"The moon, Mama!"

The smell of chocolate cake baking makes me heady. My friend’s birthday is this weekend, and I’ve spent the evening whipping frothy egg whites, melting dark chocolate and licking my fingers.

The house is quiet, in that way houses get at the end of the day when everything is put in it’s place and children are asleep. Outside an orchestra of insects trill, and across the room The Piano soundtrack plays. I haven’t heard it since high school, when I loved it with a sort of moody passion. Finding it again, the same feeling rises up. The drama and cinematic artistry of the movie moved me to tears, and the music still manages to slip into the small open places in my soul, in a way that begs for solitude and intimacy both.

The past few days have been filled with sun drinking and wave kicking; long enough away from home to miss it. And it has also been one of those milestone weeks for Bean, who has taken to everything here with wide-eyed wonder: the lizards with their bright red throats, the delicate hibiscus, the sleek bellied otter, the ocean’s waves, the shells, the snakes, the endless sand.

I find myself staring at him (like I always seem to,) trying to mark in my head exact moments: the way he knelt on a big chair at the table, and ate couscous all by himself with a spoon last night; how he ran wildly, willfully, eagerly down the shore towards a flock of rosy-legged ibis today, carefree and confident that we would follow; or how tonight, getting ready for bed, he kept pressing his small palms to my lips for kisses, and then turned them so I could kiss the backs of his hands, and then his wrists and elbows. Over and over again he wanted this ceremony of affection, and over and over again I complied, my heart filling with a feeling beyond sweetness, beyond sorrow, beyond joy, but made up of all three.

I used to feel entirely one with him---the border between his self and mine, a mere distinction of skin. But now he has started to really become his own self---choosing to ignore me when I call him, fighting to do things without help, or asking for things with specificity and intention.

Each week, each month as a mother, it is necessary to learn a new choreography of love. And now in this dance there is a delicate space between us; space that he fills with his giddy twirling, his wild happy limbs, his smile, his troubled pensive frowns, and his many new words.

“Moon, mama!” he says now, pointing up at the sky. And there it is, the moon bright and clear, against the evening blue. I feel my heart skip a momentary beat in wonderment: he has just claimed the moon for his own, for the very first time.

Mapping home

It’s been a busy week: tumbling through these strange days of weaning, unpacking, and packing all over again for vacation. The fact that I’m not necessarily an organized person flares up in times like these, and I find myself circling the house every morning looking for my hairbrush, or trying yet again to remember the last of ten items on one of my many mental lists. But despite the small specks of chaos that continue to dance over the surface of my days, things are falling into place, and home has begun feeling like just that. Home. I’ve had the hankering to cook here: grilled tuna and couscous salad, vanilla waffles, banana scones, barbecued chicken and corn on the cob, hearty soups. I love sliding pots over the smooth soapstone of our counters, and finding knives and measuring spoons just where they should be.

Every day Bean, DH and I go for ambling walks: imprinting the geography of our land onto our souls. Learning by heart the location of the many apple trees, the small creeks, and the thick carpet of wild strawberries in the high meadow at the back of our land. We visit the sheep and donkeys down the road; walk through chest high grasses and daisies to a thicket of blackberries, just starting to swell and ripen; or sit out on the newly mown lawn in the evening to watch the bats zip about, backlit by a pastel sky.

My heart has been longing for this kind of solace: for this connection to a place. This sense of belonging. And now I drink it up daily, gulping with a certain disbelief. Eager at once to know everything about this place, and to never be done exploring.

From the driveway, the moon looked like a chip from a teacup wedged into the piece of sky between the V of our roof last night, and across the meadow and along the tree line, fireflies were blinking like a hundred small stars in a universe of grass. And when we went to bed—DH and I pressing into each other, reacclimating to being just us in bed, coyotes started to howl, high-pitched and wild, from the nearby wood.

A year here

A year ago, more or less, I started this blog hoping to find a reason to come to the page every day. I have. You. Thank you. For your kindness, your friendship, your encouragement, your humor, your beautiful art, your appreciation. This blog has become a kind of lens for me, allowing me to look from a different angle back at my life. Most months I have come to the page almost every day and given something up. Some shred of my day, some moment, some thought. And the act of writing it, and sharing it, has altered it. Like sudden small diamonds pressed out of the carbon of daily life, I’ve learned to see things differently through this process.

I could not have imagined this outcome. When I started writing here, I still felt like I was an imposter as a parent. I was still in a riot of shock that I was somebody’s mother, and this was the place I came to start exploring this new role. Now a year into the thick of it, scraped knees feel second nature. But also, I’ve found art again: my brushes, camera, keypad. I’m so grateful.

PS—Tonight we sat outside at the edge of the lawn where the last of the evening sun fell in large swathes of yellow on the grass. We blew bubbles, and watched them float weightless and dreamy through the light. Bean, his hands outstretched towards each swirly blue and rainbow orb. Me, shutter happy as usual. See ?

Apparently I've been asking the wrong question...

Over the past two weeks, before I got here, I definitely whimpered once or twice, "Can it get any worse?" The answer is YES, you idiot. I have mastitis again. For a third time. The worst I've had it. Fever, soreness, the whole works. I'm ready to fully wean, but Bean has been more needy than usual, tossed about in the recent turbulance of our lives, and then there are those four pesky molars. So things have dragged on longer, and this is apparently how my body processes stress.

So much for long luxurious posts while I'm here (I have yet to write about what didn't happen with the marathon) and book reviews (I just read the Mermaid's Chair by Sue Monk Kidd--in a day. I devoured it.) Instead I'll be in bed. Hopefully I'll kick this by tomorrow & I can post some pics of Bean on his tricycle (he can't quite reach the pendals, it's a hoot!)

So while I'm curled up on the couch, I won't dare ask if it can get worse, because I'm starting to understand that it can, and probably will. But don't begin to think I'm depressing, because if you were here in person, you'd know an odd piece of trivia about me: I at a humor high point when I'm sick and/or miserable. Like after being in labor for 18 hours--the nurses were in awe. They kept saying, "We've NEVER seen anyone in such good spirits at this stage." I was cracking jokes left and right--and lord, I had an audiance (I think there may have been 14 people in the room when Bean finally showed his little self to the world). When things are clearly getting worse, I get funny. It's my survival mechanism. Which is actully pretty funny, because I'm generally not that funny at all. Oh dear. You see the state of my brain.

Respit

Bean’s bare feet fwap across the living room floor, zig zagging at random, humming a little tune as he goes. Outside the birds call and the sun has broken through the cloud cover, spilling light across the pine trees and wild grasses growing at the edge of the lawn. Bean and I are in New Jersey, three hundred miles from home. We slept together like foxes last night, his small body tucked into the curve of mine, our breath inscribing the turbulence of our dreams onto the air around us. When we woke, it felt hollow not to have DH’s warm and muscled back beside us, to rub up against, the fragrance of his skin enveloping us in early morning sweetness. But it was good to wake in a house with all the accoutrements of home: the coffee pot percolating, muffins on the counter, a washing machine and dryer, enough knives and spoons.

All day I allowed myself to linger, not quite ready to plunge into the business of doing anything. I felt like some mossy creature come out to sun, after such intense rain. Days of steady downpour left all my sneakers wet and my hair frizzy. Now in the sun, I am content to sit at the edge of the lawn watching Bean as he pokes a stick into a vernal pool full of dark slimy leaves and tadpoles. Then we find wild strawberries, plump and round as dimes, a freckling of red in a field of green. When I offer, Bean readily accepts, popping them into his mouth, then points to where they are growing, saying, “More!” “More!” in a lovely, soft, rounded ‘r’ way.

More than a handful of teeth are bursting through his gums: molars cresting like the tips of icebergs, incisors filling out a newly boyish grin. Not interested in eating anything today, his hands are in his mouth, or occupied with one or the other of his two handled sippy cups. He has been amazing through all these transitions—learning the lay of each new temporary home with only a minimum of fussing. Lately, he’s been coming to me wanting to be picked up. He throws his arms around my legs and holds on tight until I scoop him up and devour each of his round cheeks, whole, much to his squealing delight.

He’s such a different boy than two months ago. I missed his fifteen month letter, and here he is sixteen months next week, the days like a smudge across the page. Everything that was May is a blur of color and exhaustion in my head. The sudden lush emerald of the fields, the brown gulping of the stream high above its banks, the day in, day out toil at our house. Most different has been the way he’s suddenly grabbed hold of words. He names so many things now, earnestly, in his toddler shorthand, picking up the first syllable and vowel and repeating it, zealously pointing first at the thing he’s naming, then broadly around the room at anything that might add grandeur to his new found word. He’s so funny and expressive, it has been bittersweet to watch him grow and not be able to fully sink into every delicious moment with him, like I could today—poking sticks into a watery muck, and staining our fingers red from berry juice.

I miss DH in a panging kind of way, longing already for his hugs, his tender lips, his laughter. But for the both of us it is a relief to be this way: our little family spread over several states while our house progresses closer and closer towards completion. The kitchen is in and looks divine. So funny to have something that actually is human sized, rather than just bare walls and floors. The whole space seems different---less like a construction zone and more like a home.

Night gathers in the yard, bringing with it small rabbits eating clover in the twilight and a smattering of fireflies like small satellites zooming around the yard. Bean goes to bed without a hitch for the first time in over a week: a real bedroom with curtains and a bath with mama helps. Now I sit cross legged on the couch relishing the absolute laziness of my evening’s agenda: to write and ponder, sip tea, and maybe take a trip to the book store to browse the new nonfiction out this month.

Exhaustion

18 hour days. New muscles in my wrists. Thousands of square feet of paint and flooring. More rain. I'm so tired I could almost sleep standing up. Polyurethane fumes, and the report of the pneumatic nailer over and over again. Last night listening to the radio at 2:30 am we realized we've become their target audiance: depressed, financially strapped, and awake doing things we'd rather not be doing.

But somehow we keep putting one foot in front of the other. Friends came and helped us move the big stuff and left us with maple candy and red wine, and soon the floors will be dry and we'll be able to sleep early and deep wrapped in the sound of rural silence: a chorus of frogs and owls welling up. Tomorrow we'll be sleeping somewhere else. Not sure where yet, but somewhere.

Saying grace

Gratitude that the rain has stopped, at least for now. That sun, hot and bright, is pouring down on the fields of dandelions and lilac hedgerows. That my body, sore as it is, allows me to do this: to keep these hours, to tile, to rip out the ugly bathroom vanity upstairs plying it with a sledge hammer and crowbar, delicately so as not to destroy the wall. That my inlaws have been here all week, caring for Bean, making meals, helping to paint. Gratitude at looking up and seeing a bowl full of dark ink and stars spilled out across the heavens.

Gratitude at driving the washboard bumpy road to the house and seeing a fox slink into the high grass almost every evening, a wisp of orange, a fleeting hint of wildness.

Gratitude standing under the apple trees and hearing the hum of a thousand bees, the air pulsing with their honey-gathering vibrations.

Gratitude that today we start flooring, and that when the inlaws leave my dearest friend and her boyfriend are coming to help us move.

So much to be thankful for, even now when every muscle in my body aches. When my head zings from lack of sleep. When, as I type, I can feel tenderness in all the tiny ligaments in my wrists and fingers.

This process is something like labor: there is no alternate way out. We must simply make do. Confronting each day and moment with everything we can give, and trusting we’ll get there. Now, only a handful of days.

Self Portrait Challenge #2: An introduction

The furrows between my brows have gotten deeper this month. No time to breathe, uncoil, rest. Everything is push-pull, pell mell, full throttle. More than can be done, must be. And every off color remark, every comment that could be recieved as criticism, IS.

In this picture, my eyelashes are wet from tears. Haphazard, overtired tears. Hormonal, exhausted tears. Tears because of nothing I can remember today.

We're living off of large cups of gas station coffee, purchased on the way to the house, and determination. I dream of sleep, of a dry basement (many of my paintings were ruined), and SUN (it has now rained for a week and a half, non-stop.)

So this is a different introduction. Another side of me, careworn, frowning, furrowed, exhausted. One more week, and then we move--even though we won't have a kitchen yet.

Tile and grout, like a trout

So it's been RAINING for days and days here. I'm growing gills. The fields are slick lakes, flooded with rain. The road a narrow ribbon snaking between shimmering expanses of blue. Every available hour is spent at the house. No time to sit back, put my feet up, write. Bean turned 15 months, and I've been composing a post about this in my head, packed with the immense unbounded gratitude I feel at having him in my life, but it hasn't made it to the page. Nothing has, though my computer (after repairs were done in safe mode) seems to be behaving, which is a huge sigh of relief.

The downstairs bathroom has tile! Today, grout. And pictures. I'm bringing the camera today.

The way imagination happens...and, a new painting

15" x 30" mixed media collage.

Here are some up-close shots.

***

Of course, the good ideas always hit at the least convenient times: in the shower maybe, when I’m out on a run, or just drifting off to sleep—any place far from pen and paper. I know why this happens. My mind will start to dislocate then, slipping out of the present and into the luminous space between what is real and what is imagined.

Then, images like bright sun spots start to dance across my internal page. Sometimes I’ll see an entire picture, as though the bulb on a slide projector were suddenly flipped on and the scene dances towards me on the particles of light. Other times I get only a slight inkling. A whisper of theme or color, wending it’s way into the chinks of my busy mind, catching my attention the way the tiny rainbows do, that scatter out about a café, refracting light from the diamond on a lady’s finger as she raises her cup to sip café au lait.

For days after I get an idea, I’ll carry it around in my mind like a pocket full of sea glass, carelessly fingering each smooth shard a hundred times. Then in an evening after the house is quiet and my baby is asleep, I’ll pick out a canvas, and begin, smudging the page with dark blues or pale ochres and white. I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know the colors of the rainbow—nor can I remember not knowing how colors blend: my young fingers holding stubby beeswax crayons already understood that bright yellow mixed with emerald would make the chartreuse hue perfect for drawing new foliage.

Color always comes first, for me, followed by shape and the juxtaposition of realistic sketches and collage. It is rare that I am able to put into words what I will paint before I do. Even when I think I know exactly what I want to draw, I also know it will be different from what I’ve imagined when I’m through. This is the secret I am always learning: painting is about the unexpected, the crazy, haphazard, willy-nilly, process of imagination, and it cannot be defined or controlled.

Each time I come to the canvass with my brushes, my pallet thick with paint, and my heart wide open. Then I follow with bold marks the wild flight of my imagination through some internal landscape of wonder.

***

PS--I've added this one to my gallery.

Soundtrack of my heart

Sound • track: a thin strip at the edge of a movie reel or videotape on which sound or the soundtrack is recorded

At the edges of my mind there is a narrative, a song, a whisper, a laugh, a sob, a steady pulse. Even in the wildest times, the times most pressed with worry, when there is little air and even less time for reflection, if I listen, I hear it. In the place between the reality of every day, and the wonderment of dreams, is the thin strip of lyrics, the soundtrack that plays out across my consciousness, defining my world.

In bed just before sleep; in the car driving the half hour stretch between our house and apartment listening to jazz on VPR; in the shower with hot water running in rivulets between my shoulder blades where wings would be, if I could fly; or standing at the stove stirring soup, I hear it. This is when I tune in to the words that slip edgewise into the conversation I keep with myself. The things I hardly say out loud, or never. The things of intuition and inkling, that shape my drive, my fears, my love.

Right now I’m trying consciously to tune in. It is hard to do. The dialogue is illusive and when I try to pin it down, it is as though static is lacing the airwaves. When I listen closely I hear this: below the joy of being offered a job I’m excited to accept, and beyond the worry of finding a daycare program for Bean that will nurture him, is the battle cry of my creative self begging not to be abandoned with these upcoming changes.

It is startling to find myself here, on the brink of so much change, again. It’s been just over a year since change tore through our lives like a river in flood, redistributing everything, shifting our very geography, altering our sense of home.

Last May we were packing our house in CT and trying to imagine what life here would be like. I remember sitting at our kitchen table (I loved where it stood, in a nook off the kitchen with a big bay window facing the backyard) looking towards the living room, the hall, the front door, noticing with sudden clarity and attention how familiar those angles and rooms were were. Noticing the quality of light on the tiled kitchen floor; the Prapluie-Revel umbrella poster between the front windows, the jars of sugar and rice on the counter, and wondering how it would be not to call that space “home.” Our first real estate investment, a noteworthy stamp in the passport of adult hood.

This May everything is different, and yet we’re packing again. On the brink of moving to a place saturated with promise. Like honey comb, drenched with sweetness this house is drenched with our hopes, our longings, our dreams. Everything in it bears the mark of what we have become: a family.

This time, as everything shifts; as the river fills with spring rains and floods its banks, and the shape of the valley is forever altered, I want to be more conscious about holding on to the things I’ve grown to love: my artist self, my writer self; my camera’s lens, my runner’s thighs. Looking back I’ve started to see how easily these things slip to the margins of my life, when other louder more demanding things push to the fore. This time I want to keep an ear to the ground, attune to the beating of my heart. This time I need to remain whole, even as my life divides.

The Swan Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river? Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air - An armful of white blossoms, A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies, Biting the air with its black beak? Did you hear it, fluting and whistling A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall Knifing down the black ledges? And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds - A white cross streaming across the sky, its feet Like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light of the river? And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything? And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for? And have you changed your life?

--Mary Oliver

Moody

All day I felt tender, my heart prone to easy bruising. I awoke after too few hours of sleep to little Bean pressing the buttons on the clock radio, causing some sort of very lively Indian music to spew forth LOUDLY. It was kind of funny, in that other-worldly, ‘this isn’t really happening to me’ kind of way.

From there the moments just continued to fracture. Everything today felt out of synch, like I was always playing catch-up with each moment. Sadness kept staining the space around me as though it were the pigment seeping from crushed petals. So much is undecided. (I got an interview on Monday, and I’m terrified; we’re going out of town for the weekend---our first overnight hotel trip with Bean; there are only three weeks are left before we have to move; I think I have a stress fracture in my right shin, but I have to wait until Tuesday to see my very busy doctor.)

Guilt always crowds in at times like these. Bean didn’t really get any sit-down meals today except lunch, and his nap times were totally off. And, though I’m already sick of writing about the disappointment of my mother’s visit, she keeps creeping back in: hers is the voice that narrates guilt for me, and today I heard “I would never do that,” a hundred times as I fed Bean organic alphabet soup from a can, and let him bang wildly on a plastic piano in a toy store when he should have been napping.

But there was also this: the rainbow tonight driving home. And before it, a wash of gold over the distant mountains. The sky was filled with storm clouds as DH and I ate calzones for dinner on the lawn at our new house. Bean napped in the car. From below us, the sonic trilling of peepers drifted up. And when Bean woke, we took a walk, just the two of us, hand in hand. Through tall grasses, and then under the low-hanging cloud of apple blossoms, almost blooming. Five gnarled apple trees, their branches leaning earthward, make up a perfect hideaway.

Fingers crossed

I remember going down a water slide for the first time: I was six or seven, it was the apex of summer and very hot. We were in L.A., at someone’s backyard pool, with the babysitter. I didn’t know how to swim—or at least, I didn’t know how to swim without support (I remember clinging to plastic milk jugs to buoy me up—the cheap version of waterwings, for sure.)

“Go for it,” she told me casually from the edge where she dangled her long legs in the water. Her toes were painted red. I adored her. "When you hit the water, hold your breath and kick you feet, and don’t stop kicking.”

I believed her entirely.

And I wanted to go down the slide so badly. I imagined its blue fiberglass hull was the back of a dolphin. Resolute, I climbed up the rungs of the ladder; up to the top.

I could see over the fence from there, into the neighbor’s yard—I could see their turquoise pool and waterslide, and beyond it, another pool in another yard. This is what certain neighborhoods were like in L.A.: back yard pool after pool, separated by high fences or concrete walls. A patchwork of postage stamp yards—with a stitching of bougainvilleas and roses between them.

But we didn't have a pool. And we didn’t live in a neighborhood like this. My dad always had a fierce attachment to having land (something I seem to have inherited), so we lived on two acres at the top of a mountain in Northridge, with a wild yard full of bamboo and prickly fruit and loquats. Instead of having pools, our neighbors kept horses.

So the whole pool thing was wildly exotic to me. A dream come true. The perfect antedote to the oven-hot of mid day. The perfect balm to scratched knees and boredom. The perfect escape.

Once I’d decided, I went for it, just like that. No second guessing. No long minutes wavering at the top. I climbed up, crossed my fingers, and slid down—the speed sending me hurtling towards the water, replacing breath with giddy glee. Then I hit with a splash and sank. Down I went, and down, and down.

But I held my breath.

And I started kicking.

And suddenly I was moving up and up, towards the blue bright surface where the water and air pressed together in a thin line. Then I burst through, gulping and ecstatic. I was swimming.

I'm still like this. When I decide to go for something, I simply do. I don’t waver. I don’t linger at the top wondering what if?. I just jump in.

Then I hold my breath and start kicking---which is pretty much where I’m at right now with my whole job search. I went to a school today that I’d love to teach at—close to home, and rich with opportunities for professional development. But it’s in the most competitive district in the state—and they've received close to 200 applications for just that one position. So I’m mostly just holding my breath. And kicking.

And keeping my fingers crossed.

Being related

I drive my mother to the airport early, and on the way home stop for straight-from-the oven croissants and scones. I get a small coffee in a paper cup with maple syrup and cream, and snatch a little solitary time at my computer, nibbling on a date scone with lemon icing. It is only a matter of minutes before Bean and DH burst from the bedroom, tousle headed and ready for the day, but right now our tiny house is quiet, save for the cats who race in circles around the room.

Having a mother, and being a mother is a polarity I thought about often this weekend—How someday, invariably, my boy will grow up and his thoughts and ideas will shear away from mine like an ice berg from the polar cap. With unswirving certainty he’ll find criticisms of me; see me as different from him in fundamental ways.

Blood is a limited connective tissue—biological relation is only a small part of who we become, and I felt that this weekend, talking with my mother. Sitting next to her on the couch, I see small pieces of myself: my cheekbones are like hers, my nose. Occasionally, I hear a phrase, or a handful of sentences she says that wrap their way around an idea, and resonate with me. But most of the time her conviction, her intensely burning idealism, and her far flung beliefs: in palmistry, astrology, anthroposophy, cosmology, numerology, cause me to veer the other way. The outlines of our differences are stark.

I lean towards relativism; my reality shaped more by day to day experience than by esotericism. I value truth—both sacred and factual, as it resonates for me, but I don’t expect other’s to see it as I do. There are as many ways for knowing god as there are people; similarly for living a good life or raising children.

Childrearing came up a lot over the past few days, and I found myself always second guessing the things I’ve grown accustomed to trusting. Her perspective on raising a child is based on the implementation of a strict rhythm: meals and bed times marked indelibly onto the meridians if the day. She values a certain stoicism too: crying it out is a method that works for her, and doesn’t rip apart her every nerve.

The teacher in me has already for years valued the way children thrive in the security of a structured day—and routine is an important, predictable background onto which the daily activities are superimposed. But I also feel like there is a place for the willy-nilly glee of deviation; of following a whim, of breakfast in bed, of dinner out late on occasion, or skipping a nap for the sake of an adventure.

I try to exhale and shake off the residual tension that’s found its way to my shoulders and heart over the past couple of days. Outside rain is falling again and the cherry blossoms are just about to burst into bloom. Suddenly the house is filled with shrieking, and the patter of small running feet, coffee being made, the cats being chased round and round the kitchen island. On the counter, the bright orange roses my mother brought home for me from the market. We’re both growing.

Ways of looking at the pieces

The past few days have been piled with small fragments. Tesserae. A jigsaw puzzle in a box. The deadline for the house is rapidly approaching: five weeks until our lease is up here. Five weeks to do: drywall mudding, paint, floors, kitchen, and both bathrooms.

My mother is here for a visit, and seeing her come towards me from across the wide foyer of the airport, I felt a lurch of familiarity and distance all at once. Her shoulders felt small when we hugged—smaller than the shoulders I perpetually remember from my childhood. It always takes us a few days to synchronize, our interpretations of each other always slightly off at first encounter.

Sitting on stools at the kitchen island we sweet mandarins and talk about her past, my childhood, our futures. Words that keep coming up: comparison, criticism, home, happiness, choice. Hearing her describe the threads of her biography (misplaced affection, intense shyness, an affair, a baby, and then she married my father: a man she hardly knew, but whose ideals she loved) makes me feel a bit like I’m a bird trying to swim in the lake of her perception.

She’s brought good chocolate: hazelnut and currant, and I nibble on it, hardly able to fathom the gap in perceiving that spreads out between us. But we find much to laugh at together, and she makes incredible food.

The second day of her visit she stays with Bean, while DH and I hang drywall for hours. We work at first like giddy high school sweethearts, saying goofy things, laughing, so happy to be together. Then we grow steady, a rhythm evolving. Our movements become synchronized: each moving one step ahead of the other, our actions overlapping only when necessary (to hold each piece of gypsum up; to wield the drill, dimpling screws into its papered surface.)

When I come home for dinner, my mother has done the incredible: the house is clean, Bean has been fed fresh cooked squash with brown rice, and all the laundry is done. To me this is an incredible feat. Most days the house limps by, in a state of constant neglect. The laundry is the worst of it, and my best friend knows me well enough to say, “Oh god, you must be really stressed,” after checking on the status of our clean towel supply--- and finding none.

DH and I are a team with housework as with other things. We clean together, cook together, and neglect housework together. But we are also lucky that neither of us have particularly high standards of clean, or else we'd drive each other mad. My mother on the other hand: the domestic superwoman. I murmur my thanks between bites of succulent herbed chicken.

She doesn’t see her strengths: afraid to trust in her own innate power, she is terrified of finding a ‘real’ job. Work. Of creating a home that no longer has, for her, its customary center (my father). After Bean is in bed we try to talk about this. Try, though the words feel like they are weighted differently: meaning one thing to her, and another to me.

And then DH calls with low blood sugar, feeling off. Exhausted maybe, or worse, possibly. He’s type 1 diabetic, and every time he calls to tell me that his blood sugar is going low it feels like I’ve swallowed Draino and it’s making it’s way down my limbs, melting them. He doesn’t feel okay by the time he makes it home. The test strips read one thing but his body another, and he’s shaking (fear? or something worse?), so we go to the emergency room.

After a few hours everything returns to normal (we think he accidentally took extra units of insulin at dinner), and we are tear-drenched and grateful when we hear the first raw cries of a newborn baby entering the world a few doors away.

It shakes us up, in a good way. Sometimes this is needed. When working on a jigsaw you can look, and look, and look and not find the piece you need until you shake the box and let the pieces fall anew, and there it is. For us, this reminder: life is precious, sweet, and fleeting. No house, no deadline worth its loss. Stress, like a tangle of barbed wire, needs to be coiled and set aside.

So today we played. A late breakfast (omlets, jammy toast, iced lattes), and then went to a home expo where Bean batted at balloons and DH oogled viking ranges and slate roofing. Tonight, just the two of us got to take a walk along the empty streets of the city under one umbrella, our feet and knees freckled with raindrops, our bodies touching.

The past three days by the numbers:

8 hours spent writing applications.6 application packages sent out. 400 other applicants competing for the same positions. 1,000,000,000 units of stress about obtaining one of said positions.

1 mother visiting. 5 loads of laundry done by said mother. 1 happy grandson.

6 hours of drywalling. 1 diningroom completed. 2 black-hole hours at Home Depot.

3 hours in the emergency room. 2 new babies came into the world while we were there. 1,000,000,000,000, (x infininity) units of gratitude that everything is okay.

6 hours of interrupted sleep. 3 possible teeth on their way in. 2 exhausted parents.

I swear I'll post tonight & I heart you all for writing me emails wondering where I am.

Enjoyment at random

Going over my writing from the past couple of weeks, I’m struck by how serious I’ve been. Early spring seems to do this—the last rain soaked days of quiet gray on brown silhouettes of twigs and trees before the riot of color hits. Then the blossoms arrive, heady, erotic, unreasonably beautiful, and the whole world goes a little nuts basking in all the loveliness of it.

I’m feeling inklings of that today. The maples are all flirty with little red catkin blossoms, and the magnolias (one of my favorite flowers) are blooming everywhere. And all day I felt kind of haphazard, but in a good way. Carefree, non sequitur, goofy. Things are strewn about everywhere, the house is a mess, and Bean was off schedule all day, but for some reason I haven't minded. Instead I painted, and wrote a list of ten random things that strike my fancy.

*** 1) I love accordion music. I love how it’s its own little orchestra, how I am immediately transported to cobble stone streets in Europe, with high stone buildings and fountains and people eating in outdoor cafes. If I could suddenly acquire the ability to play any instrument, I’d pick this one: comical, romantic, with a gypsy soul.

2) I have the hankering this week to look at art by Gorgia O’Keefe. Again, this must be a spring thing. Her flowers. Surely you have seen them.

3) I just remembered how much I loved reading Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins when I was in high school. He writes in such a wild, heady, ridiculous, over-zealous, over-educated, over-the top way that I dig, sometimes. When I read it then, it was at the suggestion of my first serious boyfriend and we were all loopy for each other. Sappy, yes. But it really IS a great love story.

4) I’ve had time to mull over the changes coming up (re: going back to work,) and it seems okay to me now. Exciting even. This is what I’m like: it takes me a day or two to warm to an idea, and then I’m all game.

5) I’m over my chai tea obsession that lasted me through the many months of cold winter. Now I’m in love with iced, sweetened green tea.

6) I’m planning on buying bagfulls of wild flower seeds this weekend, and scattering on the hillside below our house. I won’t have time this year to plant a real garden, but it will be fun to see what comes up from the handfuls I toss about.

7) The Vanity Fair Green Issue is my bathroom reading this month.

8) I am daydreaming about my future studio. I can hardly fathom what it will be like not to be doing paintings on the dining room table. I’m looking at paint samples, picture hangers, and storage options. Pure heaven.

9) I’ve started listening to NPR’s jazz profiles. I could do this all day. Like higher math, jazz is something I find utterly mind-blowing.

10) We had a picnic tonight in the new house, in the room that will be my studio. Indian take out: chicken curry, aloo ghobi, naan with coconut, lassi, mango chutney, raita. Bean sat on the floor with us and fed me spoonful after spoonful of rice, and then ran circles around us, his face smudged yellow from the curry.

Your turn: ten random foot loose & fancy free things.

Striking a balance

Hunger lurches through me and my fingers peck haplessly at the keys; my heart lurks at the edges of the room, where the lamplight doesn’t fall, licking the wound of worry like a dog.

It’s been decided—at least in part, that I’ll be going back to work next year, and it makes sense. But I've been balking a bit, since those words tumbled out into the room conspicuously like a pocketfull of marbles onto the floor in the middle of a sermon at church. It’s taking me a while to adjust to this idea.

Like always, my mind gallops off---the eager, sunny pony that it is, says: this will be wonderful, just what I need, I have been lonely and longing for the connections and meaning that work brings to my days. But my heart, like a donkey, is lurching about. I’ve grown deeply content with the span of my days, with the ampleness of creative time, with the simplicity of exhaustion after a day spent with only one little boy: mine.

So it’s been like this: cays of internal impasse (have you noticed the paucity of posts?) As though a permafrost has spread up from my heart to my head. Days of creative emptiness revealing the strange limbo of now.

I’m putting together my resume, cover letters, applications and I hate it. Like teasing out the burrs from wool; the inevitable process of preparation, before action. And also I hate how Murphy was right: things always converge like ths in piles, awkwardly, anxiety heaped upon stress, on top of exhaustion.

But even with all this (the creative freeze, the endless house renovations, the worry about next year,) it there is a part of my mind that keeps coming back to this phrase: what is meant be will be. What can go right, will go right. Perky and annoying , like dandelions in a lawn, but welcome just the same.

*** In the car driving back and forth from the house to here, there is a field, and behind it a mountain, blue and dark, like a slumbering dromedary of rock and pines. I love how it makes my eye follow it’s jagged line, up from the edge of the woods and into the sky.

In the foreground, along the roadside, the pasture is turning green and old hay bales, round and taller in diameter than I am, sit heavily in a long row and wait.

Something will happen to them, eventually. A tractor might come, load them, lift them, toss them; or they might just stay at there at the edge of the field, as new grass grows tall, and slowly decompose. But right now there is no telling, they are just there, and beside them the fuzzy yellow heads of dandelions by the hundreds, heaping, golden, bustling, turn their faces up to the sun.

Total sappiness

This guy rocks my world.

It's been a rough couple of months, especially for him, since he's carrying the brunt of this crazy renovation project—on top of his day job (day trader). Neither of us get down time, and sometimes everything hits us in the face like mud sprayed up from the tires of a passing car.

Sometimes it’s days on end of not enough sleep, no time to ourselves, and way to much to do. Sometimes it’s back to back days of feeling depressed, and worried, and just plain stressed. But in between are these bright moments, like sunspots—that linger even when your eyes are closed. Moments of lingering, of sweetness and touch, of passion, of pure goofiness, that are the antidote to everything else.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit like wet laundry on a line: flapping about, rumpled. I forget to tell him this enough: how wildly, whole-heartedly I’m in love with him. How he's an AMAZING dad. How incredible I think it is that he can go read a how-to book, and then actual BUILD A WALL, that actually looks (and acts) like a wall. How I love the fact that he's so affectionate with his family. How I think he's brilliant, and totally handsome, and really, just plain amazing--seeing as he’s been managing (mostly) to hold it all together, despite the 16 hour days, the too-small apartment, and the tight budget.

And then goes he does stuff like wash the dishes or buys me chocolate...or kisses the back of my neck, unexpectedly when I'm hunched over my computer typing away furiously. It doesn't get any better. It just doesn't.

Where my heart finds home

When my heart begins to flutter like the fins of a hundred small fish with worry about the things I cannot control, I seek out wild places where words no longer matter. Where language is the drip of snowmelt, the rat-a-tat-tat of the early woodpecker, or the calling of the chickadee.

Today I explored a small corner of the several hundred acres of woodlands behind our house.

With Bean in the backpack I begin to climb, feeling his weight transfer to my hips. Soon I hear the thrumming of my heart in my ears, my cheeks flush hot, and my lungs find a new cadence as I as I move. At first Bean’s small voice rings out clear among the stands of trees, branches still bare save for snow in nooks between limb and trunk, but soon he grows drowsy with the steady side-to-side movement of my gait, and drifts off to sleep. Then I hear his tiny breath whispering softly above my head.

I smell snow, metallic and sharp, and the tang of newly cut wood where someone has come before and cut away a tree fallen across the path. After a while, I’m not anywhere else. Just here, balancing on small stones to cross rushing streams where the water runs clear and cold and sparkling silt gathers in pools on the mud below. Just here, where everything is still, save for the dripping of snow melt falling from trees and the trilling of an occasional bird. Just here, where my muddy tracks cross the tracks of wild turkeys, then field mice, then a vole’s. Many tracks I see are partly obscured in the slush, their edges melting.

I come to pool after pool of water, each like a piece of amber with last autumn’s leaves glowing from below the surface. Snow fell yesterday here, and everything is saturated, slippery, muddy. Sometimes my shoes stick and as I pull my foot away, the mud sucks it back.

All around me is forest. Above me: a halo of delicate branches. A filigree. A vast network of capillaries: twigs running with sap, buds just forming everywhere. Most of the trees are young—small enough to wrap my arms around, wrists overlapping; but some maples have been here longer—their trunks burly and split open, their gnarled branches reaching up thickly into the sky.

After a while I turn my attention to the worry in my bones and find it has melted with the snow. This is now. This is all I have. Moss adorned with water droplets, new shoots of green pushing up through wet snow. Here my heart is home and this is all that matters.

(p.s. I am feeling better—thank you for your kind thoughts. A day of rest was seriously needed. I may have spent most of yesterday asleep. I'm not sure. :)

Also, more pictures are here.)