Blueprints
After a few days off I’m back to writing, fingering the blueprints that make me who I am. I’m going back to my childhood in the Colorado mountains, and to the stories of my parent’s love and faith. I’m looking for meaning in their loneliness and isolation; I'm looking for maps that can help me to describe the context of my own life. Sometimes it feels impossible to make words describe the things my heart needs to say. Sometimes, barely, the right ones arrive on the page in the nick of time to save me from the heartache of knowing but not being able to explain.
Following the path of the dead
Opening and folding, flush petals move towards sun, where warm life stretches to the boundaries of stem pulling nectar upwards against gravity.
In the moonlight moths flock to the ghostly silhouettes of backlit petals. Their wings beat aimlessly, falling for the sham of appearances.
Hovering at the edges at twilight times, at dawn, worlds open and close like the finning gills of fish, pummeling the air like the call of a coyote.
Here perceptions shift ; the shape of the sea star gathered up becomes an interior space.
Self Portrait Tuesday: Time # 4--A sense of humor is about timing and possibly furniture
Ikea furniture is always packaged flat—for easier transport, and because it requires less packaging this way. It is up to you to haul your boxes of furniture home, usually tied to the roof of your too-small car or shoved precariously in the back, with the trunk open, and when you arrive, you stumble inside with the long cardboard rectangles containing what will be your bed or nightstand, and begin the hours-long process of assembling things. It takes a lot of patience, and with any luck, your techniques improve as you go along.
You take a heap of flat boards, pegs, an allen wrench, and follow the schematics that, if they have words at all, are printed in fifteen different languages. You are aware that what you’re doing is a little bit like magic. You are turning the nearly two-dimensional stack of wood and particle board, glass and wicker, into something three dimensional and useful.
You build a wicker backed chair, after putting the legs in place wrong twice. Your cat will later love to sharpen her claws on its rattan and soon it will no longer be presentable, but when you first put it together, all you see are its clean lines and lovely promise. You imagine dinner parties, and sunny mornings over coffee.
Or you put together a glass-topped table that will for years, show every condensation ring but you still can’t be bothered to buy coasters. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to make sense of the arrows and dotted lines: connect region B with point C using tool A. It might not be fine furniture, but it’s a start, and though you dream of owning REAL furniture, the kind you see in the windows of the home wares store you walk by every day, you’re happy with these flat-package creations for the time being.
This is pretty much exactly what the process of acquiring a sense of humor is like.
If you’re me, that is, and you were raised in a home with two of the most earnest, somber parents on the face of the earth. My home was also devoid of TV which contributed to a) the blossoming of my wild and vivid imagination an b) the utter absence of pop-culture sensibilities and all the accoutrements of humor that come with this terrain.
For me, sarcasm, silliness, wit, and comic timing did not come preassembled: an already functional part of my personality from day one. In fact, for years I was almost entirely lacking of anything that could possibly pass as an acceptable sense of humor.
Unfortunately sarcasm is still mostly lost on me. And, though you can slay me with a good play-on-words (my father, in all his etymological neerdieness would, on a cheery day, toss out one after another at the dinner table, and you’d have to be well versed in homophones and double-entendres to find them laugh-worthy, which I was), no amount of hanging out with boys has helped me to understand why it’s SO FUNNY to repeat one liners over and over again.
But I am gradually starting to get the hang of funny. It’s taken years for me to assemble, but I'm finally starting to get that it’s okay to JUST TAKE THINGS LIGHTLY sometimes. To NOT be serious every single minute. Years for me to finally understand that having a sense of humor, first and foremost, means having fun. It means giving yourself permission to make a fool out of yourself—to jump into things, arms and legs akimbo, laughing all the while.
And Bean is like the schematics that come with the furniture. He makes being silly easy. At 13 months, he watches everything I do, and then replicates it, often with unbelievably comic effects. He’ll take a sip of water and then let out this delightful, over-exaggerated sigh, and everybody just dies laughing. Or he’ll hear music and start wiggling his booty around with complete uninhibitedness. Finally, I'm starting to see that this is what humor is all about: over-exaggerated uninhibition. Gusto. Glee.
So we make time for this every day: we sit on the floor, roll around some, and act silly. I’m hoping that by the time he’s big, both of us will have a rip-roaring sense of humor.
Weekend sweetness
Syrup making in an outdoor evaporator, old iron spiles, sap dripping into galvanized buckets with lids to keep the squirrels out. Standing around with people we barely know (our neighbors to the west) it feels so easy to be ourselves. To laugh, to throw the slimy tennis ball for their spaniel, and lick syrup from a paper cup, still hot, unselfconsciously. We share conversation the way two friends might a sandwich, snatching juicy bits here and there while Bean crawls about on the wood pile and gets licked by the dog.
“Doggy,†he says, over and over again. “Doggy.†And we can’t help but laugh with wonder and scoop him up. He’s starting to talk!
All weekend a friend has been visiting, and our house is full of the quiet harmony that occurs when someone you love is around. An extra set of hands. Dishes done. She laughs at all my husband’s jokes and and Bean adores her. Between us we've probably had six bars of chocolate. And in the moments in between everything else, we’ve been sorting out our souls over cups of tea or red wine , talking until we’ve gathered many bright words like handfuls sea glass.
Hair cuts today (I got bangs—see above), and playing in the late evening sunlight at the waterfront, chasing Bean about the lawn and drinking up the light.
Before and during
Out in the field of trampled grass we sit under a gray bucket of sky, looking towards the roofline of our house, angled and steep against the gentle slope of the hill. Redwing blackbirds call from their perches on budding branches. Maple sugaring tomorrow with the neighbors, and the electrical wiring is done, the walls finally framed. Drywall this week, then paint. These things feel like progress but there is always more to do.
This early part of spring is always a time of disbelief for me. So long since foliage was familiar, I can’t remember the soft outlines of trees, fuller with leaves, nor can my memory slip comfortably around the color of bright green grass or blossoms. Yet it is only a matter of weeks, a half a calendar’s page of days before the landscape’s contour changes. When the peepers come and the new sap stops dripping into the buckets in the sugar maple stands, it will happen. It is the same way with the house now. We walk the rooms, so accustomed to the film of drywall dust, the nails underfoot, the exposed studs. Picking paint samples is an act of faith. But soon we'll have floors, the kitchen cabinets in place, tile underfoot in the bathroom.
Before and during feel so much longer than the after, when in reality, of course, the opposite is true.
Growing
The sun made me happy today. Bean & I went to the park and I think he felt it too: that glorious springtime light splashing our cheeks and making shadows look like blue cut-outs in a collage. We squinted and laughed and climbed the jungle gym and then went for a latte and a vanilla milk.
He’s becoming his own little self. Thoughtful, interested, pointing out everything. It seems like this past week all of a sudden he’s started to notice the most minute details in things. He points to airplanes in the sky---and last night we came home late and I cradled him in my arms so he could see the big night sky and he pointed up at the stars and started babbling excitedly, turning his head as we walked up the steps to the porch, so that he could get one last glimpse before we came inside.
I write, I have written
I tried to think of something clever to write to describe the weekend, but I couldn’t, because all I’ve been doing is writing and I feel squeezed dry tonight. (The yeast infection, the serious shin splints and the ridiculously cold weather haven’t helped.) Every spare second for the past three days, writing. I have about 10,000 words of stuff that in the good moments I think is actually decent. Then there are the moments that I feel like flushing it all down the toilet. These moments occur in abundance. But it’s some kind of progress. The deadline is tomorrow, so it’s up to the stars then.
The highlight of the weekend: see below.
Some nights I wait with an empty cup
Some nights there is too much to define: the places where I begin and end, where my heart leaves off loving and begins needing unsayable things that make me flutter like winnowed chaff in the wind.
I want more than water and tea leaves, more than steam. Some nights the world stops in my soul and I must wait like a heart attack victim for the pulse of words and meaning to return.
I pour the liquid into my cup and burn my fingers on the steam; then bring them to my lips, hold them there, caressing their blistered heat.
Some nights, I wait for words to rush up like the steam, to catch me unaware.
Pictures from my kitchen tonight
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.
Snowy day
We woke up to snow---powdery inch upon inch making everything sparkling and white. When the sidewalks were plowed, the snow came up to my knees on either side, and all day fat dreamy flakes drifted down.
Sometime in the past month Bean has connected the word "snow" with snow, and today when I said "do you see it snowing?" he ran to the window to look out, still in his jammies.
After a breakfast of waffles and eggs we put on our jackets and went out on the porch. This was the first time he's ever REALLY played in snow---the first time touching it, bare handed; the first time he made the connection that the stuff on the porch was the same stuff coming down from the sky---and he'd point to snowflakes falling and say "uh, uh, uh!"
He ran out the door and knelt in it eagerly, but then sat back and stared at it for a good long minute, as if frozen in amazment. After his initial shock that it's REALLY COLD, he started to play, picking up handfuls, and watching as each little flake dissolved in the heat of his palm.
It's March
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.
Little delight
My silly boy. He LOVES to slurp noodles.
I didn't necessarily get anything more accomplished today, but I feel less worried about it. Things have a way of working out, especially when I allow myself to return to the moment.
I made plans with DH so that I can have some solid hours of writing later this week, and today under bright blue skys Bean and I took a walk.
I was eating an apple---something I rarely do, and Bean watched me in wonder for a bit and then wanted a bite himself. And so we walked: one bite for me, one for him, a couple of steps, repeat. We looked at all the snow, still powdery and white along the edges of the sidewalk. We kicked lumps of frozen snow---his little feet following the intention of his brain with surprising accuracy. We pulled at dried grasses and picked up sticks.
It took us about twenty minutes to walk the length of our block, and I felt lighthearted and glad to be outdoors holding his little hand. Moment by moment, things have a way of working out.
What does it take?
Sometimes it feels so impossible to do this well: to be a mother and be all that that requires and still do other things. To have days like today when Bean was restless and fussy and probably teething (when he would cry and achieve spectacular meltdowns when I denied him things like the phone or a full pitcher of water) and to keep intact some sense of purpose outside of mothering.
I can’t help feeling anxious: a writing deadline for a workshop I want to take this summer is rapidly approaching. I want it so much my heart aches, and yet, immediately the chorus of doubt starts warming up.
On days like this I lie in the dark of the bedroom nursing Bean for what feels like the umpteenth time, and to grasp at the wisps of images that linger at my mind’s periphery. A new idea for a painting. A handful of possibilities for the manuscript I must write. But when I finally settle down after the laundry has been done, the dishes washed, I am able to locate only tiny fragments.
I try to remember to breathe, to let the hurdy gurdy of my heart play easy music, even when there is hubbub all around, the room strewn with a hundred small things: shoes and toys, books, little snippets.
I try to remember to pause, to let the kite of my soul lift off the ground even when the day brings complication: so many things that are not either/or, that are not simple, that are instead sticky with doubt and exhaustion.
I try to remember to let words be more than the little pieces: linking contents with ingredient, newsprint with the days events, even when I am empty like the broken glass I swept into the dustpan from the kitchen floor.
I try to remember to be patient, to stitch together moments into a mosaic of things that matter: tea & crumb cake with Bean at Barnes & Noble in the morning; buying 79 cent Dagoba chocolate samples and raspberry licorice, fresh naval oranges, milk in a glass jug, and squash & maple ravioli. A half hour to myself (the only time all day) when he finally napped in the afternoon: just me and the cat and more tea on the couch, eyeing Annie Liebovitz's pics in Vanity Fair. And later, reading essays from this collection at the gym.
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.
Bean recieved Yesterday, winter festivities
I love living in a place where instead of complaining about the cold, people celebrate it for a good cause. There was hot coffee to be had amidst the revelry, as groups of costume clad folk made their way down to the water and JUMPED IN. There was whooping and gafawing and general yodeling going on as the DJ played "Cold as Ice" and brave souls got wet. Mind you, they needed to break the ice from the water first. I'm not a brave soul, but I took pictures.
We had a wonderful morning outside in bright winter sunlight, an afternoon nap that stretched on until early evening---the three of us to a bed. Then I managed to squeeze in a five mile run at the gym which brought my first week of marathon training to a close with my cumulative total miles run adding up to twenty. This is the first winter I haven't gone into hibernation, and I'm pretty thrilled.
Enjoy the chilly pics. There are more here.
Ski jump eyelashes.
Ice sculpture
Rocks on ice.
Uncarved blocks of ice.
Chilly.
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?â€
“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.
Self Portrait
Creative Womb gave this challenge: take some pictures of yourself in good light---that you like; that you don't allow yourself to pick apart right away. So, in preparation for the harder stuff, and in honor of my own creative self, here are a couple shots I took today by the window looking at the calla lillies my mother sent. This is hard stuff. Looking straight at yourself. Allowing yourself to be, without revisions, without commentary. Try it. I dare you!
Yesterday, the vibrant beginning to a new year
It was so lovely read all of your kind birthday wishes. Thank you! Driving back from this show at midnight, the temperature hovered just above 0, and wind sent gusts of snow whirling across the road. The region of Canada around Montreal is remarkably flat—all geographic features rubbed smooth by the glaciers of the last Ice Age. Now, fields stretch out as far as the eye can see in either direction from the road. Every mile or so, there is another dairy farm with golden light spilling out onto the snow in puddles underneath the smudged glass of the barn's windows.
Things felt rushed up to the point of our departure. The company we bought flooring from delivered it to the new house yesterday, and the big truck couldn’t make it up our long snowy driveway—even after we plowed it. So we spent the better part of two hours transferring sap maple flooring into the bed of the pickup truck, and then driving it up the hill and unloading it, before leaving.
We also found ourselves caught off guard by the sudden foreignness of Montreal with it’s maze of one way streets, fast drivers, and French language. The show was intense and amazing. Thousands of lights, and multiple screens allowed the dancers on stage to interact with a computer-generated graphic environment. Once I let go of my expectations of seeing a typical Cirque performance with acrobats and clowns, I became engrossed in the intense visual and musical performance of Delirium, that narrated human being's quest for self-knowledge in a world that is at once isolated and mechnaized, and yet intensly passionate, dynamic and fleeting.
I left inspired and overwhelmed. The sheer volume and brightness almost felt invasive--- the thrumming of the drums making my heart alter its rhythm---but the seeing art in such intensity was also invigorating, and the bright technicolored images of lithe dancers in a forest of sky high dandelions spun through my dreams all night.
Today the air is cold. Hoary fingers of ice travel up windows like the fronds of tiny ferns. In the kitchen my mother-in-law is making cheese cake. Upstairs the neighbors feet make knock-knocking patterns across the floor. The house is wrapped in warmth and early evening comfort—the cats purring in the lamplight, and Bean investigating a pile of blocks. This year was a fitting way to launch the year—with intense creativity, with family, and with a handful of quiet moments.
sunset yesterday
snowy woods at dusk
Canadian farmland
silo silhouette
snow gusting across the road at midnight
Montreal tunnel
Tomorrow, 28
Tomorrow is my birthday, and today my mother sent me a box full of calla lilies. Each waxy bloom perfect, it’s yellow pistil caked with pollen.
She has never sent me flowers before—every delicate stem wrapped in cellophane---and receiving the long lovely box at the door and putting the long-necked blooms into water made me profoundly happy. It is funny that flowers can do this. So much is contained in the gesture of giving them. These flowers were saying: safety, unending love, openness.
This year I became a mother, and as a result, began to see my mother in an entirely different way. Since my father died, my mother and I have been navigating new terrain in our relationship, and it has not been without land mines. So much lies buried in the geography of our shared lives. So much love and wonder and hurt in our souls is brought to the surface when we talk, and sometimes stumbling upon each other’s every weakness—clumsily, hurtfully, without grace. But gradually we are learning to keep some things: to keep safety, to keep openness, to keep love steadfast even when we come up against these jagged edges.
So with my birthday coming tomorrow, I find myself contemplating how this day is wholly mine, and yet wholly hers as well. My birth marked a turning point in her life—that changed everything for her. I understand this now with new wonder and appreciation. I realize the sacrifice, the worry, the frustration of motherhood that she felt—and see myself in her, just as I also see how much I am her opposite.
This is the gift and the challenge of being a parent: to shepherd a little person into adulthood and then let them go to be anyone they want to be—entirely unique unto themselves. My son is already, even before he can talk, totally his own person—and I can’t help but wonder how he’ll see me throughout his life. First just as his mama, but maybe later hopefully as a source of inspiration—-and maybe as the writer, the artist, the teacher and dreamer that I am. And I wonder too what he will be like throughout his life, and how I will see him—-as a child first, and then later as his own person, and a source of inspiration.
Last year on my birthday I was immensely pregnant, right on the cusp of the unknown. I couldn’t fathom how my life would be, and my days were heavy with a certain anxiety—not to mention actual the actual heaviness of my belly. Then blink, and a year has passed, and here I am, beginning training for a marathon, in the midst of renovations on a new home, and the mother to a small boy who has started taking steps (!) towards me, eyes twinkling and arms outstretched.
Like each beautiful lily drawing drinking water from the jar, the moments of this year have been sweet and good.