Happy Thanksgiving! Bean was sick with the stomach flu last night. All over everything. He's better today, but we're all a little delerious, and are getting ready to turn in for a nap. Rain is falling steadily and the air is heavy with fog. Brett Dennon is playing; the stove is toasty. Nap time it is.
The way I operate
The work you love and the work you do /
A day to catch up with myself: the boys left early to install soapstone counter tops at the inlaws house. I slept in until after 10 a.m. I’m not sure when I last did that. It felt unbelievably good. I woke up to sun splashed across white flannel and the cat purring and sang in the shower. I had breakfast alone by the woodstove in the dining room, reading Heat and eating bacon, eggs, toast, and a peach-raspberry smoothie, then headed outdoors. I couldn’t stop myself from grinning. The sky was bright blue, and the last golden leaves were floating down. I cleaned the chicken coop, relishing the work.
As I scooped debris from the floor I pondered how within the scope of my life there are different kinds of work. So many of you responded yesterday with job worries, and these resonate with me: with my longing to be doing something else (specifically: writing full time.) It seems as though for so many of us, what we do, and the work we love have become disparate, cleaved out of necessity.
What is the work that you love? For me it is a dozen things: wearing leather gloves and stacking wood; raking leaves; turning soil. It is mowing grass, cutting branches, planting seeds. It is spending six hours back to back writing. It is waking up when the sky is stained pale pink, to scribble in my notebook. It is putting paint on a canvass. And also, some days, it is greeting the faces at the door, eager, curious, exalting. But most days it is my job. The thing that pays the bills. The thing I am good at. The thing I put 100 % of my energy into every day. And yet it doesn’t fill me up the way it used to; my solar plexus is too full with longing, with words that never make it to the page.
Like peguins /
I hate that I get to the point where some remarkable super woman part of me has managed to sort, organize, file, and accomplish, and I'm just rounding the corner on being "ahead," when then the week catches up with me again. I hate that on any given day I can never really accomplish even half of what I’d like to.
I know deep down that this moment, right here on this couch, matters. Here, in a circle of light surrounded by the dark of the sleeping house, with my breath and my anxious heart, this is what matters. Here, with my feet tucked up under me and the steady clacking of the keyboard, my fingers fluttering to create words without conscious effort. Here, longing for sleep. This is what matters.
But I get hungry for days where everything feels sorted out and accomplished. Where there is time to come home from work and take a walk outdoors; time to do some yoga, or run; and mostly, time to write. Each day I don’t write I feel a terror rising in me. What if I never get this down? What if all I can ever do are fragments? But each day, the demands prioritize, like jostling penguins. I’ve heard that they’ll do this at the edge of an ice burg: push and bump until one or two penguins fall into the icy water below. The rest stand watching—waiting to see if the ones they pushed surface and swim about or are devoured.
I keep picturing some graphic organizer, some chart, something that could synchronize and streamline the crazy that is my day—but even if it were—even if I could remember and coordinate all the things I need to accomplish, it still comes back to this: the hours run out. The clock’s hand crawls steadily around the face. Night fills my body with a craving for sleep, and then, too soon, the alarm clicks on.
One or two /
On a run, we talk. It is a good time for talking actually. The conversation makes the strain forgettable. In between words, pauses long enough for breath, and for making things intentional. We run past open meadows and woods where the leaves are piled high and brown. The sun is warm on our backs, but we wear woolen hats. We talk about the things we’ve always wanted. About the dreams we have. Living in Europe; graduate school; a life where we can look back each day and say we lived it well and fully. It’s easy to dream and forget to leap. To stand at the top of the cliff, and get lost looking down, without ever stepping off, and then there’ll be the day we’ll look back and regret.
“That would be the summer you’re supposed to be pregnant with another baby,†he says, of two summers from now. We’re talking about living in Europe—a part of a graduate degree program I’ve been accepted to, and have decided to attend. I feel my stomach flip flop.
When I pick up my friend’s baby, he fits perfectly into my arms. My body remembers that rocking motion (a side-to-side movement I grew so accustomed to, that for month’s I’d catch myself standing in line at the grocery store, or the bank, swaying.) I bring my lips to the softness of his downy head instinctively. Motherhood is in my bones.
And yet, I have a fierce, anxious longing to do more than this. I’ve come to this other passion slowly, like an embering fire. It hasn’t been a direct route, like Karen Russel, who at 26 has already published an acclaimed, original collection of stories. Writing for me has been more like a slow aquifer, bubbling to the surface with greater and grater force with each year’s passage.
I love my son wildly, and am grateful for his little satellite self, orbiting my days. But I’ve just started to feel like things are possible again. Life beyond the insular circumference of a baby’s needs. I imagine a sibling for Bean. But when I really examine this image, I find much of it is a composite of expectations. Everyone I know has had two or more kids. I grew up in a family of three. I don’t really know any onlies, and people ask me regularly when I’ll have a second.
As it stands, it’s a matter of timing. A matter of putting one dream ahead of the other. People say siblings born close together are happiest—they have each other, and all that. But I can’t imagine this now. I can’t imagine the constant rush. The never enough hands. The diapers in addition to the night time worries of a toddler. I can’t imagine never being able to sink back into the couch with a stack of books, to read to a wide-eyed eager Bean with no interruptions. Nor can I imagine giving up this wellspring of focus and direction that I've come to in my writing. Maybe I could do both. Maybe, especially if they were far enough apart in age. Maybe if I had a two-book deal in the works. But now?
I can picture a second. I can picture being pregnant again, and a part of me wants that chance. The first time I was caught so off guard, the whole nine months passed in a blur of coming to grips. I’d be able to do it more gracefully now—and also those first crazy months. I’d be less terrified, more confident in the certain joy of hour of melted moments spent staring at a newborn’s face.
But as much as I can picture this—and even want it—I cannot imagine it now, or next year or the year after. Huge, in the front of everything else, is the desire to write, to publish, to make this into my career. And I get these things, still, I am uncertain.
I want your thoughts on this. If you’ve had kids—why have you had more than one? How did you decide the timing? How did it affect the scope and outcome of your dreams?
Trailing /
I skip work and sleep in until ten. My body has felt like a Duchamp painting the past few days, in too many places at the same time. When I woke up the sun was flooding the room, and I lay in bed, surrounded by soft white flannel, and watched the dust motes dance in the light. When I wake up, especially when I wake up late or from a nap, I feel like I am trailing myself for a few moments. I startle easily then, and prefer to move slowly, to linger where I am still fluent with the images of my dreams, before language ripples the surface of my mind like someone throwing a handful of pebbles into a serene pond.
I made my way to my studio where lady bugs still seem to linger—one or two greet me each day on the windowsills, moving about as the sun warms their shiny beetle backs. I wrote for an hour or so, feeling the zinging of anxiety rise and fall in my chest. What if it’s not good? What if I can do better? What if I can never get past the point of beginning, or the halfway? Then I’d move to my yoga mat facing the sun, and bring my attention towards my tight hamstrings and uneven breath.
By noon, I went running. Some days I wish every day could be like this: mired into the thick of the work I love most, yet able to be flexible and active midday when the sun makes the air fragrant with the smell of dry leaves and damp earth. I came back determined to gather focus, and to pursue what I want (to write fulltime) with more clarity. I’ve been waiting for this to happen. This shift away from summer’s dreaminess and early autumns tumbled wonder. Like waking up, it takes me a while to shift gears towards productivity after the sensory world I inhabit when the fields are green and the air is rife with the fragrance of ripening fruit and the busy humming of insects.
Anticipation angst /
This morning called for errands in town. Warm cinnamon buns from the last farmer’s market of the season, and people watching in the rain. Returning home for a much needed two hour nap among soft white flannel sheets (with the cat at my feet) and then an afternoon cleaning in that wholesome, down to the nooks and crannies kind of way that is utterly satisfying. Tomorrow we’re having a shindig with several dozen people. All good friends and neighbors. Cider, pumpkin carving, a rip-roaring bonfire. And though I can’t wait to have everyone in one spot, I’m way out of my comfort zone.
Throwing parties isn’t something I’m good at yet. I’d like to be. I’d like to be better at social things in general—and it was a resolution of mine this year to push myself in this direction. Being the Aquarius that I am, I’d prefer to be holed up somewhere creating, or with a few friends huddled over steaming lattes in a bohemian cafe. I don’t do new social situations with ease—or, more honestly, I don’t do anticipating them well. Once I’m actually in the midst of it all, I’m generally fine. I fly by the seat of my pants and hope everyone’s having a good time. But the residue of the ahead-of-time angst makes me nervy for the first twenty minutes or so of any new circumstance.
I look back on my quiet, almost cloistered home life as a child, and find my anxiety coiled there. We rarely had guests. My parents never “entertained.†Hence I really only have the random collection of fall-back experiences from my late teens and early twenties, and mostly those sucked. Red plastic cups of cheep beer, etc. But I’ve always craved more. I love people, and I love good food, and I love these in combination. Like a chapter out of an Isabelle Illende novel, I want my house to be full of the vivacious, bubbly, cacophony of voices and laughter. I want this to be the memory Bean has. Friends, always welcome. Dinner parties. Gatherings. Ruckus chatter under starlight, as people gather around a fire.
synchopation /
I have the day off and I’m gleefully miring my way through an inconceivably long to-do list. I have yet to figure out how to accomplish my every day life and everything else that needs to get done.
The biggest thing I’ve accomplished: completely reorganizing and painting my studio. Last year sometime, in the middle of the winter, under a blanket of depression, I painted my studio a pale blue, which felt like a bad idea almost seconds after the last coat was applied. Without meaning to, I began to use my studio space less and less, until I would go for a week or two without ever entering it.
This affected me on a subconscious level. I felt creatively terrified. Performance anxiety corroded any attempt to splash color across the page or really sink back into a routine of writing. Without a space I felt comfortable in, I resorted to writing at the kitchen table, in the midst of the hubbub of daily life, and routinely sabotaged my own efforts even there, buy skimming through my favorite blogs, or trying to keep up with the voracious demands of my gig over at Parent Dish.
Somehow the entire month of September (and nearly all of October) was swallowed by the murky creature of un-ambition. All summer I was entrenched in the rich sensory beauty of the outdoors; of leisure; good food; good novels. Then fall arrived with the first nip in the air and the hillsides turning orange, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. My syncopation was jagged and blurry; like a scarecrow trying to dance. Somehow with the shift in seasons I stopped doing all the things that I love: running, writing, art, and instead became (maybe necessarily) submerged in the fabric of work.
Headlong there, in the classroom, participating in the daily alchemy of turning eighteen individuals into a working group of learners; time spent watching spiders eat grasshoppers in the terrarium; and writing stories about magical shrinking potions. Time spent tying shoes and counting shells and navigating small sorrows. Time spent feeling nearly exhausted every afternoon; always empty, hungry, anxious.
And then I came home a few days ago to an empty house (Bean and DH were out running errands) and despite feeling hungry and grumpy, I decided to pull on my running shoes and head out in the perfect autumn sunlight for a run.
On the way back, passing a long field that follows the road for a good stretch, a small pony saw me running, and cantered up to the fence and then ran with me. I stopped and petted her tousled mane, and then continued, delighting in the unexpected equine attention. And then I realize: I was no longer either hungry or grumpy. My mood and body had been off kilter because I’ve been so out of rhythm. My soul misses running, it seems. Just as it misses moving through steady sun salutes on my yoga mat on my sunny studio floor.
So in the past few days I feel like I’ve come back into orbit around the quiet fire of my inner self. I’ve started running again, and I want to do it nearly every day. My body needs to move, just as my mind needs the quiet emptiness of one foot falling in front of the other along the gravel road.
So I’ve cleaned my studio and tackled my to-do list, and finally feel like I’m at least leaning towards a place of balance. Not quite there yet, but at least facing the right direction now.
As I write, thousands (really!) of lady bugs have migrated to our house. They are landing on the windows, twirling through the hazy autumn air in their bumbling flight. Do they hibernate? What are they doing here? Some say lady bugs are good luck. I'm content to imagine that they are.
Twirling in a burlap sack /
Or something. This week has been hectic, and I'm grumpy that I'm turning into one of those depressing post once a week bloggers. I love coming here and finding all of you and your comments and your stories, and I have a zillion posts that I write in my head... you know how it is.
This week though, in particular, has been like a bizarre synchronized swimming competition and I've barely had time to come up for breath. It shouldn't really be so hectic--my in-laws have moved here (and though they don't have appliances so they're here all the time for meals, they help A LOT with Bean and such) and my class at school has finally started to come together as a group. There have been no more incidents of scissor throwing or wailing or refusals to say, sit in a chair, or come to the meeting area, and today a parent came in and built an exquisite terrarium for us.
At home we have a toasty warm new wood stove, and the hills are turning to burnished red and saffron. When we take walks in the afternoon we walk through armloads of fallen leaves the color of gems, freckled with rainwater. The rooster has begun crowing. The skies at dusk are purple like the stain of a grape, with gauzy gray clouds smudge across the mountains. It’s a good time of year. Time for apple pie, and café au laits and pumpkin cheesecake ice cream.
But I still have this feeling; like a dervish. Twirling, my feet barely touching ground. I know the real reason is that I haven’t connected back with my writing for several weeks now, and the threads that connect me to the stories I’m constructing have become fine and tenuous like spider’s webs. But every morning I wake up still tired, and every night I go to sleep with my mind a kaleidoscope of fragments. I have forgotten the geometry of being divided in this way: mother, writer, teacher, spouse.
In a conversation with my mother yesterday, she was saying how so many women she knows are on a quest to find the true things that they love. A calling. A direction. A depth of purpose. I laughed, relating my own woes. Mine has never been a lack of purpose or direction or enjoyment, it’s always been a lack of time.
“If I could do every day twice,†I said, “then maybe, just maybe I’d get everything done that I long to do.â€
How about you?
What do you believe? /
I'm sitting outdoors with a bevy of chickens clucking at my elbow. Across from me the cat is licking himself, fur soaking up warmth. Next to me Bean digs a big hole in an empty flower bed. The grass is wet from rain, and the sun is warm on the black rubber of my boots. I just spent the weekend with a good friend I've known since I was fourteen. He's an creative, free-spirited atheist. Invariably we always have at least one argument about faith. He sees no need for it--the opiate of the people and all that. I'm on the other side, but less articulate. I don't keep a drawer of knife sharp words to define the shape of what I know. Tautology. Ignorance. Deism. How do you use the scientific method to argue the depth or scope of spiritual faith? How do you use logic as the basis for accepting or denying that which you cannot know about the movement of another person's heart?
So now I really want to know:
What do you believe? Do you have faith, or do you live outside it? How do you rationalize your fundamental view of the world? Can logic define it, or is something lost in translation?
September mornings /
The weather has been perfect. The leaves falling, every day more, until the ground has become a kaleidoscope of red and yellow. Days are filled with small things that make me be right here. Pomegranates are in season. The wood is stacked, cords deep, and our new wood stove arrived; fire-engine red, tucked into a corner in the dining room. Apples are tangy and sweet now, and on the tree beyond the kitchen window they look like the burnished red beads on some old woman’s necklace. The air’s still sweet and noisy with the end of summer: crickets at night, and the last cut of hay, but there is a bite to the mornings.
Sometimes I want fragments. Short phrases. Words in the loop of a poem; the dangling thought of an elipsis; the wanton lust of the run-on. Sometimes I can't say things all the way, the way they are. Instead, the feeling is simply there, welling up. Like woodsmoke in the air, or the red streak of the tanager. This week I want to return to something I did last September. A poem a day. A morning poem. Whatever words come to mind to paint the colored arc of soul and dreams across the page. Tomorrow, first thing, with a steaming mug and the fog rising, I'll scatter careless armfuls of words like autumn leaves. Will you join me?
Winnowing at the surface /
Each day is a fracture landscape of moments we intend and moments we do not. There is so much reaction in my day; so many times I’ll carry something from one end of the house to the other without thinking about it; or worse, say words I don’t really mean. More than words, it is tone that oozes with the organ-dark mess of moods.
Especially breaking back into a daily routine structured by necessity: earlier wake-up times, more to accomplish within the falling sand of every hour, I watch my energy and effort splinter off. I remember certain things while others leave me almost as soon as they happen. Like steam from a mug of tea; or summer’s heat once autumn has arrived.
Maybe I’m shallow. Maybe I am hardwired to be more resilient: able to move forward shaking off the past that has drenched every pore. I’m not sure. I do know that there are times when I need to be more conscious—especially with DH. We so easily hook each other into little spats. Small words that tailspin, ripping context to shreds. I nearly always take his bait. A sentence flung sideways.
The worst part is that often right in the middle of it, when I’m still bristling with ego and unwilling to back down, I cannot quite, entirely, recall the words that were said. I tag too much on tone, too much on gesture. I remember the context but not the specific content. I assume too much.
And then in the blurry high-moon dark I’m dream-soaked and restless, making up for lost clarity. I skate across the surface of sleep like a water-bug; not really in the water, not entirely above it either. I’m grateful for morning, and early quiet of the house as the sun slowly rises, pulled from behind the mountains like a marionette. The trees are dappled with gold. Each day more leaves turn the color of fire and persimmon. Deer apples, small and round, are sweet and tangy on the trees. I’ve promised Bean we’ll gather them and make an apple pie.
Rabbit-hole days /
I’ve been feeling empty word-wise, and it almost feels like a betrayal. Flat screen, flat words; the keystrokes brittle and familiar as I pound out paragraphs. Especially here, I feel a new emptiness. The recent combination of less comments and more visibility has made me hesitant to write about the small mundane things in my life that I’ve filled posts with before. I’ve started to wonder if people care what my days consist of, the moments packing in one after another until the bushel basket of each day is full to overflowing. Maybe it’s a feeling of overextension. I’ve written so much from my point of view, I feel like I have nothing new to say. It’s the end of summer here. Leaves on the first of the sugar maples are turning fire engine red and burnished orange. We’ve had a few damp days, humidity hanging in the air until afternoon thunderstorms send the moisture raining down in sheets.
When we walk in the meadow, insects scatter. Fat grasshoppers, praying mantis. I’ve been looking for monarch caterpillars to bring into my classroom and at first thought they’d made cocoons early and had already metamorphosed and flown south; no sign of them on the milkweed clustered along the edge of the lane down to the pond. But looking closely I found some, so tiny they were barely visible at all. Just as long as my pinky fingernail is wide. Little horns and stripes, eating holes stained white with milk on the fat green leaves.
I gathered them up, a dripping milkweed caterpillar bouquet, and carried them home. Now they’re eating their way through leaves and leaving poop at the bottom of a glass jar on my windowsill. Tomorrow they’ll travel to school with me; and soon, they’ll grow accustomed to the eager eyes and hot breath of children. So will I.
See? This is all I have to say. Summer has done me in. I’m languorous and scattered. In my studio I’ve started a new canvass, several feet wide. I have more energy right now for color, for wild brush strokes and the haphazard following of whimsy that paint provides, than for the record keeping of my days. I’m thinking though that with this exhaustion of my own perspective fiction will come easier. I find myself looking forward to when I can sit down to write through another lens, a different window. To hold open the doorway to another person’s heart, though invariably, it leads back to the corridors of my own. But I haven’t had time yet to sink into even this.
My new routine hasn't taken shape yet. I need a week, or two, to fall back onto the trampoline of early morning writing and jam-packed days. Until then, I’m all over the place, trying to get other things done. Stacking a woodpile, replanting azaleas, buying paint to redo the livingroom in sunny acorn.
And because I’ve been lackluster about posting and even more so in commenting on all of your blogs, there’s been a lull in this small corner of the interweb and I miss your comments, your snappy, snarky, encouragement. Perhaps all this to say, I’m ready for summer to be over? Ready for a shift. A new direction. I’m not sure. I love the sun-drenched days, and I feel nervous about winter. But I feel like I’ve slipped down a rabbit hole, having sunk so entirely into the present of my days.
Here goes...something /
Every year the fledglings learn this: at some point the nest of twigs and thistle down and the blue ribbon from last year’s presents is not enough. The dappled rustling shade of further branches beckon. The wide arc of sky, streaked with wind and sunbeams becomes a daily siren song. And then the day arrives when they must make a willing leap into the empty air despite having never flown before.
It feels like this, linking my writing over at Parent Dish to here. At once both terrifying and certain, it has always been the natural order of things. The work of showing up at the page here was always with this is in mind. Writing here was an attempt stake out a claim on behalf of my writing within my own heart. A way of saying yes, this is possible, this is the future of my longing.
You have to start somewhere to get to somewhere, and this is where I began, words running long across paragraphs, photographs, no-post days.
It’s incredibly vulnerable to think that more people from my ‘real life’ and my work life will inevitably find me here and find the archives of fights with my husband, the heartache of winter longing, the sallow listless words just before spring, and the posts filled with poop and wonder and breastfeeding that have been my personal history as a new mama.
I didn’t have to link here. Yet not doing so felt like it would be a cop-out. The finch opting to hop about on the forest floor instead of taking flight. It would have reeked with self doubt, not to stand by what I’ve written. The many thousand words here are deeply personal, but also good. I’m proud of how this almost-daily practice of finding something to say here has shaped my writer’s voice in a new way. Your comments, and the emails I gratefully receive, have given me the first inkling of audience, and also courage to say more. No point stopping now. No point hovering at the edge of the quivering twig.
Tumbling towards start /
The last few weeks of summer before the start of the school year make me feel like a tumbleweed; aimless and windblown, with so many things up in the air, and without the routine of work. I laugh, realizing that I’ve arrived at this point: ready to go back. I miss a routine, even though I’m not good at exacting one upon my cantaloupe eating summer days. Over the vactation I’ve managed to slow down enough, unwind enough, to start missing the days of waking up early to sip something warm and write before heading off to work. Now more than ever I need that structure. I need to get started on the forty pages I’ll be exchanging with my writing group in December, and starting this week I’ll also be posting over at Parent Dish.
I like the tingly feeling I get contemplating how with each progressive step I’m sinking more deeply into my commitment towards writing. And also, trepidation.
There’s no better way to get started than to simply sit down and get started, this much I know. But I have a particularly hard time with this. Introductions. First days. First words on the page. First weeks of a new routine. The beginning of anything is something that time sets me on edge and makes me resistant. I drag my feet. Think up every reason in not to jump in. And then, invariably, I finally do.
But what is it about starting that’s so hard? There’s something in those first moments that’s raw and unpredictable. It’s an act of throwing yourself off the cliff, of leaping into the blue space of air and unknown. My heart thuds in my chest when I sit down, poised, ready, my fingers hovering above the keys. Does this happen to anyone else?
A dare /
Here’s why: You will not always be the age you are today, and someday you, or someone who loves you will want to look at these pictures, lingering over the way you looked so beautiful right in that moment, in good light with the wind in your hair.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. How life moves at an exponential speed. When you’re two, one year is half your life. When you’re thirty—a year is one thirtieth. Time compresses, blurs, flutters, but always moves forwards, and with it, you. Always changing. Who you are right now will be a smudge on the window of memory in a handful of years. Take some pictures. Like a watermark or a timestamp. Something to remind you. What are you like, right now?
I’m at this point in my life where I’ve just started to notice that I’m aging. Tiny crows feet dance at the corners of my eyes; a furrow between my brows forever marks the way I frown. Some days, when I kneel in front of the mirror with my little boy, his skin fresh and flawless, I am startled by how changed I am. How old I look. Of course, I know that for someone a dozen or two years older than I, nearly thirty is spring-chicken young. But that’s what I mean: sometimes in the moment it’s hard to just appreciate.
So go do it.
/
All month I've been feeling the pressure of lists of things I should be doing: making dentist appointments; editing the final draft of a piece and sending it off; finishing the half dozen books I've started this month; running more. Then, when another blue-skied summer day passes and I've done nothing from the lists, surliness spreads across the surface of my mood like an oil slick. At night I toss in bed, piecing together bits of plot for stories I can�t bring myself to write; then I wake exhausted. Short fused. Critical.
But today it dawned on me that I don't have to get anything done for these few short days of summer that are all mine. All year I zig-zag through the day at a breakneck pace, waking up before the sun climes through the bare branches the silver birch outside my studio to make coffee and write, before heading off to a classroom full of lively, scrabbling kids. My days from September to June are oversaturated with accomplishment. I multi-task until the moments are frayed. I get things done.
Summer is the only time I can ever lick homemade raspberry popsicles, fool around with Wordpress themes, or spend twenty minutes with Bean on the looking -for four-leaf clovers. It's the only time I can read the New Yorker at the kitchen counter over toast and an iced latte for breakfast without having to be anywhere else. The only time I can spend the afternoon with DH, pulling down a dilapidated shed or stretching garden fencing. Summer is the only time when the hours swell with fragrance and the lazy hum of bumble bees; when words fall short.
So this week I've been trying to exhale and forget my damn lists. Forget arranging words into neat paragraphs. Forget the voice in my head that keeps whispering that I'll fail if I'm not throwing myself at everything I want, right now, with the fierceness of a matador.
I'm not sure where I got this voice. Or when I started letting it have such power over my days: staining perfectly good moments black. But I'm ready to try to be less complicated for the few remaining weeks of summer. To try, at least, to remind myself that if I spend a whole afternoon flicking through the Wordpress theme browser, and making an utter mess of things, it's okay.*
Right?
Some days like this /
Yesterday was brilliant, and then today I woke up inexplicably sad. Yesterday I made French Onion soup. Farmer's market fresh onions, bakery baguette, outrageously priced Gruyere cheese, and it was perfect. Last night we went to see Paris , Je' Te Aime, and to pick up some bowls at clay studio, newly fired. They turned out beautifully. Pale sky blue, nesting together, still carrying a whisper of warmth from the kiln.
The film was quirky with 18 different directors/stories. I loved all the ways it portrayed love: the raw, sharp shards of love that come with the grief of loosing a child; the unexpected fragility of ending up alone, or together; the myriad ways love is tangled in translation: across faith. DH hated it, because he said it depressed him: too close to life, I guess. He wanted something cheerier, some handful of stories that knit themselves together, ending with old folks rocking on some sunny porch together, at the end of a life well lived.
But to me, love IS achingly fragile and the likelihood of surviving a lifetime with it intact, improbable. All the more exquisite because this is so. Like finding unbroken sand dollars at the sea shore. I'm not much of a critic though; a sucker for anything that portrays a faraway place and snapshots of the human condition. I like films to be arty, poignant There were a handful of stories I didn't like, but more that I did. Watching the film felt like reading a volume of short stories (which I'm doing, by the way. Alice Munro's RUNAWAY.)
But today, despite the perfect sunny skies, I feel like crying. Hormonal maybe, or maybe just off after a late night, sleeping against Bean, who went to sleep in our bed last night after telling the babysitter he missed us. Maybe I need to go out and soak up sun. Do you ever wake up this way? Simply off, with no real reason you can put your finger on?
Midsummer moodiness /
Somehow, the summer is slipping by. Without warning it is more than half over really, and I'm feeling moody about it. The sky has been a mosaic of torn clouds this week. Strong winds and rain have been thrashing about wildly like a greenbroke horse. The night sky burnished with sheet lightening, thunder always rolling low in the distance. It's that time in the summer when I start to think about it ending, and I feel a certain abject sorrow thinking of it. Like driving again after living through a car crash, the prospect of going back to work and living through another winter makes me white-knuckled and anxious, albeit in a hazy popsicle and sun-stupored way. Last year's autumn and winter left scar tissue running the length of our relationship: mine and DH's. We survived, but sometimes the ache of it painted entire weeks with indigo and gunmetal gray. We came out of it, one bowl at a time at the pottery studio, centering, finding each other among strangers, with slip on our hands and glaze splattering our shirts. But it took until after my birthday to feel like we'd make it to the next.
Now roses are blooming hot red and hooker pink, their petals promiscuously soft, but the slugs are eating holes in the leaves. We still haven't put in a garden fence, and the ground where the beds have not been turned has begun to reclaim its meadow-ness, grasses and tiny fingered ferns and sturdy-rooted dandelions sprouting up through the rubble of tilled soil. I wake up and spend my days sprawled out reading novels which is something I almost never do, and cannot quite get accustomed to. Hours in a book, interrupted every fifteen minutes by Bean who lopes about the yard with his bubble mower or a watering can.
We got him a set of trains and a an oval loop of track and they keep him occupied for nice long stretches of time, during which I get hauled into whatever place is inked out on the pages I'm turning. I get pulled in so easily, my whole day takes on the hue of the story, as though my life were a cotton cloth saturated in the dye of each story's language and emotion; little ripples and circles left clean, like tie-dye, where necessity forces me to resurface.
Small things bring me back to the moment. Making alphabet soup. Lying in bed with DH, my head pressed into the soft place where his arm and shoulder meet and his heartbeat thrums so loudly in my head, all at once I start to think it is my own. Or sitting on the planks of the small dock at the neighbor's pond with Bean, our toes in the water, listening for frogs and splashing, while above us swallows swoop and dive. But in between these things, words are running a haphazard narrative inside my head. Stories are bunkering up against each other.
Last week I finished Pam Houston's novel Sight Hound, which I wasn't entirely drawn into at first (many narrators, one of whom is a dog) but found myself sobbing by the end, grateful for it's right-there in plain sight way of talking about risk and faith and grief. Today I finished As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. DH's ninth grade copy with his ball point pen notes in the margins.
I read it in two days, though I didn't expect it to. There was a certain terrifying tension to it. Faulkner's language is so heady and convoluted and looping that the act of reading it becomes part of the story. You become torn, and belligerent and hateful and grieving because the language makes you feel these things. Like a rip tide, it tows you under. One sentence looping back on itself again and again until you can no longer read it and have it mean anything at all, or another so abrupt, so sharp with colloquial timbre that you have to catch your breath. I want to go back and read the whole thing again, because I felt myself pushed to the very edges of comprehension, as though it were my gut and not my mind to towards which the story was aimed.
I’m also reading Homeland, a collection of short stories by Barbara Kingsolver. My everywhere read. The one I snatch at in all those in-between moments. Each story yanks me into the very center of it’s truth. I read them hungrily, picking over the skeleton of the story, trying to understand how it is made. The gathering of small details, the weight of lines, or the way the author’s voice rides up high over the words of the narrator like radio stations overlapping.
Yet with all the book reading and the lolling about, I haven't been able to stay focused on writing. There is something in my aquarian nature that is both sanguine and ambivalent. This, combined with Bean's intermitent pestering, and it seems it is nearly impossible for me to effectively structure my days. I get disoriented in summer, with all the basking and book reading and love making and such, the heat rising up early and abating only after the thunder and rain have rinsed the grass and sky.
Anyone else feel like this, midsummer? What are you reading? Doing?
Reasons to celebrate /
I have to say, I feel like I owe you—Internets—one heaping helping of gratitude. You have, again and again made me take my writing seriously. Thank you for all of your comments…(Do you know how much I love them? A TON! ~ On that note, sorry about the funky commenting problems. Just hit “submit comment†ONE TIME, and it goes through, even if it tells you it doesn’t. Still don’t know why—though I’m trying to figure it out.) Thank you for all your emails, your encouragement and companionship from the very depths of my heart.
I started this blog two years ago this month, and I’ve benefited from the community I’ve found through it immeasurably. I laughed aloud when I went to look back at my first posts. See this one? Some things have come full circle, non? ( I never went that summer. Something about having a six month old prevented me. I think I’d delusionally signed up to CAMP with him and DH for the five days, in a two person backpacking tent, in a campground full of middle-age, new-age types who were seeking an ‘experience’ while there. We didn’t make it past night one.)
Anyhow, if I were a dog I’d be thwacking my tail into something rather hard. Since I’m not, I can’t stop grinning. Spent the day picking wild strawberries with Bean, wandering newly mown paths through our meadows, and yesterday, happily reunited, the three of us took a four hour nap in the sun. Life is good, good, good.
Always last minute me /
An inefficient overachiever, and a sick one at that.
I'll leave in the morning tomorrow, and drive for six hours. Signing along with the radio, trying to get the directions right, and feeling like my stomach might fall out my mouth, but I'll try not to focus on that. (Have I mentioned how anxious I get right at the beginning of things--at that cusp of unknown? I have. I know. But I really hate it.) But with all my heart I'm excited to be going, and I have questions that I'm determined to ask of the lady whose prose makes me grin, or catch my breath. But I also want to know answers from you. If you write, or read, or dream of writing, I'd love to hear your thoughs.
* Where are the lines between life and fiction. How can pieces of life, stories, characters, annecdotes become the tapestry of fiction?
* How much is enough? I'm forever writing the long piece. The piece with backstory on the backstory. I want to learn to craft a shorter narritive. Something with just enough to let the reader do the rest. How do you know when to leave off, without saying everything?
* And audiance. I don't feel like I have a sophisticated enough sense of audiance yet. Kurt Vonnegut says "Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia." If you write, who is your one person? Who is yoru audiance. Maybe that's my problem, I can never think of just one person.