Sunday mosaic # 3
The last yellow leaves came down in the wind today and the light has taken on a winter hue. I walk about barefoot before breakfast, gathering up CDs and ripped magazine pages that have been scattered throughout the living room like confetti.
Later we drive again to look at the house we're in a tizzy about. It's rather awful really, built the year I was born and decorated in the poor taste and color pallet of the late 1970s. Barn board on the walls, linoleum, wallpaper, and crappy kitchen appliances. But the land is so beautiful I gasp, looking out a the view.
Set up on a hill looking out over the Green Mountains, it is twelve acres of woods and fields, a small stream, old apple trees. My mind imagines space for gardens, chickens, maybe a pony. We spend at least a half hour walking about the house taking pictures, trying to visualize what it could look like if we put down pumpkin pine floors, knocked down walls, and pulled off the awful rustic siding.
Outside, walking up on the hill above the house, the air smells sweet like drying leaves. Old stone walls scissor their way through the trees; remnants of a different time when the fields were tilled by hand and people worked at a slower pace.
Bean has almost grown accustomed to drifting off to sleep in the car and waking up in a new place, on a tour of other people's homes. Today he plays with his echo in the empty rooms of the house, and copies the rhythm and pitch of our voices with his "uh-uh-uh-ings."
Before we started the process of looking we should have written a list that said: here the things that matter to us. But we didn't, so we get caught up in the moment, pulled about like body boarders in a rip tide. Standing on the terrace looking out towards the hazy blue lines of the mountains, all I want is this.
Later, after we make pasta and garlicky bread with friends for dinner, and then gorge ourselves on berry pie, ice cream and coffee, I sit at my desk nursing an overfull stomach and glum thoughts. I imagine the long weeks turning into longer months of renovations waiting for completion. I picture the dark sloped ceiling of the bathroom upstairs, and the strange, somewhat problematic two sided fireplace in the living room.
I picture us arguing the way we are now---over the little choices: the stove, the dishwasher, the colors for the walls, the very floorboards. I am not sure how much choosing we can take. The ability to make choices is the ultimate expression of human freedom. Yet it is the possibility of choice that invites guilt, fear, failure, risk. Taking one path, we leave the other unexplored. Committing to renovating here, means we cannot also build. My dreams for a decadent master bath put on hold again.
Ready for his bedtime bath, Bean crawls away top speed into the kitchen, giggling as I chase after him. Then I think: THIS is what matters.
I'm happy in a tent. Happy with just my sleeping bag and the dome of heaven above me, starry and black. I was happy as a child too, in all the strange houses I grew up in that were never renovated until the month or two before we moved. It is so easy to forget this: that in the moment right here, now, happiness means hearing my son laugh, or eating the sticky sweetness of warm pie. Being present in the moment allows for a certain flexibility, that imagining into the future stunts.
DH pulls up a chair beside my desk. He's drawn floor plans. I can feel the warmth of his skin next to me as he explains the outlines he has drawn in pen. I like what he has drawn.
Car pictures
Took a drive in the late afternoon to see some houses edging the small college town we're into. Still indecisive about buying or building, we met our agent to look at two farmhouses, both too near the road. Strange to walk through other people's rooms, fingering their door knobs, opening their closets. Hanging behind the basement door in the first house was the cleverest little retro tool set. Made for a woman the hammer and screw drivers were small in size with sparkly plastic handles. All the way I kept gulping the landscape up with my eyes. This is why we moved here. This is why we're trying to make it home--despite the long uncertain process of finding what that might look like. I brought the camera, and took a couple shots out the window as the light changed from winter sunlight to dusk, black crows flying up from the fields in flocks, startled.
traffic light
plowed field
dairy farm
yellow house
river bank
sunset
windmill moon
Mohawk grins
Bean is on the mend, it seems. He spent the afternoon flinging CDs off the entertainment center shelves, one at a time, giggling with delight as they crashed in a puddle of plastic cases around him. One little sharp tooth has (finally!) cut through, and the spots are fading...and last night he actually slept for more than two consecutive hours.
Small things, big things
After I got out of the shower this morning, the house was quieter than it usually is. I came into the bedroom and found my boys had gone back to sleep: my husband curled around our son, their cheeks touching. I tiptoed out and reveled in the early morning quiet, making French toast and herby omelets. Watching the cats loll in the checkered sunlight on the floor. Taking the time to breathe; to notice the faint smoky haze across the room, making the light streaming through the window appear in falling rays.
I've been thinking lately about how each day is filled with choices that are momentary and small, yet when viewed from a wider angle, have an impact on a far greater scale in my life, and in the lives of others. Taking time the time to notice these small things---or not. Breathing deeply, in the moment---or forgetting to. But also choices like these: buying milk from the local organic dairy, instead of from huge national conglomerates that pump their cows full of hormones, or eating the small bumpy heirloom apples grown here, rather than the smooth skinned ones trucked in from across the country.
So often, I find myself reacting rather than consciously choosing. When tired, pushed to blurry limits, it's easy to forget to live with active intention. But since moving here, to this place where people stop when the light is GREEN to let a pedestrian walk across the street, I've started to make the daily effort. It matters. Every day matters.
When they woke up, my two guys looked so scrumptious I wanted to devour the both of them whole: pillow cheeks, rumpled hair, sweet smelling and drowsy from sleep. And because it was still early, we had time to eat together, giving thanks. Outside, I could hear geese calling, migrating south high up in the windy sky.
This way and that
Anxiety has spread out across the surface of my life tonight, like the glaze a potter applies to a bowl. Liquid under high temperatures, then ridged when left to cool. So many things feel up in the air, suddenly. In transition, in motion. I'm finding myself dreaming, gasping, muttering. Longing for more sleep, for long, uninterrupted times in my studio. But mostly, I'm wishing for that the impossible: for vision that will let me know the outcomes of all the things started now. I'm wishing for certainty and feeling only chaos.
My sister was here the last four days, and it was good. Good to explore new ways of talking, of seeing each other: based less on the past, and more on who we are now. We both took risks to talk with honesty, to say things that mattered, to show small pieces of us that are less than perfect. Over peanut noodles and cheap wine we realized that the story of our childhood was one of comparison and never quite equals in the moment. Now we're trying for new ground, level to start with. Hopeful, unsure of where we'll end up.
My son has a rash. Red spots freckling his body like a dappled sunburn. The doctor says it's benign: the side effects of some virus he picked up. This, combined with teething has him terribly out of sorts. I spend my nights curled round him, trying to weave a cloak of protection with my breath and murmured prayers around his little body. My body aches with loving. I want to sleep. I want him to feel better. I want his teeth to be fully in his mouth. I'm a little on edge.
My husband and I spend the afternoons driving around the country side looking for houses or land to build. We have stacks of timber frame home plans, for-sale-by-owner ads, MLS listings. Each place we visit leaves my heart feeling like a trout pulled up by a reel. I flip flop: wanting it, then not. Imagining home, then feeling impossibly far from it.
This is what it is like: o plunge into the future. To take the next step towards things that matter to me, to my family. I know it is here on the edge, on the verge of new things, that the simple act of committing is more valuable than any crystal ball. I try to take a breath in, and let it go: trusting that the universe will move in response to my movement; that things will turn out fine.
Serious
Teeth coming in and a night of very restless sleep. Today pensive. I am blown away, watching my son, at the complexity of his emotional life--at only eight months. He has started anticipating our actions in response to what he sees us looking at. He reads our faces like an emotional roadmap. But today I felt like his mood was all his own, solemn, wanting to be held. A day where the world must have seemed very large to him.
Fragile
Due partly to the fact that daylight savings time is something invented by adults, and as such has absolutely nothing to do with the natural circadian rhythms of sleeping that animals and small children follow, Bean has been waking up quite early this past week. There have been many early mornings when the sky is just turning rosy and he's ready to play and explore his world, patting our sleepy faces with enthusiasm. As a result, I've been more tired than usual---if that is possible---and a side effect of more tired is more moody. I've been moved almost to tears by practically anything this week. The tiniest things make me profoundly grateful, or sad, or awestruck, or lonesome.
Like seeing Claire Kramer's photography. This photo in particular made me sort of gasp, with recognition, loneliness and awe all at once.
Or this: Instead of doing the usual while Bean napped this morning (trying scatterdly to complete the too-huge list of things to do that always looms over my head) I sat down with coffee and a grilled bagel on the couch and read uninterrupted for an entire hour. I cannot describe the simple delight this brought---sitting in the sunlight, the cat purring at my shoulder, just reading The Sun.
Each month I devour it voraciously. Filled with writing that speaks to heart and intellect both, each issue leaves me wishing I could be more, do more, say more to affect change in the world. In addition to essays and interviews and brilliantly written prose and poems, each month readers write in about a given theme. This month's "Reader's Write" was "True Love" and nearly every entry made me swallow hard.
There are so many ways to love, and each is profound. Readers, scattered all over the globe and from all kinds of backgrounds wrote in about their idea of true love: sacrifice, grace, devotion, adoration.
I was struck reading each small story, by how deeply every person experiences his or her world---and how differently. I try to remember this when I am affronted by the immense distrust and fear our media spawns of "otherness."
I try to remember this when I look into my sons eyes, and then look into the eyes of the stranger I pass in the street. Then I think, "you are someone's child. Someone gave birth to you. " This is enough to keep me lifting my eyes to meet the eyes of every face I pass.
Sunny day
I put Bean in the backpack and went on an urban hike today. We went down along the waterfront, where the old railroad tracks used to be, and along the wetlands where wilderness is reclaiming the pavement. I took pictures and felt heady in all the sun and wind. Bean talked the whole time, cooing and singing, and then slept on the way back. I was so pleased with how some of these turned out, I had to upload them straight here rather than posting them as a slideshow on flickr first.
A view from above.
Graffiti art on the community boathouse.
Dog silhouette.
Lake waves up close.
Once a parking lot.
Bringht sky.
Graffiti art on an abandoned railway car.
Connections.
Migration.
NOVEMBER'S LIST
Some things I’m into this November:
Writing, and sketching my little moleskine notebook.
Hanging out with the other hapless writers in my writing group and swapping the chapters we’ve written for critique.
Machine washable merino wool yarn I’m using to knit Bean a baby blanket.
Classic toys, like the ones found here.
Buying cross country skis.
Organizing a postcard swap and getting paper mail.
Sending out query letters.
Taking black and white pictures.
House hunting.
Baking bread.
I'm having fun Sunday mosaic #2
The last farmer's market of the season with pumpkins on the sidewalk, the tables heaped with squashes and knobby brussle sprout stalks. Already the lady who sells honey from her small batch of backyard hives is gone, and textiles---woolly hats and scarves fill up stalls where in mid summer sunflower bouquets and fancy heirloom tomatoes jostled for attention.
The sun, bright overhead against a backdrop of blue, makes the leaves shine golden even though the foliage season was a bust here, with a killing frost before the leaves could turn to crimson the way they usually do. We walk down to the lake with coffee and ham and egg sandwiches, still hot.
Bean, bundled in layers of fluffy fleece and mittens, screams furiously every time we add a layer, but naps contentedly as we sit together on the swing, kicking our legs and watching a hubbub of mallards quacking on the water. All the boat slips are empty now and white gulls perch on the power supply boxes.
Across the lake, a band of snow still on the mountains, but the air is warm in the sun. By midmorning we take a run, wearing shorts and hats and long sleeves. The edges of the path are slick and yellow with fallen leaves, wet from weeks of rain. Other runners are out. Everyone smiles as they pass, soaking up sun like lizards.
Downtown some shops have their doors open, and on the sidewalk a dog lolls, tummy up. Today teenagers are wearing wigs and bits and pieces of costumes. They walk down the promenade giggling, smoking cigarettes and looking self conscious. Yesterday the big parade brought throngs of kids dressed as cows, superheroes, witches and firemen and doting parents; tomorrow, trick-or-treaters are sure to come knocking at our door.
In the afternoon we take a drive southwest of here, to look at a farmhouse, then land, and lastly the town we'd maybe like to settle near. 180 years old with a gnarled apple tree out back, the farmhouse is a dream. A clawfoot tub, a laundry shoot, a huge hearth in the dining room. But as we leave we can't help but notice how the unplanned urban sprawl has crept up: farmers selling acreage; subdivisions encroaching on the view.
A sunset for the first time in months, soft pinks spreading out across the sky like delicate gown hung up for airing. The waterfall pounding below the bridge in town sends whole trees over it's crest. They gather at it's base, circling, bumping up against each other like toothpicks. Bean stares wide eyed. I play with aperture, noticing the word Bean's been saying all week on a sign on the window of an empty store.
We drive home in early darkness, daylight saving's time has set us back. We talk together quietly as Bean takes a late nap. Stars are above us as we bring our things inside. We heat leftover lasagna and then eat pumpkin pie.
The amazingly talented Nichola gave birth to a beautiful baby girl on Thursday. Welcome to the world, Esme & congratulations mama! Nicohla also organized a postcard swap last month and, being a sucker for foreign stamps, paper mail, and all things artsy, I was excited to participate. The only rules were that they had to be handmade and postmarked by the 31st. As usual, I'm cutting it close with the deadline. (In theory, though I finished them today! they won''t be postmarked until November 1st.)
I wanted each postcard to be unique, and yet similar--so I used the same media (acrylic and watercolor paints & a block print) and colors, but varied the theme for each as my whimsy dictated. I really had fun making these---allowing my paintbrush to follow my mind into abstraction. I also really liked the idea of including a fish print in each---because fish are sort of a signature art piece for me.
I would love to do another postcard swap---so if you would like to participate please let me know in the comments and I'll email you with the details.
Friday afternoon
We're in the midst of househunting---not for this year, but for next spring. A place with land---pastures, wooded areas, perhaps a stream. We moved north to find this---and today we spent a couple hours driving around and then walking out along trails onto land that we tried to imagine as ours someday.
It's a bizarre process---trying to imagine something that doesn't yet exist. You have to be half lunatic, half dreamer to survive it. Yet it also fills me with a giddy breathlessness as I imagine where my garden might go. Where a swing might hang from a tall maple for Bean, where we might sit on the porch in the morning with coffee watching wild turkies or racoons raid the seed below the bird feeder.
With each place we visit, the home I imagine is becoming slightly less a figment of my imagination and slightly more tangible. Click on the photo above to view a few of the sights from our rambles today.
"Becoming a mother is a trial by fire"
Growing up, I bucked up against my mother fiercely. I felt similar to my father with my academic, intellectual habits: late nights devouring books and talking about ideas. But I almost felt scornful of my mother who was quiet and shy. She would ask me to keep my voice down in public places, and when we fought, she would use silence to win every time. In many ways I simply took my mother for granted. She was just my mother---the one who cooked meals, and drove me places. It was only after my father died that I started to get to know the woman she really is. Perhaps she too began to know herself then, differently, finally out of my father's shadow.
And, though I think my mother would say that she is still unsure of her own voice, after so many hearing my father's, she is becoming someone whose words I admire. She observes the world carefully, noticing the smallest of things; constantly connecting the big picture and the small. Since Bean, I have grown to understand that her quiet attitude of giving and her selflessness came not from lack of self confidence, but from her vast love for her children.
Last night she wrote me this:
Ah yes, Christina, you are getting it: motherhood. Nothing prepares you for it, that is one sure thing. I cannot imagine that heart surgery is more intricate or painful than the push/pull of a mother's being as it continues to form a womb around her child. A kangaroo pouch would be so much simpler! The gods give us women this incredible learning around compassion. Of course dads feel it too, but, I believe, in a different way. Their very skin hasn't been stretched beyond belief leaving memory marks. Nor has their body carried the growing weight of a child. I think men in battle, caring for their wounded, must feel a similar stretching of their being---as buddies die or are profoundly wounded in front of them. Maybe that is why motherhood, and war, have existed down the ages. There are many ways to experience this selflessness. But becoming a mother is a trial by fire.
Sick
Nothing prepared me for this: the fragility and fiery protectiveness I'd feel when confronted with caring for my sick child. Bean awoke last night about an hour after going to sleep---crying inconsolably, hysterically, till mucus ran in two small rivers from his nose. He cried hard and frantically, throwing his body about in my arms as I tried to offer a breast, or hold his hands under running water, or show him the cat---my usual ploys to calm him when he's upset. But for a long while nothing consoled him—a long enough while enough for DH to call pediatrician and then make a trip to the store for children's Tylenol.
Finally I put John Gorka on and danced with him, slowly, in the semi-dark of the living room lit only from the streetlights outside the window. Finally his breathing grew regular. He sucked in the last puckered sobs. His head dropped to my chest.
Then we sat together, his body pressed tightly to mine---wrapped in blankets in the rocking chair, and I rocked him until his body grew limp with sleep. And then I kept rocking, never wanting to let go.
Later in the night he woke again: crying, sobbing, wailing. Again I put the music on and danced with him till his cries turned to whimpers, and then I curled with him in the big white armchair in the living room, burrowed under a down comforter, listening to the music until he finally slept. I carried him to bed and he slept nestled up against the heat of our bodies, his small feet pressed into my belly.
He slept then until morning, and woke happy, with a running nose, wanting to be carried all day.
Nothing prepared me for this: the quivering feeling of guilt, when I look into his sweet sick face. What could I have done wrong? What small neglect?
By mid morning I realized I was sick too, and we napped for hours, our cheeks next to each other---his hair damp with sweat. And later, he was content to ride about in the sling on my hip---something he almost never does because he wants to be moving about, exploring, active, pulling up on things.
I'm not sure how to begin to comprehend the immenseness of this feeling: this love, this guilt, this exhaustion. And yet a part of me realizes it isn't about comprehending at all. It's simply about being there in the dark, dancing with my son up against my heart.
Self Portrait Tuesday: Life Documentary Series #4
MORNING It is dark when I wake up. Rain pouring down, smudging the window with tiny rivers. It has been three weeks of rain.
I shower. The rooms in my small apartment are dim and blue and quiet, except for my baby's excited babble.
I dry my damp skin and wait for the collection of memories and present moments about my life to gather in my mind, making the daily mosaic whole of who I am. I dress.
The solid metal of my belt buckle. Jeans. These are the things I put on every day, that in some small way, make me who I am.
My son crawls up my legs. He needs dressing too. He asks for every fragment of my soul. All of my love, right now, this minute.
My hair is wet. Yesterday the hair dresser asked, "What products do you use?" I shrugged, "Nothing. Some days I'm lucky if I get it brushed." Her laughter tinkled through the salon, polite, young.
The heady earthy scent of coffee comes to me from the kitchen. Already on the floor, a myriad of blocks. I breathe in. I breathe out. I am here. Now.
Where the images went
Over the past few months I've discovered, again, that I am an artist. I knew this truth as a child, and I kept sketchbooks voraciously. I drew the everyday things of my life, and I'd sit for hours using crayons to imagine places I'd never been. I could lose myself inside the landscapes by artists I loved. At the museum, I'd be the one still staring after everyone else had gone on with the tour.
After high school, I went to Germany for a year where I learned silk screening, and produced vibrant, delicate scarves with sea horses or cherry blossoms or swallows in flight moving across them. I loved using salt: watching the paint marbleize where each grain landed. I used acrylics there too, in my long afternoons between work hours. I painted orchids, and a map of the world.
Before I came to college I spent two weeks in Harlem with people who had HIV. We did rapid contour drawings in charcoal: impermanent and bold. My sketchbook was full of figures dancing across the pages. People's faces, hands, eyes, done in graphite or pen.
But once I settled into my life as a student something shifted. My internal landscape became crowded with words.
I poured my inner imagry into my notebooks: word drunk, over stimulated, and exhausted. I wrote crappy poetry and some good poetry. I took some writing classes and gradually I learned to hone a decent sentence. I grappled with the stories of my life. I learned to interview. I worked sometimes for the college paper. I began thinking of myself as a writer. But after my required art class freshman year I stopped painting.
When I graduated, I plunged headlong into the world of teaching big things to small children. Their faces, each an entire landscape of wonder, watched me as I spoke--living into my words, my breath, my laughter. I wrote things every day in the context of the classroom.
I modeled writing that mattered to me, that was real, and packed with details that they could care about: the scratching sounds of pencils in motion; the sobbing wails of the angry girl with the nappy hair in dozens of small pigtails sprouting out of her head outside the kindergarten classroom; the smell of popcorn from the teacher's lounge or lunch in the cafeteria where they served green hot dogs, nearly a foot long, and salad drowned with dressing.
I told my students stories. I used these narratives to teach plot, suspense, figurative language, and metaphor. And I drew pictures of bivalve mollusks, of tidal marshes, of maple trees in autumn, of shag bark hickories in spring to accompany the hands-on social studies and science curriculum I designed.
But teaching pulled from me every ounce of my creative energy, and when I'd ride the train home, often as the sun was setting, I'd have the energy only to shut my eyes, or to scribble a few half hearted observations: the lady with the bouffant hairdo and the to-red cheeks who talked loudly, as though no one else were in the crowded car, to her travel partner who was standing in the vestibule, checking his watch and fidgeting with his leather gloves.
When I had my son, for the first few months I staggered about writing in my notebook, start time 11:15 right breast, nursed for 3 minutes, then stopped, but I quickly gave this up just started trusting my instincts.
Things evened out. My baby grew. I got some sleep. We moved. I started running, finding a rhythm, remembering to breathe. And I had hours, interrupted, fragmented hours, punctuated by squeals or roars or wailing, but hours none the less, to start letting my mind unwind.
I was tightly wound. And as the filaments of my mind unfurled, images started flooding in. I longed for paint. I bought a few on-sale brushes. I filled pages with collages and quick heavy strokes. And then I started to remember why I was an artist first.
Unwinding
I breathe in. I breathe out. I am calling to myself, looking for centeredness. It is past 9 p.m. The house is still tonight. Tues on my iPod. Stan Getz. I drink the second half of a glass of Pinot Noir from Chalone Vinyard in foggy Montery, California. The chair creaks under my shifting weight. The cat licks his belly and darkness settles down around te windows.
I think of figs, fresh and ripe, that I haven't eaten since I was eleven, at church, picked from the tree behind it's stuccoed walls. I didn't like them then, though I love them sweet and sticky and dried.
I write with a fat-tipped sharpie, letting go of control. Letting my messy writing spill across the page, trying to unwind after the past two days of inlaws and house hunting. Almost the house we want---but not quite.
I am trying to TRUST THE UNIVERSE. Already it has brought so much. My life is full and I am greatful. I gather up moments of stillness.