Wednesday::

I woke up in the middle of the night to a nosebleed. In the dark I could imagine the color, my cupped hand already filling, reaching for tissues. In the morning an ice storm, a two hour delay, lingering over coffee.

At school, everything out of routine, topsy turvy, but we're talking about poems and poems make anything better.

In the evening the sky was navy and threatening, but then suddenly each twig and branch was gilded with light.

Project runway ended. It made me happy.

What is your midweek like?

Attempting

I make lunch the night before; do yoga first thing; then come home from work and play with my boys. The three of us take a long walk down the melting muddied road. It is pock marked with potholes: perfect circles of mud and splashy water, just right for jumping, which Bean does in his black and yellow rain boots. I love the way he pauses before each jump, placing his feet together, crouching down, getting the most out of his small muscled legs. The water goes everywhere in satisfying droplets. I love too the way he pauses to fish around in the muddy, icy cold water, then stands up triumphant: “I found a beautiful rock!” he yells. I make lunch the night before, circling the counter unaccustomed to thinking about food at 9:38p.m. Especially not a chicken & arugula wrap, fresh berries and yogurt, walnuts and raisins. In the morning I slip from my bed and turn the shower on before thinking. I stand bleary, rubbing my eyes, my feet on the looped lavender bath mat. Then I turn the water off, circle the house, find my yoga mat and breathe. After the fourth or fifth sun salute I realize that the entire right side of my body aches: my ear, throat, hamstrings, ankle bones. I apologize to my body for just living in it so often, without thinking. I take my vitamins. I turn the shower on again. I exfoliate. I let hot water pound on my back until I know it’s made my skin lobster red. I linger. Then I plunge towards the day.

I am trying to live this month as intentionally as I can. Taking care of myself. Making the whirling chaos of my day to day life less chaotic. It’s all about the small things, that I’ve given too little thought to. The things that ultimately bear the Morse code of self discipline. Food. Exercise. Laundry. Dishes. Creativity.

I loved reading your lists about the things you’d do if living “perfectly” for a month. Now I’m wondering: what stops you from doing them? What stops us all, really?

Lists, naps, and a month of living 'perfectly'

I wake up from dreaming of the Arizona desert and a professor and his wife I don’t actually know in real life. The phrase “sand frills” sticks in my mind, something I’ve invented in sleep: as in, the canons and mesas give way to sand frills. It almost works to describe the way the sand is funneled and scarred with gullies and rivulets, flash floods scraping rivers into dry mud and red rocks. I wake up with an ear ache, the pain sucking at my right ear like altitude.

I slip away from the others, still sleeping: my small boy with his arms flung side to side like the oars of a rowboat, a contented sleep smile staining his face rosy; and my husband who was feverish last night and who wears and orange t-shirt and twitches inadvertently. It is the last day of vacation and I wake up mid day from napping with the sun slanting through the slits of the wooden blinds, dust motes rising and twirling in the air.

Yesterday I napped too, alone with the cats. Both of them curled nose to tail on the flannel. When I joined them, the apricot one chirped a welcome to me. At night she follows me around the house as I turn off the lights, bank the fire, get ready for sleep. She meows plaintively then, wanting one thing: a pinch of cat nip that makes her whirr like a summer fan and fall to the floor like a dervish in a state of ecstasy.

Today I wake up at 2:37 p.m. dreaming of people I don’t know. For the longest time, or what feels like the longest time, I am convinced that I do actually know the man, who in my dream was a professor, we both were it seems. I try to pull my mind from the shallows of near sleep, where thoughts dart like the shadows of trout, illusive and just below the surface.

Gradually I stir, hoping that if I move, inhabit my body again, feel my fingers and toes, I’ll be able to place him and his wife, dark olive skin, but I’m only more confused and the pain from my ear creeps down my neck. When I put my hand up to my throat I find the glands on that side are swollen. Everything participating in the purposeful choreography of falling ill just as vacation is ending, of course.

When I climb from the bed I move the covers, I move my knees, and my ankles and the soles of my bare feet make contact with the wood floor. I can feel the grooves between the planks. The round circles where penny sized tabs of wood cover screw holes. For a minute I sit there at the edge of the bed with the dust motes circling my tangled hair like a halo and am stricken.

I think of all the screws. Thousands, maybe a million, although I can hardly imagine what a million screws would look like, each one made of dark metal, machined somewhere in a plant in Idaho or Tennessee or Mexico or China. I am astounded considering all the people who contributed to my floor in this way: the workers in protective goggles and gloves sorting and correcting package weights; the fork lift driver; those at the shipping yard and at the hardware store, and also the men who likely knelt a million times or more to place each screw, thankful to have an electric or battery operated screw driver.

The floor is old, and when we bought the house, the finish was almost black with age. It didn’t gleam, and by the windows in my studio, a lot of water damage. Someone left the windows open more than once during a summer rain. Now it gleams, sanded and finished twice over. Our sweat. Our bending knees. My feet make contact with the floor. I pull myself to standing. I pull on jeans. I pull on a white terry sweatshirt that I’ve just put through the wash with a few tablespoons of Chlorox.

In the dryer I added a Mrs. Myers Clean Day geranium scented dryer sheet. The smell made me happy. It spelled clean and not cloying, though not natural either. The house is clean now, at the end of vacation. My life feels in order. I’ve spent the week putting things in order: paints on the shelf in my studio, carmine and cobalt and cerulean. I’ve scheduled things: doctors appointments, dental check ups, hair cuts, meals with friends. I’ve crossed things off my list: updated accounts, passport papers, green peppers and Irish oats and oranges for squeezing. On the bag they say “Take home and give us a squeeze.” Like some sort of huggable small trolls nestled together there in the orange webbed bag.

I’m reading Don DeLillo's book White Noise, and am fascinated with the way he uses lists to tell the story. Lists spiraling and deepening, a little the way Tim O’Brian did in The Things They Carried. This month, March, is a month of lists. It’s a month I’ve decided to live contentiously, focusing on the small things like replying to emails regularly and packing my lunch for work the night before. I get so outside myself, tilting towards the big picture, towards the hungry heat of my passions, that I forget to be here much, and here has a way of getting crowded and overwhelming as a result.

In O Magazine, someone wrote an article about “A Month of Living Perfectly” and I laughed, because it was my idea, the very thing I said to DH. “What if we spend March living the way we always say we want to live? No waffling.”

He nodded over toast. He wasn’t really listening to me. It was the end of February and the snow had numbed his brain. It keeps falling, by the way, falling nearly nightly. Making the woods white and glittering and the driveway slick when it melts and then turns to ice in the dark. But now March is here, and I’m going ahead with my proposition, ready, set, go.

If you were to live “perfectly” for a month, what are the top five things you would do every day?

It's alright

We’re good. Better. Hours outdoors snowshoeing, just the two of us, the sun filtering through the trees like gold onto the snow. Conversations over wine and salad about astronomy and politics and five year plans. A few extra minutes in bed together, lips brushing against warm skin, after sending Bean off to play in his room. Holding hands while walking around the grocery store. Taking the time to remember what it was like when our universe was just us. When he was my only focus. When I was his.

And yeah, the jealousy is still there. But I also know that I’d be heartbroken without this. Without the maples drenched in snow, the tiniest of new red buds just showing. Without this house that smells sweet with the heady aroma of brownies and hums with the rhythmic whir of the dishwasher. Without these boys: the big one and the small. I know this. I know there is an arc to everything, and that I’m on mine, and I’ll get there. And I know that this is my story: this juxtaposition of homestead and wanderlust. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But thank you for your reminders. I needed them.

Here again

Outside, in the quiet winter cold, a dog barks again and again and again. A series of three staccato yaps, then a pause, snowflakes swirling in the silence before it barks again; left somewhere outdoors, hot breath making the fur wet around his mouth, icicles gathering in shaggy snarls.

In the sky, the moon, rinsed in the shadow of a recent eclipse, climbs higher up the edge of the dark.

Inside, I almost hold my breath. Heartache coiled in my chest again. I’m restless.

It is still winter here, and I’m home after a week away, where I was submerged in desert sunlight and words. The yearning to be at the next place in my life is fiercer than ever now; to be doing this writing thing, full tilt, without anything else. To be writing every day, without a day job that leaves me feeling like one of those tabs of fish food you throw in the tank for the fish to nibble relentlessly while the owner leaves for a vacation.

It is still winter and stumbling about the internet I find a classmate from my year in college who has published her first collection of essays, and also has the job I wish I had, in the thick of the Manhattan literary world, among tall buildings and subways and martinis. I bite my lip seeing her book jacket, her shiny hair.

I hate the color of this thing that creeps up in my solar plexus. I hate the way jealousy makes me feel small and suffocated, and the way it makes me ask a hundred stupid what-ifs, as if time weren’t irreversible, as if I weren’t here in the thick of this winter snowstorm with a three year old tucked into flannel sheets upstairs and a husband suffering through another bout of depression.

Maybe this is the thing I hate the most. How he won’t admit that his entire way of inhabiting the world hinges on finances; on what he makes or looses for the week in the market, the charts and numbers blipping by him faster than a heartbeat. He won’t say that his life is empty of things that make his heart tremble with passion; he won’t say that he keeps putting these things on hold to maintain our status quo, to keep afloat, to put in a home gym and a flat screen TV, to do whatever comes next in the acquisition process that never ends but never makes him really happy either. He doesn’t see it this way. But I feel his emptiness like a dry heat licking at my skin, making my knuckles crack, my lips grow chapped.

Winter. It seems to always find us here, under sweaters in different rooms with hardly anything to say. It’s been three weeks of tight jaw muscles, and shorter conversations. We hug each other by the kitchen island over Saturday morning pancakes with maple syrup and bacon and hot coffee, but there is always something that makes one or the other of us pull away abruptly, as though magnetism, like heat, is scarce on these cold days and longer nights.

The only time I really see his face bloom into an unguarded smile is when he is with Bean. Then it spreads across his cheeks like the unexpected tiny rainbows from the prism hanging by a ribbon in the window, and a small sharp sliver worms its way into the very center of my chest. I can’t help but wish his smile would bloom like this for me.

But we’re like hungry dogs, circling, ready to snap at the slightest provocation. It is as though we’re both looking for a reason, for some release of tension—both of us craving the pulpy mess that exposes our hearts and leaves us pressed close together with heat between us. Maybe this makes no sense. Of course it makes no sense. But why else do we do this at-once push and pull?

When he’s around, it’s all about pull-your-hair-out-crazy mood swings, and this week has been his worst week ever in the stock market. Everything tipped in the wrong direction, keel up, toppled like dominos. And at the end of a day I can’t help it, I turn away, heart pounding. I’ve already given nearly every shred of patience away to six year olds who play modern warfare games and miss their mothers living in other states. It’s almost like a reflex: the way I avoide directness, intimacy, while feeling like everything between us is flayed: muscles, tendons, hearts, tears always at the back of our eyes.

But then when he’s gone all I can do is watch the clock, the minute hand dogging the hour hand until he’s back, craving him like homesickness.

Three years old

Dear Bean,You are three this week. Three, and around you everything is a little tornado of delight. When I came home from a week away and slipped into our comfy king sized bed, you were already there, curled among the flannel sheets, nuzzled into my pillow. I kissed your cheek and you smiled, a dreamy sleep smile, but still one of contented recognition. Later, you woke to find me next to you and threw your arms around my neck, “Mommy” you sighed. “I love you so much.”

In the morning we made blueberry pancakes, and stacked them on your plate with a star candle, flickering brightly. At your place, I put the rocks I’d collected hiking on trails winding along the desert outside Zion, Utah. One smooth and round, sparkling with tiny bits of glitter, like a star-filled sky. Another, a small bit of petrified wood, found on the muddy trail outside of the park where the group stopped and ate apples and chocolate and almonds while the desert sun soaked into our skin.

You pay attention to everything around you now. Never missing a subtlety of expression, you listen to your daddy talk stocks, and when we asked you how your day was going, you shrugged mournfully, held your hands up in the air, palms up, and said: “My stock is going down; it went all the way down under the floor." Then you grinned like an elf and added, "But it came back up.”

More and more I notice you paying attention to text—everywhere you notice letters—the ones in your name, and also others. When I was gone, I left you a small present for every day I was away. One was a counting book, starting at 10 and going backwards. By the time I came home, you knew all the words, and pointed to each number identifying it correctly. Like me, I think, you are a kid born to learn. I’ve always been voracious this way. Always full of wonder and hungering to learn new things, and I’m glad this is something we share.

I missed you while I was gone, in a bewildering tender way: I kept thinking wherever I went that I’d forgotten something. Still, I was thrilled to go. I hope you understand this. We napped together today. I needed to catch up on much needed sleep, after a week writing, my entire being thrumming like a tuning fork with inspiration after being with such an amazing group of writers.

When we snuggled under the covers, you whispered, “I missed you so much, Mommy,” and gently kissed my face again and again. I said I missed you too, but that it was good for me to go, because it made me happy and you nodded.

I watched you all day today, content to let my orbit grow small around you after a week of airplanes, content simply to be your mother. Remembering three years ago, labor long, spring temporarily bursting in the Connecticut suburbs where I circled the deck working through contractions. Remembering the disorienting blur of new motherhood, your small body no longer a piece of mine. On your birthday we spent the day doing things your way: walking along the waterfront checking out trains, playing with cars and cranes on the floor, and giggling. Lots of giggling.

Adjectives that describe you right now: inquisitive, persistent, curious, determined, intelligent, astute, perceptive, silly, playful, intuitive, and observant.

I’m so proud to be your mama. I love you.

Inspired.

I'll be back by the weekend.

Gallop, gallop, gallop

Whew. Met the deadline, but now: getting ready to leave my classroom in the hands of a sub. A very capable one at that, but still, do you have any idea how hard it is to clone yourself? That's what writing lesson plans for an entire week feels like. Too darn busy.

Hence the almost absence from around here. Will be back shortly.

30 today

Update: because I've almost slipped off the face of the earth

* My laptop is in for repairs (the screen split down the side for no apparent reason) and I'm going through withdrawal trying to write on my old, slow HP. * My rooster, who was attacked by a neighbor's boyfriend's dog, is dying. I am so sad, and feel so guilty and awful, not quite knowing what to do to help. He's more severely injured than he let on the day after--and I think I'm going to have my father in law shoot him. He might have crushed ribs--and certainly a broken leg. He won't eat, or drink. This is the part I hate about loving animals.

* I have another writing deadline (the first of next month) and am tangling deep in the middle of a manuscript. Hence, I have no time to do anything else. Including art. Feeling guilty about that.

* I can't seem to shake the feeling of guilt hanging over me lately---can't seem to ever feel like I'm getting everything done well enough, fast enough, etc--yet I can't seem to figure out what to cut back on.

* I'm turning 30 at the end of the week, and am feeling nervous. Shouldn't I have accomplished more by now? Please tell me, what is the best thing about turning 30?

Fairy dust and climbing shoes

Another really long day. And then, the best thing ever. We started our climbing class tonight, and as an early birthday present DH got me a new harness and shoes. In between trying on pairs of shoes--and while waiting for the sales guy to dig through his inventory for my size--I picked up a climbing magazine and leafed through it. Then, while reaching to put it back, this little gift was sitting right there--where the magazine had been.

I've always adored Rosa for doing this kind of thing and have secretly wished I'd someday be the recipient of a little random bit of whimsy. But to find it today was simply perfect.

I was so exhausted, bummed out, and feeling defeated in general. Let's just say it was a looong day.

So we went climbing and it was glorious, and now I have a little magical bag of glittery gold fairy dust and I can't stop smiling.

The only difference

Friday night my heart felt like a hundred rain splattered puddles: each one reflecting a different small circle of cloud covered sky; so many different things to do all in exactly the same few moments.

Friday I was a flood of hormonal mood swings before I start to bleed, and I felt anxious and sad and utterly overwhelmed. Also nearly sick again. Then Saturday came, and the sun was shining through tatters of clouds and I went for a run for the first time in a month, and dear god, why can’t I remember this?

I need to exercise.

Every day I need to feel my body move, outside, among trees and open spaces, side stepping puddles, feeling my lungs suck in cold air. I need to exercise not because I want to look a certain way, but because I need to feel a certain way. It’s the only variable I can think of that genuinely affects how I manage stress. It’s the only thing that really makes a difference: being outdoors, feeling my blood hot in my cheeks, feeling my muscles sore afterwards.

Exercise brings balance to my life, yet regularly in the winter I let it slip by. Day after day I come home, to the sun staining the west a meek orange, and the shadows already those of dusk. I feel selfish then, setting out on a run, having not spent time with my small boy.

Yet without exercise I start to become irrational. Guilt becomes an entire harbor in my heart, sheltering a whole fleet of inadequacies: I do not spend enough time with my son; I don’t cook enough or clean enough or see my husband enough; I am not a good enough teacher or writer or reader.

The only difference between days like this, and days where I feel like I’m on top of the world is that on the days where I’m kicking ass, I’ve also gotten outdoors and moved.

Seriously. It’s that easy. And that incredibly difficult. Does anyone else experience this?

Today as a (totally bummer) postcard:

I woke up late this morning. In the night the power had gone out and my alarm clock was blinking 3:45. I was late to a staff meeting.

The children were needy, needy, needy today.

I came home to a missing rooster who had been chased down the road to my neighbor's house (several hundred yards away) by their daughter's dog. He was dazed and missing tail feathers but alive. I caught him and tossed a sheet over his head and carried him back up the hill in my lap in the passenger seat of the car.

I ate soup with my mom tonight, just the two of us at her place, and felt deeply grateful to be cared for.

I keep forgetting where I've put things: a sign of too-tiredness. I can't find the notebook I use to keep my lists. I've seen it and can remember seeing it but cannot remember where. It is maddening.

How was your day?

Puny

I have unreasonable expectations, constructed on scaffolding I can hardly climb, and from up there I sometimes get vertigo. When I sit down to do art, I feel them creeping up : that I’m not doing more, or better work. That it’s not good enough. It’s so lame, this inner voice. So useless, yet there it is.

Tonight I insist on quashing this inner critic and cut squares at random from magazine with Bean on my lap. At my floor, a widening circumference of scraps. I am a messy artist. I wrap my hand over Bean’s smaller one and show him how to brush gel medium over the scraps I’ve assembled.

It’s not much, not pen and ink or watercolors or even really any work I generated myself. (See, there’s the voice. Where does it come from?) And yet I force myself to go with it tonight, making a mosaic of color. Pictures of spaces, dishes, fabric, dreams. For an instant I imagine there: in the restaurant with the red-backed chairs, or the windowed room with the pale green blown glass baubles hanging from the ceiling.

I try to let it be enough for a Tuesday, when my temples ache and the cat vomited on the kitchen table and the dishes are still in the sink.

Sigh.

Dig in and read.

It is midwinter here in my small corner of the world and also in my blue-roomed heart. I’m tucked in, my pulse moving slowly and full of trepidation like water running under pale knocked together shards of ice. Self doubt circles like a pack of coyotes, their tracks mushy and dark where the earth collapses, pressing up close to icy ribbon of river.

This is what winter always brings: a bareness; an uncomfortable edge; inadequacy. Things seem so blatant; personal deficits larger than life, like the huge fiery orange sun we watched today. It tangled in the bare branches of the trees near us at the top of the sledding hill, then slipped away, leaving the snow stained pink with longing.

I spent the morning in a quiet house reading Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer, and coming face to face with the blunt edge of my own lack. In the back of the book, “119 Books To Be Read Immediately” and I’ve read only a small handful. I’m a slow reader, with a tendency to dally in the text. I soak up sentences. I read with a pen, marking, dog-earing, rummaging back through previous pages. But I’m also a sporadic, undisciplined reader, and I’m ashamed of this.

Books have a way of inhabiting the drawers of my mind, like so many jars of gesso and paint, easily jostled, staining the surface of my day. I have a hard time shaking free of them, and carrying on, so I have a certain reluctance grappling with anything weighty unless I have the means to hunker down and read it for an entire day.

Also, I am lazy. I drag my feet about finishing books that don’t catch my interest in the first few lines (fickle, I know). I lack analytical fervor. I read simply for the joy of language, story, and words, which I’ve always loved and carried covetously around in my pocket on the scribbled pages of a 4x6” Mead memo book. But I lack critical finesse, and also time, clarity, and a hundred other things have thus far prevented me from reading the list of books I probably should already have read.

Somewhere along the way I’ve also let myself start thinking that time spent curled on the couch with a book frivolous leisure time, less meaningful than time spent clicking away at the keyboard, constructing jagged sentences about blue shadows falling long across bright snow. Have no doubt: I’ll devour books by the authors I love (mostly contemporary writers: Kingsolver, Diddion, Munro, O’Brien) and I’ll jealously leaf through books by new authors who are rising like sudden shiny stars into the literary sky. But I’ve rarely gone back to the masterpieces, the ones that have endured: prose and plot and construction indelible and profound across time. And lately, as I’m grappling with my own writing more and more, I’ve started to feel a hunger for these texts: knowing that as I read them, I’ll be carried across time, into the world of ideas, word by word.

Word by word, closer to what I need to know.

So I’ve decided to make this my year of reading. This, simply, is my mondo beyondo and my one little word. Read.

{ Tell me: What two books most changed the way you see the world, writing, life, etc?}

Leap

I sat down tonight to paint the way Bean does--with color first, then the image taking shape. I had no plan, no illustration in the back of my head, just the commitment to take a small corner of time out of my day to do art this month. It feels good to keep returning to my studio. To give myself this gift of quiet moments, paintbrushes clinking in jars of chalky colored water; tubes of paint and stamps and papers fluttering to the floor like moths.

When the turtles showed up, I pictured them poised to leap into a sky filled with stars, mythic and dreamlike. Because isn't that what the moments before anything are like? Before you leap? Before you know the outcome. You're just there, with a possible bucket of stars below you.

My secret inner superhero

The other night I was talking to a friend. He said, “I don’t know, I guess I still feel like somewhere inside me is an inner superhero.”

I’m right there with him.

I still have that feeling: like one morning I’ll wake up and miraculously be able to live full throttle—without the shredded edges of tiredness that come with staying up late and waking up early and doing a job that requires me to be one-hundred-and-fifty percent on every single minute of the day.

My secret inner superhero (who is tucked into the pocket of my heart, along with my first-star-of-the-evening wishes, and all the instances where find four-leaf-clovers, or cross my fingers for luck) is someone who doesn’t hesitate, second guess, forget things, or feel totally scrambled and drained at the end of a week, and isn’t prone to weird allergic reactions to any form of allopathic medicine (I totally am & am currently so disposed) or bouts of unnecessary snapping at the people I love.

My secret inner superhero can ski triple black diamonds, ride a mountain bike downhill without fear, run triathlons, contribute to magazines, publish a novel, do art, paint her toenails flawlessly, send packages to friends and loved ones ahead of important dates, show up early, hang glide at least once , travel to every continent, speak another language, spend a week a the Louver, actually reads all the books I should have read in high school, and meditates regularly.

The thing is, I attempt all of these things, but sometimes just feel so small, so fragmented, so insignificant, compared with what I dream.

I throw myself into the day, and then blink and it’s over. I made a perfect latte this morning—first time ever. During writing workshop at school, the classroom hummed—pencils scratching, the chatter of kids reading their work to each other, the clack of the keyboard. In the afternoon I caught my breath in the cold, walking to my car. The sky was a frosty, pale orange. The sun was setting. Birds, quiet in the winter twilight, made black silhouettes along the telephone wires. I gathered Bean into my arms. Together we painted, and giggled, and read stories. Then in the dark, I pressed my head against his hair, and inhaled. Just that.

Maybe it’s not so small after all.

(P.S. What is your secret inner superhero like?)

Vermillion

Across the snow, the cardinals dart, the vermillion hearts of winter. The wind pulls the mercury down below zero, and the air bites bare skin. Water is glassy under ice in the chicken coop in the morning, and the sun, when it shines is followed by a sun dog, the sky frosted but blue.

Create, live with abandon.

The snow is falling outside, making everything like a milky dream. The trees are flocked with white, and I can’t remember the scent of summer: cut grass, ripening blackberries, dust rising up from the dirt road; in the same way I can’t really remember what last year was like, so much uncertain, heartache like broken dishes gathered in a paper sack. I never imagined that I’d have to reach out and cut my fingers on the shards to grow in a marriage; in fact I never really pictured this life at all.

This small boy, this man, this house, these fields dappled blue and white with snow and shadows. How can you ever really imagine how your life will be? Dreams are so fickle, so rife with longing. It’s good to have them—and to send them on whispered breath out into the world like so much dandelion furze. But I’m grateful that the Universe has a bigger dream for me.

Grateful that in the year between then and now, we’ve come together again, pulled towards one another inevitably like the tiny magnets on the backs of Bean’s toy trains that hitche one to the next. Grateful the embering heat of the wood stove, the heat of his love, and the inches of powder that keeps falling out of the sky, making it possible, finally, for me to learn to ski.

Yesterday Bean spent the night at his grandparents for the first time ever. We went out for dinner with friends, sipping champagne and honeyed martinis in a restaurant with silver painted walls. Gold and white balloons bobbed from the backs of our chairs. Our voices carried certainly to the neighboring tables, our laughter rising up ruckus and often among forkfuls of roasted garlic, olives, flatbreads, crab cakes with micro greens, carpaccio, crème brule. Then we came home and were just us, in the soft flannel of our bed when the pale morning light pulled us from slumber. Just us, and the siren song of bare skin and warm shoulders calling for an embrace.

Then we made coffee, buttered raisin toast, and eggs, and talked about our resolutions for 2008.

Mine: Publish at least five pieces of writing. Get more organized (with everything from regular writing time, to planning what’s for dinner.) Kick some booty as an athlete: get to be better at climbing, yoga, running (maybe a triathlon?) and skiing. Grow a garden. Live with abandon.

Good times + Art Everyday

Happy & merry to all of you!

It has been a BUSY week. (Thank you for all the well wishes!) I've somewhat recovered from the most horrible sinus infection/fever combo I have ever had. The word misery does not even serve it justice. Seriously awful.

But, I'm mostly better, and we had a wonderful Christmas. I made baked pears in wine with orange zest and served them with mascarpone, toasted walnuts and chocolate, on Christmas Eve. Delicious. Bean was rediculously cute Christmas morning. Eyes WIDE, wide, wide. We used tissue paper and colorful ribbons to make the unwrapping that much more fun--and it was. He's been playing with his toys non-stop ever since (a wooden kitchen, a Plan City parking garage, lincoln logs and tinker toys were the big ones.)

Yesterday we went skiing and I am finally good enough to not be horrible, and I love the thrill of zipping down the mountain carving great curves in the snow. I'm still pretty terrible, but no longer terribly afraid and that makes all the difference. In fact, I LOVE it. DH also gave me a gift certificate for a climbing class in January, and I am thrilled to get back on the wall. I haven't climbed in years now, and I miss it.

For the month of January I've decided I'm going to do some art every day & post it here. Anyone want to join me? It's so easy over the holidays to get all blurry around the edges. To forget to focus inward, even though I think that's what the heart of wintertime should be all about. I'm looking forward to having a commitment to create something every day, as my life seems to be chronically busy of late, and I've been struggling to stay focused amidst the tornado of things that clamor for my attention daily. I haven't done any art in months, and I miss that part of myself. If you want to join me, respond in the comments and I'll make a special sidebar links for Everyday Art in January.