A fun weekend
New baby chicks & new bantam chickens from a neighbor (we named the rooster Guisseppe!)
A new bike for Bean.
New plants in the garden.
Sore muscles.
A night with just DH.
And only four three weeks left of school.
I know I promised I'd write more
But it's been sunny and I've been outdoors in the garden. I've decided I want to keep a garden journal here--but I'm afraid if I say so, I'll surely sabatoge my entire attempt. Everything I seem to say I want to do I immediately lose all interest in following through on. Why is that? Anway, I've double dug three long beds--and am currently in the midst of digging mounds for squash, watermellons and pumpkins. My legs itch from using the weed-wacker to cut down tall grass at the edges of the garden, and I'm wearing a big floppy white hat. Why am I posting then, when I claim to be in the midst of gardening? Bean is taking a poop. And dear lord, I still can't figure out how to teach the boy to wipe himself. So I was summoned from the garden with yells echoing from the bathroom. "Mama! I need to be wiped." I am sure the neighbors love that.
How do you wear this?
So, in a month we'll be heading to Spain for a friend's wedding. Have I told you that? I'm so excited. It will be my first time since 1997 being overseas. Holy shit. I was 19 when I left, after having spent a year in Germany (also the year I set my hair on fire on my birthday.)
Anyhoo, I'm trying to find a dress for a very formal, large, Spanish wedding. I like dresses like these, that are halter tops--like this one. But I can never figure out how the hell I'm supposed to wear them, really. I mean come on, only perky 19 year olds, can go without support in such a dress. And if you beg to differ, let me just say one word: breastfeeding.
Okay, so now that we're on the same page, how does one go about wearing such a dress? What secret undergarments actually work with an open backed sheer-fabric dress?
I know, not my typical post. But see, I promised, I'm going to try to post more, so this is what you get. Run-ons and random clothing questions.
Also, on an entirely other note:
Bean is cureently asleep on one of those giant beanbags in our bedroom (which, by the way, are way flatter and less poufy than they appear in the picture.) I'm trying to get him to stop sneaking into our room the minute we say goodnight and come downstairs--because, though I don't mind him coming into our room in the middle of the night, I do rather mind not being able to go to sleep spooning with DH. So my newest plan is to get him to at least sleep in his own space--in our room. He seems happy as a clam. Sound asleep, tucked under a comforter, and snoring away.
Weekend snapshots
(Bean took this one.)
The world has turned green. Less than a month left of school. The morning sun is waking me up, and I've been heading out to run more. Still not feeling totally in harmony with myself yet: still too much on my plate. But more days and more moments where the the orbit of things aligns with my own twirling self.
(Btw: The Cure was a wild, loud adventure that included getting lost when leaving Montreal--4o miles east, before we realized we were supposed to be going south. Oy. And the next day was a blur of tiredness.)
I am hoping to update here every day this week. I have a thing with perfection. I don't like writing here unless I have long moments to spend, delving into the deeper fabric of my thoughts. But I miss the daily practice. The flawed jotting of notes, of small moments, of daily life. When I first wrote here, I wrote all the time... but somehow I seem to have upped the standard on myself, and now I'm dragging my feet, feeling like if I can't post a brilliant post, I should'nt post anything at all. What is with that?
Nerdyness
We are going to The Cure tomorrow, up across the border. I’m not sure if this is cool. DH thinks it is, but he’s the kind of guy who can sing the lyrics to EVERY SINGLE SONG on the face of the earth. Really. His favorite genre: every song from the ‘80s. Thus, when I found out that that The Cure would be near here, I knew we had to get tickets: just so I could go and watch him sing along to every word. True love, baby.
However, he's returning the affection:
In late summer A Prairie Home Companion is happening my town, and this made me so excited I may have even equated Garrison Keillor with The Cure: as in, the Keillor is as cool in my mind as the Cure is in DH's. Basically I'm an NPR addict all the way. Other shows that make me swoon/giggle hysterically: Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, or Say’s You.
Now that I've posted this DH is learning how to hide his head hole in the ground from an ostrich.*
Alas, I cannot stop.
What kinds of wine come to mind when you read the following clues: (snagged from Say’s You—which I had to listen to in the driveway, until it ended because I could not stop laughing):
1) Fake window glass
2) A deer in the doldrums
3) The tide’s out at Mer San Michelle
Oh, I am such a nerd. It’s spring, I met my deadline, and I get to go somewhere international tomorrow to eat yummy food and listen to music I’m unsure about with my long-eyelashed guy. Life is good.
It figures...
...that the day I've set aside (taking full advantage of it being Mother's Day so I can totally claim several back to back hours) for finishing up my two manuscripts (which incidentally are DUE tonight) is GLORIOUS. Apple blossoms, a perfect breeze, seedlings to plant in the garden. Sigh. And here I am in my shady studio, clacking away on the keyboard. It is nearly impossible not to procrastinate now, when I'm working on revisions (which I hate) and a honey cheeked little boy comes running upstairs clutching a piece of bread and butter with the sole purpose of giving me kisses.
Anyway. Happy Mother's day to all of you mamas out there. I'm so lucky to know so many of you.
Glimpse
He’s there on the couch playing guitar and the notes are doing things for him that make my breath catch. Not perfect, but strings of notes in a minor chord from the sun-faded couch where he’s sitting barefoot. Outside the lilacs are just beginning to bloom. It’s Saturday again and I can’t seem to manage to put in more than a post a week right now, or get enough sleep.
Saturday in reverse
Eating Nutella out of the jar and writing. A two hour nap with Bean, our noses pressed into nooks amongst the pillows, rain falling outside.
Buying seedlings: artichokes (the love affair continues), lettuces, swiss chard.
Following a dashing Bean around the Aquarium, checking out turtles stacked like pancakes, and sea stars and frogs. "Let's be sturgeons," he said tonight after dinner.
Blueberry pancakes, made my DH, smothered in maple syrup (the only way to eat them.) Outside the azaleas are blooming.
A three mile run first thing this morning, on the treadmill, while Bean ate banana bread and butter and played with "Big Orange" the tractor.
Scraps
It is somehow already Thursday. I am like salt in a shaker, scattered haphazardly over the things of my days. Small scraps that I want to remember. ***
Coming back to the classroom I put a jar full of tulips by my desk, and smiled when it was the boys who noticed. A little girl came in with a Tupperware of salamanders for our terrarium. A boy who constantly pushes my buttons looked like he was up to no good, so I swung by his table and discovered he was writing: You are the best teacher in the world on a heart he’d drawn in marker.
Also: we’re studying matter, and we’ve been having the best conversations.
Me: What do you think matter is? Kid: Maybe whatever it is, the person who invented it is named Matt?
Me: Matter is anything you can touch or feel. Kid: If it’s anything we can touch or feel, do we eat matter? Kid: Do we breath matter? We can feel air, so we must! Kid: Matter is ANYTHING. Kid: If matter is EVERYTHING, is there anything that ISN’T MATTER? Kid: If matter is everything, then is God matter?
*** Yesterday we went to a two-bit circus with Bean. It’s a tiny family circus that seems to tour the country—360 shows per year. What a life. All the clowns and acrobats and jugglers were either too young or too old to make a crack at it anywhere else, and the ponies napped between rides when everyone was taking a break to buy popcorn and bright bobbing star-specked balloons and sparkling wands. But it still had magic. There were moments when I gasped. And Bean, big eyed from his daddy’s lap, his face sticky with cotton candy, could not take his eyes off everything that was going on.
I always remember loving the circus. As in: I wanted to run away and join.
Now I’m bitten with the peculiar desire to follow a troupe around and write their story. I often wonder if anyone else is curious about this? How these people live, all year, in trailers, going from place to place, performing, practicing, always on the road. How does the 12 year old Peruvian juggling marvel (who dropped his props) go to school? Or his sister, the contortionist who could twirl her entire body bent over backwards by holding onto a swivel with her mouth. But I can’t imagine they’d want me there, poking into the private corners of their lives, after fake eyelashes have been removed and the ponies are bedded down for the night.
*** Today I came home from work nearly staggering. Tired. I buried my head under pillows. I’ve always loved my bed, wherever it’s been. It’s the thing I think of when I think of home. Soft sheets, the window open just a sliver, light falling golden through the big-leafed tree in the blue bowl by the bed. Without intending to, I was asleep. Not slumber, but black out sleep, that when I awakened I could not recall. The kind of sleep where you’re not sure if you were asleep at all, yet the shadows are longer.
Bean and DH let me sleep until dinner time, at which point I emerged like a baby raccoon. Clumsily and disoriented, at the very least.
Onwards.
Happy heart
A weekend trip south, to Blue Poppy's, to spend time with wonderful Lizardek and her lovely mom, and Elizabeth and her T. Ambling walks in the sunshine with a crowd of golden pups. Every moment filled up with wonder and delight and gratitude: these women come from my planet.
Some days I feel entirely alien to the orbit of people I'm surrounded with at work. People who aren't apt to contemplate karma, or Annie Dillard, or gel matte transfers, or the way light falls on a row of golden gourds on a vintage chest of drawers. But these women, they are brilliant, insightful, generous, and beautiful. They make my heart sing. (BP and I were mistaken for sisters several times, and it delighted me to no end. She is absolutely gorgeous. Inside and out.)
Not to mention is was lovely to sip wine until late and then slumber late without anyone to coax me awake (save for an invitation to see a moose). And also to be fed perfect blueberry pancakes with warm maple syrup and blueberries.
A post in pictures
It's suddenly warm here. Days perfect for drinking fizzy water and limes. Days for getting first sunburns, working in the garden. A week of vacation: to catch up on writing and sleep and time with my boys.
Bean and I spend every second outdoors in the afternoons, ambling through our meadows, taking stock of everything that is new and green and budding. He found these old baskets from last autumn's crysanthemums on the brush pile we're preparing to burn. Natraully, they offered endless entertainment.
Made the first batch of sun tea this week. The temperature has hit 80, and it's almost soporific. Just two weeks ago I was wearing down and socks, now I'm barefoot, my toes badly in need of a pedicure.
Writing, upstairs, alone in the house, I heard a thud. Unmistakable, reminding me of a childhood in the Rocky Mountains in a big-windowed cabin and my dad, holding stunned birds in his quiet palms. They always flew away, and compelled, I went downstairs and out the screen door looking. It was there, below the frong windows, wings spread wide, eyes closed. But I scooped it up gently, and held it. (My dad always said holding the birds helped them with the shock.) And eventually, he started to blink, and move about, then perched for a while on my thumb before flying off. A small blessing.
Wildflowers suddenly everywhere, and insects. I'm so damn grateful to be through with winter.
We hung Bean's first tree swing yesterday. So much nostalgia from childhood: my feet scraping the blue bowl of sky.
I found two today, the first of the year. I think of them as my writing talismans. Last year they brough so much: my writing group, Pam, a piece to be published this summer in the Sun. I've pressed them in my new Molskine.
He's just so beautiful. Yesterday in the garden he was stomping about. "I'm going to get the moon," he said, and then wandered off, gesturing that he'd gotten it and was holding it and bringing it back. "I brought you the moon, Mommy," he said, beaming.
A Mighty* Life List
A list of things I hope to do in my lifetime.
Occasionally I go back to it to add a new goal, or mark something as accomplished. Both are incredibly satisfying.
1. Write and publish a book.
2. Take a roadtrip across the US in a camper.
3. Live in Europe for a year; preferably Paris.
4. Drink mint tea in Morocco.
5. Speak fluent French.
6. Learn to dance.
7. Grow a garden.
8. Hanglide or paraglide.
9. Keep bees.
10. Learn to surf.
11. Take a photography class.
12. Write regularly for a magazine.
13. Buy a potters wheel & kiln and throw pots in the garage.
14. Teach creative writing.
15. Complete a sport triathlon.
16. Own a tiny apartment in a big city to sneak away to.
17. Meditate.
18. Learn to kayak.
20. Take a trip to India.
21. Learn to sail.
22. Travel somewhere every year.
23. Grow a rose garden.
25. See the northern lights.
26. Go on a multi-day biking trip with just my guy (again.)
27. Ski Snowboard black diamonds.
28. Go camping in the summer.
29. See the monarch migration in Mexico.
30. Visit Prague.
31. Re-read the great American novels I never read in high school.
32. Build Bean a tree house.
33. Host a dinner party.
34. Find more close friends nearby.
35. Own horses.
36. Speak at TED.
37. Meet as many of my writing heroes as possible (Isabelle Illende, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Strout, Tim Winton, Alice Munro...)
38. Spend a winter in New Zealand or Australia.
39. Make small + smart investments.
40. Visit the Galapagos.
41. Lead life-changing creative spirit workshops.
42. Live on the ocean.
43. Meet Ira Glass or be interviewed by Terri Gross.
44. Live in a house with painted white floors.
45. Get a Round The World ticket and spend 1 year traveling
46. Live in the Pacific Northwest
47. Learn to develop film in a dark room.
48. Go fly fishing.
49. Learn to fish-tail braid my hair.
50. Take a paragliding lesson.
51. Host an interview series on my blog.
52.
Host a monthly dinner party for friends.
53. Learn to screen print.
54. Paint with encaustic.
55. Spend a week in Iceland
* Inspired by Mighty Girl I always an on-going list of the big (and sometimes small) things I want to do before I die, tucked into the back of a notebook.
As Tim Brown puts it: "Believing that something is possible, will somehow make it so."
What's on your list?
From here
The sunlight in the morning has made all the difference lately, and this morning you could see new grass on the lawn, bright green, almost transparent in the light. I made a double shot of espresso for an iced latte to-go, and thought about how my life is different now than one year ago, or two. This blog has become a record for me, of small things. I go back and look at what the weather was like two seasons ago. My mind, full with the present, is fickle in the light of the past.
When I started to write, I was a new mama and every single aspect of parenting felt like fraud to me. It took me more than a year to wrap my head around the idea of being someone’s mother. My heart on the other hand, only required a nanosecond of adjustment: when he was first there in my arms, warm and wet and wide-eyed, he was instantly mine.
Still, I started this blog because I felt some urgency to document the affect becoming a mother had on my life, as though it had been tucked precariously into the nook of a slingshot and then launched, suddenly, all of a stumbled moment. For the first year I diligently wrote letters to my small boy, a baby yet, whose miraculous feats of sitting up, crawling, and walking became also benchmarks for my own life.
Then gradually I stopped feeling that raw ‘new mama’ status. I went from being a ‘first time mom’ to just a mother. My baby was suddenly a kid who could talk and was potty trained and climbed trees. I stopped recording the little things. Each day, exponentially, the things he says astounds me: so much so that at the end I can hardly remember all the delight of talking to him about the way he sees his world. He has become someone that I want to know; someone I love to lie with in the newly growing grass on the back lawn drinking fizzy grapefruit soda and eating blue corn chips.
Now when I write it’s hardly ever about Bean, not really intentionally, but just because my focus has shifted: towards writing and work and the multifaceted inner topography of emotion I’ve been exploring this year.
But oh, he’s a love. He’s SO BIG now, you would hardly believe it. So articulate and observing and funny. It’s like his personality can no longer be contained on the page: I sit down to try to capture a few phrases that he’s said to me, and my mind is instantly crowded like a sky full fluttering parrots. One thing I do know: he still sucks at sleeping through the night.
Really annoying strange stuff is happening in blogland
I don't get it. My blog has disappeared several times ENTIRELY in the past twenty-four hours. WTF?
Where the edges became frayed
I’ve been shy here, lately. Perhaps dodging myself a bit. Not really sure how to pick up where I’ve left off—I’ve been so sporadic with posting lately—yet I really am missing the regularity of sharing moments and comments. I’ve been fragile this winter.
For the first time since November I felt like I could breathe in again this past week without anxiety fraying the weft of my heart. Miraculously (maybe) or intentionally (with great effort) I’ve stopped feeling like if the world will clatter to a halt around me: a mess of splintered parts if I stop doing everything I do for a split second.
Depression, however fleeting, put me right up against the edges of things: the tattered cuff, the broken branch, mud-spattered snowmelt at the edge of the road. It stained my heart ashy, the color a clouded sky turns after dark.
Not something I was used to, wide awake at night, each day starting out with tight breath and tears close.
I think it had something to do with the fierce longing that I have so often voiced, that eats away at me like a smoldering fire if I’m not careful. A longing to be both here and somewhere else: making a homestead, doing the exact opposite of that (whatever that may be.)
It also had to do with the fact that I was feeling imbalanced at work: I was giving too much, yet not willing to give it. Lately I’ve been feeling less depleted there: allowing myself to focus thinking critically about learning, and children; somehow honing this as a craft.
Perhaps this was what was hardest for me: reconciling the fact that I am still a teacher even as I long with my whole being to be able to write full time. I let myself start hating my work simply because it was the thing that was stopping me from doing the work I was yearning to do. It almost felt like a betrayal to dedicate myself to my work at school, not that that rationally makes any sense.
I realize now that really I was making myself bitterly unhappy because everything in my life was skewed. I resented my work, and myself for doing the work, and this resentment had a corrosive quality like salt and lemon juice. Everything felt scoured and sour. I felt inadequate as a writer, without enough hours in a day, and that inadequacy burned a hole in the very center of my creativity.
Recently, gradually, I’ve been letting myself sink back into the small fragments of my life, not yet whole the way I wish it could be, but certainly a mosaic as it is. I started doing some running again, down our mud slicked road with grooves down the center six inches deep. I started painting. And I got word that I’ll be teaching second graders next year which excites me. I like teaching older kids. I love watching them become thinkers, with writer’s notebooks and organized work spaces, and I like them more than I like the younger ones who need so much reminding about things like nose blowing.
In the end I keep saying it was the winter, and I keep feeling like since the arrival of the first mellow (if not warm) days, my mood has evened out and I’ve become more peaceful. But I cannot say for sure. What is it really that ever makes us sad? I don’t think it can ever be defined entirely by the narrow perimeter of the weather, or for that matter a job or another human being. Somehow, achingly, each arrow of sadness is drawn from the sheaf of our own unquiet soul.
In the spaces between
The roads have turned to mud now: layers of ice-hard earth thawing to slush, sticky and trampled. The yellow evening light is speckled with the flutterng wings of bugs, newly hatched, air eddying around their tiny exoskeletons.
We go for a run, just the two of us, conversation filling in the spaces between hard breathing uphill. A chainsaw whines and the scent of fresh cut wood makes my nostrils flare. Our feet sink a little with each step; muscles suddenly thrumming with heat and momentum. The air is soft, and while the snow still lingers at the edges of the fields, the brown grass lies exposed to the sun most places.
“Every step I take my feet sink,†DH says. The setting sun is at our backs. The sky is like the water I dip my brushes into: a bowl of pale ultramarine and pale saffron spilled at the horizon.
We’re holding hands. It’s the end of our run, and we’re walking back along the muddiest part of the road. In our heads both of us sing, every step you take…
Neither of us sings it aloud, but I know we’re both tuned in to this same static. “Did you just sing that song?†I ask, to be sure.
He nods, laughs. Even more than me, he’s the one doing this: filling in the spaces between thoughts with the flack of a thousand sitcoms, commercials, songs, clichés.
We do this all the time. Pop culture interference broadcasting stuff into the spaces between our thoughts. A word triggering the memory of another. Phrases tumbling unbidden into the twilight in spite of us. Turbulence in the spaces between. It’s a lovely day.
In my palm I feel the heat of him there next to me; so much between us unsaid.
What were like, before it was like this? Before thoughts were so commonly shared: before mass media and marketing, email, texting, technology instantaneously and exponentially making each thought at once more available and more clichés. In the spaces between, there was once an arc of silence. A breath beat without stimulus.
Now our minds hum constantly with unbidden music. Random access memory. Filler.
Without it, what would we be like?
Hieroglyphs of a turbulent heart
One day I’m only able to see the sun. Everything is bright: my future, the mangos split into perfect segments on the table, the way my son laughs, the way words fall readily into place. Other days my heart plays wild gypsy music. I howl at the moon, lust after long gone loves, linger in the blue light of my laptop screen parsing stilted fragments and run-ons into barely sentences.
In college I remember a boyfriend flipping through the pages of a journal that I’d left tucked into a bag in his room. His jealously about the way I’d described my ex was palpable, his eyes were sparks, he couldn’t take the fact that I would write about anyone other than him with shards of longing, or affection, or anything other than contempt. He was actor. The kind of man who would turn anything into a passionate fight followed by passionate reconciliatory love making.
The fight about the journal was the most bitter. I wouldn’t back down, or say it wasn’t true, or do anything to soothe his wounded ego. And all I could say was, idiot. Why’d you read? My heart is ambiguous, turbulent, and true. Every day the world is a different hue.
This is the way I write here. Each post is a splattered blueprint of my everyday heart on the page, and you’ll get a wildly irregular and possibly skewed perspective. I want to sink into the moment, that’s why I write. I want to remember the way today a warm wind woke us up in the morning, and how it rained all day—leaving the rivers choked with snowmelt, slipping over their banks into the brown meadows of trampled grass. I want to remember the way I feel when we fight, or when I am abundant with joy, or when I am occupying the fragile thin edge of loneliness and longing that circles my life, that makes me hungry.
Today I am trying to get myself motivated to go for a run. Exercise is one of the keys, often missing, that makes my life feel whole. Yesterday I lay in the sun outdoors for hours, under the trees on the newly drying grass, just inches away from melting snow. My skin was singing with sun. I felt a smile blooming somewhere deep inside my solar plexus. Everyday is different.
Thirst
I’ve never felt this way before: followed by this unnamed dread, this sorrow, and I keep turning to look behind for the hungry dog of my distresses that hides in the bushes, waiting. I never do. I don’t know where she lurks like a bitch in heat, howling in the middle of the night, scratching at the door of my contentment. In the morning there are splinter’s everywhere and my head’s a mess of fragments. It’s still winter. I keep saying this is the problem. I keep blaming the shivery sliver of mercury hovering below freezing. Ice makes the puddles filmy, and bubbles rise when I poke my booted toe in.
But maybe it’s more. Maybe even with longer days and supple heat and petals this thing will gnaw at me. Some days it feels like I’ve swallowed the missing shard from a pot glued back together, the porcelain pieces pressed so close the adhesive running between them looks like transparent veins.
Maybe it’s this: I dream about breaking clocks. About scattering the numbers and the minute and hour hands across the snow; about leaping from the clock tower and having my fall take forever, weightless, because finally there is enough time.
I wake up and throw myself at the day. I know this isn’t graceful, but animals aren’t when there is a terror or a wound to lick. It’s like I’m always at the edge of the forest with the scent of smoke curling at my nostrils. The days are too short, and at the end of each I am still thirsty.
Saturday mosaic
I’m in the dining room where the sun makes a pattern of rhombuses: bright and shadow across the table, and the woodstove fills the room with snug heat. The cat sleeps sprawled in the sun, while around the house wind moves incessantly, like restless spirits.
If I look hard, I can see the small buds on the trees growing rounder—as though the woods have been stained with a faint and hazy hue of red. And though it snowed yesterday, the ground is scabbed with mud and melt. Still, it’s cold out. Bitter in the wind the way it was in January, and my body has grown sluggish and soft from all the weeks indoors.
Today we ate toad-in-the-hole’s, ripe mangoes, yogurt and honey, hot coffee. Then packed snacks for a road trip to anywhere, but here. Spring fever has made us stir crazy, and we went looking for sugar makers and for barnyards with animals; for wind-whipped ridges and different sky lines; different windows to look out of, at the very least.
In a neighboring town we licked freshly poured maple candy off our fingers after pulling it from the snow in long golden ribbons, our cheeks chapped in the wind. People serve bread and butter pickles here, during sugaring, and home made doughnuts. Then we ducked indoors at a café where the floors were old pine in wide planks and the lattes were thick with microfoam and the coffee and foam was poured into a perfect bloom at the brim of every cup.
On the way back the sun made us squint. This American Life on the radio, Bean napping. We stopped at the carwash, and DH pointed the spray gun at the wheels, trying to dislodge a winter’s worth of frozen mud hugging up against the rotors. Small things, really, but a change of scenery; a couple hours to elope from our everyday where spring still hasn’t come and the laundry has yet to be done.
Free will astrology
AQUARIUS: The composer Stravinsky had written a new piece with a difficult violin passage," writes Thomas powers, quoted in the book Sunbeams. "Afyter it had been in rehearsal for several weeks, the solo violinis came to Stravinsky and said he was sorry, he had tried his best, the passach was too difficult, no violinist could play it. Stravinsky said, 'I understand that. What I am after is the sound of someone trying to play it." Keep this story close to your heart in the coming week, Aquarius. It will give you the proper perspective as you, too, go about the work of doing the best you can at a task that is virtually impossible to perfect.
See? The universe has my back. Apparently all I need to do is listen.
***
It has been sunny all weekend (Happy Easter!) and being out in the sun almost feels like being drunk. The intoxication of brightness. The way the angles of light outline new buds: the silent beginnings of another growing season. I'm still lurching about, trying to find a blanance: trying to be outdoors every single second of the day, and still trying to get everything else done (writing, laundry, vacuuming, minutia.) So far I don't seem to be succeeding all that well. But then I read the above and try hard to just be.