A list of beautiful things

...that have caught my eye or gave me reason to pause:

This necklace.

This photo.

The chai tea from this place. (I also love the fact that on the wall by the counter hangs a hammer. Below it is a note that reads, In case of emergency, smash anything.)

This found art.

This church.

This t-shirt.

These classes.

These sheets.

This project.

…and this online zine.

10 Months

Dear Bean,You are starting to have a will of your own and it is amazing to watch you attempt to express yourself—your joy, your contentment, your frustration. You’ve started showing both compassion towards others and determination to do things your own way. You love to share now. You also love to go where you are not allowed. You smile wide, wide, wide when we dance, and at night when we lie down together, you sing with me as I lull you to sleep.

This month you’re doing big-kid things like sitting and looking through board books for ten or fifteen minutes all on your own, with quiet interest. You’re eating macaroni and cheese, reaching for each noodle with your perfect pincer grasp, and drinking water from a cup. You sing for milk when you want to nurse, and wave “hi” when we do. Suddenly, your babbling has increased ten-fold. Each day you explore new sounds. And you can point to things you know: spoon, book, your Daddy, the cats. (You love the cats and pester them mercilessly. One day, they’ll expect payback. Remember this.)

I watch you now and swallow hard—your first year is almost finished. Never before has time gone by so quickly for me: months wash by in the span of a giggle. And yet, never before has time gone so slowly: when you’re fighting sleep and I haven’t had enough, those moments stretch out forever, rubbing every nerve, and I can’t wait for them to be over.

So now you’re ten months old and almost walking—balancing recklessly in the middle of the room for brief moments. Today with your little friend Bella, you kept picking up your toys and handing them to her. You smiled at each other in wonder that you are both small people, and were amazingly tolerant of the fact that each of you has about as much muscle control as a stroke victim, and as much eagerness as a Labrador retriever.

Being your mama is everything like I imagined, and nothing like it. I came from a family of women who have made hard choices about the timing of their children: either choosing to have them, or choosing not to, and before you came I struggled with these choices too. Around me my peers were trying to shape the building blocks of their careers, and it was often said in passing: to have a baby would be the end of independence. Before I had you, I believed that. Even during my pregnancy I wondered, worried. I was reluctant to become a mother. I worked up until the last minute, and then, all of a sudden after twenty four hours of labor, you were there and you fit. Perfectly.

I want you to know that after we sigh with relief having put you to bed at the end of a long day, your Daddy and I then spend another ten minutes talking about how amazing, and silly, and wonderful you are. Tonight, for example, you went to bed early because you missed part of both of your naps and were literally falling apart at the seams. After I finally got your little body to unwind, shushing you a hundred times, I tiptoed out and told Daddy what you did to the slice of orange I gave you earlier.

It was too cold, so when you bit into it, it surprised you and you made an awful face and your whole body shuddered. Then you threw it on the floor, and ROARED at it. You kicked it and roared some more. Then you picked it up, and threw it down again, and roared a little more.

You can count on us laughing about the silly and ridiculous things you do for a good long while. But you can also count on us to be proud. So proud. Like when you put the wooden puzzle pieces into the correct slots tonight after Daddy showed you how. Each time you slipped the piece into it’s place, we clapped, and grinned at each other above your head in wonderment and glee. We think you're pretty darn incredible, kiddo.

Love, Mama

Looking for the right words

Tonight at the writing workshop I try to untangle a little more of the story I am attempting to put down in ink. The people I write with are an mismatched, well read, easily humored crowd who all have day jobs. We sit around eating pretzels, discussing the virtues of present tense. They ask me about my dad. I try to explain how my relationship with my father, who died nearly four years ago, has been evolving in a one-sided way since then. Sometimes it’s hard to locate him in my memory, except in freeze frame images. Snapshots. Mostly, I can’t help looking through the lens of the present: dissecting who he was, his beliefs and flaws. I know that then, when we were in our relationship, I couldn’t see outside of it. I know I didn’t analyze his beliefs in the way I do now, measuring them against my own. The seam between my thoughts and his was often blurry. I loved his way of thinking. His persistent, disciplined way of examining the spiritual world through meditation and questioning. I loved how he could apply logic to the fixing of a broken radio, or the cutting of a fallen tree.

After he died, for weeks, months, the first year even, I could call to mind his face, his smile, his fierceness, and our love was very present. Now, I spend hours hunched at the computer, my body mirroring his posture, writing about the ways I’ve been shaped by him. It’s a strange shedding process that is taking place. I’m slipping out of the skin of my childhood as his daughter and fitting into my own. I am gathering myself up—finding abundance in one hand, loss in the other.

Looking for harvest

I beg for you now, your absence is an ache like a sadness at new moon. A craving for touch, a shock when I look at familiar photos and know those bones and skin, are not around the corner.

I do not know my feelings now. Cannot grasp onto any understanding of moments or metaphors. You hang like a crescent moon in my heart a sliver, a sickle, a tool of harvest.

Yet I do not know the fields where I can go walking to find your abundance. I know not where to find the round fruits of your love.

So I wait. Polish the scythe. Hold on to my heart.

pieces of my soul

I spend the late afternoon as darkness falls with headphones in my ears. The upstairs neighbor’s music makes me restless. The incessant beat raps a staccato in my head. I long for the quiet of open winter fields. For wind. Bean is finally napping with DH after crying for awhile, tired enough to protest the nap but too tired to skip it. I find solace in Stan Getz on my iPod, and follow the random branching network of links answering my search: “tips for keeping chickens in winter.”

I know it will take years to evolve from my greenhorn self into someone who knows what to do to keep the frost from killing sleeping bees or roosting chickens. It will require trial and error, and lots of talk with locals, to understand the true art of the perennial garden, or to know which animals leave tracks along the snowy paths in the woods.

It’s not that I want to suddenly slip onto a farmstead and never return. I’m to much of a girly-girl with a penchant for expensive jeans to want to be far from the city forever. Yet this much is also true: I am someone who is most centered when I am connected to the land on which I live.

I’m not waxing bucolic. I’ve just always had a profound love for nature. I think I must have gotten this from my mother, who always notices the most exquisite little things on walks we take: a newt on a log, orange and wet, or the feather of a wild turkey stuck in some briers. I have a deep sense of self when I connect to a place. The outline of my position in the universe, small and unique, is most apparent when I am able to see how I am connected to my immediate surroundings. I like to see the fields being used; like knowing where my food comes from---and I take some sort of satisfaction when it comes from a local farm rather than from Argentina or Brazil or trekked across the country in a big rig.

I am far too much of a voluptuary to uproot entirely and live ruggedly off the grid. It was my mother’s story and not mine to boil cloth diapers in a pot and then line dry them in the middle of January in the Rocky Mountains, until they hung stiff and frozen like boards. I’m too academic, too soft around the edges to be that wholesome or self-sacrificing. I like my frothy chai from the local café. I have a penchant for expensive outdoor gear. I love the ease of eating out, the pleasure of savoring food without the preparation or washing up. But I am also someone who strives to live consciously, aware of my impact on this earth.

Everyone struggles, I think, with these things. It is the side effect of living in our world today, with technology folding in around the edges, media pushing it’s way through the chinks of our souls. I think each of us must experience this push---pull: heart and mind narrating different stories. I want to know, what scattered pieces make you whole?

Self Portrait Tuesday: Reflective Surface # 2

There we are, a whirl of color captured in a shop window. This is what we do every day: walk, bundled up, to get coffee. Snowflakes kissing our cheeks, the wool of our hats pulled close against our ears. This is me: the one who takes note of small things. The one who documents with words and images; the topography of our little family.

See other self portrait bloggers here.

Sunday Mosaic # 4: family

We bundle up in our red jackets, and put Bean in the running stroller which is wind proof and warm, and walk two miles to a gormet market, stopping to get hot chocolate along the way. Inside it has the most wonderful little café, tucked in among isles stocked with wine and marzipan, biscotti, and maple butter. The walk made us hungry, and we order big fluffy slices of cinnamon raisin French toast, omelets, and fruit. The girl who waits on us has a lip ring and a punk hairdo and a beaming sunny smile. She tells, "careful, the maple syrup is really full.’"

I watch Bean sitting in his highchair, picking up slices of fresh strawberries and eating them as though he has always done this. His little thumb and forefinger working together perfectly to grasp each piece and bring it to his mouth. It takes my breath away to watch him and I feel tears smarting up in the corners of my eyes. He catches me looking at him and bursts into a huge grin, his two brand new teeth poking up from his bottom gum. Then he reaches out his hand and offers me his gnawed on strawberry half.

Walking back we peer in the windows at the architectural salvage warehouse, at claw foot bathtubs and old doors we imagine maybe using during renovation. When we open the door at home the smell of the garlands we hung yesterday hits us: piney and warm. We nap, three to a bed, and as my two guys sleep I can’t help lying awake staring in wonderment at their faces.

When I wake up it is already 3pm and the afternoon light is pale and weak out the window. I dress for a run—the first in two weeks since I injured my knee. It's my first run since it’s been snowy, and I thrill to feel my body fall back naturally into the rhythm of it. I run a new route, on sidewalks through the hill section of town and then up past the University where the gibbous moon hangs fat and solemn in the blue sky above the red brick buildings. I can see all the way to the lake, a thin blue ribbon at the feet of the mountains. Ice has formed where the air and water kiss the rocks and sticks along the shore.

We eat dinner with friends in a small Italian restaurant, where we watch a family celebrate their grandmother’s birthday. She coos at her granddaughter saying too loudly, “Isabella say cheese,” and they all say, “don’t talk so loudly.” I can’t help smiling. Later I talk to my mother on the phone as I finish making linzer cookies. We are trying to learn how to reword our communication so that it’s clear and present, not painted with the lacquer of childhood miscommunications, and our conversation is full of love.

exhaling

The morning light was flecked with falling snow, and few inches of powder already covered roofs and sidewalks when we woke up. I’ve been waiting for snow, and felt like I could finally exhale, my breath lingering whitely in the air. After a long week of fun-house ups and downs, things felt mostly even today. Bean is has gone and started doing adorable things like waving, and offering me his crackers or orange slices, and my heart starts flapping about all wild and goofy when I watch him trying to stand on his own. I catch myself trying to pin point the exact moment he's gone and gotten older, but I can't quite. It's just a blur of almost toothy grins, as he boogies to the music or chases the cats around.

Finally DH and I had a few moments together too, that didn't involve discussing future house projects, our finances, or our son. We sat around covered in icing and listening to Sinatra’s Christmas classics, decorating gingerbread cookies for the people in our lives with kids in theirs, for the better part of yesterday evening.

Today we bought garlands of balsam and spruce to string up around the apartment, and a wreath for the door, and spontaneously, on our way to pick up the greenery, drove out to the house. The road looked like a storybook, with white frosted trees leaning in on each side and lights gleaming from under a layer of snow, on eaves and barns and tall evergreens. It felt good to just drive by and look. To imagine next year, but to be happy right now, with our car load of greens and our drooly, grinning boy.

self portrait in the car

at the christmas tree lot

on the way to our house

my juicy little guy

gingerbread

lights

Check out more pictures from our day here

looking inside

It is starting to be long john weather here. The red line on the thermometer never crept past 30 degees today, and the air bites at exposed cheeks. The light at dusk strikes the buildings with sharpness. There is no depth to it like in the summer, or even in the autumn when the rays seem to fall in long angles. Now, the light is filterless and bright; shadows spilling onto the streets in dark contrast. Winter has a way of making me look at my life starkly, as though I were seeing my soul in series of x-rays. Like the fields of corn stalks tilled into frozen soil or the rocky hilltops exposed below the silhouettes of trunks and branches, when I look in on myself I see mostly skeletons. I go back over the writing I have done in years past, and am stunned at my own depth, yet feel incapable of duplicating it. The voice of my shadow that always whispers “failure,” harps louder now.

I have new canvasses and the longing to paint, but a terror to pick up the brush. Everything I make might be ugly. Words stalk me at indecent times when I have no notebook, no means of record. But when I sit at the computer with an hour of quiet stolen from other tasks, nothing comes except mouthfuls of hesitation.

Natalie Goldberg says it doesn’t matter. She says “One of the main aims in writing practice is to learn to trust your own mind and body; to grow patient and nonaggressive.” I try to come back to this. To simply write. To get out my paints and follow the movement of my hand. To trust that I will once again feel the divine moving through the branches of my soul like wind.

But like the flock of startled crows I saw today, whirling black specks against the grey sky above the rooftops, I become easily scattered. I know this is to be expected in this time: this collision of moments when we are making choices about our future happen now. Buying this house isn’t just buying a house for me. It’s about fulfilling a dream that has been a part of my mental geography for as long as I can remember.

I am like that. When I loose myself in my thoughts, I am lost in a specific geography. I have always been someone who has felt closely tied to the land. I have worked on farms, milked cows, grown gardens, and I know that these things provide a rich soil for my creative life. I long to put down roots in this place. Keep bees, learn to ride horses.

So I am here in the midst of making something I’ve always imagined a reality, and it feels awkward like I’m trying to help hatch a baby bird. They are so fragile and ugly and gawky when they first peck their way out of the shell they’ve lived inside for weeks. Then they just sit there in the nest, all beak, squawking.

It’s cold out. The mud is frozen solid and our apartment is too small. I can’t help squawking, doubting that flight will ever be possible. The pessimist in me chokes at the stir-crazy feeling I know I’ll have we finally close the deal after the new year and start to rip down walls. It will take months of effort before anything resembles anything I imagine. This process should be familiar. It is the one I face every day when I come to the blank screen or the empty canvass and struggle with a mess of words or lines. I should know. The good stuff only happens when I’m patient.

You'd better watch out, you'd better not cry...

'Cause I was there today.

The antedote to all my idyllic posts

Tonight I can't help wishing I had hired cleaning help, a clawfoot bathtub, a bar of chocolate, and a nice glass of merlot. Instead... when the bath drains the toilet makes gurgling noises. We ran out of toilet paper ENTIRELY. Of course I was ON the toilet when I discoverd this. And our house needs so badly Bean managed to eat an entire second dinner off the floor under the table.

***I wanted to write all sorts of brilliant and reflective things in response to hanging out for four days straight with my friend Willow whom I’ve known since fifth grade. But instead I spent the night single parenting and ate cereal for dinner, so all insight has been shelved for some later date.

I have no idea other mamas pull it off with any grace at all. After just a couple of hours every surface in our tiny apartment is strewn with toys, or objects being rendered as toys (think spatulas, bowls). Actually that is an understatment. What I mean is our apartment went suddenly from livable to kick-it-when-you-try to-walk messy. The laundry is in a heap at the top of the basement stairs, and every counter top is covered with dishes.

In an effort to turn things around I washed dishes for so long my fingers pruned. In the past I’ve tried to be very zen about having to wash dishes by hand: it brings you into the moment, yada, yada, yada. But it doesn’t really. It’s less sanitary and a total waste of time that could otherwise be spent reading Bean a book. You can bet we already have a dishwasher picked out for our new kitchen.

The real trouble though is that DH has the stomach flu, and truly there is nothing nastier. It is so hard for me to take care of someone who is vomiting. I think of all the times as a kid when my mom held the bowl for me to puke into, and I shudder with awe, realizing the lengths mothers go. I suppose I would do the same for Bean in a heartbeat—but I can’t quite feel the same empathy for DH.

I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for myself as he lay on the couch with a low-grade fever clutching his stomach, and I went through the motions of making dinner for Bean, feeding him, cleaning up. To my credit I did manage this more or less to myself, and instead of turning into a total harpie, I proffered ice water and a cool hand. All the while Bean was trying to stand hands free, narrating his progress with a series of high-pitched shreeks, and I kept wondering hell she does it with two little rascals.

There were no catastrophes, really, other than a solid stone rolling pin landing on my foot (clean up from gingerbread cookies I made earlier), but I couldn’t help feeling like I was flailing about in a rising tide. After such lovely days with an extra set of hands, and lots of laughter, it felt really off tonight to be down to just me and Bean. Now everyone’s tucked into bed and for some reason, though it’s earlier than I usually call it quits, I’m totally exhausted.

Self Portrait Tuesday: Reflective Surface # 1

Taken in low light, at night, indoors. This is my hands holding the lense of my camera--reflecting into the lense of another camera and blue ceramic bowl on the table. It was nearly an impossible shot---but I wanted to try because it says so much about my new found interest in photography. I am discovering a new piece of me, still blurry, reflected in the images I take with my camera.

Weekend Mosaic

A weekend full of grins with snowflakes falling on our noses. Lunch at a little French Bistro, good chai at the local coffee shop, long conversation. I’m still relishing every moment that’s she’s here today—and trying to hammer out a dozen pages for the workshop tomorrow in the gaps in conversation when we listen to Horowitz and she sinks into a soft armchair with a book. So for now I leave you with a mosaic of little moments. Snowsuit weather. Playing on the couch. Shopping for ornaments in the local arts boutique. Several high-scoring rounds of scrabble, and bright winter skies.

Talking toay

A close friend who knows bits of my heart is visiting. We’ve known each other since we were eleven, with skinny knees and flat chests. Our conversation takes flight. We move outside the boxes of our ideas, words becoming dreams or prayers for the small pieces of future we imagine. Today there was solace. We went to the house and looked out over the still quiet landscape dusted with snow.

Ripe pomegranate seeds eaten over the Scrabble board. Looking through camera lenses at each other, a bunch of digital geeks. So good to have her here today, tomorrow, the next day. She's brought pocket full of reassurance, sunbeams, laughter with her from the West.

Illustration Friday: Blue

Early winter before the snow starts falling, when everything is cold and grey, and darkness swallows up the world, always makes me sad.

Today I just can’t seem to shake it. All the giddiness of yesterday, evaporated like the almost-snow in the air. The immenseness of the fact that we moved here just over a half year ago and I’m still grappling with finding the time to find friends makes me feel terribly alone today. It doesn’t help that I’ve been stricken with an unusually fierce bout of procrastination and self doubt.

My writing sits and lurks at me from the screen, like a couple of pickled eyeballs in a jar. It taunts me. I can’t finish a paragraph further than I’ve already gotten. My workshop deadline is next week and I know I won’t be finished.

I hate days like this. Wanting attention, but not to give it. Wanting alone time, but wanting good company even more. Wanting something decisive to happen, but still in limbo with just about everything.

Sundog, snowbelt and other compound words that mean home

We spent four hours at the house yesterday, with the inspector. We peered into every dusty corner, poked every possibly leaky length of copper pipe, tested spots on the ceiling and floor for moisture, pushed through heaps of insulation, and came up with nothing. This is one of the few times when nothing is good in life. Nothing at a house inspection is the opposite of disappointment.

Of course, there were small things: the house is exactly as old as I am—-built the year I was born—and neither of us are entirely dent free. But I like to think we’ve both aged gracefully. The house is in a snowbelt—-it snows up in that particular little mountain valley more than in the surrounding areas—-and was built to withstand the wind and snow, with it’s stone front facing the open valley. The roof will need replacing in a year or two, and the odd window latch needs fixing, but overall it’s in excellent shape. Which is about how I feel.

Since having Bean I’ve started to notice that I look older in the mirror in the morning. I have a small scattering of smiling lines, delicate and barely there, spreading out at the corners of my eyes. And the dark circles under my eyes—that I’m genetically disposed to (my father always had them), seem to have gotten darker, and more permanent with each short night of interrupted sleep. But I’m also leaner than I’ve ever been and stronger. I can run out in the cold for miles, and love it. And I’m not obsessed with being young forever. I’m grateful to finally be old enough to know better: to not always run bull-headed into things, putting my foot in my mouth. Old enough to finally have a smidgen of experience under my belt about this house business.

It is the second house we will have owned, and I’m hopeful that it will be the last for a long while. Long enough to put up a tree swing, and figure out which kinds of heirloom apples grow on the sunny slope outside the kitchen window. Longer. Of course, nothing is set in stone yet—the closing won’t happen for another month or so, and until then things are always up to the universe. But the day we signed the contract I saw a bright gleaming sun dog in the sky, and just when I saw it, DH walked into the room and the two of us just stood their grinning at the rainbow smudge at the edge of the snow clouds.

We grinned because with every significant move we have made, we’ve seen some form of rainbow. When we decided to rent an apartment together in Manhattan for the summer while I was still in school, we saw a rainbow—huge and bright in a stormy early summer sky. When we singed the lease on a little beach side cottage—which took us away from the humdrumness of our suburban second floor apartment in Connecticut, we saw a rainbow. And when we signed the contract on our first home, again, we saw a rainbow. The timing has been uncanny. Just in the moment of committing, the universe moves to respond.

So we’re all bubbly tonight because we walked the isles of Home Depot for an hour, talking cabinets and soapstone and appliances. Sometimes, I want nothing more than to be able to STOP talking about our plans. Sometimes it seems it’s all we talk about of late. But tonight it was fun. We were on the same page: imagining sap maple floors and the kitchen open to the sunny dining room.

This is where we picture Bean growing up: spitting water melon seeds, building tree forts, climbing trees. It will be home to him, and it will be where DH and I will reach middle age. It feels silly and magical and solid to picture us there, older. I try to do the fast forward thing in my head that nature shows do, to demonstrate a plant’s life cycle or the changing of seasons. There we are, on the front deck we have yet to build, looking at the mountains with our morning coffee.

Till then, we’ve got months of renovations. Months of demolition and salvage and drywalling, and we’re bound to go crazy more than once. But tonight when I think of the sundog house in the snowbelt, I feel giddy and peaceful the way I feel after a long journey. I am imagining home.

ODE Magazine

Progressive, pragmatic, and full of ideas that matter, ODE is a magazine with an optimistic edge. Though it is sometimes funny and always well written, I don’t come away from reading it with my mind at ease. Each issue makes my head spin. I read to be made more conscious of the choices and beliefs I bring to daily life. I read to discover ways I can affect positive change in my community. From an article on Non-verbal communication strategies developed by Marshall Rosenberg came these ten points, which I promptly cut out and taped to my wall.

1. Spend some time each day quietly reflecting on how you would like to relate to yourself and others.

2. Remember that all human beings have the same needs.

3. Check your intentions to see if you are as interested in others getting their needs met as you are in meeting your own.

4. Before asking someone to do something check to see if you are making a request or a demand.

5. Instead of saying what you don't want someone to do, say what you want the person to do.

6. Instead of saying what you want, say what action you'd lik the person to take.

7. Before agreeing or disagreeing with anyone's opinions, try to tune into what the person is feeling and needing.

8. Instead of saying "no" look at what need of yours prevents you from saying "yes."

9. If you are feeling upset, think about what need of yours is not being met. Think what could you do to meet it, rather than about what's wrong with others or yourself.

10. Instead of praising someone who does something you like, express your gratitude by tellng the person what need that action meets.

Baby, it's cold outside...

The theme this week at Mama Says Om is cold. I'm having fun with this one.

Back to normal operations, or: sleep is for the weak

I got it here, when we were there. Could there be a more perfect T? If you look reeeealy closely, you can see his first little tooth poking through. And yes, the other one's coming in so we're not getting much sleep around here. Still.

Buisness as usual: finding magic even there

We came back late Sunday amidst rain falling warm against a crust of snow, and spent the first hours at home unpacking and sorting through mail. By the following evening, we finally felt caught up on all the little things that make a home run: the floor was vacuumed, the plants watered, bills paid, phone calls returned, and we had a moment to step out into the early falling darkness of evening. The air was cold and the night slightly windy as we made our way downtown. As we turned the corner between tall buildings, we saw it: the cobble stone pedestrian walk bordered on either by trees and shops was lit with thousands of little white lights. Every tree, twinkling softly. It was so beautiful, we just stood there, our mouths open.

Then we made our way for toasty slices of chees pizza and hot chocolate and sat in front of the gigantic spruce at the top of the block, sparkling in a myriad of colors. Bean's eyes were huge and round like small deep inkwells reflecting the lights. He grinned wide when the wind blew the branches. And from somewhere, Carol of the Bells was playing softly.

Remembering the texture of moments

I'm feeling mostly better today, and tomorrow we're our way back north. Towards our small, busy apartment; towards the unfinished business with the house and work; towards heaps of christmast cards that need mailing and cookies that need baking; towards snow; towards days without the joy and distraction Bean's grandprarents bring to his life. But also towards our morning ritual of a walk downtown and coffee; towards our cat's soft purring; towards friends; towards home. Already the walk along the the canal on Thanksgiving day is just a collection of snapshots. Memory. Autumn, still clinging to tree branches. Canada geese in droves along the edges of the water.

self portrait. windy hair. up close.

concord grapes against concret.

autumn still lingers. leaves like bright flames over water.

a tangle of grass seeds like delicate jewlrey.

bird berries.

burgundy leaves. some small insect's feast.

tree berries. sliver and knobby against dark water.

bird's nest. lonley and dark in the twigs against the sky.