A quiet space

Here are some studio glimpses...I love it so.

And today I am trying to make one more hard, important, life-changing decision about career pursuits. It depends wholly on others: their help, support, time, etc. And it's about having kids and having a career, naturally. About pursuing graduate school now, or waiting. It's about feeling like time is slipping by (my time, and their childhood's both.)

It's about loving them hard: my boys with their sweet sticky grins and laughter and innocence, and about about wanting the best for the... and also wanting the best for me. It's about wondering if those are mutually inclusive or mutually exclusive.

It's about getting ahead or falling behind and about hopefully ending up right where I'm supposed to be.

(I'm curious what you believe: Does the universe have the outcome planned, or are we architects of the outcomes all on our own?)

Trusting, trusting, trusting.

There is an art to this

There is an art to this. To waiting, to being present in uncertainty when moments are only whatever it is that they are until the next moments arrive.

+++

Today writing terrifies me. It terrifies me because of the way these stories last, the way we tell ourselves stories in order to be who we are, to become who we are becoming. It makes me ache, to see the small uncertain snapshot of myself as I am right now: here at the dining room table, in a room so humid the pencil digs into the soft pulp of the paper like a finger nail scratching at mosquito bitten skin.

Outside it is pouring and green and warm. Water drips from the gutters in irregular staccato and farther out the rain falls steadily with a rushing noise that fills the valley, the house, the sky with sound. Upstairs, in his crib, my son is sleeping, likely on his belly with his cheek pressed softly into the matted sheepskin he’s slept on since the day he was born. He’ll sleep for another hour and then wake and my day will circle about again, and I will become something less productive and possibly more real.

In thirty years what will these moments mean?

Today I re-read, slowly, meticulously, intentionally, every line Joan Didion’s piece, “On Going Home,” examining each comma, each particular use of parenthesis, each use of metaphor and observation, and found myself nearly in tears at this last paragraph, knowing as I know, that her daughter died at 39.

It is time for the baby’s birthday party: a white cake, strawberry-marshmallow ice cream, a bottle of champagne saved from another party. In the evening after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face, where it is pressed against the slats, with mine. She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that. I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her a funny story.

What can I promise? What do these moments hold?

How this began

Going through an old hard drive tonight I found this poem written May 5, 2004... three weeks before I'd find out that I was pregnant with Bean.+++

Today I heard that the Voyager satellite, sent up into space the year before I was born, is now nearing the edge of our solar system. Some scientists think it will encounter a shock wave, before going into the space beyond. My life feels like this, nearing it’s known edge, careening, orbiting, drifting off course around some other center I have not quite named or found, but feel. I expect to be thrown up soon, with force upon taking the risks I know I should take but do not yet understand. I imagine that amidst the white-hot vibrations of shock it will be the memories of things, the words and honey comb and lightening storms, that will cradle me. Giving birth, when the moment is right to a new self, among the nebula and stars. +++

I had no idea how spot-on I was. A poem, like a tear in the stage curtain of the present, and there I was behind it, peeking through.

I also found this, from August, 2009. A quickly scribbled note about a conversation with Bean:

"I fell from the sky mommy. I was a star, and I fell into your tummy." If you look back, can you find any inklings, notes, or snippets about the time when life as you know it now began?

a different kind of validation:

"Oh,"  T. said yesterday as we were both stumbling over the HEAPS of laundry on the floor upstairs, "I guess you actually really DO a lot of laundry." YES. Yes I do. (And it's been a point of contention, I might add.)

But this week: not so much. In fact not at all actually. And it SHOWS. Our house looks like a bomb was detonated somewhere in the vicinity. Housework has dropped off the very bottom of the to-do list, to be returned to sometime when this proposal is done, and life returns to normal speed.

By then I may have a hunchback (I have discovered I have terrible desk posture) and my family might have been devoured by mutant laundry heaps. Alas. (Or T. could just do the laundry. Perhaps he will?) (A confession: I love every single minute of this bleary-eyed, up till 2am, creative, messy process.)

Today i need...

Today I need you to remind me that the many hours and the messy house and the hunched shoulders and the dark circles under my eyes will all be worth it. (It will, right?)

Because I'm at that point with the proposal. THISCLOSE.

I have a headache. It's been raining all day. The birches look dramatic with their new chartreuse leaves blowing against a cement sky. Crows keep flying past with bits of things in their beaks. I've had too much coffee. And all my dreams were about my book.

+++

(If you haven't,please become a backer, ...even for the very smallest of amounts...)

a work in progress

It's been twenty days since I launched A Field Guide To Now, and in those twenty days I have been more intensely creative than I’ve been in over a year. I've been forced way outside my comfort zone. My word for the year was action, and this project has forced me to take action on behalf of my career as a writer and artist in ways I couldn’t have conceived of when I first took the plunge. I've had to learn how to query and research and push the limits of my ability to create at night after small boys go to sleep. I’m working on this book project, my novel, paintings, and a few other big projects that are under wraps with fingers crossed.

(I am also working part time, at a job that is pushing me to learn In Design and Photoshop, always under deadline. The child-free hours of my day are spent thusly: designing ads and view books and writing press releases. The rest of my day is spent juggling, with a single-minded focus pounding in my head like jungle drums.)

I am compelled, determined, wired, moody, thrilled, exhausted, inspired. When I sleep my mind is active in a way that is almost new to me. It’s frenetic and repetitive: gnawing away at the creative tasks I’ve left off from before bed. This past week I’ve begun dreaming of whales—and they’ve inspired some of the newest art for A Field Guide To Now. Here is a glimpse (in progress.) Incidentally, when I looked up what it means to dream about whales, this is what I found: Whale reintroduces us to our creative and intuitive energies to show us a talent we've forgotten about or haven't been aware existed. How spot-on is that?

I’ve had more coffee and less sleep; more wine, more sex, more dreams and less rhythm. I’m spending less time on laundry and dishes (and the house is in probable shambles because of it) and more time perched on the stool in my studio painting, with gauche on my fingers. Less time taking leisurely walks with my boys; more time trying to multi-task while they’re under foot.

It's made me think about my identity, about who I am and how I define that. For a while, after Sprout was born, I slipped wholly into the identity of mother, and felt my world narrow to the small, domestic orbit of that life. It was restful, to be there. For a while. Sprout was such an easy baby that I enjoyed his babyhood in a way that I never fully did with Bean—who cried more and was more needy, just as I was newer and more anxious at the whole mommy thing.

But now, Sprout is walking. Bean is 5. The house is littered with legos (Sprout holds lego helmets in his mouth like a chipmunk. I’ve checked his diaper but he’s never actually swallowed one. Go ahead call me neglectful. YOU just try to keep legos off the floor with two boys in the house, four years apart.) There is a constant stampede of activity and peanut butter sandwiches and glasses of milk that get spilled. The vacuum is out all day long. Money is tight. Bean has outgrown all his pajamas. Sprout is starting to say words.

And.

And in the midst of all this messy, simple, regular domesticity, I’ve begun to long fiercely for myself. For myself not as a mother, but as someone entirely separate from my children.

Truthfully, I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with the definition of motherhood, and now, more than ever, I am enjoying my boys and wanting to be distinct from them, in my own right. A writer. An artist. Right now my mind is preoccupied with the craft of writing, with images, and also about self-doubt, and longing…

How do you define yourself? Where does your definition of motherhood (if you are, or want to be a mother) shape you? What are the words you use to tell yourself the story about your life as it is at this current moment?

A list for Wednesday

What is your greatest human intent? Where we are and where we've been Cherry blossoms One year ago, today

What are you up to today?

This is the work I am learning to do

Hello friends! Where have you all scuttled off too this month? I miss you around here… I’ve been changing things up… have you noticed? It's still a work in progress. (I crashed my entire theme twice. I wish I understood CSS.)

Something about having the kickstarter widget broadcast in the sidebar was really throwing off my mojo the past couple of days. I started to hate seeing the amount of funding flatline... and it has been interesting to listen to my own inner dialogue turn doubtful, even as I’ve gotten the most exciting new (!) and incredible support because of it so far. (Can’t tell yet....not for a while.)

I am discovering that art and risk become something else entirely once a dollar sign is attached. It’s made me take myself seriously as a writer and artist in a hundred ways I never saw coming...and for a long, long time I never took art and writing seriously (although they were the things that made my heart sing) because my father—who was an enormous influence in my life when he was alive—pushed me towards a ‘worthy’ profession. While he appreciated art in a sort of distant and abstract way, he implied often that to pursue it would be self-absorbed and indulgent, compared with pursuing a career in the service of others—as a teacher.

So I became a teacher.

To this day, one of my greatest regrets is that I listened to him when he told me that interning at Ms. would be a frivolous waste of my time. I still wonder how my career would have been different had I taken that internship that I’d been offered.

So it’s been a long time coming for me to believe that my words and art can be a career. And this way, this project has been an incredibly tender and scary and exciting process of self discovery.

I have been breathing, eating, sleeping and dreaming ideas and words. And I’ve been thinking about the community on the web, and what makes it, and about how if we could meet, we’d look each other in the eyes and laugh and share delight and there would be no question in your mind that you’d put ten bucks behind me. But here, in this almost imaginary place, filled with a vast, unfathomable amount of information and creativity, I am small.

So.

There it is.

In the middle of the night I wake up wondering what failing at this might look like. I watch the snow falling outside the window and wonder if it was foolhardy to leap without a parachute, holding only the strings of handful of helium balloon hopes. Then I wake up in the morning and I can feel excitement zinging in my veins. This is what I want. This creative, terrifying journey. This work.

+++

Every winter I wait for a time when I can no longer remember the way the world looked before white, and then I know that spring is near. I wait until I feel myself falling into the faulty labyrinth of memory. Like a mime, I like to put my hands up against the pretend container of the present and see how well it holds me. And today it happened.

Today I can’t remember leaves. I look at the gray birch out my window, the one that is tall and leaning with the rot gnawing at a burl where a limb was torn away in a summer thunderstorm, and I cannot see it green with shimmering leaves. Logically, I can remember it, but I cannot really see it in my minds eye any longer. This is the beginning of spring fever. This is when snow is wet and heavy and slides off the roof hard and fast in sudden melting avalanches. This is when, invisible mighty things start happening in the earth.

Sap will flow. The birds know. Soon they will start building nest with mud and sticks.

+++

I'll be posting about the project once a week from here on out...and over on the kickstarter site maybe more often. (I don't want this blog to become all about this project all the time.)

Please know that your gentle words of support are just as valid and and inspiring and helpful as a pledge. I get that times are hard, and there are other, bigger things (Haiti, for one).

And I am curious tonight: have you ever ventured out on a limb for something that you wanted or believed in? What was it? How did it turn out?

Love & LAUNCH!

I did it. Days of mapping out details and collecting information and editing video clips (whoa, no small thing!) and finally, here it is. A Field Guide To Now. It kind of feels like giving birth. A lot like it in fact: the risk, the unknown, the realization that it's all beyond my control even though I'm going to give it every single thing I've got.

It's the first time I've ever taken a leap like this. Plunged with a fluttering heart towards a dream.

Please support this.*

+++ And also: I have two birthday boys this week! Bean's birthday is the 16th and Sprouts four days after. This is the week that has changed my life, twice, momentously. It felt so utterly right to launch this project today. (Still. I'm nervous.)

xoxo!

*Things are tenuous financially, and this would make a huge difference. Please Share this project with everyone you know.

Good things.

Sprout took his first steps on my birthday! He's been venturing out into the wide expanse of floor ever since and it melts me every single time I plunk him down on his little feet and he makes his way towards me hesitantly, grinning ear to ear. I wish you could all meet this kid. I am so smitten with him. I know that's all I ever say about him--but it's so true. He's so easy going and funny and laid back. When he makes it all the way to me he throws his arms around my neck and practically gnaws my cheeks off with drooly kisses and seriously: MELT.

Also: in the middle of making carrot muffins yesterday afternoon as a snow whirled past the windows the phone rang and it was the Red Hen Press calling! To tell me I won the June 09 Short Fiction Contest judged by Judith Freeman . AWESOME.

And: I am thisclose to launching my KICKSTARTER project. It's so exciting. I'm up to the gills in creativity, which makes me very happy indeed. My only barrier: TIME. I'm hoping I'll have it up tomorrow. Stay tuned.

+ + + Tomorrow I want to share a bunch of links with you of beautiful blogs and good things I've been eating & reading and enjoying for the past couple of days... And I'd love to hear about your favorites right now: what magazine do you love to read? What do you love to have for breakfast? What is one thing you're going to do this week that you're a little scared of doing? (That's right. Commit to that last one.)

xoxo!

Timing is everything

Hi Monday. Apparently I hit publish last night before bed, and this odd collection of urls and lines of text went live yesterday night sometime. Oy. ( I'm glad you liked my 'experiment,' Denise.)

I did want to share all sorts of things I've been crushing on lately though, including these poems, and enough gorgeous pink blooms here to almost make me weep. Also, this inspiration to play around with some stenciling. (I've always had a crush on Banksy.) And this artist's interpretation of the "Missed Connections" section in the paper, which is where I go, too, when I'm looking for a new story.

Speaking of a new story, I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year. You all remember my failed attempt in August, I am sure (which was kiboshed by a heaping helping of freelance copy-editing.) This time? No excuses. I need to get this story out of my system. I need to get this story on the page. I need to see my words accumulate following NaNoWriMo's instructions:

"Do not edit as you go. Editing is for December. Think of November as an experiment in pure output. Even if it's hard at first, leave ugly prose and poorly written passages on the page to be cleaned up later. Your inner editor will be very grumpy about this, but your inner editor is a nitpicky jerk who foolishly believes that it is possible to write a brilliant first draft if you write it slowly enough. It isn't. Every book you've ever loved started out as a beautifully flawed first draft. In November, embrace imperfection and see where it takes you."

So basically, it's ON, November.

Also, I got a part time job at a place that is very close to my heart--doing something I've never done before, with lots of opportunities to learn new creative things like In Design which will, in part, help to pay for my writing habit. So this coming month it's all about time management and balance. A week or so ago, at the suggestion of my very dear and very organized friend, I watched this lecture on time management, and I'm inspired to try to keep a time log this week to attempt to become more aware of how I spend my time. I'll likely be posting more on this at the end of the week..

This week is all about getting ready for Halloween around our house. Carving pumpkins. An obscene amount of foil tape and a pretty cool robot costume in the works. It's also about finishing two short stories and getting an essay submitted so that I have a clean plate for November's novel insanity.

What are you up to? Where do you think you spend your time? Have you ever kept a time log? Where do you know you need to become more efficient?

Endpoint + Ladybugs

The ladybugs have arrived. They come every October, en masse through the slanting autumn light, their small vermilion exoskeletons plunking into the window panes, flitting through briefly opened doors, gathering at the corners of the ceilings in every room. They come like clockwork, when the days are short and the light is like amber in a jar, before the hard cold. They bring promises, nostalgia, delight. Bean bursts into laughter as they land on his pants, his hands, his shoulders. He extends his arms carefully, watching them crawl about then lift off, their small buzzing wings carrying them in drunken zig-zags towards the house, where they seek dark nooks to overwinter. Their arrival marks the end of autumn and the beginning of the long season of snow and cold and boots and socks at the door.

Things are ending now, and beginning. When I wake up the valleys are blue and soft with mist, and the last yellow poplar leaves twirling to the ground make my heart ache: such a certain, gorgeous loss. Which is how I feel now, at the brink of things: new community, new friends, new work.

I want to say that it feels like the end of an era, but I’m not sure what I mean. Just that things feel like they are starting to be different. And it's good. But also, change is always awkward and slightly devastating, even if its just something temporary (a trench coat left hanging at by the door after the wearer has gone ahead wearing something startlingly bright and full of promise.)

There's always that moment of hesitation, a glance backward, even as I'm plunging on ahead.

I miss, for example, the days when I was new here, when I had such a voracious voyeuristic enthusiasm for sharing my life and reading about other peoples lives. Those were the days when this blog was my lifeline to a reality I'd thought I'd maybe lost, having just had Bean and moved north to a place where I didn't know a soul. But now, four, almost five years later, every day is filled with little boys and writing, work, and new friendships, and life has somehow begun to shift more and more off the screen and back into the three dimensions of day-to-day.

And somehow this feels bittersweet.

How do you make these things coexist, reconcile, balance in your life?

At it again

Today I felt like maybe, finally, I might be making progress. I can't really describe the way I've felt for the past couple of weeks, other than to say that I've felt like I've been drifting somewhere above myself, above my life. Out of touch, maybe, or tangled. Desultory. Haphazard. And this week has been all about coming down to earth. Getting on top of things. Organizing. It was a busy month, and maybe that is my excuse. Introverted by nature, non-stop wedding parties and a week long visit with my dearest of dear friends, and a weekend visit from my sister and her husband, packed my September to it's gills. Not to mention freelance work was eating up all my spare moments. The result: dislocation, distraction, doubt, disillusion, despondency. (Okay, so I'm suddenly alliteration drunk. But you get the idea.)

Either way, for the past couple of days since all the fun ended I've been moping about the house, doing heaps of laundry. SIDE NOTE: I kind of want to write another entire post about laundry, actually. How I had this groundbreaking moment watching my friend fold my laundry precisely, neatly, into these perfectly stacked rectangular piles of shirts and jeans and sweaters. Groundbreaking as in: it never occurred to me that the purpose of folding the damn laundry might be expanded to a) fitting more in one's drawers neatly and b) to reduce the amount of wrinkles in any given garment. I honestly have been folding laundry all these years because it's what you're supposed do with laundry, right? I mean, who doesn't fold laundry? But truthfully, I never put thought into it. Now, I am reformed. See? I simply must post more about this (with pictures!)--it's become a new obsession.

It's taken all week to sort myself out. But finally I'm starting to get the hang of my life again. I have my submissions calendar sorted out and some clear-cut goals, and some long term novel goals (40k words by the end of October) and some maybe sort of plans for an autumn party with the community of friends I am gradually starting to make here, and it all feels good.

It kind of astounds me how easily I got knocked off kilter in the past two months. I've felt so alarmingly fragile, up to my neck in angst and uncertainty that I've had hardly anything to post. Things have felt tenuous and flimsy around here financially lately, and that too adds to my apparent state of internal vertigo. My mind has been twirling all day long, but when I've come up for air, there has been nothing to put on the page. No way to capture the tightly wound, tugged-at feeling that's lodged itself in the pit of my stomach except maybe to say that a part of me has been feeling a little like a kite caught up in a tree, thrashing about in the wind. But less so today after eight loads of laundry, and listening to Selected Shorts while making apple sauce.

So. Hmmm. All this brings me to October.

I have plans for October. Real, practical, concrete plans to disentangle and make things happen around here, including more organization and less stress.

And I'm thinking of doing morning poems again, as a way to slip back into writing for real. I have done morning poems in the past, and have loved it when you have joined me. I've gotten so much this exchange. These small scraps of joy and arc and moment that we capture, first thing, before the blur of the day takes over; before the laundry piles up.

Are you in? The rules are really simple. Show up at the page every morning and write a poem. It doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be much of anything. All it needs to be is a small handful of words tossed up to the gods; an offering, a gift, a start to the day.

Sitting down to write.

And there is sudden trepidation. Like always. Like skiing for the first time every season, or doing a flip turn in the pool. Even with practice, there is always this. These moments of blank screen when everything else seems more attractive/reasonable/safe.

Monday crushes

Zoom!That was just the entire month of August flying by. I cannot believe how quickly it has gone. One week until September. Already there are fallen leaves on the lawn.

I wanted to share a few things I have been crushing on today:

This darling little clock project.

This glorious sketchbook series and this lovely inspiration wall.

And this list of stories. Good to listen to while doing the dishes.

The past week has been a blur of copy-edit days. Every scrap of time spent close to the thesaurus and the delete key. I miss my book. I miss talking to my characters in my head in the shower. I hope they're waiting. It terrifies me that maybe they have slipped away. A page of events and scenes languishes in the top drawer of my desk. It cracks me up that I professed big plans for this story by the end of the month and here I am at end of the month. And I am not even close.

But there is something to this that I've been learning and learning again this summer. Things come and go---and really, you can't hold on to anything too tightly.

I'm starting to get that it's okay to just ride the waves. To be greedy with sleep and joy and creativity when they find you---and to sink into work and fast-paced days and tiredness on the days that those things hit hard. Each will return, and leave, and return again. There is something in this of faith, I think.

Whatever today is, tomorrow will be different. Yet there is a thread that loops through the fabric of both with its promise. Continuity somewhere. Balance, eventually.

It's scary though to feel a surge of creativity, only to have it plundered by more practical things. There are moments where it feels like having a blindfold yanked down over my eyes, and I'm just bumping into things, fingering the shape of each moment with hands as unknowing as the blind eyes of potatoes.

Are you doing the life you want daily?

Hmm.

A new look.

Hi. It's about time for a new look around here.

In the process, I seem to have lost a post, but no big deal. It's Monday and its sunny which are two things I generally really love, except last night Sprout woke up at 4am and pretty much didn't go back to sleep the rest of the night/morning. And how I count on those two hours. Oh man. It will certainly be a two latte day.

Now that things are fresh and clean around here, I want to share some links I've found lately that I've been enjoying.

Firstly, Tait Simpsons's photographs. They are full of line and texture and mood. Also Sophik's dreamy summer photos. Especially this one. I've always had a soft spot for old trucks. These portraits by Mikael Kennedy also grabbed me. They are haunting and memorable and somehow almost secretive, like you're there in the room, but no one knows.

Also, a little music. I'm listening to this over and over again. It's in a story I'm working on, and the more I listen the more I love it. Gould was a fascinating, remarkable, devastating musician. Speaking of music, have you heard this? If not, you are in for a treat. It's the kind of mixed up soundtrack that makes sense to me. That music is like what stories do in my head: one talking to another until they become part of another story together.

So. Hi. What are your plans for August? I'll tell you mine, if you tell me yours. I want this month to be outstanding. It's the last month of summer. The month when all the insects start singing in the grass and the blackberries get ripe. Its the month for doing big things.

So I'll admit. I have an embarrassingly enormous writing goal for August. I had a story blindside me the other day, and it won't let go. It's as far away from anything I'm comfortable writing as I've ever been, and yet it's good and the exciting and the characters just keep whispering in my ears. It's all rather discombobulating, as I was right in the middle of my book project, and I have more than one short story on the stove too right now. But it wont leave and is demanding to be written, so I am.

I decided to do my own little August version of NaNoWriMo. Ha. Did I just say little? Not so much really. I am aiming to have about 80,000 words by the end of the month. I know, right? Crazy. I can't help it though. The story must. be. written. And I figure if I write about it here it will be just one more reason to do it.

Also, I am really interested to see how I respond to such concrete writing goals and completely new material. The stuff I've been working on for other book is so different. I have so much material already there that I am constantly tripping myself up with ambivalence and indecision. That story is close to my heart and I love it, but it is a pain in the ass. Kind of like another child.

The new story, though, this hit-me-upside-the-head story is more like someone I have a crush on. I am obsessed. I want to do nothing but sit down and listen to the characters as they chatter amongst themselves. My fingers ache at night from typing, and there is no way, no way at all I can type fast enough to get everything down it seems. And I like it like that. And I am interested to see what happens if I go for it, all out, no hold barred, no excuses.

See, the thing is, I respond well to goals and deadlines whether I want to admit it or not. And I also respond well to doing things in little bite sized manageable pieces. Like the 30 Day Shred, or running 3 miles, committing to 2500 words a night seems like a concrete and small enough goal that it will actually get me somewhere. Like in the neighborhood of an entire novel by the end of this month.

Right, so, off the deep end I go. Tra la la.

What are you up to this month? What thing do you really want to do in that quiet secret compartment in your heart? I dare you. I dare you to do it every day. For the whole month. (PS-Because I'm into doing things big this month, I am declaring it an unofficial delurking day. Please say hi. Your comments are one of my favorite things in the world.)

Inspired by:

Hi. Wednesday. There was sun today for the first time, literally, in weeks. Tell me this, Internets, is it sunny where you are? And if so, is it often? I'm starting to get itchy feet. Hankering to be somewhere else maybe. Some place with more sun, more... I don't know. If I were foot loose and fancy free I'd be tempted to do this. I've always wanted to write a story about big rig drivers. Cool, right?

Really though: do you love where you live? Tell me about it!

Also today: lots of revising and forward progress. Writing is a crazy making profession for sure. So much terror and doubt is there, every day, waiting in the margins, in the click of the space bar. During breaks today I was inspired by her beautiful aesthetic. And also this breathtaking art.

This super cool journal also caught my eye today. I love when image and story and news and ideas collide. It's how it's like inside my head.

Speaking of things that get inside my head--I loved reading this story in particular because it reminded me somehow very much of The Year of Silence by Kevin Brockmeier in the Best American, which was originally published here. I wish I could find a link for you to read it online--because then you'd see what I mean about these two pieces connecting. This picture in particular, of Sao Paolo stripped of visual pollution is just what I pictured when I imagined a city stripped of sound. It's serene and calming and yet...I like a mess, which is why I liked how Brockmeier's little piece ends immensely.

And finally, because I adore lists and am a total sucker for good food, Travelers Lunchbox delighted me so much today. Particularly this list of all foodie lists. My short list of to die for food off the top of my head: cherry pie, pasta from Mezzaluna, lime gelato in the Piazza della Signoria, affogato, oysters with white wine and garlic butter.

Runners up: root beer floats, hot chocolate from Quebec served in a bowl, majool dates, fresh raspberries, steak frites, unagi sushi, raspberry sorbet, licorice, dark dark chocolate, caramel apples, dry packed scallops, Oh lord, I have started something I cannot stop. What are your top five and your runners up?

A weekend roundup

First off, I very much loved reading about your media habits the past couple of days. I have continued keep a record of what I've been consuming media wise, and I think that it's made me much more conscious and thoughtful about my choices... I've decided to keep the record going over at twitter. It seems like the perfect, if not slightly ironic venue for such things. But before I do, I want to share with you some of my favorite links from the past couple of days:

Firstly, Elizabeth Strout's essay "English Lesson" in the Washington Post this week is fantastic. She is such an amazing writer to me. Her characters are so real, nuanced, subtle. She deserves every ounce of praise for Olive Kitteridge, which was my favorite book I read last year.

Also, I am giddy with the discovery of the Washington Post's Summer Reading Issues from years past. I am sure everyone else on the face of the earth has already devoured these stories, but until now they have somehow escaped me. Delight. I cannot wait to read all of them (I have not yet.)

Also, speaking of the Washington Post, if you don't read Gene Weingarten you should. This piece made me sob when I first read it. This one made me nearly die laughing. Also, because things seem to work this way in my life, his piece this week explores the various glories and follies of tweeting. Ah-hem.

Now, without further ado, some family updates (a.k.a, my camera is fixed people. Prepare yourselves for some seriously photo-heavy posts to come!)

First off, have you met Bob, our rooster? Bob, Internets. Internets, Bob. He is named after this book.

Here is the new batch of girls who have finally figured out how to do the free-range thing, thus saving us more fruitless attempts to catch them whilst thrashing our legs on sharp pine boughs.

And here is newest member of the poultry bunch: the chick that the goose hatched. It's name name is Twitter. Bean named it. I swear he knows nothing of my current media obsessions.

And because I cannot stop staring at my beautiful boys:

Also yesterday, because it was raining and we were bummed because we were supposed to go to this amazing parade to celebrate the umpteen hundred years of our city's existence and instead had to stay home to avoid being drenched and bedraggled, we had a dumpling party instead. The four of us. Fancy frozen drinks for everyone and homemade dumplings using this recipe.

While we were frying up the dumplings we had pandora on, set to a Madonna quick mix (which turned out to be the best movin, groovin, bootie shaking tunes ever!) The storm was right overhead with lots of serious thunderclaps. For dessert we made chocolate pudding with fresh strawberries and watched the Tour together on the couch.

What have you been reading, doing, and eating this weekend?

Media Habits

Wednesday. When I type that word I think of fifth grade, of the yellow lined paper I used to practice spelling it on in loopy cursive, Wed-nes-day. I still say it that way in my head when I write it out.

Funny how certain things stick and others evaporate in a second. Just as I was writing this I thought of the premise for a perfect short story. By the time I’d pulled up a new sticky note on my desktop, it had slipped my mind and all I could remember was the fact that I need to email several friends and am very remiss in doing so. Maddening.

Memory. It’s such a loopy, lumpy thing, like an old floral couch with little spots burned in the fabric from where the sun struck it, shining through a vase on the windowsill just so.

I remember my childhood vividly and sporadically. From fifth grade I remember learning the entire Greek alphabet, all of the prepositions in alphabetical order, how to spell Wednesday, and how I kicked Zachary O’Day in the crotch with those slouchy pointy toed boots that were all the rage along with acid washed jeans in 1986.

I do not however, remember yesterday, unless I put some serious mental effort towards the task.

No. That isn’t true. I do remember the way last night we decided to go with a red metal bucket to pick raspberries down by the pond and a quarter of the way there ran into two stray dogs. One was a yellow lab with one of those pronged collars that look vaguely threatening, and the other was a black wisp of a dog with floppy ears and lanky legs and pale ghost blue eyes, part husky for sure. They weren’t from around here. Not any of the neighbor's dogs, and when we went towards them they ran, away from us, up our hill, towards our house and our free range chickens.

Incidentally, just yesterday DH decided that our two month old chicks were old enough to go free range, without the enclosure we normally put them into. And by decided, I mean he took the path of least resistance, as they had escaped him when he was trying to transfer them from the large wooden box where they spend the night in the coop, to the enclosure on the lawn. They escaped and he decided to hell with them. So they were out under the pine all day and just fine except that now of course two feral and rather hungry looking dogs were heading right towards them.

We ran back up our hill, pushing the stroller with Sprout who indignantly began to wail and Bean, who dropped his bike and skittered up after us, his yellow helmet bobbing, his eyes on the sky where thunder had begun to rumble. "I saw lightening," he said, his voice all quavery. "It might get us."

Seriously, when it rains it pours around here.

And so there we were, trying to deter the dogs by yelling and throwing rocks in their general direction, and then trying to catch and re-coop the not so big and definitely not so smart chicks who would make a mad dash for the coop door and then at the very last minute would scatter frantically in all directions.

I remember this. Yes I do. But what I don’t remember—unless I stop now and really think of it—is what I read yesterday, what I learned, what media I consumed. And I’ve been thinking about that since my last post: how I am maybe suffering from information/networking overload and what to do about it.

And I came up with this: For the rest of the week I am going to try to keep notes here about my media habits and see where this gets me. Likely, I'll be back with my first record this afternoon. You in?

Already here

A little bit of photo booth goofiness for your Wednesday. It's how we started our morning, at the counter and on the couch smooching and giggling, me and my two boys. (Don't you just love Bean's little broccoli top?)

It is already mid June. I can't believe it really. How the time blurs once the days warm up. Buttercups are everywhere, daisies, the first wild strawberries in little glades at the edge of the woods.

The goose is broody. Bean stuck two hens eggs into the warm circle of her nest and there she sits, some patient instinct advising her to hunker down and wait for new life to happen.

The New Hampshire reds we got in the mail a few weeks ago are feeling plucky with a new set of rust colored feathers. They’re in an outside run now, scuttling about, catching bugs. They’re fun to watch. I love the way instinct summons chickenness for them. It’s evident in all the ways that they are: heads bobbing, peeping to one another sociably, grooming their new plumage, and to think they’ve never had a mother.

We’re so different, with our long babyhood, then childhood stretching out for years and years. I watch Bean learn new words. He repeats them, uses them in context. I am utterly enamored with the way he is right now: full of drawings and ideas. His pictures are jam-packed with action: wheels turning, light switches, fire hoses, robots, homes for little mice.

On his bike he’s become a daredevil, skidding to a stop, making dizzy loops around the road, cutting tight corners, riding over the bumpiest of potholes at high speeds. I love watching him ride. I love his yellow thunderbolt helmet and his lightening grin as he passes by, legs going at top speed. He is perpetually dirty this summer. Jam on his shorts, on his chin. Mud on his feet and grass stains. He goes through two sets of clothes a day, easy. Sometimes more.

In the garden we’re mostly done planting. Bean comes down with me in the morning while Sprout naps, and we get an hour or so in before we hear him on the monitor.

This year's crop: moon & stars melons, sugar babies, lemon cucumbers, zucchini, yellow crook-necked squash, potatoes, rainbow chard, yellow peppers, five kinds of tomatoes, purple cabbage, carrots, broccoli, radishes, four kinds of lettuce, spinach, ashworth corn, onions, parsley, dill, thyme, oregano, basil, rosemary, chives and sage.

As the short growing season heats up, I’ll be planting more flowers, more carrots, more cucumbers for pickling (DH has a ridiculous pickle habit). We never got our act together with the berries, but Bean and I have scoped out a copious patch down by the neighbor’s pond that we aim to visit in a couple of weeks.

We have fun in the garden. I made Bean a tepee out of slender logs. Then gave him a packet of beans to plant, and sunflowers, and pumpkins all around. Today while I was spreading straw he came down to the garden dragging a quilt to hang over the tipi frame. Inside is a quiet secret little boy space full of packed dirt and small rocks, a pine bow for a broom, a magic door. In his bouncy seat, Sprout watches, pleased as peas.

I realize lately that I haven’t written about Sprout much. I expected to have more to say, honestly. I expected it to be harder, to be more of a fight to adjust to life with two boys, but in truth it’s been a breeze. He sleeps. That’s the main thing. And I say this with utter awe and gratitude and reverence because Bean did not sleep so I know. But Sprout sleeps and he smiles and he’s trying to sit up already. He lies on his belly and watches Bean play with matchbox cars and he’s as happy as a little fat clam. He grins and he giggles when you zerber his tummy, and he mostly just feels like he’s been here with us forever. Four of us.

I know this post is all over the map. I've been working on my book every night after the boys go to bed, more words there, less words here I guess. But I have questions for you today. A little bit of informal research.

What does settling down mean to you?

How does marriage change you?

How do children change you?

If you could chose all over again (or if you have not yet chosen), would you stay footloose and single? Why or why not?