Anticipation angst

This morning called for errands in town. Warm cinnamon buns from the last farmer’s market of the season, and people watching in the rain. Returning home for a much needed two hour nap among soft white flannel sheets (with the cat at my feet) and then an afternoon cleaning in that wholesome, down to the nooks and crannies kind of way that is utterly satisfying. Tomorrow we’re having a shindig with several dozen people. All good friends and neighbors. Cider, pumpkin carving, a rip-roaring bonfire. And though I can’t wait to have everyone in one spot, I’m way out of my comfort zone.

Throwing parties isn’t something I’m good at yet. I’d like to be. I’d like to be better at social things in general—and it was a resolution of mine this year to push myself in this direction. Being the Aquarius that I am, I’d prefer to be holed up somewhere creating, or with a few friends huddled over steaming lattes in a bohemian cafe. I don’t do new social situations with ease—or, more honestly, I don’t do anticipating them well. Once I’m actually in the midst of it all, I’m generally fine. I fly by the seat of my pants and hope everyone’s having a good time. But the residue of the ahead-of-time angst makes me nervy for the first twenty minutes or so of any new circumstance.

I look back on my quiet, almost cloistered home life as a child, and find my anxiety coiled there. We rarely had guests. My parents never “entertained.” Hence I really only have the random collection of fall-back experiences from my late teens and early twenties, and mostly those sucked. Red plastic cups of cheep beer, etc. But I’ve always craved more. I love people, and I love good food, and I love these in combination. Like a chapter out of an Isabelle Illende novel, I want my house to be full of the vivacious, bubbly, cacophony of voices and laughter. I want this to be the memory Bean has. Friends, always welcome. Dinner parties. Gatherings. Ruckus chatter under starlight, as people gather around a fire.

Mommy stone

“Where is my mommy stone?” He asks, upper lip quivering. It is bed time. I’ve come to say good night. Then he says, “I love you and I missed you.” He says this often, the latter almost automatically following the former; but it’s also something that must reflect the hunger his little self feels for mommy time. I’m not always available the way I could be—if I were wholly and exclusively focused on being his mother. Selfishly, I take time for me often. I write, I run, I forfeit controlling the circumstance of his days in exchange for time to do my own things.

Now we’re in the semi dark. He’s talking about the small stone I gave him when I went back to work this year. I told him it was a Mommy Stone with kisses in it, to rub on his cheek if he missed me. I don’t know why he’s suddenly thought of it tonight, and seeing him, upper lip trembling, I want to make everything immediately okay.

“I’ll find you another mommy stone and put kisses in it and have it ready for you in the morning,” I rush to offer.

“But how can I see the kisses? How do they get in there?” He is earnest, almost crying, and suddenly I’m over come too. I wrap him in the dark, kissing his cheeks a hundred times, tears suddenly, unexpectedly wet on my cheeks. “You can’t see them, you can feel them when you rub the Mommy stone on your cheek. Because I love you, and I put the kisses in there just for you,” I say.

“Okay,” he says, and then “I love you, I love you mommy.”

“I love you too, with my whole heart,” I whisper into the air against his cheek.

“I love you, I love you,” he says, his arms wrapped around my neck.

synchopation

I have the day off and I’m gleefully miring my way through an inconceivably long to-do list. I have yet to figure out how to accomplish my every day life and everything else that needs to get done.

The biggest thing I’ve accomplished: completely reorganizing and painting my studio. Last year sometime, in the middle of the winter, under a blanket of depression, I painted my studio a pale blue, which felt like a bad idea almost seconds after the last coat was applied. Without meaning to, I began to use my studio space less and less, until I would go for a week or two without ever entering it.

This affected me on a subconscious level. I felt creatively terrified. Performance anxiety corroded any attempt to splash color across the page or really sink back into a routine of writing. Without a space I felt comfortable in, I resorted to writing at the kitchen table, in the midst of the hubbub of daily life, and routinely sabotaged my own efforts even there, buy skimming through my favorite blogs, or trying to keep up with the voracious demands of my gig over at Parent Dish.

Somehow the entire month of September (and nearly all of October) was swallowed by the murky creature of un-ambition. All summer I was entrenched in the rich sensory beauty of the outdoors; of leisure; good food; good novels. Then fall arrived with the first nip in the air and the hillsides turning orange, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. My syncopation was jagged and blurry; like a scarecrow trying to dance. Somehow with the shift in seasons I stopped doing all the things that I love: running, writing, art, and instead became (maybe necessarily) submerged in the fabric of work.

Headlong there, in the classroom, participating in the daily alchemy of turning eighteen individuals into a working group of learners; time spent watching spiders eat grasshoppers in the terrarium; and writing stories about magical shrinking potions. Time spent tying shoes and counting shells and navigating small sorrows. Time spent feeling nearly exhausted every afternoon; always empty, hungry, anxious.

And then I came home a few days ago to an empty house (Bean and DH were out running errands) and despite feeling hungry and grumpy, I decided to pull on my running shoes and head out in the perfect autumn sunlight for a run.

On the way back, passing a long field that follows the road for a good stretch, a small pony saw me running, and cantered up to the fence and then ran with me. I stopped and petted her tousled mane, and then continued, delighting in the unexpected equine attention. And then I realize: I was no longer either hungry or grumpy. My mood and body had been off kilter because I’ve been so out of rhythm. My soul misses running, it seems. Just as it misses moving through steady sun salutes on my yoga mat on my sunny studio floor.

So in the past few days I feel like I’ve come back into orbit around the quiet fire of my inner self. I’ve started running again, and I want to do it nearly every day. My body needs to move, just as my mind needs the quiet emptiness of one foot falling in front of the other along the gravel road.

So I’ve cleaned my studio and tackled my to-do list, and finally feel like I’m at least leaning towards a place of balance. Not quite there yet, but at least facing the right direction now.

As I write, thousands (really!) of lady bugs have migrated to our house. They are landing on the windows, twirling through the hazy autumn air in their bumbling flight. Do they hibernate? What are they doing here? Some say lady bugs are good luck. I'm content to imagine that they are.

'Cause I'm swift like that

Tonight, while painting my studio, I pushed a box that bumped a table that bumped a shelf on which our portable phone sat. The phone arced through the air and landed I THE BUCKET OF PAINT. No joke. I spent the next twenty minutes cleaning it with q-tips. It still seems to work.

Okay then.

My studio is now a yummy golden pumpkin color. While the paint dries I'm eating dried mango strips and espresso chocolate while my cat is curled at my elbow. The woodstove has made the house toasty. Rain is spattering the windows. Dark noses in at the glass.

How did you spend your day?

Twirling in a burlap sack

Or something. This week has been hectic, and I'm grumpy that I'm turning into one of those depressing post once a week bloggers. I love coming here and finding all of you and your comments and your stories, and I have a zillion posts that I write in my head... you know how it is.

This week though, in particular, has been like a bizarre synchronized swimming competition and I've barely had time to come up for breath. It shouldn't really be so hectic--my in-laws have moved here (and though they don't have appliances so they're here all the time for meals, they help A LOT with Bean and such) and my class at school has finally started to come together as a group. There have been no more incidents of scissor throwing or wailing or refusals to say, sit in a chair, or come to the meeting area, and today a parent came in and built an exquisite terrarium for us.

At home we have a toasty warm new wood stove, and the hills are turning to burnished red and saffron. When we take walks in the afternoon we walk through armloads of fallen leaves the color of gems, freckled with rainwater. The rooster has begun crowing. The skies at dusk are purple like the stain of a grape, with gauzy gray clouds smudge across the mountains. It’s a good time of year. Time for apple pie, and café au laits and pumpkin cheesecake ice cream.

But I still have this feeling; like a dervish. Twirling, my feet barely touching ground. I know the real reason is that I haven’t connected back with my writing for several weeks now, and the threads that connect me to the stories I’m constructing have become fine and tenuous like spider’s webs. But every morning I wake up still tired, and every night I go to sleep with my mind a kaleidoscope of fragments. I have forgotten the geometry of being divided in this way: mother, writer, teacher, spouse.

In a conversation with my mother yesterday, she was saying how so many women she knows are on a quest to find the true things that they love. A calling. A direction. A depth of purpose. I laughed, relating my own woes. Mine has never been a lack of purpose or direction or enjoyment, it’s always been a lack of time.

“If I could do every day twice,” I said, “then maybe, just maybe I’d get everything done that I long to do.”

How about you?

(Time in parenthesis)

We took a weekend trip. Just us. Two. Without the little scampering sweetness we've created. It was the first time, since him. The first time to loll about in bed, taking advantage of uniterrupted time spent both horizontal and unclothed. And also, time to laugh and sip martinis at the open bar (we went to a wedding) and to tear it up on the dance floor. Time to giggle and eat ice cream and walk hand in hand. Time to watch mallards landing on the Delaware River, and the fog lifting. Time to poke into ecclectic hippie shops and glass blowing galleries and cafes. It was, simply put, an amazing weekend of rediscovery. We have so much fun together. He rocks my world, still. More now.

What do you believe?

I'm sitting outdoors with a bevy of chickens clucking at my elbow. Across from me the cat is licking himself, fur soaking up warmth. Next to me Bean digs a big hole in an empty flower bed. The grass is wet from rain, and the sun is warm on the black rubber of my boots. I just spent the weekend with a good friend I've known since I was fourteen. He's an creative, free-spirited atheist. Invariably we always have at least one argument about faith. He sees no need for it--the opiate of the people and all that. I'm on the other side, but less articulate. I don't keep a drawer of knife sharp words to define the shape of what I know. Tautology. Ignorance. Deism. How do you use the scientific method to argue the depth or scope of spiritual faith? How do you use logic as the basis for accepting or denying that which you cannot know about the movement of another person's heart?

So now I really want to know:

What do you believe? Do you have faith, or do you live outside it? How do you rationalize your fundamental view of the world? Can logic define it, or is something lost in translation?

Sweet, sweet, bittersweet.

Morning Poem # 3

Swallows swoop in at the barn doorand their feathers, bones filled with air, brush up against the corrugated metal roof.

The air is rife with musk and hay and the hot piss of sheep pressing against each other in woolly urgent nearness.

The sky bends down closer to the earth now; blue tucking the edges of the vermilion mountains in;

and every vine heavy with wild grapes bittersweet.

Morning Poem # 2

Because his small hand fits into my palm still,I hold my breath and feel the gills of my heart pummel inside my chest.

There is no way for keeping this; like stacking bags of sand against the jetty, crumbling no way to keep back his tide of growing up.

“I’m you’re a little bit big boy,” he whispers against my cheek in the dark then moon gets caught in the branches on the hill

and I’m begging that this filament these slender fish bones of love and the flotsam of our days will keep us when he is taller than my head,

and turns to walk the other way.

Morning poem # 1

The sun falls in broken rectangles on the floorshards of yellow plates we gather in our pockets, for the winter ahead. Our skin bare to the wind, the grass tattoos our arms with zig zags and clover while the moments grow steady and the verdant humming of summer dwindles into the big-moon nights and stillness.

September mornings

Sometimes there are other things. Mornings of sleeping in an extra half hour instead of getting up and dragging myself to the keyboard in the pre-dawn chill, because my days already feel like the fragile worn fabric of a quilt. The first flu of the season has me bleary eyed and achy. I’d whimper, but the afternoons with skies all blue and full of tatters, make me too happy.

The weather has been perfect. The leaves falling, every day more, until the ground has become a kaleidoscope of red and yellow. Days are filled with small things that make me be right here. Pomegranates are in season. The wood is stacked, cords deep, and our new wood stove arrived; fire-engine red, tucked into a corner in the dining room. Apples are tangy and sweet now, and on the tree beyond the kitchen window they look like the burnished red beads on some old woman’s necklace. The air’s still sweet and noisy with the end of summer: crickets at night, and the last cut of hay, but there is a bite to the mornings.

Sometimes I want fragments. Short phrases. Words in the loop of a poem; the dangling thought of an elipsis; the wanton lust of the run-on. Sometimes I can't say things all the way, the way they are. Instead, the feeling is simply there, welling up. Like woodsmoke in the air, or the red streak of the tanager. This week I want to return to something I did last September. A poem a day. A morning poem. Whatever words come to mind to paint the colored arc of soul and dreams across the page. Tomorrow, first thing, with a steaming mug and the fog rising, I'll scatter careless armfuls of words like autumn leaves. Will you join me?

Enmeshed in forward motion

In the Pacific ocean, 1996.

This afternoon I sat among boxes in my studio and dug through relics (an attempt at organizing, gone very far tangent.) I found pictures of high school boyfriends; letters; collages. All small fragments of who I was then, different, yet still me, in ridiculous cut-off shorts and too-large plaid shirts (thank you Nirvana.)

It felt so funny looking back---feeling the way time arcs like electricity, fast and slow between now and then. It seems so impossible to me sometimes, that we can only go forwards. That we can only live today and maybe tomorrow, but never yesterday again. Those romances, back then when I wore converse high tops and baggy jeans were so sweet and achingly awkward. They were all good guys, and I still know most of them. Some, I’m still close friends with, which says a lot about the both of us, I think. But even though we're friends, and we talk and share pancakes when they come to visit my little family here up on our hill, we can still only go one-way: always towards the future. We’ll never be able to slip back into the skin of our past selves—there on the rocky coast, posing for the camera on self-timer in wind-rumpled blue parkas; or there on the cobbled streets of Florence, in hiking boots and backpacks.

Riffling through the box of artifacts I felt myself slip up above like a helium balloon on a string. Suddenly with a birds-eye-view: there I am, in the middle of my life. That is how it has all turned out. That man. That small boy. That house. And not those other men, despite their earnest efforts, and big hearts. It felt like time travel, seeing my name, printed out on numerous envelopes. My maiden name. Those consonants now grown unfamiliar on my tongue.

Has anyone else ever felt like this? Startled, for a brief moment, or surprised, to find yourself right where you are? Not that it could be any different, or that I would want it to. Simply that time moves on, and that on a rare instant I see how I am enmeshed in its shimmering net, the tide pulling steadily forwards, and regardless of my loves and my discrepancies, and I arrive each day, a little further on.

Pell-mell Tuesdays

Every minute of the day was allocated for something. Gah! Do you ever have days like that? I'm still getting the hang of it, and mostly I suck. If left to my own devices I'd be the haphazard, spontaneous, bohemian Aquarius that I am, to the core. I’d forget to eat, and then have pancakes for dinner; I’d write for hours on end and skip washing my hair; I’d sit in cafés to people watch past 10pm, and loose count swimming laps at the pool. But because I am not left to my own devices, I sometimes struggle to stay afloat of the waves of laundry, the books that need reading, the posts that need writing, the drafts that need revising, the kids that need shoe tying, and the small boy who needs smooching. Not to mention the big one. Who I feel like I've barely seen this week. I hate crossing paths, barely. I hate when we only sink into each other's arms in bed. When the entire day is parceled out.

Not all days are like this, but Tuesdays for some reason often are.

What was your Tuesday like? And also, what would you be like if left to your own devices?

Celebrating right now

For DH’s birthday: I woke up to make pancakes and pick fresh flowers before heading out the door for work. In the evening we went out for dinner at an lovely little Italian place. Good wine. Excellent food: smoked/grilled fresh mozzarella with eggplant; pumpkin ravioli with duck; veal saltimbocca. Bean was a delight. A perfect example of manners and peaceable dining. He noshed on the pumpkin ravioli and daintily pretended the breadsticks were chopsticks. A perfect evening.

DH's birthday comes two days after our anniversary—not our wedding anniversary, but our first-got-together one. Eight years. Pretty cool to know someone for nearly a decade, and to feel like time has flown.

Is this what it feels like forever? Time speeding up exponentially with each rotation of earth around sun? Until decades tumble down upon each other, and thus is a life? Is this really how it goes? Each moment so full, so poignant, so messy and rich and joyous, that it all seems like yesterday. I look at Bean, our shiny-eyed rascal of a boy, and I can’t see a baby in him any more. He’s all little boy. Rough and tumble and sweet. It makes me catch my breath.

We spend so much time looking forward to things, and then, so much time looking back. The moments in between, before the fruit is picked, before the seeds are spit. Sheer present; so hard to hold.

Snippets

Several of you made me promise I'd tell you when my piece hit newstands in Mothering Magazine. The editor says nice things about it here. And also--I need your help: Dh's b-day is this weekend. Any fun ideas?

Winnowing at the surface

Awakenig after a night of strange sleep, has me feeling like I never went to sleep. Does this ever happen to you at night? Drifting to sleep you hover just before it, on the brink, not quite able to shake the weight of consciousness. It doesn’t happen frequently, but when it does, and I toss about, poking my feet out from under the covers or seeking the muscled spoon of DH’s hot back, I am struck by how utterly exhausting consciousness is.

Each day is a fracture landscape of moments we intend and moments we do not. There is so much reaction in my day; so many times I’ll carry something from one end of the house to the other without thinking about it; or worse, say words I don’t really mean. More than words, it is tone that oozes with the organ-dark mess of moods.

Especially breaking back into a daily routine structured by necessity: earlier wake-up times, more to accomplish within the falling sand of every hour, I watch my energy and effort splinter off. I remember certain things while others leave me almost as soon as they happen. Like steam from a mug of tea; or summer’s heat once autumn has arrived.

Maybe I’m shallow. Maybe I am hardwired to be more resilient: able to move forward shaking off the past that has drenched every pore. I’m not sure. I do know that there are times when I need to be more conscious—especially with DH. We so easily hook each other into little spats. Small words that tailspin, ripping context to shreds. I nearly always take his bait. A sentence flung sideways.

The worst part is that often right in the middle of it, when I’m still bristling with ego and unwilling to back down, I cannot quite, entirely, recall the words that were said. I tag too much on tone, too much on gesture. I remember the context but not the specific content. I assume too much.

And then in the blurry high-moon dark I’m dream-soaked and restless, making up for lost clarity. I skate across the surface of sleep like a water-bug; not really in the water, not entirely above it either. I’m grateful for morning, and early quiet of the house as the sun slowly rises, pulled from behind the mountains like a marionette. The trees are dappled with gold. Each day more leaves turn the color of fire and persimmon. Deer apples, small and round, are sweet and tangy on the trees. I’ve promised Bean we’ll gather them and make an apple pie.

Rabbit-hole days

I’ve been feeling empty word-wise, and it almost feels like a betrayal. Flat screen, flat words; the keystrokes brittle and familiar as I pound out paragraphs. Especially here, I feel a new emptiness. The recent combination of less comments and more visibility has made me hesitant to write about the small mundane things in my life that I’ve filled posts with before. I’ve started to wonder if people care what my days consist of, the moments packing in one after another until the bushel basket of each day is full to overflowing. Maybe it’s a feeling of overextension. I’ve written so much from my point of view, I feel like I have nothing new to say. It’s the end of summer here. Leaves on the first of the sugar maples are turning fire engine red and burnished orange. We’ve had a few damp days, humidity hanging in the air until afternoon thunderstorms send the moisture raining down in sheets.

When we walk in the meadow, insects scatter. Fat grasshoppers, praying mantis. I’ve been looking for monarch caterpillars to bring into my classroom and at first thought they’d made cocoons early and had already metamorphosed and flown south; no sign of them on the milkweed clustered along the edge of the lane down to the pond. But looking closely I found some, so tiny they were barely visible at all. Just as long as my pinky fingernail is wide. Little horns and stripes, eating holes stained white with milk on the fat green leaves.

I gathered them up, a dripping milkweed caterpillar bouquet, and carried them home. Now they’re eating their way through leaves and leaving poop at the bottom of a glass jar on my windowsill. Tomorrow they’ll travel to school with me; and soon, they’ll grow accustomed to the eager eyes and hot breath of children. So will I.

See? This is all I have to say. Summer has done me in. I’m languorous and scattered. In my studio I’ve started a new canvass, several feet wide. I have more energy right now for color, for wild brush strokes and the haphazard following of whimsy that paint provides, than for the record keeping of my days. I’m thinking though that with this exhaustion of my own perspective fiction will come easier. I find myself looking forward to when I can sit down to write through another lens, a different window. To hold open the doorway to another person’s heart, though invariably, it leads back to the corridors of my own. But I haven’t had time yet to sink into even this.

My new routine hasn't taken shape yet. I need a week, or two, to fall back onto the trampoline of early morning writing and jam-packed days. Until then, I’m all over the place, trying to get other things done. Stacking a woodpile, replanting azaleas, buying paint to redo the livingroom in sunny acorn.

And because I’ve been lackluster about posting and even more so in commenting on all of your blogs, there’s been a lull in this small corner of the interweb and I miss your comments, your snappy, snarky, encouragement. Perhaps all this to say, I’m ready for summer to be over? Ready for a shift. A new direction. I’m not sure. I love the sun-drenched days, and I feel nervous about winter. But I feel like I’ve slipped down a rabbit hole, having sunk so entirely into the present of my days.

Remembering.

Back to alarm clock wake ups

Back to waking up when the sky is stained pink and the birds are loudest. Back to those first blurry moments of dawn, watching my guys sleep nose to nose like racoons. Back to work. And definitely not into the swing of things yet. I'll resurface soon. Please don't go away.