Sun high on the meridian, humidity making my hair curl and the cat nap, a sprawling stripe of fur on the windowsill. Reason enough to head down to the local hardware store for a blue plastic kiddy pool. Cold water splashing on our sun-hot skin. A perfect afternoon.
Some days like this
Yesterday was brilliant, and then today I woke up inexplicably sad. Yesterday I made French Onion soup. Farmer's market fresh onions, bakery baguette, outrageously priced Gruyere cheese, and it was perfect. Last night we went to see Paris , Je' Te Aime, and to pick up some bowls at clay studio, newly fired. They turned out beautifully. Pale sky blue, nesting together, still carrying a whisper of warmth from the kiln.
The film was quirky with 18 different directors/stories. I loved all the ways it portrayed love: the raw, sharp shards of love that come with the grief of loosing a child; the unexpected fragility of ending up alone, or together; the myriad ways love is tangled in translation: across faith. DH hated it, because he said it depressed him: too close to life, I guess. He wanted something cheerier, some handful of stories that knit themselves together, ending with old folks rocking on some sunny porch together, at the end of a life well lived.
But to me, love IS achingly fragile and the likelihood of surviving a lifetime with it intact, improbable. All the more exquisite because this is so. Like finding unbroken sand dollars at the sea shore. I'm not much of a critic though; a sucker for anything that portrays a faraway place and snapshots of the human condition. I like films to be arty, poignant There were a handful of stories I didn't like, but more that I did. Watching the film felt like reading a volume of short stories (which I'm doing, by the way. Alice Munro's RUNAWAY.)
But today, despite the perfect sunny skies, I feel like crying. Hormonal maybe, or maybe just off after a late night, sleeping against Bean, who went to sleep in our bed last night after telling the babysitter he missed us. Maybe I need to go out and soak up sun. Do you ever wake up this way? Simply off, with no real reason you can put your finger on?
Weekend mosaic
This is how he spells his love: wresting cedar posts into position, mixing cement, and framing out the door for the coop, using the funky top-half of a Dutch door that I've had my heart set on. These are not his projects, but he makes the so, for me. And I can't help grinning watching him move, biceps sweat slicked, scratching our initials into the cement of the final post.
These are the days that imprint like sun spots on my memory. Iced espresso and buttered cinnamon toast carried out on a white metal tray for an afternoon snack. Bean with mud on his knees, loading gravel into his dump truck. The field windswept and freckled with daisies and black-eyed-susan's, and the sky above blue with a ragged tatter of clouds. The beginning of things to last: the phantoms of future raspberry bushes, an asparagus patch, bowls of new summer lettuce, and pastel eggs nestled into hay.
How did you spend your weekend?
Spill it
I was sitting in the car today, poking desperately through my bag to find something to entertain Bean with while waiting for DH to pick up some last-minute essentials at the General Store just down the road from our house (Yes, we really have one. It s fascinating. There is a stuffed bobcat that has seen better days atop the freezers, and the man behind the counter has a comb-over and lives with his mother in the house up the street. His dog's name is Jasper. And he carries a bit of everything: nails, tackle, popsicles, potato chips, tampons, lemons, matches, ice cream sandwiches, steaks) and concluded that the eighty-nine things I’m toting around are a dead give-away about who I am. Maybe.
First of all, I never used to even carry a bag. I was anti bag. I stuck my wallet in my butt-pocket and sometimes even skipped that, opting only for cash and my ID. But I've come around. I didn’t have much of a choice. Once you're somebody's mother, certain things become essential. Like bag-having. And extra arms.
Second of all, I'm not sure what I'm really supposed to call It. A bag or a purse or a pocket book or the ever chic sounding 'handbag?' My every day bag is a pale green Gucci knock-off (remember this?) made of beautiful soft leather that is big and floppy that swallows it's contents. Especially my car keys. Without fail, I'm stuck in the parking lot holding an umbrella, two bags and Bean who is determined to get down and drive away without me, trying to find them. I know. It should be simple. I should always put them in that tidy little front pocket. But that would be utterly out of character. And I never think of it until times like now.
These essentials that can always be found in my bag are as follows: 1. A Ziploc baggie of wipes. I remember shopping for a to-go wipes container while I was pregnant. I was very attached to the idea. Certain I'd need to whip out a perfect little compact case of wipes---as if the things have to stay serene and neatly folded or something. Now it's down to a Ziploc which fits beautifully in any bag, and can double as a trash-bag if necessary (I used mine today, when Bean decided he needed to poop in the woods while we were on a mini-hike.)
2. Random non-perishable snacks including Ziploc baggies of animal crackers and fruit-leather. I've always been awful about remembering to eat. Then I'm utterly famished and miserable. It seems I've passed this gene on to my kid, and though it took me about a year to get the hang of it, I now always carry something in my bag to proffer when the traffic gets heavy, when the lines get long, or when the playground was just so much fun
3. An extra pair of Bean underpants. Just in case. Have I mentioned Bean is totally potty trained (except for the occasional night accident, and the odd time when we don't make it to a bathroom fast enough)? It's lovely. Except for I think I was a little unprepared for the whole public bathroom with small child who wants to touch everything business. Is it wrong that I just let him stand ON the seat while peeing, so that he doesn't have to sit on it?
4. Lip gloss. My last minute instant pretty look. It's the only makeup I wear. Except for mascara sometimes. Because really, when is there time for more?
5. Cell phone. I hate it. Yeah, I'm one of those people. I never answer it. But I like knowing it's there, just in case. Also because it's a fabulous distraction for a two-year-old when all else fails.
6. And then the eighty-nine other random items, some of which I've sketched for your viewing pleasure. Others include: two cancelled tickets to a mini train ride. A very beaten bottle of Motrin. Hair ties. Crumpled receipts. An extra Bean t-shirt. The wheel of one toy tractor. And the plastic hat belonging to the man that goes in Bean's favorite digger.
What do you keep in your bag? Go ahead. Play along. Post about it, and leave a link to your post, or spill right here in the comments.
Midsummer moodiness
Somehow, the summer is slipping by. Without warning it is more than half over really, and I'm feeling moody about it. The sky has been a mosaic of torn clouds this week. Strong winds and rain have been thrashing about wildly like a greenbroke horse. The night sky burnished with sheet lightening, thunder always rolling low in the distance. It's that time in the summer when I start to think about it ending, and I feel a certain abject sorrow thinking of it. Like driving again after living through a car crash, the prospect of going back to work and living through another winter makes me white-knuckled and anxious, albeit in a hazy popsicle and sun-stupored way. Last year's autumn and winter left scar tissue running the length of our relationship: mine and DH's. We survived, but sometimes the ache of it painted entire weeks with indigo and gunmetal gray. We came out of it, one bowl at a time at the pottery studio, centering, finding each other among strangers, with slip on our hands and glaze splattering our shirts. But it took until after my birthday to feel like we'd make it to the next.
Now roses are blooming hot red and hooker pink, their petals promiscuously soft, but the slugs are eating holes in the leaves. We still haven't put in a garden fence, and the ground where the beds have not been turned has begun to reclaim its meadow-ness, grasses and tiny fingered ferns and sturdy-rooted dandelions sprouting up through the rubble of tilled soil. I wake up and spend my days sprawled out reading novels which is something I almost never do, and cannot quite get accustomed to. Hours in a book, interrupted every fifteen minutes by Bean who lopes about the yard with his bubble mower or a watering can.
We got him a set of trains and a an oval loop of track and they keep him occupied for nice long stretches of time, during which I get hauled into whatever place is inked out on the pages I'm turning. I get pulled in so easily, my whole day takes on the hue of the story, as though my life were a cotton cloth saturated in the dye of each story's language and emotion; little ripples and circles left clean, like tie-dye, where necessity forces me to resurface.
Small things bring me back to the moment. Making alphabet soup. Lying in bed with DH, my head pressed into the soft place where his arm and shoulder meet and his heartbeat thrums so loudly in my head, all at once I start to think it is my own. Or sitting on the planks of the small dock at the neighbor's pond with Bean, our toes in the water, listening for frogs and splashing, while above us swallows swoop and dive. But in between these things, words are running a haphazard narrative inside my head. Stories are bunkering up against each other.
Last week I finished Pam Houston's novel Sight Hound, which I wasn't entirely drawn into at first (many narrators, one of whom is a dog) but found myself sobbing by the end, grateful for it's right-there in plain sight way of talking about risk and faith and grief. Today I finished As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. DH's ninth grade copy with his ball point pen notes in the margins.
I read it in two days, though I didn't expect it to. There was a certain terrifying tension to it. Faulkner's language is so heady and convoluted and looping that the act of reading it becomes part of the story. You become torn, and belligerent and hateful and grieving because the language makes you feel these things. Like a rip tide, it tows you under. One sentence looping back on itself again and again until you can no longer read it and have it mean anything at all, or another so abrupt, so sharp with colloquial timbre that you have to catch your breath. I want to go back and read the whole thing again, because I felt myself pushed to the very edges of comprehension, as though it were my gut and not my mind to towards which the story was aimed.
I’m also reading Homeland, a collection of short stories by Barbara Kingsolver. My everywhere read. The one I snatch at in all those in-between moments. Each story yanks me into the very center of it’s truth. I read them hungrily, picking over the skeleton of the story, trying to understand how it is made. The gathering of small details, the weight of lines, or the way the author’s voice rides up high over the words of the narrator like radio stations overlapping.
Yet with all the book reading and the lolling about, I haven't been able to stay focused on writing. There is something in my aquarian nature that is both sanguine and ambivalent. This, combined with Bean's intermitent pestering, and it seems it is nearly impossible for me to effectively structure my days. I get disoriented in summer, with all the basking and book reading and love making and such, the heat rising up early and abating only after the thunder and rain have rinsed the grass and sky.
Anyone else feel like this, midsummer? What are you reading? Doing?
Napless
These are the days
We kept Bean up late, with a cup of frothed milk and a pillow in his wagon, because a neighbor puts on a grand firework display every year, and tonight was the night! As good, or better than the ones in town. Dozens upon dozens of sparkling, fill-the-whole-sky-with-brilliance, fireworks. Sipping cold beer. Fresh chocolate chip cookies. Plenty of dogs. Bean curled in my lap, his wide grin lit again and again by each new display.
Have I mentioned we have lovely neighbors? We really do. DH and I keep feeling like we walked into a storybook—at the end of our long dirt road. I am beyond grateful that we found this place: this land, these people. Last Friday we went to another neighborhood shindig: a strawberry festival. Everyone brought deserts featuring local strawberries. The counter top was a mosaic of berries and cream and cake. Bean was the only kid in a forest of adults and everyone indulged him: pouring more lemonade, adding extra chocolate dipped strawberries to his plate, and cooing when he flashed them a smile and bated his lovely eyelashes.
He's at such a cool age right now: he says thank you and please without prompting (mostly,) and can tag along to such gatherings without certain disaster ensuing. Tonight he was a love. Wide-eyed and eager, he totally dug the whole firework thing. And then rode home watching stars and fireflies, and crawled willingly into bed. These are the days I want to remember when I'm eighty.
Tangible moments
We are wrapped in summer now; heat pressing in at 9 a.m., the mountains obscured by a soft haze, and the woods verdant with foliage. Along the mown paths that we’ve cut through the meadows, black-eyed-Susans and daises flutter like prayer flags. Tiny wild strawberries hide under delicate serrated trios of leaves, and we squat to gather them at the edges of the path, the juice staining our fingers red. We watch the clouds gathering on horizon listlessly from the shade, wearing hardly anything at all, waiting for it to pour. Then we stand our faces upturned, fat raindrops speckling our cheeks.
Bean seeks out the hose, splashing cold water across my knees as I lounge in a lawn chair reading a novel. Heat stupored and languorous, I am trying to adjust to the pace of summer, recalling what life is like without urgency.
We make frosty smoothies from fresh peaches and frozen raspberries, eating them with long handled spoons from tall glasses in the shade. Mostly, we loll, Bean running naked in bright yellow Crocs and a sunhat; me in a chocolate colored bikini, wondering what sun will do the silver rivulets of stretch marks that have shimmered on my belly since his birth.
I catch myself staring. He’s so lithe and muscled, with the perfect little gibbous of a frog belly floating out in front of him. He moves with the ease of a yogi, squatting to inspect an iridescent June bug, spontaneously somersaulting down the easy slope of lawn, or racing pell-mell, with arms akimbo towards the garden where dirt and worms keep him occupied for over an hour. When he lies back on the grass, eyelids closed, I know he’s feeling the earth spin. His skin is still translucent, and I can see his veins running in intricate patterns across his ribs.
He’s my kid, and sometimes still I’m struck with disbelief. It was strange to be away for a week and then back—to watch how the warp and weft of my life separate and then entwined again. Strange to feel the familiarity of just myself: moments long on thought, late nights sipping wine and eating oysters, my pulse quickening to the tempo of the tenor sax. And then to feel the sticky sweet headlong passion of two-year old ardor, my heart thudding like a jungle drum.
Lately DH and I have been stopping each other in the midst of things to point out moments we could never have expected when we first found out we'd be parents. Like last night, the three of us in the back yard after dinner, the long rays of the evening sun falling just-so to make everything tinted with gold, DH playing guitar and Bean twirling around him in lopsided arcs. Or when all three of us were sitting on the grass, each one with a gawky chick in our lap, our uncontested favorite named “Mrs. T†for the way her orange feathers make a mohawk at the nape of her neck. Or lying naked on the bed our bodies slick in the evening heat, the fan oscillating and the moment ripe with longing, and then Bean clambering up to toss pillows on our heads, declaring, “I’m making a fort!â€
It can’t really be reconciled, the way these moments merge together to make my life. Sometimes I think what would have been, might have, had June not brought the two blue lines in 2004. I wonder if I would have arrived at this point, with my writing, with my love, with all the corrosive stress that has worn thin the membrane of my heart, or if I would have veered off: painted big canvasses perhaps, or gotten a PhD in marriage and family therapy, as I once thought I wanted to do.
Listening to the stories of the people I spent a week writing with, I realized how absolutely not alone I am in the experience of my life. The odds tumble against everyone, and then turn. Life has a way of bringing us what we need, though not always when we imagine we need it. I was struck by how everyone held longing close to their hearts; how each had made major life decisions that painted the canvass of their life with bold strokes, yet every picture was as flawed as the next. No situation has it all—life with kids, or without them; partnered or flying solo; degree program or grass roots experience. Each of us had trepidation that first day; each harbored the same isolated terror before reading his or her work aloud in front of an audience (which we confided to each other later over Malbec and warm buttered bred.) Life simply is.
So here I am, somebody’s mother. Thigh deep in the decadence of summer: strawberries by the pint full; vanilla ice cream staining our lips with milky mustaches at midday. I took Bean to the lake for his first swim of the season yesterday, and like a little waterbug, he plunged right in, head high, legs churning out a steady stream of bubbles. At night I dream of four leaf clovers, which I then find when I wake up, and stories keep raining down now, like marbles spilling from a jar.
Reasons to celebrate
I have to say, I feel like I owe you—Internets—one heaping helping of gratitude. You have, again and again made me take my writing seriously. Thank you for all of your comments…(Do you know how much I love them? A TON! ~ On that note, sorry about the funky commenting problems. Just hit “submit comment†ONE TIME, and it goes through, even if it tells you it doesn’t. Still don’t know why—though I’m trying to figure it out.) Thank you for all your emails, your encouragement and companionship from the very depths of my heart.
I started this blog two years ago this month, and I’ve benefited from the community I’ve found through it immeasurably. I laughed aloud when I went to look back at my first posts. See this one? Some things have come full circle, non? ( I never went that summer. Something about having a six month old prevented me. I think I’d delusionally signed up to CAMP with him and DH for the five days, in a two person backpacking tent, in a campground full of middle-age, new-age types who were seeking an ‘experience’ while there. We didn’t make it past night one.)
Anyhow, if I were a dog I’d be thwacking my tail into something rather hard. Since I’m not, I can’t stop grinning. Spent the day picking wild strawberries with Bean, wandering newly mown paths through our meadows, and yesterday, happily reunited, the three of us took a four hour nap in the sun. Life is good, good, good.
Writing assignment # 3: An alphabetical story
(The first letter of each sentence is in alphabetical order. X or Z may be left out, but not both. One line must be one word; one must be 100)
Zig zagging above us, the bats move through the fading light like acrobats. Yellow light stains the mountains, but in the valleys evening makes the shadows long. We’re in the lower meadow, picking sweet corn from the garden when we see them. Very slowly, we turn in unison, though neither of us has said a word.
There in the shadows, a doe and two fawns step from between the maples and the birches, heads low, grazing on wild strawberries and newly waist high grass. She lifts her head from time to time, sniffing, but we’re downwind. Reaching for me in the semi dark, I feel his hands fold around my shoulders, and I sink back into the warmth of his chest. Quiet.
Purple spreads across the darkening sky. One by one the stars come out, and fireflies start to twinkle at the edges of the lawn. Night folds her quilt of dark around us. Meadowlarks and the last of the swallows dart towards the pines along the drive.
Leaning back into his chest, he smells like grass and salt and honey, and I can hear his heart beating like a distant drum, until gradually an entire chorus of night sounds begins to build around the rhythm of his pulse, steady and persistent; bullfrogs calling from the pond below our meadow punctuating the higher more urgent trilling of the peepers and the tree frogs, with a bass that reverberates slightly in my sternum, and above them the insidious sonic treble of mosquitoes who are, as of yet, simply circling, while the bats swoop low, just missing our upturned faces.
Kissing him is suddenly worth more than spotted fawns, and I turn. Just then the coyotes that we’ve heard nightly begin to call. I pull back. He tilts his head like a dog, listening as their wild yapping reaches fever pitch. Goosebumps spread on my arms. Fleeting like shadows, we see them at the edge of the woods, crossing the upper meadow. Even as we’re watching, they disappear, melting into the night, their song ending suddenly as it began. Disentangling, we turn towards the house where light spills onto the lawn in golden squares.
“Come on,†I say.
But he pulls me back, his hands running up my shirt. Another moment in the dark, and we’re falling into the knee high grass.
June Self Portrait Challenge: environment # 2
Bliss
Have I mentioned that I’m having a divine time? I sat for three hours and wrote this afternoon after receiving brilliant criticism on the piece I am working on. I went to the beach yesterday, with a picnic: spicy fried chicken, pot stickers, salad, grapefruit soda, and a coconut & chocolate chip cookie. Then I watched the sun set over the water. I heard Maxine Kumin read from her work, and oh, how my breath was lost somewhere as she read, like the flight of birds.
And I went to dinner with Pam and the class tonight. She is charismatic and analytical and forthright. She’s been in the Bronco’s locker room and interviewed Toni Morrison, and she can make a room of people laugh belly laughs repeatedly.
Here are a few things she's said so far this week that I really want to remember:
On why she writes: “Writing is the way I honor the physical world. I think of it as a kind of prayer.”
On craft: “Sink the story into the metaphor. The challenge is how to sidle up next to the big things without becoming lecturers and making total fools out of ourselves.”
“There is nothing worse than trying to say something. You’ll always fuck it up. Keep it concrete.”
“You don’t have to tell everything. Let the concrete specifics stand in for the general.”
You cannot communicate depth using emotion word. ”Just read your seventh grade journal to see that!”
On Revising: by the fourth draft, “take out the things you needed to say to know, but now they can be removed.”
On fiction versus nonfiction: “Everything I write comes out of my experience. I hardly imagine anything.”
Do you know how freeing that was for me to hear? Do you understand how those few sentences made lots of things possible for me with writing, that I hadn’t imagined possible?
On audience; “You must believe your reader is as smart as you are.”
Writing assignment # 2: an airplane story
The big rigs were matchboxes and the cars marbles and then it was over. On the way down, the salt flats were pale green and iridescent blue, and the mountains heaved up like bread rising in the oven. I chewed gum on the descent, for the first time I’d ever been allowed, and felt my seven-year-old body slam into the back of my seat as the wheels hit the tarmac and the wind flaps roared with engagement. I tried hard not to swallow my gum. The second time, two years taller, on a ranch outside Gunnison I was in the back seat next to my sister. She was always talking about being a pilot when she grew up. I decided I wanted to be one too, but the way she talked made me keep my dream to myself.
My dad sat in the front seat with a thermos of coffee and bread and butter sandwiches wrapped in cellophane next to Art Gilmond, who was sixty, and smelled of engine oil and sweat. He was balled and sunburned and he kept a ranch with mustang horses and fruit trees. We were staying the week.
I’d surprised him heading for the bathroom the night before, coming up the stairs just as he was passing in the hall.
“Boo!†I yelled.
His fist stopping just inches before my startled face.
“Damn it. Never do that again,†he said his face suddenly ashy. “Never surprise a Vet.â€
I kept my distance.
The yellow and white propeller of the little four-seater wound up like a drunken bumble bee. This time the plane bucked down the runway and then lifted off, air slipping under and over its fat white wings like someone had tossed it aloft. We circled the canyons low enough to startle horses. The engine vibrated in every cell of my body. The sky seemed to be a brighter blue than on the ground, and everything looked miniature like in a painting or like a toy store village. We at bread and butter as we circled; flying to the edge of a canyon and then flying on, the land suddenly falling away below us. My ears popped, and I gulped air.
The third time I was seventeen, and alone in the front seat with the instructor. The long cable that connected the glider to the belly of the plane up ahead of us would pull us aloft, he told me. I was ready. By the fence my dad stood with his foot on the bottom rail, a thermos of coffee in his hand. I’d been reading. I knew about aerodynamics and the Wright Brothers. I also knew about Icarus.
I was ready for anything except for the way when the instructor retracted the metal cable after we’d climbed up, and up, circling with the tow plane until we were at gliding altitude, it was suddenly silent. No motor, just rushing wind. I could see gulls circling just below us, and the tiny speck of my dad.
Small unbelievable things
Walking knee-deep in the ocean. Picking up scallop shells for Bean. Uniterrupted reading time. Trying to kick fear in the ass, and the prospect of an entire night of uniterrupted sleep.
I'm somewhere else
I left at half past nine, and followed the sunshine south. Listened to Radio Lab. Did you know dolphins and ducks sleep with one half of their brain at a time? I was fascinated. Listened to a fiesty Niko Case play for a live audiance, and watched as the landscape flattened and the trees became stubby and gnarled. Now I'm here, feeling light headed and wonderous. Ready to take a walk to the beach, and maybe to scope out the local coffee shop before orientation starts in an hour.
I have work to share, but I'm terrified, still. DH read it dutifully and gave the best of advice: you have to start somewhere, and anywhere is good. Especially if you love words as much as I do. And besides, they're not going to eat me alive just because I signed up for advanced fiction when I've only written a handful of fiction pieces in my life. Right? We'll see. I'll be posting a lot this week (no two year old!) I'm interested to keep a record of my emotions as I jump into this. Something I'm drawn to and totally scared of in the same breath. Must be a little how moths feel, fluttering by the porch light.
Always last minute me
An inefficient overachiever, and a sick one at that.
I'll leave in the morning tomorrow, and drive for six hours. Signing along with the radio, trying to get the directions right, and feeling like my stomach might fall out my mouth, but I'll try not to focus on that. (Have I mentioned how anxious I get right at the beginning of things--at that cusp of unknown? I have. I know. But I really hate it.) But with all my heart I'm excited to be going, and I have questions that I'm determined to ask of the lady whose prose makes me grin, or catch my breath. But I also want to know answers from you. If you write, or read, or dream of writing, I'd love to hear your thoughs.
* Where are the lines between life and fiction. How can pieces of life, stories, characters, annecdotes become the tapestry of fiction?
* How much is enough? I'm forever writing the long piece. The piece with backstory on the backstory. I want to learn to craft a shorter narritive. Something with just enough to let the reader do the rest. How do you know when to leave off, without saying everything?
* And audiance. I don't feel like I have a sophisticated enough sense of audiance yet. Kurt Vonnegut says "Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia." If you write, who is your one person? Who is yoru audiance. Maybe that's my problem, I can never think of just one person.
June self portrait challenge: environment
More environment self portraits here.
Noticing colors, and a list
Tonight a sunny cafe dinner with just Bean. Watching 'big rigs' and trucks drive by; slurping fresh tomato basil soup from a wide silver spoon. Then sharing an ice cream cone and watching him zip static-headed and grinning down the slide at the playground again and again.
Armloads of peonies. Such a heady, delicate scent. Pure decadance.
A stomach full of butterflies about the impending workshop; but also: a week of sleep and open beaches and new possibilities and time to write.
And I'm sorry I've become one of those bloggers--so irregular with my posts you barely want to stop by. I can hardly wait to come here regularly {I have a dozen GREAT posts all written in my head, I swear!} and share and rant and follow my whimsy.
At the inlaws
Navigating the bizarre, delightful terrain of family. The humidity is something. Bean rides his bike in gleeful circles on the drive. His grandad lets him steer the lawn tractor. His smile is impossibly wide. We eat outside, toasting with bubbly wine and watching the fireflies come out. There is so much about this family that is complicated, but so much that I adore. I have a stack of end-of-year reports to finish, and more fiction to write. Right now I am in desperate need of coffee. And shorts. I don't own any--except garden work worthy ones. I don't know how that happened really, except for the fact that I find it impossibly hard to find shorts that fit well. Do you have any favorites? Happy weekend everyone!