Almost a package of candels old
I made a flourless chocolate and vanilla cake from a recipie I found here. It was divine.
Studio Friday: Favorite Tool
When I got to thinking about it, I realized that the tool I always use in my art is gel medium. I've already shown what happens to my son when I use it here. Better than glue, I use it to adhere pieces in a collage, as a fixative for pastels or watercolors, as a sealant, or as a thinner. It dilutes paint without making it runny, adds texture, depth and translucence. This stuff is good, people. Yes it gets all over everything. Yes I catch myself pulling off thin sheets of dried gel from my elbows or fingers like peeling skin after a sunburn, but I'm fine with that. I've never been one to keep my hands clean anyway.
Illustration Friday: Roots
Listen to this. Andrei Codrescu's words filled my soul last Wednesday, and for days I've kept running over these sentences in my head. Images suit me better in times of wonder or grief. So I painted.
Starting with a topographic map of the Mississippi delta, I wanted to convey how hope takes root, like it always has. How it floods up through song, through sorrow, through the mouths of the poor enraged by poorer leadership. How our country, always feeling entitled, stumbles and then reaches out, realizing that to blame is not the point. And from flooded rubble, a million small stories of human grace turning devastation into song. So much is lost, but this we can remember.
Today
Six full years today, DH and I have been together, and he came to me this morning with a box wrapped in coupon paper for juice and tied with a red ribbon. Inside a beautiful hand made silver necklace--just the one I would have picked. My smiles scatterd about the room like freckles. I am so in love with this man. Then a day spent watching cyclists race, crashes up brick pavement, speed, adrenaline, sweat. The sky was bright like a blue ceramic bowl over turned above us, filled with sun. A long nap with Bean tumbled between us in bed, awakening to the sounds of boys playing stick hockey in the street, and harmonica drifting up from a few houses down.
An evening spent getting to know new friends over shrimp and pasta, tossed salad, wine and trappist cheese. Laughing about what we were like in high school, so long ago, and now. Ready to sink willingly into the sheets, to press up against my husband's back, my little one nestled into my body's spooning curve. Then sleep, as the planets whirl and the night air falls in through open windows, bringing dreams.
because some days it's all about ME
Answers to the meme Steph tagged me with: 7 Things I Plan to Do Before I Die: 1) Write & publish. Writing is a love-hate thing for me. I've established that I can't live without it, but I've also established that writing is a major pain in my ass. It's introspective, personal, and challenging, yet without it I feel an absence of purpose. I believe deeply that writing can affect change, and I feel that it is one of the ways that I can affect change in the world. Yet I procrastinate about writing whenever I possibly can. It's a vicious thing, this writer's bug I've got.
2) Teach writing at a university(dream job.)
3) Keep bees and chickens and grow an organic garden. The first thing I plan to do when we have land again is to learn how to keep bees, I love honey and as I mentioned here, bees are becoming threatened throughout the world by bee blights that are resistant to most traditional treatments. This will ultimately affect food production world wide, and on a small scale I can make a difference by learning bee keeping techniques, and growing organic vegitables and flowers. As for the chickens, I kept chickens when I was a kid. One chicken, named Blackie, came when I called her and sat on my shoulder. She was the fancy breed of chicken that lays green and blue eggs. And I loved having fresh eggs. Nothing quite like them.
4) Learn to sail. I would love to take my kids on a sailing trip around the world for a few years & home school them, but if that's not possible, at the very least I'd like to have a small boat we can spend summer weekends on, diving off the deck, basking in the sun, and sleeping like sardines in a can packed below deck.
5) Live in a foreign country for a year (or more) with my kids and husband. DH and I have many roots in Italy and Germany, and I would love for Bean to grow up knowing that culture is an expansive thing, that horizons stretch farther than the eye can see, and that diversity is a necessary and vital part of human existence.
6) Learn a second language fluently (see #5)
7) Hang glide I've always wanted to do this since I was little & I'd look up in the sky in Colorado where I lived and see hang gliders circling like birds in dizzy winged spirals.
7 Things I Can Do: 1. Figure out how kids learn, and help them with that process. 2. Rescue a 6 foot, 220 lb guy from the bottom of a swimming pool (or from the ocean---which I once did, for DH in Puerto Rico when his blood sugar went low when we were snorkeling over a coral reef.) 3. Use grammar & punctuation rules correctly. (My freshman year in college one of my writing teachers tore apart a piece of my writing, telling me to get Strunk & White's book and use it, and that she was not "my writing janitor." Later she said, "once you know the rules, you can break them." I now know them well enough to break, though I'm still a TERRIBLE speller--thank god for spell check! 4. Articulate my ideas in conversation. 5. Listen. 6. Make some wickedly good scones. 7. Forgive people easily.
7 Things I Cannot Do: 1. Play any musical instrument. 2. Order drinks at a bar without feeling self-conscious. 3. Go to a party without obsessing about my outfit. 4. Understand religious or political extremists. 5. Spell. (For years I spelled water, w-a-t-t-e-r, different as d-i-f-e-r-e-n-t and just last night I realized I’ve been spelling destruction as d-i-s-t-r-u-c-t-i-o-n for years now!) 6. A downward dog that doesn’t make other people cringe watching me. 7. Sex in a public bathroom.
7 Things That Attract Me to the Opposite Sex: 1. Self confidence. 2. Beautiful eyes (love smiley lines!!) 3. The ability to build things and fix things with his hands. 4. Someone who can do sports with me without feeling the need to compete (seriously, I'll NEVER have pecs like that, so no, I'll never be able to jump a log on my mountain bike like that. Sorry.) 5. The ability to cook really well. 6. A sense of humor. 7. Willingness to grow, change & listen. 7 Things I Say Most Often: 1. I love you. 2. Who's a little bean? 3. Shhhhh! 4. It's your turn 5. Just let me finish this! 6. Ow (in response to my hair being pulled by Bean a million times a day) 7. Hmmm.
7 Celebrity Crushes: Because I grew up without TV in my house, I have a huge popular culture void that I'm still trying to accommodate for. That said, it's nearly impossible for me to name five celebs I even find interesting, let alone have crushes on.
7 people I want to do this: If you're inspired, go for it. Leave your answers in the comments or a link to your site!
Gel medium paste gets in his hair.Learning Curve
I am starting realize that the early baby months---when Bean has been a pre-crawling little bundle easily carried from place to place--gave DH and I a slightly warped sense of what it means to be a parent. I mean, thus far we have managed to retain some of the grace and adult-only sensibilities that keep us on par with our non-baby friends. We have a white chair in our living room for example (what the hell were we thinking???) and CDs on the bottom shelves of the entertainment center. Sometimes we even have fresh flowers in a vase on the coffee table. Cats and magazines lie on the floor unsuspecting…
But most of all most of all, we still live with the illusion that we're COOL like we were pre-Bean.
But this week we're realizing with a great deal of trepidation that a shift is about to occur. We know that it's only a matter of days really before we're forced to become parents for real. Parents with safety plugs in the outlets, toys scattered across all horizontal surfaces and (possibly) a regular bedtime routine for Bean that includes more than a hand washing, and some lullabies (the boy ,manages to get himself DIRTY now. Not sure how. And he's fighting sleep these days like nothing else!)
All this because Bean has gone and figured out how to INCHWORM his way across the floor. Not really crawling---more army cadet style belly dragging, but man it gets him where he wants to go. And he he's working on going vertical. And sitting all by himself.
And this is fun of course. Thrilling even, to watch him drag his belly across the floor with determination. But also it fills us with a gaping feeling of worry we're unaccustomed to.
This is what it means, isn't it? To be a parent.
Bean has suddenly entered the frightening terrain of being able to get hurt---on his many adventures with gravity, he bangs his face into the floor, just after doing a gorgeous downward dog. Or slams his cheek hard into the wall after making a great bunny hop.
And when I sit down to think about it, it isn't becoming UN-COOL that has me feeling edgy and unsettled, really---though I know our chair's upholstery is totally doomed, and I'm well aware sippy cups and blocks are going to outnumber wine glasses and pretty pottery around our house from here on out...What really has me is the sudden stunning realization that I cannot control everything that happens to my baby boy.
Until now, my body was nearly his entire geography. Now, the world is. And my heart, it expands each day with love, with worry, and leaves me feeling breathless.
The way we talk
I spent my senior year of high school skipping class to go body surfing with a red-headed rodeo boy who worked at the gym where I taught swimming lessons. I had other boyfriends too, but I could never decide on which one to keep. Then I went to Germany and met a boy with long hair who rock climbed and had just finished a cycling tour of most of northern Europe. I fell in love, and spent a year with him there.
We had a lot of fun: I learned to rock climb, and road ride with him. We traveled a lot. But somehow we never could really talk---in spite of the fact that he was a dual German-US citizen and could speak English fluently. In fact, our communication, or lack of it had less to do with language and more to do with the fact that we didn't have the same starting point. There was no overlap between us, so we were always hearing different things.
I read James Joyce and Jane Austin at the local library. He hated to read. I used words like etymology, nomenclature, and quintessential, and he'd give me blank looks, until I paraphrased. I was planning to go to college. He was planning not to. I wanted to have romance, he wanted to have sex.
Eventually I went to college and he kept rock climbing. I had a bunch of other men in my life then, some were sort of boyfriends, some just bed friends. And I spent a lot of money on phone calls. We tried to grow towards each other, to clarify things, to articulate something about the way our hearts moved, but everything we said clashed, and when he moved to the states I kept wanting him to read the damn poetry I wrote for him, and to respond. And he kept kicking my ass mountain biking and would leave me crying on trails I couldn't ride.
So I rode Canada with a bunch of girls, from Massachusetts. And several hundred miles of road later, after swimming in Canadian lakes and fixing my own derailleur, I decided I didn't need a man.
Then I met my husband. He was a total biking dork, who said he had his life all figured out. The first words I said to him were "nice bike," the mountain biker's equivalent of the "you had me at hello."
We went downhill mountain biking the day after we met, and had an fantastic time: he let me ride his bike, and waited for me when I couldn't keep up without making me feel small, and he rode my bike, and broke my wheel. But mostly, we talked. And we talked. And we listened. And we understood. And for the first time ever, I felt I'd found a man who wanted to share with me more than just his own ego, and who wanted to hear more than just 'I love you.' Which is what I told him two months later.
He was the first man, and the only man to whom I've ever said those words first. And so I married him.
Next week is his birthday. It will be the seventh birthday I will have spent with him, and I still can't shake the feeling that I've hit the jack pot big time. We play together, run together, ride together and fight together. And when we talk together, we hear each other. We speak the same language, use the same metaphors. Which isn't to say, communication is effortless, because it isn't. There are plenty of days when our words tangle and the meaning is lost. But when we're both trying, our words give our love wings. And that's a damn fine thing.
Underwater, for real
My heart goes out to them. I'm left without words as I try to imagine.
Underwater reinterpreted
In the quiet of the bedroom, the air conditioner makes the fish hanging from above Bean's bed float in dreamy spirals. We lie together, just the two of us in the semi-dark, waiting for sleep to settle over his energy-packed little body. Waiting to just be in the moment, breathing.
Underwater
I woke up moody this morning, my body drenched in sweat, feeling off-kilter for no particular reason. Sometimes it's just like that. Everything feels slanted, thick, slightly smashed. And I couldn't shake the mood all day. Even after a nap in an air conditioned bedroom, an iced tea and a trip to the bakery. Tonight I dragged my unmotivated self to the pool for a swim, doing a just about a mile. Lap after lap, pulling through the water, my lips and nose and cheekbones periodically pushing through the surface for air. It didn't help that it was gray out all day, the air heavy with rain that hasn't yet fallen. Even up here, northwards by many hundred miles, the weather reflects the storm that's pounding Louisiana right now. I can't imagine the anxiety they must feel, wind surging up so hard. Water everywhere. The threat of everything being gone tomorrow.
The end of summer
Riding back on our bikes from the beach as the sun was slowly falling towards the mountains, I noticed maple leaves turning red. Autumn always brings introversion. A time to take stock of the way the garden has turned out after the growing season; the way my feet look, with a flip-flop tan line and a callous from my bike shoes; the way my soul feels after months of expansion. I'm a bit reluctant this year to give up the goodness of summer, though I love fall more than any other season: for its gathering, its harvest, the leaves like fire spreading up the hills. But fall, with its sheer flaming beauty is like a lover that you know you can't keep, and before you've really learned its secrets, it's already gone. Piles of graying leaves and twiggy silhouettes in its wake; and with it, an inner shedding. An hesitation. Moments of silence. Loneliness creeps back up to the surface of things, waiting for snow fall.
Under a canopy of sunshine
Yesterday a 24 mile bike ride with Bean and one of my best girlfriends, out along the causeway. Lake water in every direction, ringed with mountains like we were in the middle of a blue bowl with a ragged edge.
The sky above us was sun-streaked and wind blown; tatters of clouds scudding by. Out at the end of the path, on the breakwater made with huge hunks of granite we ate sun-ripened peaches and laughed a lot.
Bean, his hair all sweaty and rumpled like baby duck down, sat in my lap sucking on the sweet peach flesh, making small grunting noises of glee. And we talked about how our mothers came from a generation that believed part of the duty of being a mother was being a martyr. That somehow raising a child meant loosing oneself.
Later, over wine and grilled corn with friends, we made a ruckus until well past midnight; the seams of our lives nearly blurring completely.
And this morning, at the corner breakfast place, heaps of French toast, coffee, fresh papaya and melon and mango, Bean slept in the Bjorn on my chest. It works, this life we've made for ourselves with him in it. There are differences, surely. But it's not the bittersweet sacrifice my mother made it out to be---in so many ways her life ceased when mine began.
It's a matter of definitions, it seems. Of expectations. What makes life good for me has started to have much less to do with outcomes than with the process itself. Knowing that I'll be woken several times a night by a baby who is uncomfortable and teething, seeking solace, leaves me two options: to feel frustrated, resentful, exhausted; or to knit the moments of half waking snuggled close against his fragrant sleepy head, into a night. And then wake up in the morning with a clean slate, greeted by the warm embrace of my husband, our baby inching his way over our bodies, giggling with joy.
I wanted to tell this to the couple we saw at the restaurant carefully carrying their two week old baby in his convertible car seat, their eyes still wide with wonder and lack of sleep. Instead I said simply, "It gets better and better every day."
Retail therapy:
Aren't these wild? I want one... These 3 designs pretty much sum things up for me tonight. I'm feeling a bit edgy & intense. Ready for the weekend. Ready to skip the day's headlines that clatter down on my brain like small pebbles dropped from a high rise rooftop. I can't help every once and a while getting good and riled up about the state of global affairs, and particularly this country's involvement in certain middle eastern ventures that seem to be undeniably about oil, despite the politicking about democracy.
As I am, as she is
Went for a run this afternoon, in the late summer heat. 6 miles at about 7.5-8 mph pace the whole time. It was sort of a landmark for me, because I did this run at the beginning of the summer, way back when we first moved here three months ago, and I was terribly winded. Red faced, my heart pounding. I had to stop several times to walk. But today, I could feel the muscles in my legs responding differently. As though my body were saying, you were made to do this. This upright forward motion stuff works for you. I didn't stop once, and I never felt winded.
I feel good running now, after doing it almost every day for three months. Even though my ankle still hurts from an injury earlier in the summer, and I feel my knees, sore, after the end of every run, my mind loves it. Something has fundamentally shifted for me, and I think it has to do with being able to run outside, along water, under sun and the blue dome of sky. Past railroad tracks, factories, sailboats, people. I like getting from point a to point b with the momentum of my own body.
But it also has to do with the fact that for the first time in my life I have the time to focus on this part of myself. I would never have imagined this is where I'd be after having had a baby. Before Bean I could never imagine that my life would TRULY be better with him. Isn't that strange? I was very reluctant about becoming a mother. We weren't planning yet to be parents---because both of us imagined the baggage of responsibility to be so great.
But it isn't like I imagined at all. These moments of closeness and joy and running. And I know I'm lucky. I know it's not like this for everyone, and it is hard for me to share this gratitude, because I don't want it to come across like a slap in the face. But sometimes it comes across this way regardless. Especially for my younger sister, who grew up with a congenital bone disease that has left her, 22 surgeries later, severely limping, with hip dysplasia, sometimes in a wheel chair.
And this has been such a strange thing for me to try and wrap my mind around. The gratitude I feel for my life, juxtaposed by the bitterness she sometimes says she feels, seeing my life. I carried her, when we were kids, all over the place, piggy back. I felt responsible for her. Protective. Angry that she couldn't escape the encumbrance of her disability. Angry that things weren't the same for her as they were for me.
Now we're both adults, and we're extremely different. Growing up in a family that never played together, we didn't learn how to take things lightly, to laugh, to have a sense of humor. Instead we were nurtured in a culture of competition. Always, it seemed, our mother was indirectly comparing us, out of some misguided effort to get us to see each other's strengths. Instead, we ended up seeing our weaknesses and feeling small because of them.
I haven't felt competitively towards my siblings for years; since we were kids, really. As an adult, I really am only competitive with myself. I love breaking my own records: academic, athletic. I don't even know what 'winning' would look like, against the people I love.
Yet somehow, because of the way we were growing up, and because of the huge physical disparity between us, it's hard to be grateful for the ease with which my limbs now move in these sports I love without feeling guilty.
Somehow I want it to be okay for us, to be different. For me to run, to celebrate my running, without making her jealous---without making her hurt or feel small. Our lives, our worlds, everything we know practically, except our memories of childhood, are different. And I want this to be okay. I love her desperately, just as she is. I wouldn't want her to change. I wouldn't want her to be more like me. The way she is: passionate, impulsive, stubborn, disabled, artistic, is perfect.
foodie prose--ode to 7 good things
slick skin, smooth flesh, wide pit. slicing it in half and cubing the flesh the way my best friend learned to do in Hawaii, eating the cubes off the knife blade without cutting our tongues. mango sorbet and in lassi at the Indian place on the corner. sweet and cool from some place far away. a little bit of sunshine, even in winter, at the grocery store.
quenches a certain soul thirst, chocolate. dark, slightly bitter, sweet. when I'm pms-ing it's the only thing I want. or when I'm tired or need inspiration. not always, but sometimes, I want it. with pretty foil wrappers from Costa Rica, San Francisco, Germany, I always get it e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e. when I eat it. always on my pants. my fingers, my lips. for kisses and licking off. or in winter in a cup, liquid with whipped cream, snow falling.
from Spain, sliced fine on salad and pasta. sitting around the kitchen table with friends, laughing, playing scrabble, eating crackers and this flaky cheese by the mouthfuls. cutting thin wedges with a sharp knife on a wooden board. nibbling it while dinner's cooking with olives, dried figs, wine.
every morning he wakes up and pulls perfect shots for me from his bright red espresso maker, pours them over ice with milk and sugar in the summer. or in winter, hot with extra foam. coffee houses around the world brewing up this stuff of late nights and early morning. my writer's inspiration. my accompaniment on long train rides to work. and now, in a red to-go mug every morning for a walk with my man and my boy.
throwing half eaten cherries at each other in the orchard when we were small, until we looked freckled with some strange disease of bright red spots the size of quarters. spitting pits as far as we can across the driveway. always stain my clothes. cherries bring summer. roadside stands. hot, dark red, firm. nothing better.
beekeepers know secrets about waggle dances and sun meridians. honey bees, makers of magic sweet stuff, keep pollinating crops year after year. without them, our food supply would be threatened world wide. think watermelon, apples, zucchini, pumpkins, basil, chives. yet the bee blight is ravaging hives everywhere. someday I will keep bees. till then I eat the honey straight from the comb, licking my fingers and thinking of the remarkable wonder that is a beehive.
summer nights, in the kitchen making fresh pasta with farmer's market tomatoes, basil. after dinner with a glass, fingering the stem while looking at stars and fireflies on the porch the baby asleep. the way his kiss tastes, slightly bittersweet, after a glass.
One of the many uses for the laundry basket around our house:
I know I've been a bit picture-heavy in my last few posts, I'm a bit stunned with how quickly Bean is growing & changing (daily, hourly.) He's starting to crawl--he can get his feet up under his but now, and get fully up into a crawling position, and he then he just sort of hangs out there, rocking back and forth and grinning. It's adorable. And also terrifying. At least the cats are terrified. They know their days are numbered. They see the glint Bean gets in his eyes every time they pass.
Bean loves to sit in the laundry basket and play with things--and by play, I mean pound a wooden spoon onto the edge of the basket. Yes, he's discovered that HE can MAKE NOISE that isn't roaring. Which he is still quite superb at.
When he was newborn, I started putting him in the laundry basket out of desperation when I needed to pee (or take a shower) and wanted him with me. It was such a great, easily transportable (and totally cost effective) solution to the whole fancy-pants bassinet idea.
All this to say, we have to lower his crib mattress tomorrow. And then childproof the house. Any tips?