Wishing on dandilions

Sometimes, blowing on a dandelion gone to seed, I wish for superhuman capabilities. Then I count my wishes as the tiny seed umbrellas lift on the wind and scatter, and my popsicle juice-faced boy laughs wildly in delight.

I wish I could be okay with just four hours of sleep, instead of the seven I must have to function. I wish I could whirl through household tasks, setting things right, watering plants, doing laundry, and still have time to sink into a corner and read chapter after chapter in a good book.

I wish I could come home after a day of teaching, when I’ve felt every fiber in my being be endlessly tugged and frayed, as though my heart were a rope toy and the children a pack of eager pups, and still have something rich to give. I wish, after a day of reading, reacting, redirecting, reconciling, and reconstructing all the little important fragments that are meaningful to the children I teach, I could regularly have energy left for here: in my studio, after daylight has ebbed away from the walls, and lamplight pools at my desk. Energy to write two thousand words instead of two hundred.

I wish I could feel patience overflowing the bowl of my soul every night when I’m snuggling in the dark with my boy. Patience, as he reaches out his thin soft arms in the dark and wraps them around my neck, fiercely, in a lock hold. Patience as he begs again for one more snuggle, one more hug, one more kiss. Patience as time slips by and I become languorous, my eyes aching, my body sinking into the spinning dark as I sing tuneless melodies into the curve of his small ear. Patience, as I want to be right there and anywhere except there in the same breath.

I wish for more times when, tumbling into the sweet curve of my husband’s body, the prospect of following my tongue and my red-hot whimsy isn’t in a dead heat with every cell in my body screaming or one more hour of sleep.

Becoming a parent brings your life abruptly to full capacity—or full catastrophe—and sometimes both, at the same time. You don’t really get this before becoming a parent, though everyone tries to tell you.

There is no way to understand before you’re in the thick of it, how you’ll simultaneously feel like a circus act and a soothsayer, mumbling, “Isn’t that what mommy said would happen?” when the lightening fast extension of your heart falls headlong over the handlebar of his wagon after he's pushed it full-tilt into the couch, and then comes to you wailing, his perfect cheek already swelling.

The acrobatics of this kind of love leaves me breathless and aching. Also, often, it leaves me entirely blindsided. My compass spins wildly, truing to an imaginary north. I want so much, yet feel so small and brittle and insufficient as each day splatters at my feet overripe and bruised with too many demands for my time.

Maybe it doesn’t hit everyone this hard.

I wasn’t ready for it, the day the two blue lines showed up, and most days I still feel like an interloper. Arms akimbo, trying to balance my enormous ambition, my longing, my wanderlust, and my fierce sense of self preservation with the endless needs of my sweet boy.

At the playground with Bean, on a day off over my vacation, I can’t shake the feeling that I don’t belong at the green metal picnic table, discussing toddler clothing labels and snack foods. I feel the prickly heat of guilt rising up as I notice a thousand thoughts that have nothing to do with the fact that I’m somebody’s mom, crowding my mind. Pushing him on the swing, my heart swells with complete pride. He’s so adorable, tilting his head back and smearing a perfect grin across the sky---and then seconds later I’m somewhere else entirely: lost in thought.

A part of me understands that this intensity will ebb, or at least alter somewhat, as he grows more independent, but this fact seems so abstract right now when all I long for are six days back to back to sink up to my ankles in fiction.

Each time I pick a dandelion going to seed, I hold my breath, examining the fuzz, planning just how I’ll release my breath so that every seed will detach and float away. I’m good at this, and also good at finding four leaf clovers. I know how lucky I am in my life. I know how good it is, how blessed I am to be a mother. But I also know that most times, when I exhale in a quick burst of air, a few fluffy seed heads will linger like tiny javelins, right close to the stem.

Sometimes I realize just how lucky I am:

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

(I am totally aware that he looks like a little urchin in this pic. As he put it:"I got some CRUD on my face." Don't ask me where he learned that.)

Urnalizing

Alas. One day he will be big enough to use a urnal. In preparation for this event, I've done extensive research on the subject. What follows are a few directions to hopefully help him navigate that complex, highly technical piece of machinery. 1. Aim. 2. Go where you aim. Do NOT go on the floor or the surrounding walls. 3. Do not shake dry on the floor or surrounding walls. 4. Flush. 5. Please for the love of god, wash your hands. 6. Zip up before exiting .

I know, sounds easy, right? I think so too.

Except every time I use a unisex bathroom (or slip into the mens room because the line for the lady's is immeasurably longer than my blader's capacity is big,) the floor invariably has a sticky yellow trail edging downhill from the general direction of the urnal. What is up with that? Do you guys LIKE that sticky feeling on the soles of your shoes, and that horseflies-in-summer stench? Or is it really more complicated than I imagine?

Moving on.

Except really, we're not. Because all things potty have become central to our daily lives here at casa mytopography. On good days this involves much cheering and hoopla for a job well done on: prior notifcation, proper underware removal, etc. However, there are the other days when Bean thinks it's particularly intreguing to hide, in say, the central island cupboard, while pooping in his underpants. And then there is still his all consuming affection of going outdoors, which he does on his own, whenever he can--except that he can't quite tilt his hips in the right direction so it likely goes all over the bib of his overalls or the waist of his jeans. Clearly there is more to this than meets the eye, people. But I can't quite figure out what I'm missing here. Alas.

Feeling the earth spin

I used to be able to lie down on the grass and relax into the very center of my solar plexus and feel the earth spin. Really. My whole body would tune to the thrumming velocity of the earth twirling on its axis very fast, gravity pressing my body into the ground. Then one day I couldn't do it any more. Now, I'll lie down like I did today after a run, and for a brief moment I'll feel myself almost slip to that place, but then I'll snap back into myself, like snapping back from almost falling asleep. Has this ever happened to you?

Changing things up a bit

A new header & with it, a commitment to share more art and stories about the small moments of daily life. I've been caught up in big ideas too much of late, and haven't given enough attention to the small things. Diggers. Bulldozers. Apples eaten round and round their equator to the core. Chimpmunks and snakes and wild things blooming everywhere in our yard. Little boy stuff. I don't want to blink and have missed it all, and already the baby has been replaced by the little boy who says, "Mama, I Bean want a digger. Bean want to go in da digger and turn it on. Bean want to drive digger. Bean want a BIG road to drive da digger on."

Hard to fathom how much has changed since this time last year.

Ingredients for a perfect Saturday:

Waking up to sunshine dappling our sheets and faces with zig-zag zebra stripes as it slips through the slats on our bedroom’s wooden shades, we stretch and lazily stumble out of bed. I haven’t slept in all week, and suddenly 7 a.m. seems decadent. Bean is big-eyed and delighted to find himself smack dab between Mommy and Daddy, and he starts the day as usual, with nonstop chatter. “Want to make a dort,” he says, not quite getting his ‘Fs’ yet. He slips down under the covers between DH an I, squealing with giggles when we reach for him.

At breakfast I read a New Yorker piece aloud and DH and both of us are laughing as he makes iced espresso in tall pint glasses. Then the boys head outside to mow the lawn. “It’s gonna be loud,” Bean says, his eyebrows furrowing. I hold him in my lap while DH pulls the cord and the lawnmower starts up with a purr. I can feel Bean’s body startle slightly, but then his boyish passion for all things motor takes over, and he scurries after DH as he makes looping arcs around the yard. The first mowing of the season. The grass smells sweet and sharp, and the sunlight prickles on my skin. Along the house, dandelions bloom in a row, weeds for sure, but both DH and I love their sunny lion’s manes, and so he doesn’t mow them down.

Then we head off to a Touch A Truck activity put on by Parks and Rec. Bean is in seventh heaven. Eighth. Ninth. He cannot believe his luck: they’re serving chocolate ice cream cones, AND he can climb on the diggers and investigate every button and knob in the cement mixer and fire truck. His grin is impossibly huge. We meet up with friends, and chat while our kids dance to the music booming from the local radio station that has set up in a corner of the parking lot under the pines. We try to wipe ice cream off of faces and fingers whenever we get a chance, but it's a loosing battle. Bean clutches his too-big plastic construction hat, and murmurs about diggers all the way until nap time.

Nap time. DH leaves to help a friend, and Bean and I eat lunch and settle in together among down comforters and striped sheets. One of those dreamy, sweet, snuggled afternoon naps that stretch on and on. We’re drowsy and sleep for hours. HOURS. Three to be exact. Maybe more. Finally I roust myself from my stupor, and soon after Bean sits up tousle-headed and grinning. We fold laundry. Or rather I do, as Bean figures out the best possible angles for launching himself into the baskets of folded clothes.

Now I’m sitting with a stack of fig bars and an iced latte in my quite studio. Outside DH is mowing the back yard and Bean in his lady-bug boots and his safari hat, is causing certain mischief. I love the hum of the lawn mower, and the way the light looks out the window. The hills are finally soft now—the twiggy skeletons of branches hazy with delicate new green. Leaves just barely unfolding, clouds in perfect sheep like clumps across the wide blue sky. I’m heading out now to start in on a flower bed. Turning soil, and tossing rocks. Then dinner at a friend’s house: pizza, wine, letting the kids twirl. Such a good day.

How did you spend your Saturday?

The shape of anxiety

There comes a point when habit pulls me here, to this place where I tell myself stories about the things I cannot do. Invariably after a week of rising early, making coffee, and touching my fingers to the keys, following words about where they will travel at dawn, my mind becomes like a child terrified of the monster under her bed.

This week, more than anything else, I have been watching my thoughts as I wake up and stumble like Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase into the moment of the present, with my mind and body disjointed in a hundred little ways. I’ve realized that without any intention I put a great deal of effort into constructing thoughts that cut me off at the knees. I tell myself: you don’t know anything about fiction writing. And, you don’t have time to really produce anything worth publishing. And, I suck at this, what am I possibly thinking? And six or ten thoughts later I’m in a tailspin writing incoherent mutterings.

But this week I’ve been trying stubbornly to not listen. Trying, being the operative word, of course. Have you ever noticed how damn hard it is not to listen to your negative thoughts, and instead tune to the positive ones? I feel like I’m almost hardwired to tune in to these thoughts, like a freaking hand-made transistor radio that can only pick up a one station. I buy my own bullshit ninety-eight percent of the time, hook, line and sinker. And then I sit down to write, and it’s a wonder I still remember all twenty-six letters, let alone how to construct a few sentences that reflect any small piece of how my heart moves.

But that is the reason I write. The reason you write. The reason we both read. Because writing is an act of turning our inner ear towards the divine breath of creativity that moves across the harp strings of our hearts, and turning that other-worldly song into words; opens our hearts, so that when someone else reads strings of their own heart resonate in recognition. Writing then, becomes something huge. Words have the immense capacity to reach across the divide between individuals, and to inhabit the private spaces in our hearts and minds from whence new ideas spring. The stories we choose to tell shape us.

Maybe this is all very obvious, but the trolly part of me that crouches in the corner of my mind and repeats idiotically a mantra of fear really needs to hear this today. So as I sit down to write this morning, my windowsill cluttered with jars of brushes, I grab a the most recent Sun and find this, by John O’Donohue:

Fear is the greatest source of falsification in life. It makes the real seem unreal, and the unreal to appear real. In The Courage To Be the theologian Paul Tillich draws a distinction between fear and anxiety. Anxiety for him, is this diffuse worry that has no object or point of reference. This is the atmosphere in the U.S., the land of the free and the home of the brave. There is a huge anxiety just down under the surface.

Fear, as distinct from anxiety, has an object and a point of reference. Tillich says that in order to handle anxiety, you have to translate it into a fear that has a definite object. Then you can engage with it. Part of the intention of growth is to overcome one’s fears.

It makes so much sense I almost laugh out loud, my hearstrings thrumming. What if I pushed farther? What if I tried to narrow the huge anxiety I have about writing, especially about writing fiction, into a fear that I can grow past? What if? I’m not there yet, but it’s a good point to launch from.

Do you have wide anxieties or pointed fears? Is there a false story you tell yourself again and again unthinkingly? What is stopping you from accomplishing the things you dream of?

Doing

Doing so many things, there are hardly enough moments to pause with cup of tea and post and read my favorite blogs. To sum things up for the past few days: * Painted my studio blue this weekend, and rearranged furniture. Today Bean stepped in the drying paint tray and then onto the hardwood floor. "Uh oh, mama! Uh oh!" He wailed. I promptly scooped him up and tried to pass him to DH over the top of my work table. He planted his panted on feet squarely on DH's jeans. Naturally, following the utter rediculousness of this particular train of events, DH tossed his jeans into the sink (as per my instruction--hot wanter will remove latex paint, if treated immediately) without removing his cell phone from the pocket. I'm sad to report it didn't make it, but because we know we're prone to bizarre accidents like this one, we have cell phone insurance, so it's all good.

* Threw some new pots at the studio tonight and finally figured out why my back has been hurting for weeks: hunching over the potter's wheel.

* Signed up for a writing workshop right after school lets out with one of my most favorite authors. Whoo hoo! (I'm not telling whom just yet as I'm still feeling a queasy mix of utter excitment and terror at the prospect of workshopping with someone I so admire.)

* Got back into the groove of things at school today. Suddenly the kids all look tall to me. Like second graders. They get jokes now, and can work independently. It feels good to be here, at this point in the year. To see the product of all my hard work in the faces of my eager kids. We wrote an acrostic poem today that I simply must bring home and post because it is brilliant.

* Mopped the floors for the first time (almost, well, no not almost...really, for the first time) since we moved--over vacation, and did aproximately nine million loads of laundry. DH folded the entire mountain today while I was at work--and put up all the dining room window trim that's been missing.

Whew. I'm sure I've missed a zillion other things but my brain is zinging from a lack of sleep. I miss blogging though. Miss hearing from all of you. What have you been up to, since spring has come?

When being Mommy will no longer be enough to keep him safe

He sat up tonight in bed, after I'd tucked him in and he was breathing steadily and I'd gone next door to my studio, and yelled, "Mommy, mommy, come in here!" And when I did, he said, "An alligator is trying to come in here."

His eyes were wide in the dark.

Now comes the hard part, doesn't it? Now begin those moments of helplessness that unravel in every direction: nothing I can do to stop the ugly parts of the world from rising up to meet him. Nothing to stop the fear he'll know, or the anger, the assaults, the guilt, the loneliness, the anxiety that invariably tattoos the skin of our existence as human beings.

Until now, he's been so small and so close to me, the world could barely wedge itself between us. I was his world. There were no alligators. But now, suddenly he's twenty six months old and listening to everything that's said around him, taking it in, digesting it, and the shield I make around him with my fierce she-wolf love, is permeable. His dreams are colored now with language. Words paint the landscape of every waking moment. Everywhere, he follows me about, almost breathless, with a question, an observation, some piece of whimsy. He copies everything. He says everything.

I kissed him a hundred times, pressing my face against his warm cheek. Then sang the tumbling notes of a lullaby I made up recently, to which he seems to know all the words, and requests nightly. But after I'd left the room, left the hallway, left the house with an armload of books to trade for store credit at Barnes & Noble, he woke up. As if he knew I'd left.

He pattered from his big-boy-bed to the doorway of my studio, where yellow lamp light exchanged space with the darkness pressing close, and called for Mommy.

After DH called me, saying he'd been waking up every ten minutes, troubled, calling out for me (which he has never, ever done before), I drove home anxiously. Skimming through blinking yellow lights, listening to haunting jazz tunes from faraway places. Saxophone, played well, always breaks my heart.

I came upstairs as soon as I got home, and found the two of them lying in the dark of our bedroom. DH was awake. Bean was asleep, spread horizontally across my pillows. I bent near his cheek and whispered, "I'm here now, baby. I'll watch over you. You're safe."

But how long will I even be able to say those words?

Intention

Time to return to the things that matter. To wake up bumble-headed and still trialing the wild ponies of dreams, pour tea, and write. To show up, because this is what I want to do with my life. Even when showing up means having a staring contest with the page, while the birds sing jubulently outside; and dawn spreads across the gravel and the new buds and the eaves. I'm determined, because I have to be, because this is what I've chosen. Some days I come away with nothing. Other days, a few sentences, like a pocket full of sea glass shards. Or poems, that tumble from nowhere before I'm even awake.

Two versions of Worship:

I kneel down at the arbor of another day kissing the small pebbles of wonder that press into my knees, the palms of my hands, the soles of my feet I gather the petals that have drifted earthwards from the quivering globes of roses, and press them to my heart

April 24

**

my heart is like a music box; many pronged tin cylinder, twirling making steady, frail music rise joining the windstorm of my soul where the notes are torn and the song becomes wild and tumultuous and I feel very small.

April 25

"Look where I pooped," he said.

So, apparently, while I was away on my glorious weekend adventure, Bean and DH had a great deal of fun wielding hammers, hauling measuring tapes, and in general, doing boy things. DH reports that at one point he was doing something in another room and he heard the back screen door open and shortly there after Bean yelled, "Daddy I pooped on da step!" As proud as could be. And indeed. He had.

About a week ago, when the weather had just turned from miserable to tolerable, Bean and I were outside cavorting about in the meadow. Since we’ve been potty training, and since he had not gone in over an hour, I decided it was time to show him one of the most fabulous things about being a BOY. That he’s entirely equipped to drop trou and pee anywhere he so should choose. Without the mess of squatting, and quite possibly peeing on one’s shoes, which, being a girl who has climbed my share of mountains, and hiked my share of back woods trails, and taken endless road trips where there are no bathrooms between point X and point Y and the distance between the two is at least two hundred miles, I know all about.

The sheer glee of that yellow arc.

He was hooked.

He started making a getaway to the back door whenever the urge to pee struck. “Mama, I peed on the step!” he’d yell, until I explained that I’d prefer if he’d pee, NOT ON THE STEP, and that any old bush or grass patch is far more acceptable.

But the poop thing. Totally unprecedented. And miracle of miracles: he didn’t step in it.

Are all little boys this enamored with this going outdoors business?

Such goodness

The windows are still open at ten thirty, and the air is warm and soft. Finally the spring peepers have arrived, and on our way back from clay class tonight, DH brought the car to a slow crawl as we drove past the boggy swamp at the edge of our road, where their treble chorus was rising up—spelling out all verbs and adjectives of amphibian delight. I have vacation this week, and despite the fact that I have either the world’s most persistent head cold, or allergies, or both, my good mood cannot be dampened. First off, I just got back yesterday from seeing Blue Poppy and Lizardek for the weekend, which simply put was AMAZING. It felt nothing like driving off into the backwoods on narrow twisty roads to meet perfect strangers, though DH kinda thought that was exactly what I was doing. “Are you SURE you want to go hang out with people you met through BLOGGING?” He muttered before I left.

Going to meet these two incredible women for the first time in person, felt like going to see people I’d known forever. We slipped effortlessly into conversation over tea and wine and toasty sandwiches. We hiked tall mountains to take in the wind breathtaking expanse of mountains and lakes, and we lolled with BP’s butterscotch hounds in the sunlight.

They are brilliant, funny, exquisite, generous women. I totally heart both of them. I’ll stop now, since I’m sure you get the idea.

Driving home, I opened the sunroof and sang at the top of my lungs with the radio, singing in my own way, a million arpeggios of gratitude, and came home to an immaculately cleaned house, and my two favorite guys. Both were sporting wind-tousled hair and smudges on their pants. Doors were hung in my absence, puddles were stomped in. The perfect start to a week off.

Giddy

Soaking up sun. We walk, his little hand in my big one. A constant narrative tumbling off his tongue like the little stream we stop to wade through in the field. No clouds, all day. And I can't keep from smiling because I'm off to see Lizardek and Blue Poppy. Certain delight.

Soaking up sunshine

It felt like spring today, for the first time. The mercury climbed to the upper fifties, and the sky, this afternoon, looked like heaven’s housewife had hung all her downy comforters out to be tossed by a mischievous wind. The sun shone down with real heat.

I came home from work, threw on my black rubber boots, grabbed a yogurt and fled into the sunshine with Bean at my heels. DH followed suit soon after, carrying his signature pint glass of iced espresso, his muscles rippling divinely under the blue cotton of his t-shirt. Barely t-shirt weather, but I’m all for it.

We rambled haphazardly, following our marmalade streak of a cat, Bandit, down into the lower meadow where the apple trees grow, and where, in summer, the grass is waist high. Now it’s trampled and brown, and the apple trees have the tiniest of budlets just beginning to push from the ashy maroon bark. I ran back to get the pruning shears and with a sudden zest, we initiated the immense task of taming the mess of wild grape vines growing like kudzu between knobby, overgrown and half-dead branches of our many apple trees.

It was pure delight to be there with my two guys, cutting back dead wood, with apple sap on my fingers, while Bean chased the cat in widening orbits around us. DH pulled out the chain saw, and we made an afternoon of clearing fallen branches and logs from the edge of the woods—piling them in a bonfire heap. Then we lay down in the grass and watched the sky spin. Like looking up into the deep blue curvature of an enamel bowl, flecked with milk.

The robins are back, and their warbling became a forte trilling as the sun neared the edge of the woods. Bean couldn’t get enough of playing outdoors. All he wanted to do was run, twirl, climb, muck about, and I can’t blame him. The slow start to spring has had me antsy. I can barley imagine foliage. It feels like snowflakes have been permanently imprinted on my inner eye.

When it was dinner time we sat at the table bathed in sunlight, with the windows open, and ate an artichoke together, Bean on my lap. Our fingers were a mess of lemon-butter for dipping the tender parts. Bean shares my affection for this oddly sweet flower, and together we nibbled the heart right to the pithy thistle down, and then reluctantly sat back, licking our fingers.

A good day.

Also, I couldn’t resist snagging this little personality exercise from Le Petit Hiboux. I’m curious. What’s your take?

Life is happening right now

He told me he loved me, for the first time, yesterday. Driving home on our washboard bumpy dirt road, spread thick with mud like peanut butter on an open faced sandwich, he said, “I yuv you mommy.”

I said, “What?” Not really listening, caught up in the replay of a Teri Gross interview with the late Kurt Vonnegut on NPR.

“I yuv you,” he said with a rosy, jelly-smudged grin.

It felt, then, like summer sunlight. Like lightening bugs flitting about the lawn on a late August evening; like standing at the top of a very tall mountain, above the clouds and suddenly breathless; like finding ten perfect unbroken sand dollars in a row at the beach;

“I love you too,” I said. “So much.”

In my chest, I suddenly felt the fluttering of a thousand mariposas.

It’s bizarre sometimes, how things you were sure you were set on, when they don’t come to fruition, make room for other things to come into focus, unfurl, blossom. Every so often I feel like I get the chance to pan out and see the full three-ring-circus that is my life. The rest of the time, I’m there in the midst of it, too close to the action for perspective, twirling with the raspberry stain of my love smudged across my sleeve, and a thousand fragile things gathered up in my arms: my child, my work, my many foibles and distractions.

Finding the small envelope in my mailbox gave me this unexpected opportunity for perspective. It made me step back and really admit for the first time, how utterly overwhelming the past year of my life has been. I’m a chin-up kind of girl, and I’ve been trying to tell myself a hundred happy-ending stories, but painted over the stress of raising a toddler and renovating our own home, has been the pale hue of trauma after the shooting that took place at the school where I work in the beginning of the year. Terror pressed into the supple limbic portion of my brain that cannot speak and only feels, with sudden abrupt urgency, and altered the certain fundamental aspects of the way I live and trust and respond in the world.

I’ve been navigating my way out of that maze of reactions the entire year, and somewhere in the process, when I applied to grad schools, I entirely forgot about the school I’d researched last year that really belonged at the top of my list. Forgot, entirely.I was so shocked to realize this, it made me no longer sad about the small envelope bearing the word regret. Instead I finally gave myself permission to slow down a bit. Permission to have the summer here, with my family and a box of mail-order chicks, and watermelon seed spitting contests and writing workshops, and to take out West to run a half marathon with my sister.

Permission to not compete with the peers in my life who are at different places in their lives, because in the end, our lives are tangled up with entirely different sets of stars. Can’t you picture that? All of us, like marionettes with fragile golden strings stretching up into the dark indigo bowl of heaven. Have you ever looked up and tried to count all those stars?

Like dislocated limb, I’ve been dangling on the peripheries of my life all year. I’ve spent many months trying to find that groove where the cartilage of necessity and the bone of loving and dreaming meet. It has been painful. My senses of safety and inner equilibrium have been precariously balanced amidst a heap of responsibility and guilt and worry. My days are scribbled with the irrational ink of worry. I’ve burst into sudden shocked tears when a glass breaks. I’ve had entire fights, painful and raw and startling, that midway through, I can no longer recall the initial provocation.

Somehow, receiving that letter didn’t shake my belief in my writing at all—the way I imagined it would, before it came. Now, from this vantage point I don’t think my writing was the reason I was rejected at all. I think instead it was because my readiness to be there wasn’t self-evident in my application, or in my hurried recommendations from professors I hadn’t worked with in years.

I don’t know if I would have been ready, honestly. It would be a little like jumping off a bus moving at full speed, and because I’m that chin-up kid with a big ego, I’m sure I’d make it work somehow, despite the inevitable scraped knees and broken arm. But this way I’ll have some time to really find my footing, rather than plunging blindly into a new stream with flooding banks, which graduate work in writing invariably is.

So I’m looking forward to summer now, more than I was. (Also because eight inches of sleety frozen crap is in the forecast for tomorrow night. Somewhere, some very drunk weather gods are having a hell of a good time at our expense.) Some part of me feels like hugging this other part of me that has reached out and offered permission to just be here right now; at the beginning, instead of rushing pell-mell ahead. I know how that sounds, but I can’t think of any other way of describing how my drive to accomplish things can a perilous and ruthless taskmaster, who crowds my days with post-it notes and plans, and forgets life is happening right now, and how relieved I am to have to slow down.

Life is happening right now.

He said “I yuv you mommy,” and he was beaming.

That’s enough.

Grin.

Mail.

The small envelope arrived. With it a thousand other possibilities, and certain (if not temporary) heartache.

Thinking Blogger Awards--Meme & Happy Easter

Blue folds quietly around the house, like dye adhering gradually to the fragile white shells of eggs. Snow is falling, still, again, and it makes me sad. I’m longing for spring, longing for raw green, for delicate petals, for grass. I’m moody tonight, tired after a day of dying easter eggs, making tiki masala with friends for dinner, and finding out that my best friend is moving to freaking Sacramento. One of those all-out weekends, of laughter and over-extending. Hunting for brightly colored plastic ovals in the stubble of grass and snow in a friend's back yard; fighting with Bean about naps after too many jelly beans and too much excitement; and feeling out of synch with the calendar this year. Now I’m curled into the rumpled cushions of the couch, with the symphony of the dishwasher whirring up around me, and the cats pacing across warm floors.

But, instead of moping, I’ve been tagged (twice) with a cool meme. The Thinking Blogger Awards. My votes go to:

Sunday School Rebel--because her poems are THAT good, because she talks to god, and because I wish we lived next door.

Le Petit Hiboux--because she's written 20,000 words for a novel, and is pursuing the wild, illusive profession I'm terrified to take up: full time writer.

Rosa Murillo--because her found art pies are relics of pure inspiration, and the universe must be smiling because of all her beautiful gifts.

La Vie En Rose--because her contemplative poems and her exquisite photos and her generous spirit are always make me pause.

Running Mix

Bette Davis Eyes-- Kim CarnesSuddenly I See---KT Tunstall Sexual--Amber Deeper And Deeper---Madonna Erotica Above The Clouds ---Amber Back In My Life--Alice DeeJay Around The World--ATC Don't Tell Me---Madonna What You Waiting For----Gwen Stefani Take On Me---a-Ha Better Off Alone ---Alice DeeJay My Heart Goes Bang---Dead Or Alive Danger Zone---Kenny Loggins Call Me---Blondie Missing---Everything But The Girl Eye of the Tiger ----Suvivor Move With Me---Neneh Cherry

Back to the gym this week, after a week off feeling sickish. It's still mud season here, and still cold, but my sister is luring me westward for a half marathon this summer... and some tiathlons closer to home are looking better and better, especially since the wicked spinning class I took last week that reminded me of how much I love to ride.

Enjoy the mix, and yes, I know, most of it is totally 80's throwback music. But listen to it while you're running a 5k. It works, trust me.

Now and again

On the windowsill in a tall glass vase, the leggy branches I cut from the forsythia and the lilac bushes a week ago have exploded into a riot of delicate yellow blossoms and green leaves; stamens licking the warm indoor air, waiting for kiss of the honey bee that won’t arrive. Instead, the cat rubs up against the branches, her coat dappled with evening sunlight.

DH is practicing guitar, and the melody circles me. It lilts and flutters, like birds lifting off high wires in unison to wing the peripheries of the field before alighting again. He’s gotten good, recently, under the instruction of a teacher for the first time in his life, and I like the way his practice has become the soundtrack for my thoughts; the way words weave gradually, to the rhythm of his song.

Last night we lay, chest to belly on the couch and talked about my worries and our dreams. I say my worries, because they are mine mostly. I’m somehow prone to lurching into worry anytime there isn’t an enchanting or certain goal in front of me. I’m the kind of girl who needs to be able to lie on the top of a grassy knoll, arms akimbo, looking up at the dark bowl of twirling stars, and have the flashlight and the star charts and the information guides about every single constellation.

I’m the girl who disembarked from the airplane at the tiny Puerto Rico airport without any plans for lodging, or transportation, or even a destination in mind. But I was also the one who had read Lonely Planet cover to cover, and dog-eared every back-door eatery and local beach and the place to get the best chorros. I wandered for days, no—weeks---through Florence, Italy, without any plans or specific sightseeing goals, and yet, I had the background info on every statue, fountain, cathedral, piece of art and small gelato joint I encountered. I can’t help it.

So when it comes to our life: mine and his and ours together with our two-year-old gorgeous little tow-headed Beansprout, I get listless and unmoored when we don’t talk about plans or have any long range goals on the table. I need things like rosebushes, which have always spoken the eloquent language of staying put to me, and I need things like raised garden beds, and bonfires, and dinner parties and blueprints for building a barn and a studio. So when we don’t talk about these things enough, or when we don’t talk about them at all for months on end, I become frantic and anxious and uncertain. Then I start inadvertently unraveling all the exquisitely beautiful bits of fabric that make up the patchwork quilt of the life we have together.

Wanderlust bites me, and spreads across the map of my body like a blueblack bruise of longing. I quaver, reading paragraphs about Trinidad or the Solomon Islands or Morocco, and want suddenly and fiercely to upend everything and just be off. I feel shaky in the everyday bushel basket of my life, as though with the least little jostle I’m apt to send all the fruit tumbling out, comparing myself first to one single friend and then to another set of friends, new lovebirds, who are still starry eyed virgins when it comes to living in the thick of love and family. I start checking the emergency exits and scribbling escape plans on bakery napkins while eating bagels with the two amazing guys who fill my days with their huge long-lashed eyes and easy grins.

I forget that right here, where we are, is a hard-won sweetness. I forget how much we have here : this house, with its hundred-year-old barn timbers and it’s expanse of soapstone counters and farmers sink and honey colored floors, is something we’ve only just acquired, with our bare hands and much love, and ounce after ounce of determination. I forget that this boy of ours, who stopped me the other day as I knelt in front of him on the kitchen floor, and said, “I like your earrings mama, they’re pretty,” as he fingered each abalone disk, is someone we’ve known for just two short years. I forget how when we’re right, we’re right like the taste of a ripe summer peach.

I forget how our love stretches out on either side of us like the guy-wires that keep bridges and steeples and trapeze artist’s hoops aloft. I forget how it has lasted, and I forget how it keeps guiding our lives back to safety and solace, or at least back to our bedroom where we make love in a hot furry of kisses. I forget that it’s been almost eight years of knowing this man, of loving him, of laughing with him, and sometimes because I forget, I toss myself at odds against what we have made together. Then I fleck the pages of my days with tears and worry; I lie restless at night, I overanalyze and over-calculate and grow easily fragile and frantic like a bevy of startled quail.

So last night, belly to chest, listening to the sound of his heart beating and feeling the warmth of his skin rising up through the cotton of his shirt, we talked about our plans and our love. How for once, for the love of god, will I just settle down for a while and quit inadvertently sabotaging the entire thing because I need everything mapped out and planned to the nth degree before I can just let go and wing it?

He laughed when I kept telling him how I need him to remind me over and over again of what it is we want, here, now.

“Because I forget,” I said.

It’s true, I really do.

So he looked at me with his languid topaz colored eyes and told me again: We want to settle here for a few years, make a garden, keep chickens, gather a big circle of friends close, and become a small but certain cog in the wheel of our community.

Every fiber in my being hums in resonance. Yes, I want this. But also this: that after giving it a fighting chance, we can up and off into the wild blue yonder if that’s still what our fancy craves.

He’s game for that too, my big muscled Italian with his espresso habit and his guitar melodies. Game for living in Italy for a year, or exploring the beach towns of California or Hawaii. But for now, here, it’s almost spring and we have a garden to plan.