark, the moon flooding his un-curtained windows, and wait for sleep.
But it doesn’t come. Illusive, like the first weeks of spring, sleep hovers at the periphery of my senses. I feel myself slipping towards it, but am yanked back, again and again until I get up once more and trundle back to his warmth. He’s moved to my side, and is asleep, holding the covers where my body would be. I nose my way in, pressing my lips against the heat of his chest, and he wraps his arms around me fiercely until I can feel the outline of every muscle in his back. And as we’re lying this way, the heat between us making the windows fog so that in the morning we’ll find condensation in upturned moons at the bottom of each pane of window glass, we hear the coyotes.
First one, a long low howl that makes my spine prickle and my eyes widen in the dark. Then many. They are running up the ravine along the edge of the lower meadow and the woods. I picture their tracks on the snow, a pack chasing the moon, chasing a buck, hungry like we both are for a riper season.
My cat got sprayed by a skunk.
Help. She smells awful and is currently spending the night in the garage with a bunch of old towels (sprinkled with catnip to sweeten the deal) until I have the time to figure out what the hell to do with her. How do you wash a cat in tomato juice?? Any and all suggestions welcome.
Gallop, gallop, gallop
Whew. Met the deadline, but now: getting ready to leave my classroom in the hands of a sub. A very capable one at that, but still, do you have any idea how hard it is to clone yourself? That's what writing lesson plans for an entire week feels like. Too darn busy.
Hence the almost absence from around here. Will be back shortly.
Feverish brain fuzz
I keep thinking I'll wake up and feel better--but whatever I have decided to kick it to me. I am STILL sick with a fever, and feel generally misearable. My brain feels like a dust bunny. I cannot think straight, let alone post anything coherent. Gah.