At the inlaws

Navigating the bizarre, delightful terrain of family. The humidity is something. Bean rides his bike in gleeful circles on the drive. His grandad lets him steer the lawn tractor. His smile is impossibly wide. We eat outside, toasting with bubbly wine and watching the fireflies come out. There is so much about this family that is complicated, but so much that I adore. I have a stack of end-of-year reports to finish, and more fiction to write. Right now I am in desperate need of coffee. And shorts. I don't own any--except garden work worthy ones. I don't know how that happened really, except for the fact that I find it impossibly hard to find shorts that fit well. Do you have any favorites? Happy weekend everyone!

What sets you on fire?

How do you write? How do you sit down and break open the cracked clay that paints your heart like a mask? How do you say the things you need to say, or want to, all the while believing in a few unsure things (the threads of a story stringing out like a spider’s fragile gossamer?)

It has dawned on me that I have no idea how to write really. Some days I feel like words are pelting me. Other days everything comes out so boring and uninspired. Most of the time I have no idea what to expect when I sit down at the keyboard. My mind plays chicken with me. The two of us wobble about mostly, looking stupid.

I think my problem is that I can imagine big. I can imagine BIGGER than big. I get glimpses of the whole damn story, from every perspective, the way it all should be. Then I have to write it, and that totally sucks. You know what I mean? Then the sentences tangle. Do any of you write?

What do you believe in? Especially with fiction? What makes you believe you have something to say? Is it story, for story’s sake, or something else? I really need to know.

Part of the reason all of this has me off kilter tonight is that I’m going for a week long workshop with Pam Houston on the coast in ten days. I’m already feeling dry-mouthed and foolish. More than anything else I hate meeting people for the first time. After we’ve met, I’m okay, but I hate those first few moments of unknown: skating out on ice the color of a robin’s egg, wondering if it will hold. I hate parties for this reason; and talking on the phone. And of course, being a writing workshop and all, I’ll have to meet lots of people; and then read them my timorous attempts at fiction. Gasp. Why do I do this to myself?

I feel like I’m lingering in the doorway of an open jet plane: air rushing past it’s metal belly and below a wide topography of green and blue and a geometric jumble of urban shapes, and the outcome’s totally uncertain. You never really know.

Nonstop

The kids stare longingly at the windows and look like second graders already. I watch them read now, and see they have hardly a ny memory of the time when the stragled in at the beginning of the year, wide eyed and tangled in short syllable words. Assessments are mid-way. It is gratifying: they're doing well. But also laborious and utterly one-dimensional. Tests only say so much about a person, and in my opinon that 'so much' is a rather small fraction of the whole.

I'm still burning the candle at both ends, as the saying goes. Can't quite get myself to settle down and go to bed early enough, and when 5:30 rolls around I'm stumbling and bleary eyed. The staccato of the keyboard and strong coffee gradually bring me to up to speed, but then I'm out the door.

Bean got a fever today, unexpectedly, after a weekend of visiting with my sister (whom he followed about and pesterd, a long-eyelashed grin ever ready to bat her way.) Now he's curled in our bed. Twenty seven months today. It dawned on me that I didn't write him a letter last month, and now there's almost too much to say. Tonight he feverishly pats the spot next to him on the bed and says, "Here mama, a cozy spot for you."

The spring rains are here too, torrenting down. Everything is finally lush and green and blooming. We have chickens arriving in two weeks. No physical arrangements for them yet--but that's a must-do this weekend, or they'll be in our bathtub. Five Aracuna day-olds. Bean talks about them as if they're already here.

I'm trying to find ways to wind down this week. I'm one of those people who needs big chunks of decompression time, and at the end of the day I find myself sighing as I try to bring awareness to snapping bean stems off and sauteeing them with butter, lemon and toasted almonds. What do you do to settle back into the quiter corners of your self? How do you unwind after a nonstop day?

Feeling the earth spin

I used to be able to lie down on the grass and relax into the very center of my solar plexus and feel the earth spin. Really. My whole body would tune to the thrumming velocity of the earth twirling on its axis very fast, gravity pressing my body into the ground. Then one day I couldn't do it any more. Now, I'll lie down like I did today after a run, and for a brief moment I'll feel myself almost slip to that place, but then I'll snap back into myself, like snapping back from almost falling asleep. Has this ever happened to you?

Soaking up sunshine

It felt like spring today, for the first time. The mercury climbed to the upper fifties, and the sky, this afternoon, looked like heaven’s housewife had hung all her downy comforters out to be tossed by a mischievous wind. The sun shone down with real heat.

I came home from work, threw on my black rubber boots, grabbed a yogurt and fled into the sunshine with Bean at my heels. DH followed suit soon after, carrying his signature pint glass of iced espresso, his muscles rippling divinely under the blue cotton of his t-shirt. Barely t-shirt weather, but I’m all for it.

We rambled haphazardly, following our marmalade streak of a cat, Bandit, down into the lower meadow where the apple trees grow, and where, in summer, the grass is waist high. Now it’s trampled and brown, and the apple trees have the tiniest of budlets just beginning to push from the ashy maroon bark. I ran back to get the pruning shears and with a sudden zest, we initiated the immense task of taming the mess of wild grape vines growing like kudzu between knobby, overgrown and half-dead branches of our many apple trees.

It was pure delight to be there with my two guys, cutting back dead wood, with apple sap on my fingers, while Bean chased the cat in widening orbits around us. DH pulled out the chain saw, and we made an afternoon of clearing fallen branches and logs from the edge of the woods—piling them in a bonfire heap. Then we lay down in the grass and watched the sky spin. Like looking up into the deep blue curvature of an enamel bowl, flecked with milk.

The robins are back, and their warbling became a forte trilling as the sun neared the edge of the woods. Bean couldn’t get enough of playing outdoors. All he wanted to do was run, twirl, climb, muck about, and I can’t blame him. The slow start to spring has had me antsy. I can barley imagine foliage. It feels like snowflakes have been permanently imprinted on my inner eye.

When it was dinner time we sat at the table bathed in sunlight, with the windows open, and ate an artichoke together, Bean on my lap. Our fingers were a mess of lemon-butter for dipping the tender parts. Bean shares my affection for this oddly sweet flower, and together we nibbled the heart right to the pithy thistle down, and then reluctantly sat back, licking our fingers.

A good day.

Also, I couldn’t resist snagging this little personality exercise from Le Petit Hiboux. I’m curious. What’s your take?

Life is happening right now

He told me he loved me, for the first time, yesterday. Driving home on our washboard bumpy dirt road, spread thick with mud like peanut butter on an open faced sandwich, he said, “I yuv you mommy.”

I said, “What?” Not really listening, caught up in the replay of a Teri Gross interview with the late Kurt Vonnegut on NPR.

“I yuv you,” he said with a rosy, jelly-smudged grin.

It felt, then, like summer sunlight. Like lightening bugs flitting about the lawn on a late August evening; like standing at the top of a very tall mountain, above the clouds and suddenly breathless; like finding ten perfect unbroken sand dollars in a row at the beach;

“I love you too,” I said. “So much.”

In my chest, I suddenly felt the fluttering of a thousand mariposas.

It’s bizarre sometimes, how things you were sure you were set on, when they don’t come to fruition, make room for other things to come into focus, unfurl, blossom. Every so often I feel like I get the chance to pan out and see the full three-ring-circus that is my life. The rest of the time, I’m there in the midst of it, too close to the action for perspective, twirling with the raspberry stain of my love smudged across my sleeve, and a thousand fragile things gathered up in my arms: my child, my work, my many foibles and distractions.

Finding the small envelope in my mailbox gave me this unexpected opportunity for perspective. It made me step back and really admit for the first time, how utterly overwhelming the past year of my life has been. I’m a chin-up kind of girl, and I’ve been trying to tell myself a hundred happy-ending stories, but painted over the stress of raising a toddler and renovating our own home, has been the pale hue of trauma after the shooting that took place at the school where I work in the beginning of the year. Terror pressed into the supple limbic portion of my brain that cannot speak and only feels, with sudden abrupt urgency, and altered the certain fundamental aspects of the way I live and trust and respond in the world.

I’ve been navigating my way out of that maze of reactions the entire year, and somewhere in the process, when I applied to grad schools, I entirely forgot about the school I’d researched last year that really belonged at the top of my list. Forgot, entirely.I was so shocked to realize this, it made me no longer sad about the small envelope bearing the word regret. Instead I finally gave myself permission to slow down a bit. Permission to have the summer here, with my family and a box of mail-order chicks, and watermelon seed spitting contests and writing workshops, and to take out West to run a half marathon with my sister.

Permission to not compete with the peers in my life who are at different places in their lives, because in the end, our lives are tangled up with entirely different sets of stars. Can’t you picture that? All of us, like marionettes with fragile golden strings stretching up into the dark indigo bowl of heaven. Have you ever looked up and tried to count all those stars?

Like dislocated limb, I’ve been dangling on the peripheries of my life all year. I’ve spent many months trying to find that groove where the cartilage of necessity and the bone of loving and dreaming meet. It has been painful. My senses of safety and inner equilibrium have been precariously balanced amidst a heap of responsibility and guilt and worry. My days are scribbled with the irrational ink of worry. I’ve burst into sudden shocked tears when a glass breaks. I’ve had entire fights, painful and raw and startling, that midway through, I can no longer recall the initial provocation.

Somehow, receiving that letter didn’t shake my belief in my writing at all—the way I imagined it would, before it came. Now, from this vantage point I don’t think my writing was the reason I was rejected at all. I think instead it was because my readiness to be there wasn’t self-evident in my application, or in my hurried recommendations from professors I hadn’t worked with in years.

I don’t know if I would have been ready, honestly. It would be a little like jumping off a bus moving at full speed, and because I’m that chin-up kid with a big ego, I’m sure I’d make it work somehow, despite the inevitable scraped knees and broken arm. But this way I’ll have some time to really find my footing, rather than plunging blindly into a new stream with flooding banks, which graduate work in writing invariably is.

So I’m looking forward to summer now, more than I was. (Also because eight inches of sleety frozen crap is in the forecast for tomorrow night. Somewhere, some very drunk weather gods are having a hell of a good time at our expense.) Some part of me feels like hugging this other part of me that has reached out and offered permission to just be here right now; at the beginning, instead of rushing pell-mell ahead. I know how that sounds, but I can’t think of any other way of describing how my drive to accomplish things can a perilous and ruthless taskmaster, who crowds my days with post-it notes and plans, and forgets life is happening right now, and how relieved I am to have to slow down.

Life is happening right now.

He said “I yuv you mommy,” and he was beaming.

That’s enough.

Now and again

On the windowsill in a tall glass vase, the leggy branches I cut from the forsythia and the lilac bushes a week ago have exploded into a riot of delicate yellow blossoms and green leaves; stamens licking the warm indoor air, waiting for kiss of the honey bee that won’t arrive. Instead, the cat rubs up against the branches, her coat dappled with evening sunlight.

DH is practicing guitar, and the melody circles me. It lilts and flutters, like birds lifting off high wires in unison to wing the peripheries of the field before alighting again. He’s gotten good, recently, under the instruction of a teacher for the first time in his life, and I like the way his practice has become the soundtrack for my thoughts; the way words weave gradually, to the rhythm of his song.

Last night we lay, chest to belly on the couch and talked about my worries and our dreams. I say my worries, because they are mine mostly. I’m somehow prone to lurching into worry anytime there isn’t an enchanting or certain goal in front of me. I’m the kind of girl who needs to be able to lie on the top of a grassy knoll, arms akimbo, looking up at the dark bowl of twirling stars, and have the flashlight and the star charts and the information guides about every single constellation.

I’m the girl who disembarked from the airplane at the tiny Puerto Rico airport without any plans for lodging, or transportation, or even a destination in mind. But I was also the one who had read Lonely Planet cover to cover, and dog-eared every back-door eatery and local beach and the place to get the best chorros. I wandered for days, no—weeks---through Florence, Italy, without any plans or specific sightseeing goals, and yet, I had the background info on every statue, fountain, cathedral, piece of art and small gelato joint I encountered. I can’t help it.

So when it comes to our life: mine and his and ours together with our two-year-old gorgeous little tow-headed Beansprout, I get listless and unmoored when we don’t talk about plans or have any long range goals on the table. I need things like rosebushes, which have always spoken the eloquent language of staying put to me, and I need things like raised garden beds, and bonfires, and dinner parties and blueprints for building a barn and a studio. So when we don’t talk about these things enough, or when we don’t talk about them at all for months on end, I become frantic and anxious and uncertain. Then I start inadvertently unraveling all the exquisitely beautiful bits of fabric that make up the patchwork quilt of the life we have together.

Wanderlust bites me, and spreads across the map of my body like a blueblack bruise of longing. I quaver, reading paragraphs about Trinidad or the Solomon Islands or Morocco, and want suddenly and fiercely to upend everything and just be off. I feel shaky in the everyday bushel basket of my life, as though with the least little jostle I’m apt to send all the fruit tumbling out, comparing myself first to one single friend and then to another set of friends, new lovebirds, who are still starry eyed virgins when it comes to living in the thick of love and family. I start checking the emergency exits and scribbling escape plans on bakery napkins while eating bagels with the two amazing guys who fill my days with their huge long-lashed eyes and easy grins.

I forget that right here, where we are, is a hard-won sweetness. I forget how much we have here : this house, with its hundred-year-old barn timbers and it’s expanse of soapstone counters and farmers sink and honey colored floors, is something we’ve only just acquired, with our bare hands and much love, and ounce after ounce of determination. I forget that this boy of ours, who stopped me the other day as I knelt in front of him on the kitchen floor, and said, “I like your earrings mama, they’re pretty,” as he fingered each abalone disk, is someone we’ve known for just two short years. I forget how when we’re right, we’re right like the taste of a ripe summer peach.

I forget how our love stretches out on either side of us like the guy-wires that keep bridges and steeples and trapeze artist’s hoops aloft. I forget how it has lasted, and I forget how it keeps guiding our lives back to safety and solace, or at least back to our bedroom where we make love in a hot furry of kisses. I forget that it’s been almost eight years of knowing this man, of loving him, of laughing with him, and sometimes because I forget, I toss myself at odds against what we have made together. Then I fleck the pages of my days with tears and worry; I lie restless at night, I overanalyze and over-calculate and grow easily fragile and frantic like a bevy of startled quail.

So last night, belly to chest, listening to the sound of his heart beating and feeling the warmth of his skin rising up through the cotton of his shirt, we talked about our plans and our love. How for once, for the love of god, will I just settle down for a while and quit inadvertently sabotaging the entire thing because I need everything mapped out and planned to the nth degree before I can just let go and wing it?

He laughed when I kept telling him how I need him to remind me over and over again of what it is we want, here, now.

“Because I forget,” I said.

It’s true, I really do.

So he looked at me with his languid topaz colored eyes and told me again: We want to settle here for a few years, make a garden, keep chickens, gather a big circle of friends close, and become a small but certain cog in the wheel of our community.

Every fiber in my being hums in resonance. Yes, I want this. But also this: that after giving it a fighting chance, we can up and off into the wild blue yonder if that’s still what our fancy craves.

He’s game for that too, my big muscled Italian with his espresso habit and his guitar melodies. Game for living in Italy for a year, or exploring the beach towns of California or Hawaii. But for now, here, it’s almost spring and we have a garden to plan.

Finding the beat

Last week I was like a satellite thrown out of orbit, twirling in crazy loops from all the scrambled sleep, and the on-edge waiting. I let myself slip haphazardly out of my routine of writing mornings, first thing while the house is still sighing in its sleep.

I’d hear the alarm, and peer at it through mostly closed lashes and then hit the snooze button with vigor, before turning to inhale the sweet sleeping scent of my boys, pressed at odd angles to each other. Light would slip softly through the wooden slats of the window shades, zebra-striping the sienna paint on our wall with gold, and mourning doves would gather below the feeder outside and coo like a clutch of kerchief clad old biddies waiting for a bakery to open.

I’d get up, staggering. If I was lucky they’d both stay asleep while I showered and made coffee, and I’d pocket those moments of silence like a thief. But I found myself missing the routine; the rhythm of bowing down first at the page, each new day.

Instead of writing, I carved some time out on the treadmill at the gym everyday last week (the weather too cold until today to be outdoors.) In doing so I began to remember this about myself: moving, running, doing, is anther way to bow down at the door of all that is good in my life.

Moving, one foot and then the other, in a steady rhythm, feeling my lungs and heart send bright red blood circling through capillaries makes me feel immediately at right with my life, with the twirling stars, with the sap running, with my all my hopes. Now, to do both: to run and to write. This is my goal this week.

** I’ll totally post the running mix! Just have to get back on DH’s computer—tomorrow, maybe?

In the meantime, tell me, what few things do you find you really need to do every day to feel whole (even if you don’t always get to do them.)

Anew

It has been a few weeks now, of feeling different. On track, in the thick of sweetness. We’re playing again, laughing, dreaming, taking care of ourselves. It wasn’t until your comments from this post that I realized maybe, really, the winter was affecting us. And since then, the longer days and weeks with occasional clouds, rather than occasional sun, have given us enough fabric to stitch together joy.

In March, our dirt road turns to mud, and driving, you get pulled in, the metal hulk of your vehicle swerving this way and that as you navigate each sticky groove, the ground pliant with snowmelt. Before March, it was our discord that was like this. The groves so traveled between us, we were not sure how to navigate beyond them. But then, gradually, we gave each other space, and the possibility of a new track, and now we’re here, knee to knee throwing bowls, or making love, or simply offering generosity of intention to every moment we’re with each other.

In our eighth year together, this seasonal quality to love is something that I’m starting to see and comprehend, viscerally. Now with longer days and sap rising in the maples, I’m ready to go buy yellow rubber boots and plan a garden. Patience is a gradual lesson. I learn it slowly as new greening of spring rises up, and my heart beats quick at the sight of him again, differently, anew.

Self Portrait: new haircut

I got a new haircut today, and I had my eyebrows done. I always feel so much more put together & pretty when I do. It's been too long since I put any effort into my appearance. The entire winter, in fact.

Afterwards I spent a few hours by myself. Sitting at a cafe people watching and scribbling in my notebook; smiling at strangers. Then using gift certificates I've been saving to buy some new things: a pair of dark jeans, a hot pink tank top for 2$, some classic t's I've been needing, and a new pair of earrings (pictured). I hardly ever get to spend this kind of time, just for me. I had to stop myself more than once from lurching out of the dressing room in just a bra when a toddler yelled "Mama!" just the way Bean does from the room next door.

It was kind of my own private celebration for taking the plunge and going after something I want. This is what I'm in the mood for right now: ready to revamp things, to gear up, get busy, plunge in, and DO. Spring has this affect on me, and though we just got snow last night, I know it's on it's way. I'm making lists today, ready to kick some butt.

At the doorway

So I finished, and I’m happy with the manuscript I put together. I wrote well, I think. My body aches from poor posture, and hour after hour in front of the computer.

Getting these applications finished is a milestone for me. I’m standing at the doorway to something I’ve wanted for such a long time, and finally I’ve given myself the all-out green light to go ahead and be a writer.

It still sounds a little scary to say that, to admit that’s what I’m doing by sending this fat envelope off. Like releasing a flock carrier pigeons, hope takes flight on a hundred wings tonight.

A week of mornings..

Monday:I’m stumbling to break into a new routine of writing in the morning before my thoughts are shattered with day. Now I wake up with dreams still trailing through my mind like the tails of wild horses, and there is nothing I can hold onto for sure. But it is a quieter time, now, with the restless cat circling my knees, as the before-dawn light spreads out above the blue of land and fog like a pale smudge of jam. I’m ready to at least sit and follow the words across the page.

*

Tuesday: It’s early and I’ve wrapped my wet hair in a fleece blanket to stay warm. The house creaks as the heat comes on. Outside the mercury hovers near zero. Already daylight is smudging the clouds with pale gray and rose. I do not want to be awake today, tiredness clings to me, making my vision blurry.

*

Wednesday: This morning the white-bread toast is gummy and the tea too sweat. I brought a handful of pecan halves upstairs, but I’m not interested now, in the dark before dawn when the temperature dips and the house is still. * Thursday: The morning is frail and dark. My body aches from a lack of sleep, and my dreams tumbled around my mind like rocks in the dryer. Now day, and I’m anxious. No clean laundry, not enough time to accomplish the things I need to get done. *

Friday: Morning, just six hours after crawling under the heap of down comforters and closing heavy lids. Morning and the sky is so beautiful, I wish I could capture it just once the way it really appears, for those fleeting moments of dawn before day. Moments when everything still rests, and branches are quiet angled lines against the delicate expanse of sky.

This morning toast with raspberry jam, and hardly anything to write or say, except to keep the momentum of early morning waking. So I sip coffee from a tall mug and hear my baby’s voice rise up, waking his daddy, and greeting day, and though I’m tired, I’m grateful.

Hopscotch

The forecast: more icy air, and I’m starting to feel antsy with winter. But today pure sunshine reflecting off the snow and spilling onto the hot pink flowers on the windowsill. It was weekend of long naps; of using a winch to get the truck out of a snowbank; of cheap red wine and good friends with toddlers running pell-mell; of a handful of quiet moments with a magazine on the couch, coffee cup in hand, its sweet fragrance rising up with the steam.

Also, it was a weekend of roller coaster emotions. In one instance I’m sure we’re in it for the long haul: we’re standing together in the sunlight in the kitchen, arms around each other, kissing, while our kid eats kiwi circles; and then in another instance we’re off kilter, unintended words tumbling like the triangular blocks at the top of the tower that make the whole castle fall, a geometric mess of shapes onto the floor.

Right now for us there is no room for error, no space for careless words, for passive teasing, for jagged edges. It’s like we’re always at square one, tossing the rock, jumping forward, trying not to land on the chalked lines, but doing so anyway. Remember that game? I used to play it for hours in the school yard. Now the stakes are high. Sometimes I wonder if we’d be better off just friends and co-parents, it would be easier, maybe. Other times I can hardly fathom how much I love, or how perfectly my body fits against his, heart to heart in an embrace.

I really want to know, what is the bedrock that holds you together with the one you love? What connects you? What make you certain?

A weekend in Quebec

Sinking into the plush down of a king sized bed. Chocolates on the pillow. Bright green apples in a black ceramic bowl on the end table. Lattes in the morning in white cups with saucers, firelight, flaky croissants and tall slender glasses of orange juice.

Walking cobblestone streets in the icy cold. Like a family of dragons, our breath clouding up around us every time we spoke or laughed. Quilted down jackets. Shearling gloves. Bean in a snowsuit with so many layers of wool and fleece beneath it, he could barely bend his knees.

Carnival horns, and ruckus cheering. An ice palace. Snow sculptures. Dog sled races, paws pounding down a snowy path through the turning streets of the old city. Hot mulled wine and French onion soup. Clouds of steam rising up from the hot chocolate gripped in Bean’s mittened hands.

Collapsing into bed with milk and PBJ sandwiches for lunch, wearing long johns and watching Inuit cartoons on TV. Bean sitting on the wide windowsill showing his monkey and cheetah the giddy five story view below.

Sipping dry red wine and eating warmed olives and toasted spicy almonds in the lounge, remembering what it feels like to be an adult with some place to be after 8pm. Shimmying close on the couch and kissing. Playing Gin. Winning. Laughing.

Stopping at a tiny bakery to buy delicate almond, orange & chocolate cookies, crispy and thin. Perfect discs of sweetness to melt in our mouths. Eating crepes hot of the griddle, chocolate everywhere.

Riding the plummeting drop in a little glass rail car, with the wide sweep of the St. Lawrence below us. Stopping in small shops to warm our fingers, Bean jumping from every stoop. Street musicians with cold fingers playing the fiddle, frozen snow breaking under foot.

Sandwiches on warm baguettes and then the long ride home, sun drenched across the wide flat expanse between here and there. Snow covered and wind swept fields, the sun sinking west. Full of joy to finally have had time to simply be: a family, a lover, a wanderer in a foreign city. So good. A perfect, perfect birthday weekend.

Photos here. I'll be putting more up, once I've found the other flash card in our luggage.

PS: thank you SO MUCH for all your awesome birthday wishes!

Tomorrow, my birthday

Tomorrow is my birthday. 29, and I think I look old this year.

You spend all your late teens and early twenties wishing you were older, and then suddenly, without realizing it you’ve slipped to the other side, where you consider getting carded a complement, and for some reason you can’t get the fact out of your head that some guy at work asked you if you were 36.

Our culture’s idealization of youth creeps in and airbrushes away all the brave, vibrant, sexy sides of aging. On a bad day I buy into that.

But the thing is, deeper down a big part of me that likes getting old. I like my crows feet and my perpetually furrowed brows, because they’re a testament to the life I’ve lived. It’s been wild, and sometimes heartbreaking, it’s also been passionate and full—and I’ve barely been alive three decades.

I’ve always thought Georgia OKeefe was one of the most gorgeous women in the world, especially in her later portraits. Something about the way she held her head---up, fiercely, with her chin forward, that spoke volumes about her courageous life and passionate arte. Also something about Tasha Tudor’s wild white hair and ruddy cheeks that spells out beauty to me: she’s a woman who does what she wants. In fact, when I think of women whose features I admire, most do not adhere to the modern, product enhanced perception of beauty. I want to look real still in thirty years, with some lines to show for it.

But tonight, on the eve of my birthday, I can’t help taking stock. Can’t help going back over a handful of self portraits I’ve taken over the past few months, looking for some outer clues about the woman I’m becoming. Maybe I do look older this year.

Driving to work by myself in the morning, as I pass the field where the frost has turned everything into a delicate filigree of white and the pale purple mountain is suddenly flooded with the first golden light of the sun, I’m utterly grateful. Grateful for these hands with wrinkles finely cross-hatching the backs. Grateful for soft expanse of my belly that gave birth. Grateful for my brilliance of my heart and mind that rush up inside my soul like the wild circling flight of the lone hawk I watched this morning, above the snow covered meadow, with the sun turning it’s wings to fire.

And if the consequence of this giddy passion for life is aging, I’ll take it, crows feet and all.

Here’s the thing

My mother in law may have, most likely, found my blog. This blog. This place where I write obstinately and openly and whole-heartedly. This place where one minute I’m cold and the next I’m hot, where I fling wildly from one end of the spectrum of emotions to the other, and where I delve, deeply into whatever the present moment means. The thing is, plenty of people from my ‘real life’ read this blog. Some have obsessively googled their way here against my better wishes, and others have been invited because they get me, and they get that this place provides me with a kind of outlet and solace that my life otherwise doesn’t provide, and they give me space to allow this to happen.

But here’s the thing. My mother in law, though I dearly love her, isn’t someone who knows me deeply enough to create a frame of reference for what I write here. She doesn’t know how to locate the ore in what I write to true the compass needle north; to make what I write a part of a larger topography of meaning for my life. And also, I write here in a way I do not want to share with her, because inevitably, invariably, what I write here will then wend its way back into my life, misconstrued and out of place, in the form of worried queries, small questions, anxious phone messages.

So much spans the gap between us—faith, age, perspective—we couldn’t be farther apart in how we live and think and grow. Which isn’t to say that we’re not close, for we are, when we’re together, in a particular way. We hug and laugh, and she makes the world’s best coffee, and we talk about the latest Tom Cruise scandal, and rehash to it’s minutia every last adorable thing Bean did. And I love having this kind of relationship in my life. I love her easy generosity, her obsession with shopping, and the way that anything my kid does makes her entire day. But the thing is, there is still that vast uncharted territory between us, and it’s there because I need it to be there. It’s there because I am a deeply private person.

Okay, so maybe I’m an idiot to come here at all, having just made that claim. I can see how ludicrous it is to say that I come here to find solace and privacy—because, duh, the Internet is the antithesis of that. Right? I get that it is ridiculous for me to harbor the belief that a public blog is place where I can write and not have to watch my step, or watch my back, or create in endless detail the specific context for everything I write. But truthfully, that is exactly why I come here.

Since I started blogging, I’ve had visitors from Saudi Arabia and Hawaii, from Istanbul and Seoul. Complete strangers send me gifts. People I would never have the opportunity of knowing have become amazing friends, half the world away. I get nearly all my parenting advice from people I’ve never met in person. And yet, almost everyone who comes here, comes here with the knowledge that this small window looks in on the shape of my life, right now, today, and respects that. Most people seem to get that what I write will be as fickle as the tide. Up one day, down the next. That I’ll toss caution to the wind and say what’s on my mind, walking the thin ledge of risk, because I’m trying to reach out and touch the heart of something that is a little bigger than me; because I am hoping that some shred of what I write matters in a new way to someone else. Or so I’d like to hope. This is, after all, why I write here. Because the thirsting part of my writer’s soul wants to grab hold of even the smallest thread dangling from the tapestry of human existence, and make something with it.

So I’m not sure what to do exactly. Not sure where to go with this or how to proceed. The idea of giving up this blog is worse right now than the thought of being plagued by misinterpretation. And perhaps this is all good training wheels. Hell, if I write a book (and I will!) you can bet I’ll be running pell mell across the tight rope of risk, wearing nothing but pair of flimsy paper wings and the wildest grin you’ve ever seen, so I might as well get used to the feeling of being gawked at by the people I love. But I wish, for now anyway, that things could go back to the way they were. That I could write—without feeling like I have to answer for what I write, or explain it; and that the good news and the bad, is taken with a grain of salt, or several, and doesn’t immediately come back to me, via a voicemail. Alas, bridges always seem to be burning while the artist howls at the moon.

masthead

Time for a new masthead. I have no clue what I'm doing, but sometimes it is utterly satisfying to spend several late-night hours playing with photoshop. If I knew what half the tools did, just think how smokin' I'd be! Here are a couple of older mastheads that I've had up. Today: breakfast out, somewhere, because there is neither milk nor bread in our empty, empty fridge. Then to the craft store to buy frames for the last of my paintings to go up in the show, if I'm still allowed to hang them--tardy as I am with the whole thing. Somehow, I really did manage to forget all about it. Oh, and before I forget, check out the new gallery format I'm trying. Better. Not great, but better, right? Anyone want to design me a real one? Pretty please?

One more thing, Bean's second birthday is coming up in a month. I want to have a fun little shindig for some of his little toddler friends, and their parents, but I'm worthless at envisioning such events. Help. What are some good, low-stress, fun things to do at a two-year old's birthday? (There may not be snow...there should be snow, but the weather has been wacky this year!)

A new start

Before it melted, the snow was boot deep and crystalline. Now unseasonably warm rains have returned and the ground is slick with black ice at night. Above the bald mountains that rise up from the lake, the full moon was setting just as the sun was rising this morning, white and round like a plate against the pale tablecloth of pink and blue.

I’m busy again, but the past two days have been deeply satisfying. DH and I keep talking, and each time it’s getting easier and richer. We’re moving, not stagnant, and also we’re starting to train for a half marathon. Five miles at the gym yesterday, and then dinner all together. Ice cream with cherries for dessert, and Bean licking his bowl. We’re trying to be gentler with each other than before, and this is good.

I’m also back in the thick of creative work, which I love. Somehow I managed to forget I’m doing an art showing in a café and am supposed to hang my work this weekend, so now my studio is spread with frames and canvasses, as I scurry to prepare for the show. I like it this way, a patchwork of rectangles and brushstrokes.

A good way to start the new year.

Happy new year!

I cannot think of a better way to toast in the new year than to hurtle downhill on a sled. Wild, silly fun. Bean’s grin spreading like sunshine across his face. DH laughing, truly in the moment and content, just before he bites snow for the hundredth time. The heat of our breath rising up against the cold air, and in between our giggling, how quite the landscape is covered in snow.

I am ready for a new year. And if I had to distill my resolutions for this year into one pure wish, it would be this: to bring loving devotion to every single moment.

I'll probably write an uberlist over here, tomorrow. In the meantime, if you had to pick one thing for this year--one theme, one goal, what would it be?

Also, happy new year to all of you!

The view (and the most random, grumpy post ever)

Here are a bunch of photos I took the other night when the light was doing the most incredible things. On my way home the stormy sky was suddenly ripped open and sun burst through, right in front of the rain—creating the most remarkable and vibrant rainbow I have ever seen. Of course, I didn’t get the camera until after it had faded (rainbows never look as beautiful as they do in real life anyway), but I did walk out onto the cold damp grass to see raindrops hanging like bright jewels from every twig and branch.

I can make no guarantees about where this post will go because I’m sick with an awful stomach bug—the second time this year, and I’m hating every minute of it. My head feels like it’s in a vice, and I feel utter anguish that I’ve left my class to some poor substitute the week before vacation. The kids are so excitable right now; we’ve discussed where Santa lives about a hundred times, and still, the conversation seems to wend its way there. As they terrorize the sub, I’ll spend tomorrow on the couch with Bean patting my cheek and saying, Mama, sick, or more urgently, Mama, get up!

I got whatever I have from DH who woke up yesterday morning feeling sick. To make matters worse, the garbage disposal chose yesterday to jam, which in turn caused the dishwasher to spew its backwash into the sink drain and the sink to start filling. Lovely, no? In a moment of flawless teamwork, a very feverish DH and I worked together to find and remove the pieces of broken plate that had fallen into it, and then, as he retired to the couch threatening to faint, I had to wrestle the darn thing back into place. Sort of like wrestling a greased pig made out of metal. I reinstalled it, to my credit (all kudos are welcome—it was the most disgusting, awkward, frustrating thing I’ve done in a long while!)

This is possibly the least festive I’ve felt at the approach of the holidays, EVER. We bought wreathes the other day, but besides that and baking cookies, our house is decidedly un-holiday like. Oh dear, I’ll stop moping when my stomach stops feeling like someone is excavating it with a child’s sized plastic bulldozer.