Self Portrait Tuesday: Time #2

Me as an 8 year old: Lanky as a bean pole with scratched knees, and sun blonde hair. Riding a red wagon down a washed out gully, full tilt. Climbing loquat and eucalyptus trees up to their highest branches, never falling. Rolling down the long stretch of grassy hill again and again and again. Keeping swallowtail caterpillars in a box. Becoming an expert mark with the bow and arrows I carved myself. Telling myself stories—outloud. Drinking root beer floats in ceramic mugs. Running naked with a herd of cattle in Covelo, CA when it was so hot, mirages would spring up everywhere at a distance…. And rescuing this squirrel from our cat. He became my pet for the year. His name was Chipper—because he liked eating corn chips, of course. He’d ride around on my shoulders, under my hair, or in a pouch I made.

Me as a teenager: Lanky and uncoordinated. Getting curves and waging a war against them. Scratched knees, a Lifeguard tan, sun and peroxide bleached hair. Riding around in a mint green Toyota Tercel with my best friend from high school eating cherries. Climbing cliffs at Goat Rock, never falling. Kissing boys again and again and again. Reading Dostoyevsky, Soloviev, Dante and Tolstoy for pleasure. Drinking beer, hating my parents and lying a lot. Writing stories---in my journal. Swimming naked at Salmon Creek beach with friends. ….And keeping chickens (7-8th grade), a rabbit, another rabbit, a dog, and Manx named Tomten.

Me in college: Lanky and mostly coordinated. Trying to learn how not to hate my curves. Scratched knees, East Coast pallor, my first pedicure and professionally highlighted hair. Riding my road bike 500 miles from upstate NY to Canada. Riding my mountain bike all over the woods. Climbing rock walls, sometimes falling. Kissing boys again and again and again, until I found the right one. Reading Diddion, Ellison, Kozol, and Morrison. Drinking wine from long stemmed glasses, learning to be honest with my parents and love myself. Writing poems and stories so furiously and copiously, I was sure I’d die of thirsting for words if I stopped. Running naked into the autumn waves at Harkness beach with my boyfriend (DH!)… And taking care of a python, a gecko, and an oyster toadfish (a work-study gig at a science center), milking 40 head of cows at a dairy (summer of my freshman year), and watching swans in the cove near my college.

Me now: Lanky and as coordinated as I’ll ever be. Finally loving my body for what it does: give birth, run long miles, hold me up right, give me pleasure; rather than for how it looks. Shin splints, East Coast pallor, and no-highlights pony tail. Riding the bike at the gym for cross training. Making plans to spend the summer rock climbing with my best friend from college. Kissing my husband and my beautiful Bean again and again and again. Reading Goldberg, Lamott, Kingsolver, Oliver, Illende and Bly. Drinking lattes for survival in the morning, loving my mother, missing my father, and trusting myself. Daring to write like my voice matters, and feeling certain that I’d die of thirsting for words if I stopped. Sleeping naked….And dreaming of keeping bees, and chickens; rescuing the neighborhood stray cat, missing my dog (with DH’s parents in NJ until we move) and tolorating the constant butt-first affection of my male cat, Mojo (why, why must cats be like that??)

Some things change with time. Other things never seem to.

Pictures from my kitchen tonight

Dinner with friends. Two one-year-olds running around the livingroom waving kitchen utensils. Adult conversation & good wine. Pizza deliverd, and ripe avocados. Fresh raspberries for desert with vanilla ice cream and brownies DH made while I was out on a early evening run. (It was warm enough outside to run in shorts!) Cappucinos. Laughter. Then a tuckered out babe, and a quiet house. Tea with turbinado sugar & snuggling on the couch with DH. Looking back through photo albums of five years ago when we were just dating and eager. (Our first apartment on the Upper East Side; a backpacking trip in Pueto Rico; a bike trip up the California coast.) Now to stumble greatfully to bed.

It's starting to feel like home

I spend the day pulling nails, removing plank after plank from the barn board on the walls in the living room and foyer. I wear leather work gloves, old pink corduroys, and a dust mask. Particles float in the air like plankton. Each piece of wood is old and feels light and brittle. Some splinter when I pry the nails out, but I am trying to keep as many pieces intact as I can. This is good wood: probably a hundred years old. I know this much: it comes from Addison County, and on one plank I found “KS + BC, ‘29” scratched into the wood.

Every time I arrive at our after being in our crowded little apartment I feel like my heart is going to burst with longing and giddy glee. Invariably, I leap from the car and must go straight out into the fields where I walk along the old stone walls, taking inventory of all the small things I hardly know and already love: mossy covered logs, mule deer tracks, coyote scat, seed pods rattling empty in the wind.

Last week the fields were covered with snow—nearly a foot in the low places—and zig zagged with tracks. Now the road dirt road leading to our house is thick with mud, and except in the shady wooded valley where sunlight barely creeps and the stream runs, the snow has melted. Brown grasses lie limp and pummeled against the sloping earth, but below the dead stalks, I can new green.

The robins arrived this week. I always know that spring is for keeps when they come. It might still snow, but the relentless turning of the earth means longer days and warmer air. Today as I’m prying the boards loose from crumbling gypsum, I feel spring fever, plain and simple.

I open the windows, and notice flies (I think must have been dormant) are now buzzing with irritating stupidity in the space between the window glass and the screen. Fresh air rushes in, and I’m warm enough in my faded red t-shirt. All I want is to get outdoors, when I’ve gotten every plank off the wall, pulling bent nails from each piece, and stacking it neatly, I give in.

The sun is falling towards the west, and in the east a gibbous moon is rising just above the trees.

I sit on the lawn and watch it rise.

I can’t remember the last time I watched the moon slowly climb the sky, moving between the branches of the beeches as though it were climbing the rungs of a ladder. The sky is a perfect deep blue, and the tree tops are stained golden in the setting sun.

I listen. The neighbor’s sheep are coming in from the fields and I can hear them bah-ing plaintively. Then I hear an early owl call from the woods, it’s whoo-whooing echoing around our land like a marble rolling in a glass bowl.

I hear mourning doves, flickers, chickadees and red winged blackbirds. I try to focus, drawing my eyes to where my ears pick up each bird’s individual call; and I see them on the tops of trees, serenading the setting sun. I can’t bring myself to move. In the field below me, I watch small red squirrels run up and down tree trunks.

The moon is above the tallest tree now, and the sun just below the twiggy edge of the woods. Sitting here like this, with my face drenched in evening sunlight nand my arms wrapped around my knees, reminds me why we’re here.

Why we struggle on so many days to put together cohesive and civil sentences with each other, exhaustion stretching us so far and we forget to do anything else. Why we’re living in a too-small apartment, in a neighborhood full of college kids whose whooping wakes us up at 2am, where we’ve grown used to seeing the spinning red lights of the ambulance, called again and again to the house across the street as a woman screams and a man yells and then things get too quiet too fast.

Sitting on now on the lawn looking at the mountains and the tiny houses dotting the valley below like toy figurines, feels just like finding one of those store directories in the mall with the little red arrow that says “YOU ARE HERE.”

We’re making a home. Making it with our hands and our longing; with our fights, our silences, our love making, our laughter, our work.

It didn’t even take a month after Bean was born to realize that we wanted to move away from the congested tangle of Southern Connecticut with its perpetually snarled Highway 95, and it’s disproportionate emphasis on money and belongings. Holding him when he was still small enough to fit along the length of DH’s forearm, his little eyes shut tight in slumber, we knew it was not even a choice. We had to move: to risk everything and start new.

I can’t help but wonder if we would have moved at that time—or ever—if we hadn’t had Bean. A part of me pictures the fragments of our lives would have been like: sharp little pieces of worry poking up through our busy days. Commuting everywhere, so much time in the car. And another part of me imagines the excuses we would have: the unknowns, the cost, the labor, the risk all would have weighed too greatly when put in the scale along side our comfortable, if not stifled life.

How grateful I am for the wild unplanned joy of Bean, and for the fierce bugle call of our dreams that sounded as a result.

My feet sink into the muddy ground, and I rest my chin casually on a knee as I watch the bright scarlet wing patch of a blackbird dip and dive across the tree line. Here I am, I think.

Wednesday Mosaic

We eat sweet ataulfo mango scored into cubes and eaten right from the peel with our fingers, the sticky juice getting everywhere. Bean runs round and round the coffee table coming back each time for more, his cheeks flecked with the yellow fruit. We’re both grinning. The sun hits the back of my neck and makes the leather of the couch warm to the touch. The cats are sitting on the windowsill soaking up the sun’s heat, and when we go out onto the porch for a moment I hear birds—not just the house finches and chickadees that have kept us company all winter, but early song birds that I cannot yet name by call alone.

The lowers DH brought home a few days ago for me, still blooming: hot magenta, lemon and golden petals filling the room with delicate fragrance. Breakfast is my favorite meal and this week we’ve been gathering around the island in the kitchen, the three of us eating mouthfuls of warm buttered toast, fresh plums, yogurt, coffee. Even though Bean was up so much last night I heard myself say to DH, “I can’t wait for the night to be over,” at around 2:30 a.m., this start to the day somehow redeems it. The tiredness temporarily wiped away by the fact that I’m here with my guys in the kitchen, DH and I swapping small talk and smiles while Bean kicks his highchair and practices using a fork.

By late morning I sink gratefully into clean sheets (I love the way they feel, newly laundered), and nap hard with Bean nudged into the nook of my arm. When he wakes me two hours later, I can’t figure out where I am. The house, the bedroom, everything is utterly unfamiliar for a minute as my brain untangles itself from the terrain of my dream.

It is one of those days of family meals, and I love this. I make tofu with sesame seeds and almonds, sautéed sugar snap peas, rice pilaf, and while I’m cooking DH and Bean take a walk down the block. I catch them with my camera on their return, and Bean sees me from half a block away and grins as wide as a melon wedge when he runs into my arms.

Later we go to the park, snow still on the ground, and I watch in wonderment as my baby is suddenly a kid. Independent. Exploring. Picking up woodchips and throwing them with glee, then taking my hand and climbing the stairs to the slide where we go down together over and over again. On the way back I look for more evidence of spring: and find sap making buds knobby and big on twigs, and former icy patches into puddles reflecting sky.

When we get home I finally make it: the perfect chai masala. Steamed milk, good sugar, and this tea.

Self Portrait Tuesday: Time #1

I ran 11 miles today. It felt like an eternity and I wanted to give up many more than eleven times, but I didn't. I chose to run indoors after my last long run left me chilled to the bone, but regretted my decision. It was sunny outside even though it was cold, and the scenery would have kept me engaged. Running indoors is synonymous with boredom, and though I brought these stories to listen to on my iPod, and could be seen from time to time grinning from ear to ear as a result, I couldn’t shake the monotony of running in place.

One foot after the other, staring at myself in the mirror for 1 hour and 45 minutes makes time do crazy things. This much I know: time is not a constant medium. In the last half hour of running, when both knees were burning and I was dying for Gatorade (which I forgot to bring) and I had to pee, it felt like each minute was stretched out the way a tape sounds when the tape film gets pulled. The song blares at warp speed, all blurry and ridiculous.

Other times —-like when on the couch and write in my notebook with the bright morning sun flooding in through the windows---an hour or two feels like a small pocketfull of minutes. I could sit there forever, writing. No amount of time feels long enough. Bean always wakes too soon.

So I've found that staying present in the moment: running only for these steps that are happening now; holding my mind in check, right NOW---is the only way humanly possible to make it through 11 miles. This is also how I make it through the rough days when everything's off kilter; and how I plan to make it through 26.6 miles.

Taken moment by moment, the quality of time evens out. Now is NOW. Thid moment I can bear—and then suddenly this moment has become the next.

***

Here is a brillaint piece of writing about time.

Here are other self portrait takers.

Snow & sky: pictures from our land

Waxing moon

Fence post at the tree line

Tracks in the woods.

Our uplowed snowy driveway.

Field weeds.

Winding road.

Mt. Mansfield at sunset.

Snowy day

We woke up to snow---powdery inch upon inch making everything sparkling and white. When the sidewalks were plowed, the snow came up to my knees on either side, and all day fat dreamy flakes drifted down.

Sometime in the past month Bean has connected the word "snow" with snow, and today when I said "do you see it snowing?" he ran to the window to look out, still in his jammies.

After a breakfast of waffles and eggs we put on our jackets and went out on the porch. This was the first time he's ever REALLY played in snow---the first time touching it, bare handed; the first time he made the connection that the stuff on the porch was the same stuff coming down from the sky---and he'd point to snowflakes falling and say "uh, uh, uh!"

He ran out the door and knelt in it eagerly, but then sat back and stared at it for a good long minute, as if frozen in amazment. After his initial shock that it's REALLY COLD, he started to play, picking up handfuls, and watching as each little flake dissolved in the heat of his palm.

Becoming

To grow is to go beyond what you are today.

Stand up as yourself.

Do not imitate.

Do not pretend to have achieve your goal, and do not try to cut corners.

Just grow.

--Svami Prajnanpad

***

I am surrounded by notebooks, and I am taking notes. Like an archeologist, I am looking for clues about the piece (a book?) I am trying to write. I want to find the veins that traverse it, that bring meaning to it’s peripheries. I am re-reading all the scribbled pages and documents I’ve written since the winter of 2004 when I was hugely pregnant, exhausted, and severely dislocated from my sense of self. It is startling and sometimes funny to go back and read all the thoughts I’ve dutifully recorded.

Over and over againI write the same things, tugging at the girdle of phrasing, couching my words this way and then that---trying to get closer to truth. And then over and over I forget.

I find I’ve written things down that make me laugh out loud. Like this:

“I look around the apartment today and think: god, I’ve all but killed the houseplants.”

Other things make me go quiet inside, the way a bird must feel after it has landed. Like this:

“The map of your identity changes when you love someone. “

**

“On the train home, we slice through the dark—an isolated rectangle of light and breath and shifting weight.” **

“The days of recovery from labor and bonding with Bean have blurred together into a continuous present. I find I am unable to think very far forward or backward and instead end up lingering in the moment doing nothing except watching and listening to my son breathe.”

** “His little fingers curl around my thumb, and I am learning humility now. The moments of each days fabric have become a string of little wonderments. Little things matter now. Like coffee, and the incredible smell of his hair.”

** “Everyone lives through periods of intense change, yet few give pause to these moments of turbulence. Few are present and reflective right in the moment of becoming.”

**

I’ve started to feel present in the story I am trying to write for the first time, and have begun to realize that it is more than a story about birth (my son’s) or death (my father’s) or love (my parents, my own). It is a story about becoming.

I want to know your stories of becoming.

Just the way to start a day

Bean woke early this morning, so we decided to make the best of it by taking a walk to a new bakery that just opened a month ago. The air was biting cold, but the sun was out so brightly it impossible not to smile. In the older section of town, where stores are a bit run down, and the people are a more flavorful mix of Somalians, Ethiopians, Bosnians and Vermonters, the little new bakery occupies a bright yellow building with blue and red trim.

We parked our stroller outside and trundled in---immediately transported to some Old World place of heady bread aromas, freshly brewing coffee and warm croissants. A tiny place really, with just enough room for wall counters and stools, and a display rack, the rest of the shop is the bakery itself, where the baker whom we recognized from summer farmer’s market trips, was rolling dough.

As if aware of our delight, Bean sat happily on the high counter in the sun, still bundled in his snowsuit, his hair standing straight up with static, and ate mouthfuls of buttery croissant. NPR was on low in the background and when fresh coffee cake came out of the oven—all crumbly and sweet, we ordered two pieces. If I could have my way, this is how I would start every single day

It's March

It’s March, and like clockwork all the maples and hickories, oaks and beeches along the sidewalks have swollen nubbins of buds. The air is just that much warmer. The sunlight lasts just that little bit longer. And it makes all the difference.

It’s been one of those weeks that has zipped by in a blur: moments scattering like a flock of grackles. Now as I sit down to write with a steaming cup of tea, it takes me a moment to gather up the memories, to locate myself in the present of this flutter of action.

A few things that have happened this week:

DH and I got to work on the house together for a few days in a row(we’ve stuck gold with the baby sitter. Bean adores her!) and this made a huge difference for us. Not only are we finally making what feels like significant progress, but we also feel like we're on the same page for the first time in weeks.

Another good thing on the homefront: 0ur kitchen cabinets were delivered on Monday, each Shaker style piece in its own cardboard box, nestling together like some extraterrestrial cityscape.

It felt like Christmas, opening them. Drawers with pneumatic buffers, a pantry with folding out storage shelves, a sink base wide enough for this kind sink; SPACE, finally for all our serving dishes, utensils, measuring cups. Progress feels like it is finally being made, and we’re moving now more rapidly towards laying flooring and building the remaining walls.

Yesterday, DH took over the evening routine with Bean and I took the night off. Time at the gym, and then to Barnes & Noble where I spent the rest of the night organizing notes for the manuscript I’m working on. It felt so good not to be rushing. To have the time to run a full seven miles (in just over an hour), and to linger reading the latest Elle magazine on the stretching mat. And then to finally sink into my writing long enough to gather up all the loose threads and get a hold of the big-picture tapestry again.

Today, I got this project underway. I'm really excited about this (and I hope you are too!)

And tonight walking to my intaglio print making class all the bells from church towers around the city were chiming—dinner hour. It was so beautiful---the sun just set, and the sky awash with rosy pinks. Then to spend three solid hours with a bunch of other artist women getting printing ink and whiting under our nails: heaven.

Little delight

My silly boy. He LOVES to slurp noodles.

I didn't necessarily get anything more accomplished today, but I feel less worried about it. Things have a way of working out, especially when I allow myself to return to the moment.

I made plans with DH so that I can have some solid hours of writing later this week, and today under bright blue skys Bean and I took a walk.

I was eating an apple---something I rarely do, and Bean watched me in wonder for a bit and then wanted a bite himself. And so we walked: one bite for me, one for him, a couple of steps, repeat. We looked at all the snow, still powdery and white along the edges of the sidewalk. We kicked lumps of frozen snow---his little feet following the intention of his brain with surprising accuracy. We pulled at dried grasses and picked up sticks.

It took us about twenty minutes to walk the length of our block, and I felt lighthearted and glad to be outdoors holding his little hand. Moment by moment, things have a way of working out.

What does it take?

Sometimes it feels so impossible to do this well: to be a mother and be all that that requires and still do other things. To have days like today when Bean was restless and fussy and probably teething (when he would cry and achieve spectacular meltdowns when I denied him things like the phone or a full pitcher of water) and to keep intact some sense of purpose outside of mothering.

I can’t help feeling anxious: a writing deadline for a workshop I want to take this summer is rapidly approaching. I want it so much my heart aches, and yet, immediately the chorus of doubt starts warming up.

On days like this I lie in the dark of the bedroom nursing Bean for what feels like the umpteenth time, and to grasp at the wisps of images that linger at my mind’s periphery. A new idea for a painting. A handful of possibilities for the manuscript I must write. But when I finally settle down after the laundry has been done, the dishes washed, I am able to locate only tiny fragments.

I try to remember to breathe, to let the hurdy gurdy of my heart play easy music, even when there is hubbub all around, the room strewn with a hundred small things: shoes and toys, books, little snippets.

I try to remember to pause, to let the kite of my soul lift off the ground even when the day brings complication: so many things that are not either/or, that are not simple, that are instead sticky with doubt and exhaustion.

I try to remember to let words be more than the little pieces: linking contents with ingredient, newsprint with the days events, even when I am empty like the broken glass I swept into the dustpan from the kitchen floor.

I try to remember to be patient, to stitch together moments into a mosaic of things that matter: tea & crumb cake with Bean at Barnes & Noble in the morning; buying 79 cent Dagoba chocolate samples and raspberry licorice, fresh naval oranges, milk in a glass jug, and squash & maple ravioli. A half hour to myself (the only time all day) when he finally napped in the afternoon: just me and the cat and more tea on the couch, eyeing Annie Liebovitz's pics in Vanity Fair. And later, reading essays from this collection at the gym.

Decisively NOT spring, but still good

Did I say something about spring? Right. It snowed ALL DAY yesterday. Beautiful, sparkling snow, but snow none the less. I actually am not complaining. I like things to be decisive. It’s the waffling that gets me: almost winter and almost not. Cold enough to see your breath, but not cold enough to tell the crocuses to wait. So now we have snow, and I’m fine with that. At least it really feels like winter. We went to the Mardi Gras parade downtown. The streets were choked with foot traffic. Revelers in gloves and mittens screamed for beads. Bean napped the entire time—even when a float impersonating a barge went by, blaring a barge horn.

Later, one my favorite people in the whole world drove four hours through the snow to come see us. She is the same amazing human being who arrived on day four after Bean was born when everyone had left and all the excitement had supposedly died down---but really I was too sore to walk or do laundry, DH had a fever of 101 and was vomiting with the same evil stomach virus that I’d had before going into labor, and I was a mess of tears and exhaustion. She came from Boston and took one look at us and started cleaning. THIS is the kind of friend you want in your life. The kind that takes one look at your exhausted face and instead of ogling uselessly at your baby during the five minutes he’s asleep, does your dishes instead. Oh how I adore her.

So, she arrived in the middle of the snowstorm and we drank many, many cups of spicy chai tea with milk and ate oodles of cookies. Life is good.

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.