Harbingers of change

The finches flutter across the canvass like my heart: hopeful, but not yet at rest. How can it be that the shortest month lasts so long?

Like an x-ray, February exposes all the weak and tangled underpinnings of our lives. On every patch of muddy grass between the sidewalk and the curb I notice trash. Glass shards and rustling plastic bags, empty paper cups, bottle caps, cigarettes. In my own life, all the fragments, the torn bits, the shaky scaffolding seems to surface now too, and I catch myself wanting to pick everything apart.

Each day this month I have longed for softer edges, for green and sap and lingering daylight. Each day the tight wince of cold still seems to force its way in, making things complicated (the added annoyance of mittens for Bean who wriggles and wails every time we put them on.) Each day there has been some sort of friction, and it takes courage to push through right now, trusting that things won't fall irreparably apart.

DH and I are both spread thin, and in our lesser moments berate each other for the things we know neither of us can control. So it is a matter of intention now, in these last few weeks before the weather turns, to share joy. To play, to linger in each other’s arms, to carve out time for family amidst the all-consuming renovations.

So today we went to the park. Bean’s first time ever down a slide or up into the air on a swing outdoors. A hundred brand new smiles; giggles on the slide. Our grown up selves remembering the wild gravity-less arc of the swing set. It was still cold out, but warm enough to go bare handed. The ground was thawing. We could smell it’s earthy fragrance from the swings.

So we laughed a lot today, and I feel better. And when I started to look , I could see evidence of spring everywhere. Like a promise, the crocuses have sent their first green shoots up above the ground. New buds are swelling from the maples by the wall; ice no longer on the lake.

Feeling a little off kilter

Everything felt slightly out of step today, the way it sometimes happens on TV when the image is broadcast seconds before the audio, so the actors are moving and speaking but their words come trailing after and nothing quite lines up. Even the weather felt like this: snow fell hard in the afternoon for about twenty minutes, and then the sun came out exuberantly.

I'm in the midst of working on more paintings for my cafe art show. This is the background for one. I'm painting gold finches in flight that will wing their way across this surface, but somehow the texture of the background as it is right now captured my mood. Pithy, a little dark, a little murky.

I'll post more when I know how both turn out (*chuckles*).

WEEeeeeee!

Bean recieved this for his birthday. Being airborn = sheer and utter delight.

Pushing limits

Before I curl up in a heap of down comforters in front of the TV with a big cup of tea and some graham crackers to watch how the winter games turned out, let me say this: I ran 9 miles in 20 degree weather today.

Nine.

I wore these, and several fleecy thermal layers that made me look much like a mutant superwoman smerf when I pull the skull-tight hood up over my head, but for the most part I was warm. My breath left my body in clouds. Snot ran a constant clear river down my nose.

But the running itself wasn’t that hard, and I enjoyed moving up the long dirt road near our new house, past bucolic red-barn farms and fields where the snow has mostly melted, although now all the streams have turned rock-solid again. Along the tree line at the field’s edge I spotted deer. In the powdery snow and dust at the edge of the road, tracks of others that had run here before: dogs or coyotes, deer, squirrels, raccoon.

The return part of the loop took me along a main road through the center of two small towns, and then directly west into the setting sun. The sky was overcast over the mountains, but where the sun was falling, each cloud was shredded and on fire. I was almost blinded by it: that bright angled golden sunlight that washes the world at sunset. The pavement was inky and blurred below my feet, pounding rhythmically.

The last mile or so had me wanting to give up. Wind in my face, and the final road to bring me back home kept not being where I thought it was. Like a mirage, it was always just a little farther on.

I kept thinking of the quote someone wrote on the dry erase board above the drinking fountain at my gym: if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten. So I kept running, and finished 1.5 hours.

Back at the house, I saw a bald eagle circling the western meadow. Triumph.

Progress

All day the thermometer hovered in the single digits. So cold, the air cuts at bare skin like a razor. The sky was pale, and the slight dusting of snow on the ground, kicked up with every gust of wind. The stream in the field on the way to the house was frozen today: a channel of blue ice bisecting an expanse of choppy ocher grass stalks. It was my first time at the house in a week. DH has gone every day, often hiring a neighbor who needs to support his snowboard habit, to help out with drywall removal and framing. I was amazed by how much they had accomplished. The difference in the space was palpable. Sunlight flooded in through the windows of the to-be dining room, filling the kitchen with light.

Seeing it made me want fast forward. I want to be there with my coffee and a croissant at the table, watching nuthatches and starlings fight for seed at the feeder, or my dog ferret out squirrels.

Instead, I spent the afternoon with a crowbar and hammer laboriously chipping the remaining linoleum from the floor. In the basement below me DH was finishing installing radiant heating, and as I sat chiseling fragment after fragment of adhesive and vinyl from the floor, I felt a little tickle of pride sneaking up my spine.

My guy can do this stuff: remove load bearing walls. Install radiant heat. We make a great team, and when I can, I’m there along side him wielding a hammer or heat gun—but this time he’s done it mostly himself, and I’m impressed.

He is fearless when it comes to tackling these projects (which are things he’s never done), and I like watching him: hair mussed, in a workworn sweatshirt and a tool belt. And watching him like this today, I started to understand his unswerving (obsessive) focus on this project.

For him, this is art. The zing of the table saw, the report of the pneumatic nailer, these are the soundtrack of his creative process. TodayI finally started to understand how for me it’s work and it’s fun, but for him it’s even more than that. For him it is a form of self expression—like my paint and the endless notebook pages I fill, DH finds himself in the process of making this space new.

The kitchen, as it was.

Almost the same view as the pic above, after the wall was removed.

Looking through from the kitchen to our future dining room.

Apple tree silhouettes against a winter sunset out the to-be dining room window.

We keep talking

The wind pulls around the house today, making the windows rattle and pulling stop signs this way and that. Bean never got sick (he’s teething instead), but I’m on the cusp of something. A sore throat and too much tiredness filling the spaces in my soul with easy sadness. Outside light dapples the pine tree by my window. The sky is torn. Gray, with gold tufts as though it’s stuffing were coming out.

DH and I fought in the whispered dark of our bedroom last night, over the accumulated stress of renovating and of taking things for granted between us because of it. I feel terror when I see us falling into patterns like this. When whole days go by and all we do is talk about the house, and pass the baby back and forth.

But rather than letting silence fill the space between us, push at each other. We argue, and the friction shows that there is still a fiery pulse below the surface, of love and passion. In the midst of the heat we discover all over again that there is nothing here that we want to lose. What we have, we want. Our love, even when it is painted a dark purple with resentment, is sweeter than any separate peace.

As long as we are talk, throwing our words about like the silent knives in a martial arts flick, we are not stuck. More than fire, I fear stasis. I watched my parents move ever further apart in their marriage. There was a morass of non-communication between them. They didn’t talk well about hurt, or sadness, or about the messiness that comes from trying to synchronize two individual lives. Sometimes they did not talk at all.

So we sparred with words last night in the dark until we found our way out of the tangled maze of feelings. So hard to do: to keep talking when the anger rises hot; when all my mind wants to dwell on are escape routes and stubborn silences.

And when light from the street lamps fell in round circles on the pavement of empty streets, we found common ground again and pulled close under the covers. We found our way back to that precious place: skin pressing against skin, against each other’s hearts.

1 Year Old

My dear beautiful boy,

Last year at this time you and I were not quite separate yet. You were still curled in the dark thrumming space of my belly. I was in labor with you all night, sleeping between contractions, willing you to turn yourself around. But you continued to face upwards, the back of your head pressing against my pelvic bone, and so I walked and walked about the house.

I watched the sun rise, a smudge of red and pink out the bedroom window. And when the day came it was warm, and I walked around the deck holding onto your daddy’s shoulders. The air smelled like spring. Like birth. Thawing mud and the sudden up-springing of sap.

I was exhausted. For the two days before I went into labor, I had been vomiting---fighting the worst stomach flu I’d ever had. I hadn’t eaten in a day and a half and was almost certainly dehydrated. My midwife gave me fluids, and I drank, willing them to stay down. But after fifteen hours of labor, sometimes in the tub that we had set up in the warm cocoon of our bedroom and sometimes on the bed, we decided to go to the hospital. The homebirth I’d wanted for you—for me—was something I was no longer capable of pushing for. I needed fluids.

Your doctor, who knew we were coming and who had supported our decision to try for a home birth, met us at the hospital’s front desk, smiling. I was hooked up to an IV drip, and almost immediately I felt a surge of energy. I started to laugh. But still you didn’t want to leave me, and it took more hours of pushing and finally pitocin to help my exhausted uterus to push you out. The sharp pain of your entrance into the world was immediately replaced by the most intense joy I have ever felt.

There you were. Wet, small, and big-eyed. I pressed you close to my skin, and warm blankets were wrapped around us. I held you by my heart—suddenly outside of me, suddenly your own small self.

And now a year has gone by. The most amazing year, filled with the wonder of watching you grow every month. You are a delight, a rascal, a risk taker, a love. You giggle, you are silly, you make mischief, you love to laugh. Because of you, your daddy and I decided to move north, away from the suburban tangled sprawl of the tri-state area.

Because of you I stopped teaching and stay home with you instead. It is a new kind of job---one that I imagined I might resent, but do not. Great abundance has come into my life this year, as I spend my days with you. I have found my creative self again. I have begun to write and paint and draw.

Your presence in the moment has taught me how to return to the moment. To right now, here where your heart beats next to mine. You are more than I could have possibly dreamed of or imagined or hoped. Happy birthday, my little one.

Love, Mama

For a photo narrative of Bean's first year, go here.

Love is...

In the atmosphere above the sun the sky is dark and stars whirl. From there love scatters earthward arcing the distance between the divine and us, --and I am drenched with it.

In the way my small boy, newly walking, curls his fingers tightly around my hand and together we cross the room; or the way my man cups my face in his hands, still fiercely with want and tenderness after seven years.

Self Portrait Tuesday: All Of Me # 2

When Bean was napping and the light was good I grabbed my camera and started making faces. Not my usual camera faces---but the ones I really make when I’m animated, or angry, or being silly. The ones that the muscles in my face revert to unconsciously---the expressions that I know the FEEL of, but not the look of.

It was fascinating to discover what I really look like, ALL OF ME. I laughed so hard going through these (unedited) photos. I kept saying to myself, “I look like that, when I’m doing that?”

The bottom right picture may have been my attempt at looking demur. I nearly peed my pants when I saw it. Is THIS is the look I’ve used for years to score countless men? How has it possibly worked? Later, I asked my husband about it. He laughed, then confirmed that YES, I do actually make those faces, quite often. Then he told me just how much he loves me. All of me. And I’m sure I made some sort of rediculous face.

The shutter clicks and a short second, or maybe two are captured. Moments are not meant to be frozen. They are nimble and fleeting, one always melting into the next organically and without pause. There is something remarkably unnatural about the ability to capture a scene, an expression, light, movement, suddenly and permanently on the page with a camera. For me it has become a double edged sword: with my camera I force myself to notice unique shots; to notice more; to pay attention to light and texture and context. But at the same time when I’m with my camera I’m not interacting directly with my environment---suddenly I have a buffer, a piece of equipment that makes it possible to remove myself somewhat from the immediacy of the moment.

It was interesting to turn this lens on myself—to see what kind of observation and objectivity it could bring.

Instead of analyzing each frame for the negative attributes as I am prone to do, I allowed myself to simply enjoy these. To be wildly entertained. MY LIPS DO SOME DAMN AMAZING THINGS, people (ergo second row, forth from the left).

The best thing about this activity was that it made me take myself lightly. I am so much more than a collection of snapshots—and seeing them made me realize this. People see my smile and tell me it is beautiful—not because it is perfect, but because it is full of life. I smile with my heart. Laugh with my eyes. Talk with my hands. A hundred expressions pass across my face in the span of a conversation, and judging from the few I captured here, they’re mostly ridiculous. But, when they’re stitched together into the fabric of the moment, they make me.

Inspiration Monday # 1

My inspiration for this week comes from: Irene, who made this precious hat for Bean’s birthday (on Thursday), and this lovely neckwarmer for me.

Her way of writing---almost prose poetry---is so subtle, so full of emotion, that it always hits me right here, in my heart; makes me breathe deeper, makes me linger over her words.

Somehow she manages to write every day, take incredible self portraits and raise beautiful sons. She makes me laugh, makes me wish I live in Paris, and makes me wish I could knit. The slivers of wisdom and insight she has shared with me have had a direct impact on my writing life (and yes, Irene, you are SO going into the ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS if I ever write my book.)

A long day

Yesterday, winter festivities

I love living in a place where instead of complaining about the cold, people celebrate it for a good cause. There was hot coffee to be had amidst the revelry, as groups of costume clad folk made their way down to the water and JUMPED IN. There was whooping and gafawing and general yodeling going on as the DJ played "Cold as Ice" and brave souls got wet. Mind you, they needed to break the ice from the water first. I'm not a brave soul, but I took pictures.

We had a wonderful morning outside in bright winter sunlight, an afternoon nap that stretched on until early evening---the three of us to a bed. Then I managed to squeeze in a five mile run at the gym which brought my first week of marathon training to a close with my cumulative total miles run adding up to twenty. This is the first winter I haven't gone into hibernation, and I'm pretty thrilled.

Enjoy the chilly pics. There are more here.

Ski jump eyelashes.

Ice sculpture

Rocks on ice.

Uncarved blocks of ice.

Chilly.

Back to the usual mess making

Last night before I put Bean to bed I took out the new finger paints I'd bought and put paper down on the bathroom floor. Bean was so excited: alternately squealing with glee and furrowing his brows in concentration. He made it a full body experience, of course---and then I plunked him straight into a warm bath. What could be better?

She's okay!

She is okay. Home from the hospital with several bruises---but she was cracking jokes over the phone. She has always been like this---somehow upbeat right in the midst of adversity. When she was little every picture she drew had a sunshine in it---always, and she's like this still a little---though I'm sure she'd be the first to claim that the opposite is true. It's strange to have a moment like this happen: a phone call and then suddenly a whole expanse of unknowns. Your mind wanders out to the brink of what loss might look like and lingers there, shaking.

Tonight hearing her voice made tears spring up unexpectedly with relief. We're different, and we fight sometimes, but today reminded me that this is not what matters. What matters is each moment living. Each moment that we're talking and painting and working things out. Each moment breathing is good. Each moment laughing---better.

Thank you for all your kind thoughts & good wishes!

Unexpected

My sister was in a car accident this afternoon, and I’m here, half the country away waiting for any news---there isn’t much yet, she’s in the hospital and her husband is trying his best to hold it all together while fielding phone calls from us and trying to get permission to see her.

Up until a moment like this happens, you can’t imagine what it will be like. The sudden prickly heat of fear traveling up your neck. The worry that makes your armpits damp, makes your voice quaver, makes you laugh nervously. There is no way of being able to know how the minutes suddenly slow. How you want to bargain with whatever profound forces are involved in such events: want to rewind time and have it happen differently.

Please send your thoughts winging out into universe her way. I love her dearly.

Notes

I wear my shearling mittens and step out into the night. I need some time away from the house; from the repetition of the too-small space of the apartment and the constant narrative of things I need to do.

The cold air hits my face and make my teeth ache. On the sidewalk, a dusting of snow reveals the patterns of foot traffic, coming and going, that are usually invisible. I walk the same direction as another set of tracks for a few blocks, then they go on straight and I turn.

I push open the red door of a small bohemian café, order chai, and wedge myself into a corner booth with my notebook. The room swells with music. On the tiny stage about six feet away, a jazz band untangles a mess of notes that say more about sanguine longing, and bravado, sorrow and wonder, than anything I’ll be able to write.

It takes me a while to arrive. To stop feeling self conscious: with my long legs in a too small corner. But gradually I do. I let the music alter me the way a photograph changes hue under running water. I let the piano player’s wild notes dance across my brain, scattering the tension I’ve felt for days—and then the trumpeter picks up his horn and plays notes that are plaintive and tremulous and bold and I almost want to cry.

In between sets, when my eyes and my entire body are not wrapped up in the music, I take sips of chai and let my pen work its way across the page. First I write about the room: the heat, the red light spilling over the tables, the people in twos and threes mostly sitting around small tables sipping red wine. Then I sketch. Quick line drawings of chairs and trumpets, the drummers hands, the bass player’s back. When I write again it is about deeper things that have to do with love and loss, and my words, like my emotions scatter messily across the page.

Being here is somehow dislocating. I’m suddenly in limbo, not sure who I am. The person I am here in the midst of all this art and energy and verve is not the same person I am at home—where I’m somebody’s mother and dishes invariably need doing.

In the booth next to me two college girls chatter and I love their sloppy, carefree way of pulling together an outfit out of wooly boots, many necklaces and hoop earrings. When did I get so serious about clothing, I wonder? Almost everything I own is practical and understated. My camel colored cable knit sweater and sand washed jeans are boring in this room full of artist types who take risks with what they wear: horn rimmed glasses, hats with sequins, beaded chandelier earrings, plaid scarves and lovely faux fur trimmed coats.

The piano player is wearing a train conductor hat, and it works well with his jaw line. In the lamplight he is handsome—but more so because of the way his fingers move, pulling beauty and emotion out of black and white keys. I let my words follow the notes he plays—wildly, all over the place. I stop trying to write anything meaningful, and instead write whatever comes to mind, drawing lines between incongruous ideas like the pauses the players take between sets. Gradually, the words I scribble begin translating back and forth between the pieces of me, until I start feeling whole again.

When they take a break, the bass player, the drummer and the pianist go up to the bar and order dark beers in tall glasses. They stand around laughing, sipping their drinks. The place clears out a little an I let my shoulders relax. Opposite me, the trumpeter sits, still playing softly, eyes closed. I listen as he follows phrase, then carries out one string of notes until it becomes a wavering song of keening or rejoicing. He plays so tenderly, so quietly, it’s hard to hear against the ruckus gafaws and rowdy greetings.

More people push through the door, bringing the cold air with them, and as the musicians settle down for one final set before they count their tips in the big metal bowl, I toss my dollars in and leave—grateful for these moments of heat and wonder and song.

Clutter

February always gives me cabin fever. It is that month before anything noticeably spring-like happens: before buds swell or mud arrives—but after the magic of winter has worn off somewhat; when it just feels cold out no matter what, and all the stores rub it in by displaying only flip flops and little skirts (this should not be allowed, I think.)

It doesn’t help this February DH, Bean and I are living in about 900 square feet of space and we’re straining at the gussets. Maintaining tidiness here feels like trying to keep a house of cards erect in a windstorm.

I’d give a lot for a dishwasher tonight (the sink drain keeps clogging, and it gives me the heebie-jeebies to unclog it.) More for a basement that doesn’t flood with every rain storm (our boxes of books and summer clothes sit damply on pallets).

Tonight I am restless with longing: for a bedroom that is JUST a bedroom (not a nursery, and the epicenter for endless heaps of laundry), for a studio (that is NOT the dining room table), for ample cupboards and closets and shelves to store things in properly

I’m bumping up against my own thoughts like clothes on tumble dry. I feel wrung out.

Self Portrait Tuesday: All Of Me # 1

My nails are almost always dirty and I have square hands. Usually my cuticles are stained with paint, my nails trimmed irreverently so that they’re short, not shaped. My knuckles boney, veins bulge.

I used to be embarrassed by my hands, boyish and un-ladylike. But gradually I’ve grown to love all that they are. My father’s hands—a size smaller. Able hands, strong hands.

I climb crags, wield a hammer, kneed bread, and paint all with my hands. I make love, bathe my son, pet the cat, and pull weeds all with my hands.

They don’t dress up well. They are not made for “hey Vito is my car red-y?” red. But they are capable of a thousand finely tuned maneuvers. In the kinesthetic memory of my fingers the expanse of my keyboard is stored.

I can type almost as fast as I think.

Synchronicity – events that seem related but are not obviously caused by one another

A week ago I saw a flyer advertising baby sitting and took down the number. DH and I had been talking about how we’re finally ready to start letting someone take care of Bean for a couple hours during the week while we work together on the house, so we called. She was wonderful, and tonight she came and spent an hour with Bean while DH and I walked down town together like teenagers—just us, holding hands.

We stopped for chai (for me) and espresso (for him) and a chocolate filled pastry (to share, licking the chocolate off our fingers), and then went to the bookstore where I devoured (on a mini artist date) the glossy spreads in design magazinesand DH wandered off to the fantasy section.

When we left the bookstore it is snowing gently. Back home, Bean was happy and the babysitter was happy (which made me unbelievably happy, and terribly relieved). After she left, friends stopped by and we had an impromptu takeout dinner—pad thai, dumplings, tofu, spicy noodles. Then I took over the table with my boxes of scraps, paints, gel, glue sticks, brushes.

I've booked three art showings in cafes this week, and I'm unbelievably excited. (One thing I have done as a result of the Artist’s Way has been to acknowledge and set the ball in motion on some of the things that I've had on my dream list for way too long. Cafe art showings has been one of those things.) For the first time since I was a kid, I’m finally allowing myself to say it regularly. I am an artist.

Meeting the neighbors

We went to the house around noon today, with plans to walk the boundaries of our property—and discovered an entire field that is ours, that we didn’t know about. It is an old meadow, grown tall with hickory and crab apple saplings. The week has been warm, as though a chinook wind were blowing from the east, already bringing spring. Almost all the snow has melted, and the mud is thick along the road approaching our house. Only on the shadiest slopes of the hill snow still lingers in white patches like an Andrew Wyeth painting. Shelf fungus and moss grows thickly on the fallen branches—ripped from trunks in the ice storm last October.

Already I am itching to keep field notes in a new moleskine where I can press beech leaves and wild grasses into the pages, or sketch the deer tracks and raccoon turds I found today along one of the old stone walls that skirt the property. Today I brought my camera and clambered up the quartz and granite boulders at the back edge of the woods, and then down to the splashing creek. It sounded deeper than it is—the ground is so satturated from recent rains, the water echoes off it like a drum.

The stream meanders down a channel of mud and rocks towards the road and the neighbor's land. We walk there next to say hello—something both of us are kind of hesitant to do. But, as is generally the case, those first encounters are more awkward in our heads than they are in person and when we knock at the neighbor’s door they both answer, soot on their hands.

“Come on in,” she says, without asking us who we are or why we’re there.

So there we are, crossing over the threshold into their snug living room, and mumbling about how we just bought the house on the hill.

He is cleaning their wood burning stove, but stops, brushes off his hands, and shakes ours. He has big limpid blue eyes, graying hair, and a dark smudge over one shaggy eyebrow.

As I say the words, “the house on the hill,” her eyes immediately tear up. I ask, “Did you know the woman who lived there?”

“I was with her when she died,” she says. “We were very close. She was the nicest lady in the world.” Then she tells us about the flowers she’s planted in our yard that will surprise us in the spring—and all about our other neighbors.

He stands there grinning, adding tidbits to the story. Egging her on when she leaves the juicy details out. “You’ve got to know about Crazy Bob,” he says. And also about kooky Kay, whose husband died years ago and her floor hasn’t been cleaned since, or so the story goes.

But they also tell us about our immediate neighbors—a doctor, a mechanic, a vet—who throw a sugaring off party each spring and go cross country skiing together, and who’ve known each other for years.

We can’t help but feel young—most of our neighbors have kids our age. But they put us at ease—extending an invitation already to the sugaring party, where, they promise, we’ll meet everyone. Before we leave she promises to help me with my garden in the spring, then blows Bean kisses in the drive as we walk back to our house.

Inside, the house is warm. The air is dusty, the floors stripped down to the plywood. DH has been going over after work, ripping down walls and reframing, and already the difference is huge. Like any renovation project things are unexpected: the set of oak stairs masked beneath hideous carpet—but also the furnace so old it will need replacing before next winter. We stand together—the three of us—eating hot pastrami sandwiches and planning out where walls will go. Bean takes bites of the bread with his new teeth and squirms in my arms. Soon we will be able to come here and let him run around on the grass. Soon, this will be home.