It's on, skunk.

I watched the skunk leave tonight, burrowing it's little nose into the wet grass, looking for worms. DH and I went out and blocked every hole under the dining room where it seems to live, with great big rocks. Now my clothes reek faintly of skunk. I sit with one knee up, trying to put more sentence on the page, and become distracted again and again by the aroma.

What if that was the mate? What if there is yet another skunk under the house now, trapped. What then?

It makes me laugh, realizing this is what I will remember from June. The scent of skunk will be forever linked with the summer Bean was four and a half, with the summer Sprout began to sit, with the months money was tight and I started working on my book for real. I wonder if it will really imprint like this?

What will you remember June for?

Hello June.

June is one of my favorite months: cloud-torn skies, hail, thunderstorms, and sudden rainbows above the wet curled ferns and the newly shorn woolly backs of sheep, their noses black and soft like crumpled velvet, let out to graze in pastures of suddenly tall grass.

Its easy to be grateful in June, to watch the poplars bend and bend and bend in the wind without breaking, and to feel glad. It’s easy to want to be something in June, to want to be alive, and to be living also: to want to push past whatever was holding things back. Tiredness matters less when the clear air is full of swallowtails and the scent of hyacinth.

June, and there are deadlines. Lots of them, for writing, for making ever minute I have with the quiet clicking of the keyboard count. Dare I whisper the word chapter? Dare I say book?

June, and the baby chicks arrived. We pulled on our rainboots Friday morning and went out to the truck across the muddy gravel drive to fetch them from the hardware store. Bean carried them home in a small cardboard box on his lap, peering in, grinning at their soft fuzzy little bodies bumping up against each other and peeping. Now they’re in the garage in a big wooden box under the red warm circle of the heat lamp. Bean pulls up a step ladder and sits on his feet peering over the edge, naming them, and then naming them again, Betsy, Jemima, Ornament, Daffodil, Sugar.

June, and the mercury is still playing shy, the temperature flirting with warm, barely. At the pond, we’re finding frogs now. They plop into the water when we wade through the tall reeds. Above us, flying in wide swooping arcs that make my heart ache with pleasure, bluebirds, streaks of summer sky.

When we eat cold watermelon on a quilt in the back yard, Bean says, “When you eat watermelon it feels like a refrigerator in your mouth.”

Later, looking at the mountains he tells me, “Mommy, don’t you think a monster's teeth look just like the mountains? They’re all jaggedy like that.”

***

June: reading more short stories, getting more words on the page. On the treadmill and the road, running faster, harder, farther. My body is feeling stronger (it’s the first time in my life I’ve done any kind of weights or jump training. Thank you 30 Day Shred.)

Sprout is trying to sit up. Trying to roll from his back to his stomach. This month will be all about documenting those changes (and about getting my camera fixed!) He is such a smiley little dude. Full of patience and grins and squeals. He is the perfect sidekick, grinning at me from the grocery cart or the Ergo. LOVE. What does June look like for you? What are you planning? Doing? Reading? Watching? Eating?

Flexing my reading muscle.

In college I had a writing teacher who made me type out stories I thought were good. Every sentence. Every slender comma, ellipses, period, paragraph, dialogue, description. She said it would help me to get inside the craft of the story. That I would begin to hear in my head the author's internal dialogue; that I'd understand the choices better: the words, the edits, the way one sentence followed the next. I did it. At first skeptically, then diligently. She was right, of course.

Now it's not so much matter of writing the story out. I write enough, and regularly enough, to feel like I understand how to construct sentences. But there is still something that can be learned from reading a story daily, richly, and then putting it on the operating table, putting your finger on it's pulse, examining what makes it beat.

So maybe for a little while I'll try to read a short story every day. Read it, and try to write about it. Try to put words around what makes it work (or not), until I get to the meat of it. Sort of flexing my reading muscle a bit.

*** This morning's read: “An Old Virgin” From DON’T CRY by Mary Gaitskill.

It is a story that asks again and again: what does it mean to be alive inside a body? Reading it, you become the voyeur. There, touching the frail skin of a father, dying; fingering the charts of a 43 year old virgin at the doctor’s office for a physical, who whispers, “just let me catch my breath” during the exam; at a stoplight next to a Hispanic boy pumping with bravado and “so much light that it burned him up inside and made him dark.”

Gaitskill’s gaze sinks into people. She captures them on the page as both entirely physical and also almost painfully ethereal, their spirits bright and sharp at the edges of the story, tangling with it, becoming for brief moments almost mythical.

“As soon as Laura looked at her father, she knew he was going to die. His body was shrunken and dried, already half-abandoned; his spirit stared from his eyes as if stunned and straining to see more of what had stunned it.”

Inside the narrators head, we go into the secret, morbid, sexual places of her mind and come up against our own humanity: which we learn is something exquisitely fragile and riddled with holes leaking spirit and curiosity and abject sorrow.

“When he answered her, his voice was like a thin sack holding something live. He was about to lose that live thing, but right now he held it, amazed by it, as if he had never known it before.”

“An Old Virgin” is a story about regret and forgiveness, maybe; and about the way these two things are always smashed together inside us, never quite reconciled in the bright, messy, and perverse rooms in our hearts.

*** What if you flexed your reading muscles too? I'd love to know what you think of the short stories you read. What did you read today? How did it move you, make you think?

Frustrated.

I cannot figure out any other way to do it, to make my heart stop thundering with this crazy need to write. So I'm up now, near midnight, revising the same damn paragraphs I've spent all day on, interrupted.

Do people really do this?

big skies

Big skies. Scarlet Gilia and Indian Paintbrush. Writing. It's where I'll be all week.

It figures...

...that the day I've set aside (taking full advantage of it being Mother's Day so I can totally claim several back to back hours) for finishing up my two manuscripts (which incidentally are DUE tonight) is GLORIOUS. Apple blossoms, a perfect breeze, seedlings to plant in the garden. Sigh. And here I am in my shady studio, clacking away on the keyboard. It is nearly impossible not to procrastinate now, when I'm working on revisions (which I hate) and a honey cheeked little boy comes running upstairs clutching a piece of bread and butter with the sole purpose of giving me kisses.

Anyway. Happy Mother's day to all of you mamas out there. I'm so lucky to know so many of you.

Thirst

The ache feels like frostbite, slowly traveling from the peripheries towards the very center of my chest. It’s the kind of ache that you can’t put a finger on and say “here, take this, do this, it will feel better.” Instead it’s pervasive, a wash of heartache, the color a cloud-torn sky after sunset, muted, when indigo starts to unfurl across the heavens and shadows are black.

I’ve never felt this way before: followed by this unnamed dread, this sorrow, and I keep turning to look behind for the hungry dog of my distresses that hides in the bushes, waiting. I never do. I don’t know where she lurks like a bitch in heat, howling in the middle of the night, scratching at the door of my contentment. In the morning there are splinter’s everywhere and my head’s a mess of fragments. It’s still winter. I keep saying this is the problem. I keep blaming the shivery sliver of mercury hovering below freezing. Ice makes the puddles filmy, and bubbles rise when I poke my booted toe in.

But maybe it’s more. Maybe even with longer days and supple heat and petals this thing will gnaw at me. Some days it feels like I’ve swallowed the missing shard from a pot glued back together, the porcelain pieces pressed so close the adhesive running between them looks like transparent veins.

Maybe it’s this: I dream about breaking clocks. About scattering the numbers and the minute and hour hands across the snow; about leaping from the clock tower and having my fall take forever, weightless, because finally there is enough time.

I wake up and throw myself at the day. I know this isn’t graceful, but animals aren’t when there is a terror or a wound to lick. It’s like I’m always at the edge of the forest with the scent of smoke curling at my nostrils. The days are too short, and at the end of each I am still thirsty.

Here again

Outside, in the quiet winter cold, a dog barks again and again and again. A series of three staccato yaps, then a pause, snowflakes swirling in the silence before it barks again; left somewhere outdoors, hot breath making the fur wet around his mouth, icicles gathering in shaggy snarls.

In the sky, the moon, rinsed in the shadow of a recent eclipse, climbs higher up the edge of the dark.

Inside, I almost hold my breath. Heartache coiled in my chest again. I’m restless.

It is still winter here, and I’m home after a week away, where I was submerged in desert sunlight and words. The yearning to be at the next place in my life is fiercer than ever now; to be doing this writing thing, full tilt, without anything else. To be writing every day, without a day job that leaves me feeling like one of those tabs of fish food you throw in the tank for the fish to nibble relentlessly while the owner leaves for a vacation.

It is still winter and stumbling about the internet I find a classmate from my year in college who has published her first collection of essays, and also has the job I wish I had, in the thick of the Manhattan literary world, among tall buildings and subways and martinis. I bite my lip seeing her book jacket, her shiny hair.

I hate the color of this thing that creeps up in my solar plexus. I hate the way jealousy makes me feel small and suffocated, and the way it makes me ask a hundred stupid what-ifs, as if time weren’t irreversible, as if I weren’t here in the thick of this winter snowstorm with a three year old tucked into flannel sheets upstairs and a husband suffering through another bout of depression.

Maybe this is the thing I hate the most. How he won’t admit that his entire way of inhabiting the world hinges on finances; on what he makes or looses for the week in the market, the charts and numbers blipping by him faster than a heartbeat. He won’t say that his life is empty of things that make his heart tremble with passion; he won’t say that he keeps putting these things on hold to maintain our status quo, to keep afloat, to put in a home gym and a flat screen TV, to do whatever comes next in the acquisition process that never ends but never makes him really happy either. He doesn’t see it this way. But I feel his emptiness like a dry heat licking at my skin, making my knuckles crack, my lips grow chapped.

Winter. It seems to always find us here, under sweaters in different rooms with hardly anything to say. It’s been three weeks of tight jaw muscles, and shorter conversations. We hug each other by the kitchen island over Saturday morning pancakes with maple syrup and bacon and hot coffee, but there is always something that makes one or the other of us pull away abruptly, as though magnetism, like heat, is scarce on these cold days and longer nights.

The only time I really see his face bloom into an unguarded smile is when he is with Bean. Then it spreads across his cheeks like the unexpected tiny rainbows from the prism hanging by a ribbon in the window, and a small sharp sliver worms its way into the very center of my chest. I can’t help but wish his smile would bloom like this for me.

But we’re like hungry dogs, circling, ready to snap at the slightest provocation. It is as though we’re both looking for a reason, for some release of tension—both of us craving the pulpy mess that exposes our hearts and leaves us pressed close together with heat between us. Maybe this makes no sense. Of course it makes no sense. But why else do we do this at-once push and pull?

When he’s around, it’s all about pull-your-hair-out-crazy mood swings, and this week has been his worst week ever in the stock market. Everything tipped in the wrong direction, keel up, toppled like dominos. And at the end of a day I can’t help it, I turn away, heart pounding. I’ve already given nearly every shred of patience away to six year olds who play modern warfare games and miss their mothers living in other states. It’s almost like a reflex: the way I avoide directness, intimacy, while feeling like everything between us is flayed: muscles, tendons, hearts, tears always at the back of our eyes.

But then when he’s gone all I can do is watch the clock, the minute hand dogging the hour hand until he’s back, craving him like homesickness.

Inspired.

I'll be back by the weekend.

I spent the entire day writing

And it felt good. So good to sink into the work, to get beyond the distractions, the internal rebellions, the anxiety. Things are starting to fit together, the synapses of the story becoming evident.

Tomorrow I'm making a cherry pie; and doing laundry. Tomorrow it's back to reality. But today was for words.

Do you have days like this that slip away into some place else? Like you never really touched down here? Today was like this.

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.

NaBloPoMo Redux

It's that time of night where I feel my bones become heavy, and I can neither make myself get up and go to bed, nor do anything constructive here at the keyboard. The stories are mostly tatters anyway, but I'm using this month of NaBloPoMo to really hunker down and write. I've been thinking about spending more time capturing the 'glimmers' of every day. The small shreds of story I overhear; the scenes that present themselves. Usually I overlook them, trusting my faulty memory to hold the small bits of scene in place until I wearily find my way to the keyboard. But it never turns out that way. I end up never sitting down. So for me this month will be one of recording details; glimmers; taking note of the small, unremarkable, bright shards of day that become story when wedged back to back. It will be a record of autumn turning towards winter: the hills washed suddenly gray with the first hard rains. The field in the morning dusted with frost. The dry heat of the wood stove filling the kitchen with snug warmth, and the moon as big and perfect as a dinner plate rising up golden over the crest of the hill.

What do you want to take note of this November?

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.”

How about you?

Snippets

Several of you made me promise I'd tell you when my piece hit newstands in Mothering Magazine. The editor says nice things about it here. And also--I need your help: Dh's b-day is this weekend. Any fun ideas?

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?

I�ve been trying to find equilibrium these past few days: feeling at once propelled by an awful sense of guilt to get things done, and lulled by the happy-go-lucky whimsy of summer. Moments of sheer delight stacked back to back against the metallic shards of self contempt. I'm not good at this.

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?