A week of mornings..

Monday:I’m stumbling to break into a new routine of writing in the morning before my thoughts are shattered with day. Now I wake up with dreams still trailing through my mind like the tails of wild horses, and there is nothing I can hold onto for sure. But it is a quieter time, now, with the restless cat circling my knees, as the before-dawn light spreads out above the blue of land and fog like a pale smudge of jam. I’m ready to at least sit and follow the words across the page.

*

Tuesday: It’s early and I’ve wrapped my wet hair in a fleece blanket to stay warm. The house creaks as the heat comes on. Outside the mercury hovers near zero. Already daylight is smudging the clouds with pale gray and rose. I do not want to be awake today, tiredness clings to me, making my vision blurry.

*

Wednesday: This morning the white-bread toast is gummy and the tea too sweat. I brought a handful of pecan halves upstairs, but I’m not interested now, in the dark before dawn when the temperature dips and the house is still. * Thursday: The morning is frail and dark. My body aches from a lack of sleep, and my dreams tumbled around my mind like rocks in the dryer. Now day, and I’m anxious. No clean laundry, not enough time to accomplish the things I need to get done. *

Friday: Morning, just six hours after crawling under the heap of down comforters and closing heavy lids. Morning and the sky is so beautiful, I wish I could capture it just once the way it really appears, for those fleeting moments of dawn before day. Moments when everything still rests, and branches are quiet angled lines against the delicate expanse of sky.

This morning toast with raspberry jam, and hardly anything to write or say, except to keep the momentum of early morning waking. So I sip coffee from a tall mug and hear my baby’s voice rise up, waking his daddy, and greeting day, and though I’m tired, I’m grateful.

officially freaking out

I've mentioned before how scheduling isn't particularly a strength, and though I do own a calendar, I don't seem to know how to use it. I've been going through this week happily thinking I had the ENTIRE WEEK of winter vacation (next week) off to work on my grad school application (20 page manuscript, shudder, cough) but um, it's due on MARCH 1st which is actually in the middle of next week. Crap. Um. So. I need you all to cross your fingers for me and tell me nice things and forgive my absence a possibly give me critical feedback if I get up the guts to post any of the work I'm submitting (some of the original ideas came from here actually.)

Can you do that? Because right now I feel like I totally suck and I have to teach two more days and I feel like I'm coming down with the stomach flu and by tonight I'm supposed to do wildly impossible things like email one of my profs from college a 'statement of purpose' so that he can write a recommendation that's up to date. Yipes. The stomach ache doesn't help things. And seriously, why the fuck wasn't I able to actually LOOK AT THE CALENDAR, before assuming I had 10 days to get this done, when really I have, oh, FOUR. Oh, and I have to be observed teaching tomorrow and I haven't written up the plans for that (part of our yearly eval process.) Crap. crap. crap.

A reader's life...

Before reading I listened. I was the eleven-year-old with scratches on her knees, perched on the armrest of my dad’s tan Lazy Boy, listening to Huckleberry Finn and The Yearling. I was a late reader; a kid in the ‘special’ reading group. But those early years when reading wasn’t really mine, gave me stories in a different way, and for this I am grateful. Listening to a book is different than reading one. There is nuance and rhythm to a text read aloud. I think every author secretly wishes his or her book will be read this way: aloud, into the quiet of a room with crickets calling through the open screen, each word received by eager ears. I was such a captive audience then, unable to skip ahead when I was bored or didn’t understand. I learned to stay with texts. I learned to love words, and book after book, my appetite for words grew. Eventually, when I did learn to read, I remember feeling a little bit in awe that I could just pick up a book, open it, and the entire story could be mine. Now I watch the first graders I teach start the year barely able to identify all the letters in the alphabet, leave in June sixty-pages deep in an adventure story, and I’m still a little bit in awe. I teach kids how to break words apart and reassemble them so that sentences become whole. I teach them how to keep a story map in the back pocket of their imagination, how to watch each character for signs of change, and how to delve deeply into the world of images they know to construct a new world specific to the book, but I do not really teach them how to read. The stories teach them, just as they taught me: how to read, and also how to write so that the words I type take on the shape of what matters in my life.

The first book that had this affect on me was Isabelle Illende’s memoir, Paula. I was eighteen when I read it, and living in Germany for a year before college. By then I had read and loved many books, but never had even remotely imagined writing them. Paula was my first encounter with creative nonfiction and reading it changed my understanding of what was possible, or even allowable in writing. It was the first time I had considered that my life—right there on the train with tears streaming down my cheeks as I finished the book, surrounded by tall men in shearling hats speaking a dialect of German thick with consonants—was story. A year later, I enrolled in my first creative writing class.

Many of the authors I discovered throughout college who still matter to me, are writers who are present with their sleeves rolled up, in the middle of their stories. Tracy Kidder, John McPhee, Annie Dillard, Terri Tempest Willaims, Susan Orlean, Barbara Kingsolver and Joan Diddion, are several authors whose work I have read, and re-read, marking the pages and underlining text, in the process of cultivating my own voice as a writer. Each brings a distinct perspective to their writing of life as it is happening to them in the moment. In Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Diddion took risks that made the hair on my neck stand up. She dared me over and over again to be more honest in my writing, and I copied sections of that book line by line, to better understand how such writing was constructed. Doing this made each comma, each period, each word, newly significant. Reading like this, through writing, allowed me to feel the meter and meaning of her prose in my hands, in my wrists, in my heartbeat.

Because listening came first, a part of me is always listening when I read. What draws me to a text might be its topic or title, but what keeps me is its tenor; the way vowels play together among words, the way meaning is made from each small parcel of lines gathered together with just the right punctuation. As a result, though I have been an avid reader of memoir and essays, nature writing, travel stories, and ethnographies, since college, my nightstand is always an eclectic a jumble of novels and poetry.

Sometimes when I walk in the woods behind my house, I realize after it is already too late that I have walked through a spider’s web spanning the seven or eight feet of path; tiny gossamer threads invisible to me until I feel them. Long after I’ve continued on, I’m still brushing away the sticky threads that linger, clinging to my cheek or hair. Reading is like this for me. A line, a character, a scene, small fragments of the prose I’ve read remain in my mind long after I’ve put the book aside. Annie Dilliard’s essay “Total Eclipse” is like this. Though the first time I read it was nearly ten years ago, I still get caught in its imagery: I cannot imagine an eclipse without imagining hers. Countless other texts have had this affect as well. Certainly Flannery O’ Conner, William Faulkner, Sue Monk Kid, Robert Bly, Mary Oliver, and William Stafford are a few writers whose names can be found along the spines of many volumes on my bookshelves; the words and characters they have created dance up before my memory like sunspots, keeping me company, giving solace, or taking me for a wild ride.

I always have at least two books with me, (right now it’s Gilead and The Year of Magical Thinking; before that, What We Ache For and The Memory Keeper’s Daughter) so that I’m ready for when a few moments land back to back, as my toddler sleeps in the car, or while waiting at the dentist’s office. Also because I’m a mother, and a teacher, and my time is flecked with interruptions, I read copiously Online. Being able to peruse Anne Lamott’s essays at Salon.com, or David Sedaris’s most recent humor at The New Yorker Online, makes me giddy. Like the orange sections offered to runners at each marathon mile mark, the essays and reviews, political commentary and prose I read Online, are moments of sheer sweetness wedged between the must-do things of daily life: email and lesson plans for the week.

Now when I try to remember what the actual process of learning to read was like I cannot put my finger on anything specific. No ah-ha moment, no instance when words clicked into place, and suddenly became story. All I can remember is that before, the words of Frog And Toad flipped about on the page like fishes, and my parents were the keepers of the wonderment contained within each book. After, the stories were mine to devour whole, and hungrily, I did. Reading is still like this for me, vital and sustaining. It has become something almost reflexive, like breathing.

2 Years Old

Happy Birthday Little One,

You are two today, bright eyed and full of laughter. When you woke up this morning, you called for Daddy, and he brought you to bed between us, where you snoozed dreamily for another hour, content in a cocoon of love and warm breath between us. When you woke for the second time, we sang happy birthday to you, and you grinned your sunny grin, your bottom incisors just cutting through your gums, and said, “Make birthday cake?”

Birthday cake is what turning two is all about for you. Especially when it’s made with chocolate frosting. You call it “Chocit iting,” and tonight the three of us made your cake together: your great grandmother’s pound cake recipe with chocolate cream cheese frosting and fresh strawberries. You licked the batter off the whisk, and the icing from your fingers, and when it came time to blow out your candles—two, and one to grow on, you took the job quite seriously. Your eyes were so large, in the semi dark. Your breath so full with two year old wonder.

You have become such an incredible person this year, full of inquisitiveness and delight. You want to understand how everything works, you can use a real screwdriver correctly, and reprogram every possible item in our house with buttons (the thermostat, by climbing up onto the back of the chair; my laptop; daddy’s computer; the answering machine...) You are a nature lover, a collector of small quartz rocks and tiny acorns. You are tender, and you hate see me sad. You reach out for us now, saying “Hug!” when you want to be wrapped tightly in our arms, and you gather up your stuffed animals and cars and trucks and even picture books, to give them hugs as well.

It would be okay to have you stay this way for another year: so sweet and rosy and full of wonder, despite your temper tantrums which mostly leave Daddy and I hysterically laughing. You delight at the world. “So pretty,” you say, noticing the moon, the setting sun, the rising stars, with your arms outstretched, and eyes wide. We love you so much, your daddy and I, despite the fact that having you has stretched the fabric of our love for each other in a hundred new directions. You make us laugh a zillion times a day, and make us stop and ponder too, how great a gift our life is.

Love, Mommy

Birthday photoset here.

Snowday # 2

Yipeeee! Snow feet deep in drifts by the door, and another day of canceled school. Another day to write, and sip chai tea, and play with Bean (just hours left until he's two, really). Sometimes winter doesn't suck.

Self portrait challenge: black & white # 2

Unexpected gratitude at 5:15 a.m., snow already piled high, and more steadily falling. A morning to myself, writing, with coffee. My studio a haven for a few hours, while I flail about like a spawning salmon, trying to get the words right. Working my way paragraph by paragraph towards the fresh water of what it is I'm really trying to say. Snowplows scrape the roads below our house, and out the window, a blur of white on white. Like love, like staying married, writing requires this: hard scrabble perserverance. So again and again, I show up at the page. And last night, on my way home, I stopped to buy a dozen roses wrapped in brown paper, for the man I love.

Hopscotch

The forecast: more icy air, and I’m starting to feel antsy with winter. But today pure sunshine reflecting off the snow and spilling onto the hot pink flowers on the windowsill. It was weekend of long naps; of using a winch to get the truck out of a snowbank; of cheap red wine and good friends with toddlers running pell-mell; of a handful of quiet moments with a magazine on the couch, coffee cup in hand, its sweet fragrance rising up with the steam.

Also, it was a weekend of roller coaster emotions. In one instance I’m sure we’re in it for the long haul: we’re standing together in the sunlight in the kitchen, arms around each other, kissing, while our kid eats kiwi circles; and then in another instance we’re off kilter, unintended words tumbling like the triangular blocks at the top of the tower that make the whole castle fall, a geometric mess of shapes onto the floor.

Right now for us there is no room for error, no space for careless words, for passive teasing, for jagged edges. It’s like we’re always at square one, tossing the rock, jumping forward, trying not to land on the chalked lines, but doing so anyway. Remember that game? I used to play it for hours in the school yard. Now the stakes are high. Sometimes I wonder if we’d be better off just friends and co-parents, it would be easier, maybe. Other times I can hardly fathom how much I love, or how perfectly my body fits against his, heart to heart in an embrace.

I really want to know, what is the bedrock that holds you together with the one you love? What connects you? What make you certain?

Self portrait challenge: black & white # 1

Polarity.

Wine. Water. Whimsy. Substance. Chaotic. Rhythm. Impulse. Logic.

The past few weeks have gone by with fewer posts than usual, and it’s because I’m never home and always busy and I feel like I haven’t hit the ground and I’m already running. But. There isn’t anything more busy about my life than previously. It’s just I’m trying to handle it differently. For one, I’m going to bed earlier, and waking up before the sun to spend an hour writing for real in my studio, with my feet tucked up under me and the cat purring around my chair legs.

I’m trying to undertake a gradual, though massive shift in priorities; really committing to work towards the things I know I want, but haven’t gotten yet: published work, an MFA, more order in my life. I’m a chronic forgetter of small things and not so small things: phone dates, emails, meetings. I can’t plan a week’s worth of menus to save my life. The refrigerator always lacks at least on essential item. Laundry is always piled in my bedroom, not clean.

Because I’m an Aquarius and an artist, an idealist and a creator, I’m struck with wanderlust and whimsy and find it miserably difficult to put things into the tidy square boxes on a calendar, or plan ahead. I’d like to, though. Because I know everything in my small world would run more smoothly.

So I’ve been forcing myself to start somewhere, and that somewhere is painfully, less blogging and more real reading. Less posting, and more time spent revising the half finished application pieces I’m still feeling delusionally semi-optimistic about. I pretty sure my life will always contain a bit of this struggle between necessity and wonderment, between substance and desire.

It’s hard for me to buckle down, but I miss my athletes’ body and my reader’s mind. I miss talking about god, and reading about spiritual practice. I miss devouring books the way I used to in college. And yes, I have excuses now that are legitimate, but if I want to ever get to anywhere further than here, I have to start here, now. So I am. Small step, by smaller step. But still, I’m starting. Do you have any polarities you struggle with? If so, what are they, and how do you find balance?

More black & white self portraits here.

Catching up

So much in the last week. Among the busyness, these moments: Thousands of crows flying overhead in a snowstorm. Looking up from city streets to see their dark silhouettes darted through the falling snow, like shadows above the lamplight of early evening.

The moon rising, gibbus and golden, smudged with snow clouds. Its bright disk filling up the winter night sky with pale yellow, like painted rings on an opaque piece of glass. Just below it, the hilltops were dark and scraggly with pines and the thatched branches of a hundred maples, birches, and oaks.

Driving back from a long, but too-short trip to NJ, two red balloons were caught above the highway in the bright arboreal green of a hemlock. Above them, the sky bluer than song, bluer than a china bowl.

So much, and in between also this:

Starting a clay throwing class tonight, with DH. Sitting side by side, but apart enough to be entirely separate. Seeing each other from an outside slant. Sinking in to the center of each piece of clay, the rhythmic circling of the wheel, slip gathering between fingers, the hum of the heater turning on. On the wall, glazed shards arranged like multiplication tables. The laughter of people together for the first time. Working in a tank top, like summer, utterly focused for a few clear moments on the supple piece of clay at hand.

So much, and I’m still trying to get back on track. Two weekends away from home, laundry piling up, papers at work in stacks inches thick, not enough sleep. This week I’m trying to catch up, and also to shift towards healthier things: earlier to bed, earlier to rise; regular exercise, and baking bread.

(Also, planning Bean’s birthday. What kinds of party favors are appropriate? We’re hoping for sledding weather, to make things simple. Then carrot cake cupcakes with buttercream frosting. And balloons. But party favors? I have no clue. Help, please!)

Sometimes song...

Every night here, in the swirling darkness of just before dreams, we curl together. His small soft cheek pressed against my heart, song rising up like an offering into the velvet of night. Here, every night, we reclaim each other from the day, his small fingers exploring my face, my arms wrapped tightly around his small bundle of limbs, always growing, now heavy with almost-sleep. Every night in the rocking chair, holding each other close, song is the mortar that connects us, making tesserae of our separate days whole.

A weekend in Quebec

Sinking into the plush down of a king sized bed. Chocolates on the pillow. Bright green apples in a black ceramic bowl on the end table. Lattes in the morning in white cups with saucers, firelight, flaky croissants and tall slender glasses of orange juice.

Walking cobblestone streets in the icy cold. Like a family of dragons, our breath clouding up around us every time we spoke or laughed. Quilted down jackets. Shearling gloves. Bean in a snowsuit with so many layers of wool and fleece beneath it, he could barely bend his knees.

Carnival horns, and ruckus cheering. An ice palace. Snow sculptures. Dog sled races, paws pounding down a snowy path through the turning streets of the old city. Hot mulled wine and French onion soup. Clouds of steam rising up from the hot chocolate gripped in Bean’s mittened hands.

Collapsing into bed with milk and PBJ sandwiches for lunch, wearing long johns and watching Inuit cartoons on TV. Bean sitting on the wide windowsill showing his monkey and cheetah the giddy five story view below.

Sipping dry red wine and eating warmed olives and toasted spicy almonds in the lounge, remembering what it feels like to be an adult with some place to be after 8pm. Shimmying close on the couch and kissing. Playing Gin. Winning. Laughing.

Stopping at a tiny bakery to buy delicate almond, orange & chocolate cookies, crispy and thin. Perfect discs of sweetness to melt in our mouths. Eating crepes hot of the griddle, chocolate everywhere.

Riding the plummeting drop in a little glass rail car, with the wide sweep of the St. Lawrence below us. Stopping in small shops to warm our fingers, Bean jumping from every stoop. Street musicians with cold fingers playing the fiddle, frozen snow breaking under foot.

Sandwiches on warm baguettes and then the long ride home, sun drenched across the wide flat expanse between here and there. Snow covered and wind swept fields, the sun sinking west. Full of joy to finally have had time to simply be: a family, a lover, a wanderer in a foreign city. So good. A perfect, perfect birthday weekend.

Photos here. I'll be putting more up, once I've found the other flash card in our luggage.

PS: thank you SO MUCH for all your awesome birthday wishes!

Tomorrow, my birthday

Tomorrow is my birthday. 29, and I think I look old this year.

You spend all your late teens and early twenties wishing you were older, and then suddenly, without realizing it you’ve slipped to the other side, where you consider getting carded a complement, and for some reason you can’t get the fact out of your head that some guy at work asked you if you were 36.

Our culture’s idealization of youth creeps in and airbrushes away all the brave, vibrant, sexy sides of aging. On a bad day I buy into that.

But the thing is, deeper down a big part of me that likes getting old. I like my crows feet and my perpetually furrowed brows, because they’re a testament to the life I’ve lived. It’s been wild, and sometimes heartbreaking, it’s also been passionate and full—and I’ve barely been alive three decades.

I’ve always thought Georgia OKeefe was one of the most gorgeous women in the world, especially in her later portraits. Something about the way she held her head---up, fiercely, with her chin forward, that spoke volumes about her courageous life and passionate arte. Also something about Tasha Tudor’s wild white hair and ruddy cheeks that spells out beauty to me: she’s a woman who does what she wants. In fact, when I think of women whose features I admire, most do not adhere to the modern, product enhanced perception of beauty. I want to look real still in thirty years, with some lines to show for it.

But tonight, on the eve of my birthday, I can’t help taking stock. Can’t help going back over a handful of self portraits I’ve taken over the past few months, looking for some outer clues about the woman I’m becoming. Maybe I do look older this year.

Driving to work by myself in the morning, as I pass the field where the frost has turned everything into a delicate filigree of white and the pale purple mountain is suddenly flooded with the first golden light of the sun, I’m utterly grateful. Grateful for these hands with wrinkles finely cross-hatching the backs. Grateful for soft expanse of my belly that gave birth. Grateful for my brilliance of my heart and mind that rush up inside my soul like the wild circling flight of the lone hawk I watched this morning, above the snow covered meadow, with the sun turning it’s wings to fire.

And if the consequence of this giddy passion for life is aging, I’ll take it, crows feet and all.

Small things I'm grateful for.

A flock of clouds, their underbellies pink and gold, just before sunset.

Running hard at the gym, just over 8 minute miles.

Doing 25 push ups in a row.

Rearranging furniture in my classroom, so the sun slants just so in the morning and the picture books are easier to browse through.

Getting a note from a kid saying, "Thanks for being my teacher, I love you"

Passing the two shaggy horses on our road, and seeing their breath rise up in the cold air.

Bean saying yes now instead of just no.

Reading short stories (because when is there time for long ones, lately?)

Mysterious birthday plans for the weekend.

Painting small pictures every day.

Morning writing

(Maple syrup on snow.)

Golden light fills my studio, the first of the morning. The sun, just up, climbs the rungs of the trees. Its smooth white disc of light is etched with a crosshatching of twigs, snow dusted and dark. Last night I made plans to wake up and write for an hour while the newness of day still holds some secrets in. So I am here, wearing my husband’s burly wool sweater and socks pulled up to my calves. My hair is still rumpled from sleep. I haven’t brushed my teeth. But something feels alive in me that allows me to fling a few unguarded sentences at the page.

After forty minutes of revising, the light spreading across my room has turned pale and bright with day. The sun has climbed sky’s ladder now, its face well above the trees, and the mountains look like cardboard cut-outs along the horizon, painted dusty blue. I go down to the kitchen where DH is mopping spilled coffee from the soapstone counter, and Bean, wearing his blue striped train conductor hat, is twirling about the room. They’ve made a fire, but it’s still cold. I pour coffee and maple syrup and milk into a pan and reheat it until the steam rises, and then pour it into a white enamel mug. With a stack of buttered toast, I head back upstairs, back to this desk piled high with books and papers where I wait for words to fit the empty spaces on the page.

After revising the entire essay, reworking sections again and again until the words fit together into a mosaic that I can understand, and that, at least in part, take on the shape of what I’m trying to know, they bust into my studio grinning. It’s 10am now and my coffee is cold. DH is ready for a shower, but before he goes he pulls me close, his hands traveling up under my sweater touching my hot skin. Bean circles my studio, a wreck after preparing for my showing. Empty frames litter the floor. Scraps of paper, one shearling clog, a case of rubber alphabet stamps. He sings, tunelessly, sweetly, as he collects and reorganizes the loot this space provides: tabs of watercolor paint, the wingnuts on the easel, a drawer full of cards, a futon frame without the mattress. He lies on it, his legs and arms spread out to account for the gaps. Perfect balance.

I finish reading This Autumn Morning, by Gretel Ehrlich. It’s an essay in the 1991 collection of Best American Essays, and it speaks to me in a language I know: one of loss and natural wonder both. As I read I relearn something about this art form that I love. That words can travel around and around the heart of whatever it is you’re trying to say, like the circles spreading outward from a pebble tossed. They do not need to go straight like arrows.

23 Months

Dear Bean, The sentences have begun. Verbs strung together with prepositions and nouns; laughter punctuating the funny parts.

In the bath tonight, the water up past your frog belly, and your sandy hair flecked with droplets, you pulled a pair of your summer sunglasses connected by an elastic band up around your legs. “Like pulling underwear on,” you said, enunciating every syllable of underwear carefully, grinning from ear to ear. Indeed. Just like that.

Or earlier driving home, watching the dalmation dots of snow falling against the inky dark of night—and you said, “It’s snowing out there!”

It’s amazing how tense has suddenly started to inhabit your language and your world. Present participles are flecked across the juicy terrain of your vocabulary like seeds in a wedge of watermelon. I love watching you unwrap language, making it yours. You’re so close to the dynamic, wild part of language that beats right at the heart of meaning and emotion, that you can still get away with making words when you can’t say the ones we use. I wish I could still do as much. Love seems like such a small word when I ask it to describe the endless scope of my feelings for you.

I picture you one day reading through this stack of letters, that I've typed and once posted on a long-defunct blog, and I wonder what you’ll be like then. Tall. Maybe with a kid of your own. I try to fathom you with chest hair, and my brain lurches to a full stop. Something about watching you grow has planted me unequivocally within the time-space continuum of now the way nothing else ever has. Before you, I lived with the delusion that I could imagine the future; that if I planned or tried, the outcome would be certain. Now I see how impossible this is, and how foolhardy. There is nothing but now, with your little off-tune songs, and your new big-boy underpants, and your glasses of milk.

Nothing but right now:

You take my face in your hands after I pick you up from daycare at the gym and pull me close. Then you kiss me, a smile beaming across your face.

On your yellow plastic sled, you are a red sausage of snowsuit and rosy cheeks. You zip by in a blur, with perfect balance, leaning from one side to the other like you’ve been sledding for years. And you’re grin at the bottom of the hill? Nothing could be more beautiful.

You’re eating vanilla ice cream with warm cherries. You stir the cream in the bowl as it melts, your face covered with purple syrup. Then you pick the bowl up and your face disappears behind it’s dome. You drink, then smack your lips, then lick the edges of the bowl.

I come home after work, and you’re there, eating snack with daddy. Your face is covered with peanut butter, and your hair tousled. You run to me, arms perpendicular to your body, a jet plane of affection zeroing in on me.

I love you,

Mama

Unrelated bits & pieces

* I drove back from the ophthalmologist (a random unidentifiable pain & redness in my eyes prompted the visit) tonight, and it was the most disorienting and sweaty palmed trip ever. Headlights in dilated eyes: not fun. Now I have blurry vision and the feeling of vertigo whenever I look at anything up close. But look at me, I’m still blogging. Wheee! Oh, and despite the redness and/or agony, I apparently have perfect eyes. Some good news. I like that.

* I’ve been enjoying creating small pieces of art nearly every day. I’m going with the idea of altering a book. This particular book was found in the basement at my inlaws house, and is called The Love Affair, which offers bits of advice such as the following:

The average man decidedly shrinks from what he calls a ‘brainy’ or ‘highbrow’ woman, and if she is in the unfortunate position of having to secure his attention, no man of her own type being available, she must conceal her intellectuality instead of trying to use it as a blandishment, which is a mistake very frequently made.

Better off as an altered book, don’t you think? Or perhaps this is my problem. I use both my brainy and highbrowness as blandishment. Don’t you? It’s fun to paint blithely over the text, watching how certain words or bits of text come to the fore while others become completely submerged.

* I’ve decided that I’m going to spend several months taking a picture of DH every day. A sort of practice in observation. I want to see what I notice. I’ve never made him the focus of any creative/artistic endeavor and want to spend some time with the images I take and see where it goes. See what I learn, about him. So much of him I don’t really know. Isn’t this almost always the way it is with the people you love? You think you know them, but really, you only know these small slivers, like looking up at a new moon and thinking that tiny sickle is all of it.

* The cold snap that has swept across the country and left orange groves in California frozen, and people without power in Oklahoma has hit here with a vengeance. -15 degrees out, and our pipes in the upstairs bathroom froze. Huh? Yeah, you read that right. Tomorrow will be day three without a shower. Really. Whimper.

Wanting to dream

My eyes ache tonight, from crying and laughing both, and I’m on the verge of being sick. I spent the weekend away with a close friend, talking over sushi and Japanese beer, about the way things really are. How everything in my life right now is like a delicate broken china cup, held together with dime store glue, and the tea is very hot.

We went rock climbing. I haven’t climbed since before I was pregnant, and my mind and body marveled at the sudden feeling vertical; instinct sending rapid telegraphs along tendons, muscles quivering. My heart thrumming in my chest, chalk on my palms, and then swinging out into open space at the top of the wall before the belay down. It felt good to simply say, I don’t know. And also to say my heart is breaking, but that I’m hopeful. Very hopeful.

Because this is true. I am. And I have reason to be. We’re talking now, daily, and part of what we’re talking about is what really matters. Sometimes it feels a bit like walking through the odds and ends of furniture and relics in an antique store looking for a particular set of silver spoons, but we’re finding things we didn’t know we wanted or cared about at all.

And it’s hard to say what it is we really want. We thought this was it: on this land, in this house, but somehow we’re drowning here. Debt swallowing up our love, and our freedom both. And also, because though we dreamed of this: mossy wooded trails and apple trees and kind neighbors, we never thought to ask ourselves when we wanted this, and what else we really wanted in our lives.

So we’re starting over, and asking this: what really matters? And our answers shock us both. To see the night sky in Australia. To bike together across Europe. To travel through the west with Bean and hike the mountains there. To shout out into the vast space of the Grand Canyon. To work on a coffee plantation in Central America. To spend a month on a sailboat. To teach in a foreign country. To have another child. To write. To publish. To live a life rich with experience.

Startled, we look at each other from opposite ends of the couch. Maybe we want more than this, here, right now. Maybe we need more, to keep us whole.

And also, when I came back after a night away, hugging him, pressing my head into his chest in that place right under the curve of his chin, I felt like I was home.

Hi. Already.

Hello, Internets !

I haven't checked my stats in so long, I believe I've forgotten my passwords. But I know that there are many cool people out there who come here, and some of you write me absolutely awesome emails, or send me lovely chocolate covered figs, or gorgeous photos, or cds with amazing girly housewarming tunes (thank you, thank you, a zillion times, thank you!)

But others of you I'm sure, lurk your way through my posts each day, never toching your keyboard. And in your honor, it's that week again. That's right. NATIONAL DELURKING WEEK. Go ahead, say hi. Every single one of you. You will make my day. My week, even. Really. And just for you, I painted this picture (in keeping with my January art every day resolution.)

Little things

Celebrating little things: potty training (thank you for all the tips!), my first art show (it's up, and my pieces look beautiful!), finally finding a baby sitter, starting a clay class with DH (the past two weeks have been so hopeful, so tenuously joyous, so tender), and really pretty underwear.

Also this: planning to do a little piece of art every single day for a month. It's my uberlist this year: starting small, each month, with something that reminds me to be, to breathe, to grow. Care to join me? Come on, even if you've never made art in your life. I dare you.

Underpants!

His first pair! He ran around the kitchen wildly, high stepping, stomping, grinning. He asked to inspect Mama's underpants and Daddy's underpants. He pulled his up, and pulled them down. We took a special trip to the mall tonight to purchase them, as it seems, Bean is ready for potty training.

Gasp. How did we possibly get here, from here? All the cliche's collide in my mind. How quickly they grow, really. I'm still having trouble picturing what diaperless is like. And of course I need advice. Spill please.

The details: after the gym two nights ago, waiting for DH I gave Bean a cup and showed him how to work the drinking fountain. He was in heaven, and six cups of water and a wet shirt later, DH showed up, we drove home, and I striped the little guy down to his birthday suit. But then, being the utterly lazy mama I am, I decided that the forty five minutes of dinner and and playtime before bed were not enough to warrent the hassel of daipering, so I put him in longjohns and showed him the potty. Causually, I mentioned, "If you need to go potty, you can sit on this one like a big boy." Then I went about cleaning up the living room, and holy crap, the kid was sitting on the potty and GOING.

He was wildly excited. I was wildly excited. He proceeded to go like six or seven times (all the water!) and each time was delighted to show me his production, and to flush with abandon.

Since then, both nights we've had successes--and an amazing poop on the potty! Really. And he wiped. (Apparently all of the times he's made himself at home in the bathroom while we're occupied on the white thrown have paid off...worth it, but still. Just once it'd be nice to do my business without having someone try to shove toilet paper down behind me before I'm through.)

Of course, there were a few accidents, but what a way to start, right? What should I do next? For car travel? Night time? Trips out?

You web mamas rock my world.