Media Record Day 1

Here is a record, more or less of the media I interacted with today: The continuation of a hysterical email exchange with my dear girlfriends about married names and given names and choosing names. One of my friends is marrying a man who happens to have the same name as her, minus a syllable. You can see how this might get tricky.

Another email exchange with some amazing friends about their reading habits, re: fiction or memoir? (Weigh in please!)

Visiting and revisiting twitter and still not quite getting how such a multi-directional, utterly dislocated conversation with a thousand different people going all at the same time makes any sense at all. But kind of liking reading about the goings on in the literary agent world (last weeks #queryfail made me laugh, though apparently it made others cry.)

Facebook, twice. A friend posted this: “prioritizing inappropriately” and it couldn’t be more apropos.

SheWrites, once. Since I signed up on Monday, the place has a zillion new members. I’m still not sure how to use the opportunity here. I’m tempted to spend all day networking. But then there’s that pesky thing called ACTUALLY WRITING which I should be doing more of. I have 90 pages of raw material. I need to double that. Then I can talk. Or maybe then I should focus my energies on revising?

Read this rather morbid list, while researching the circumstances of Plath's death for my book. Oy. I haven't chosen a profession with a guaranteed pleasant outcome, have I?

Then I read "Suspension" by Rebecca Makkai, and loved it because of it’s form. I googled Makkai after reading her story “The Worst You Ever Feel” in the 2008 Best American, and this story is where I landed.

On paper, in actual three dimensions I read Lorrie Moore’s piece "Childcare" in this weeks New Yorker. A few great lines, like this one: “ I accidentally nodded. I had no idea, conversationally, where we were. I searched, as I too often found myself having to do, to find a language, or even an octave in which to speak” made me smile because I could relate. But the piece was generally meh. Not something that will likely stick with me, though maybe now it will because I am writing about it. (Go read it! Tell me what you think. I loved doing that last time--hearing your ideas about a story. Having a little impromptu book club.)

And I read the intro in Molly’s book a Homemade Life. Every time I hold the book in my hands I am smitten with simultaneous inspiration and envy. It’s not a good combination and thus far has prevented me from reading farther. However it has inspired me to try my hand at homemade pasta. Also chocolate cupcakes.

Finally, I read yesterday's headlines in the Wall Street Journal, while walking back up the driveway with a sleeping Sprout, but I cannot recall any of them. Only that there was an entire full page add about Presidential Armored Safe's that you can obtain for FREE if you purchase multiple sets of 'government coins that never loose their value.'

I am certain I consumed other bits of information, and yet my memory of them is even more frail and blurred. What is the point of all this consumption if I cannot even remember it?

Maybe I should also note that I also did some revising, finished a chapter, started two art projects while bouncing Sprout in the ergo, took a walk (to get him to sleep), did the shred, and baked cookies. Also there was dinner and bedtime stories and so forth. Gasp. Does anyone ever feel like they have enough time?

*** Your turn: what media did you interact with today?

Media Habits

Wednesday. When I type that word I think of fifth grade, of the yellow lined paper I used to practice spelling it on in loopy cursive, Wed-nes-day. I still say it that way in my head when I write it out.

Funny how certain things stick and others evaporate in a second. Just as I was writing this I thought of the premise for a perfect short story. By the time I’d pulled up a new sticky note on my desktop, it had slipped my mind and all I could remember was the fact that I need to email several friends and am very remiss in doing so. Maddening.

Memory. It’s such a loopy, lumpy thing, like an old floral couch with little spots burned in the fabric from where the sun struck it, shining through a vase on the windowsill just so.

I remember my childhood vividly and sporadically. From fifth grade I remember learning the entire Greek alphabet, all of the prepositions in alphabetical order, how to spell Wednesday, and how I kicked Zachary O’Day in the crotch with those slouchy pointy toed boots that were all the rage along with acid washed jeans in 1986.

I do not however, remember yesterday, unless I put some serious mental effort towards the task.

No. That isn’t true. I do remember the way last night we decided to go with a red metal bucket to pick raspberries down by the pond and a quarter of the way there ran into two stray dogs. One was a yellow lab with one of those pronged collars that look vaguely threatening, and the other was a black wisp of a dog with floppy ears and lanky legs and pale ghost blue eyes, part husky for sure. They weren’t from around here. Not any of the neighbor's dogs, and when we went towards them they ran, away from us, up our hill, towards our house and our free range chickens.

Incidentally, just yesterday DH decided that our two month old chicks were old enough to go free range, without the enclosure we normally put them into. And by decided, I mean he took the path of least resistance, as they had escaped him when he was trying to transfer them from the large wooden box where they spend the night in the coop, to the enclosure on the lawn. They escaped and he decided to hell with them. So they were out under the pine all day and just fine except that now of course two feral and rather hungry looking dogs were heading right towards them.

We ran back up our hill, pushing the stroller with Sprout who indignantly began to wail and Bean, who dropped his bike and skittered up after us, his yellow helmet bobbing, his eyes on the sky where thunder had begun to rumble. "I saw lightening," he said, his voice all quavery. "It might get us."

Seriously, when it rains it pours around here.

And so there we were, trying to deter the dogs by yelling and throwing rocks in their general direction, and then trying to catch and re-coop the not so big and definitely not so smart chicks who would make a mad dash for the coop door and then at the very last minute would scatter frantically in all directions.

I remember this. Yes I do. But what I don’t remember—unless I stop now and really think of it—is what I read yesterday, what I learned, what media I consumed. And I’ve been thinking about that since my last post: how I am maybe suffering from information/networking overload and what to do about it.

And I came up with this: For the rest of the week I am going to try to keep notes here about my media habits and see where this gets me. Likely, I'll be back with my first record this afternoon. You in?

Sweet things

Things that I loved about today: figs & raw honey, a four mile run (!) and a swim in our neighbor's pond. Oh how I love to swim...and somehow I had forgotten this. I don't know why it's taken me three years to go and jump in, the surface rippling green, bluebirds swooping about. How I love the soft feel of the pond bottom underfoot, the way the water is soft on your skin, the way the bubbles rise up when you kick. Bean and I have gone every day this week. We lie like otters on the little wooden dock, and then we swim.

He doesn't know how to swim yet, but he's becoming more daring: leaping from the bank into the water into my arms. His grins, his chattering teeth, his little muscled torso nearly break my heart. He is so lovely, so beautiful, my son. My firstborn boy, so big now: learning to swim.

On his bike he is a terror. He's been riding without training wheels for months and now he purposely seeks out the washed out, steepest places on the driveway, the bumpiest pot-holes to ride over full tilt. He's a mountain biker in the making: the way he skids to a stop, leaps off his bike, swings back on it, all the while grinning, mud splattering up the back of his shirt, his yellow thunderbolt helmet the perfect statement.

Boys. Even though I imagined boys I couldn't have pictured this. The delight and silliness of little boys. The way they play together makes me nearly swoon with pleasure. Bean seeks out Sprout, he wants to be near him, next to him. He 'reads' him books, acts out entire narratives with matchbox cars, sings endless little songs, lies noes to nose with him. And all the while Sprout grins like he's having lunch with his idol. It's the best, the way my boys are together. I want more than anything for them to stay this way. For them to always be buddies and friends, for Bean to always have Sprout's back. For Sprout to always burst into wide smiles when his brother enters the room. It makes me so happy.

Bean asked if he and Sprout could share a room recently. We have 3 bedrooms, so they wouldn't have to necessarily, and it hadn't really occurred to me to have them share. But now I'm wondering, why not? What are the pros and cons? I always had to share a room with one or the other of my sisters, and while I am sure they hated it (sorry I stole all your clothes, sis!) I adored it. Not always, but most of the time. I loved going to bed and having a sister to whisper with, and waking up in the middle of the night and hearing her breathe. But now as a parent I'm not actually sure how to orchestrate room sharing--with boys who are four years apart. How would bedtimes work?

So. Questions: what were the highlights of your day today? And: yea or nay on the shared-bedroom business?

What would you ask for?

"She'd been so sure a crap liquor store would not stock French cigarettes just because you asked. The shock every time she went in, and there they were. She was used to taking the world as it was, she'd never have guessed you could get what you wanted by asking for it."

~from Paint It Black by Janet Fitch I was struck by these few sentences and the idea has stayed in my head since I finished this book (which I loved, by the way) And I've wondered: What do I want to ask for? What should I be asking for? It feels powerful and vulnerable at the very same time to think of this. To imagine asking, putting myself out there, saying this is what I need.

Today I would ask for: An agent to represent my book. Funding to be able to write and live. Financial abundance would be swell,but just enough would be okay too--to live and write, rinse and repeat. A sponsor, or sponsors. To not feel like I'm always the trailblazer. Some days I want so badly for someone else to say: here, let me show you how to do this so you won't mess it all up.

(And also maybe for some sun. The humidity is getting on my nerves.)

What would you ask for? Really. If you could ask for anything--or many things, what would they be?

10 open tabs

Day after day the rain comes in the evening, the windowsills wet. I eat an extra cookie, the chocolate melting bitter and sweet and sticky on my tongue, crumbs on the couch for sure, and put Sprout to sleep in his bouncy seat in the laundry room.

Yes. There with the fans, and the rhythmic satisfaction of clothes being turned and turned again in sudsy water (a task my great grandmother maybe did by hand with a washboard in a basin, and before her women at the creek bed, knees pressed into the silty mud, pounding with stones) there is a snugness that lulls him. The fan drones and the wash whirls back and forth, and beautifully, without a fight, he's asleep.

So. I've been moody with this rain, the humidity making my hair curl and my skin stick. I have 10 tabs open in my internet browser and I’m on the verge of tears, right on the cusp of everything as usual. It's so terrifying to contemplate doing more than whatever it is I’m doing right now. As in: sending more work out, figuring more things out, putting my heart out there in thin lines of Times New Roman double spaced and waiting for whatever.

It's terrifying to sit here on our stained couch with sore boobs (Sprout nursed less than usual today, but he was just as chummy and darling as ever,) contemplating what else could be a reality soon, or never, or maybe. What if I make it?

Sometimes that question is almost as confounding and daunting as What if I don't?

Here are the things I suck at: organizing, networking, time lines, deadlines, and synthesis. Here are the things I am good at: sentences, earnestness, heart, metaphors, and dreaming.

Between those to columns are the three words that Nike made so very famous: just do it. Sometimes that feels impossibly hard.

Sometimes I don't even know what that looks like, doing it, going for it: where to begin?

Breath. I come back to that. And then I go back to my browser with it's ten open tabs and try to make sense of my life.

You? What are you good at? What are you utterly miserable less good at?

And: Which is more terrifying: attempting success and failing, or failing to attempt success? Ha!

And I sit feeling everything

Today the sound of fans and windmy heart breaking and gathering in the turning air; a racehorse with an ankle turned, tendons like rope, continues even then towards the line, nostrils flared, hay soon and cool, cool water.

The sky is spread with shreds of clouds, the leaves are moving, fluttering, the air winnowing around the tiny furze on the swallowtail’s wing and I sit feeling everything: damp hair falling on my shoulders stems on the table of eaten strawberries small circles of berry stain, pollen scattered from the bouquet of daisies with their bending stems in the glass jar and the way I am uncertain now.

Other things know nothing of this the poplars and the meadow grasses bend and bend and bend again in the wind.

A handful of small good things:

Wednesday. Watching the rain from the porch with Sprout. Newly mowed grass, in heaps. Tired. So tired, after a night awake with a restless babe. Fresh jam. Scattered thoughts. Trying to make sense with words with some people, including with my mother, and while my heart is there, and hers is, it doesn't always come out right. You know? The words crisscross like a subway map, and you find you can't always get off where you intend to. A headache. Raw almonds on honey toast. The first zinnias blooming in the garden. And already the day is over and it's time for bed. But before sleep, some things to share:

First: some small art. Little tiny pieces that I am putting in a little gallery for sale. I know. It’s been years, literally, since I sold art here, with the time away from teaching my creative well has been filling and I’m excited to start sharing little pieces with you. Please go look. It's just a start. An inkling. We'll see where it goes.

The pieces I’ll be putting up first are in a songbird series. I have this gorgeous old vintage book about songbirds and I’m giving its pages new life with little paintings of the birds that have been making me so happy this summer.

Also, I’ve been loving…this gorgeous little journal of random things.

These photos.

This little story.

And these fascinating little films.

What's inspiring you?

What is today in your life?

It's the orioles that save me. The way they have come this year, more than any other year, to these lush woods, swooping across the stormy June skies, saffron and vermilion, like promises.

It's the hawks circling above, reminding me that I am human and very small; that I am a creature of gravity and bones, soft bellied, begging with gratitude at the dawn of each new day. Let there be a tomorrow, and a tomorrow after that.

It is the swallowtails that float up like yellow gifts on the fragrant air. I think of my father when I see them. I wish sometimes that he were here to see my life now, to witness my boys and my words; to see that my hands still remember the art of work. He was the first to teach me this: that tools and soil and tasks can be solace, can be grace.

In the garden, weeding between the first delicate chartreuse shoots of corn, it is the red efts that save me. They come from the dark, dark earth, burrowing towards the sun, carrying small secrets about the way time really goes. Slowly. Slower still.

Here I am in this life. I wake up to the sound of boys, to the rooster crowing, to the sky full of torn clouds and sun, to the poplars bending in the wind. This is new, this gratitude, this ability to say I am here and look! Look at this wondrous life! It used to terrify me, the idea of settling someplace with someone and making a go of it, but now I cannot think of anything more real, more full than this work.

For a long, long time, for all of my twenties (which felt long to me then) I was too impatient to feel this, to know the secret wealth contained in slow moments. Like the spiraling interior of a nautilus, the tasks of now continue to teach me how to be.

There are days when I still hate them. Days when it seems impossible to be okay with doing one more dish, with vacuuming again, with folding one more little shirt, but I am beginning to understand that it is the utter banality of the tasks that also makes them profound.

Many people don't use their hands any more, not the way they did when most of the day was occupied with the tasks of living. I've been thinking of this as DH and I have moved huge flat rocks from the old shambled stone walls on our land to make new front steps. We used the scoop bucket of a tractor, but when they were made into crude walls dividing fields long ago, it was with more brute strength: horses and sweat. A whole day's work to drag and place a few large stones.

We have machines now, and to them we are grateful: I cannot imagine the enormous labor of washing clothes by hand; email gets there so much faster than a letter sent with paper and a stamp in the post. Because of machines we have more time in the day, free from tasks with our hands we're able to do other things.

Still. I can feel how my body is meant to move, and how my hands are meant as tools, nimble on the keyboard remembering the sequence of keystrokes to make every word appear on the screen in quick succession. Awareness in these tasks becomes a way of saying grace.

It is the tasks that save me, even as my impatient mind lurches forwards, consumed with worry and with goals. I can do nothing really, except whatever it is I am doing right now. Here: afternoon, stormy skies, my knees pulled up to my chest the way I often sit when I write, the soles of my bare feet on the seat of the chair. Here, with a jar of irises and buttercups and a dirty milk glass left from lunch. Here with the sweet fruity scent of freshly made apricot-strawberry jam (I've been loving making quick jam lately, to eat with homemade bread. The perfect snack.)

Here at the table with the windows open, with my heart open, with the chickens pecking at the grass out the back door. So. This is my life today.

Stop. What are the moments happening right here for you? What is today in your life?

You & Me Now

It's night and things have maybe stoppedspinning for a while. You walk over to me, arms bare. Anything can happen now; everything is. But when come to me in your red t-shirt in the semi-dark; when you reach out, and fold your around my shoulders, I can feel the heat of you through the cotton, and I can hear your heart, and even if we lose everything we'll still be rich because of this the way I can press my face against your chest and feel like I am home.

So it begins...

Sprout is teething. Definitively. Soaked through several shirts. Chomping on everything, and he’s miserable. Utterly. Hence we are miserable utterly. Didn’t I just say it’s had been easy? What was I thinking? I was asking for it, that’s what. Don’t you ever wonder about those apparent universal laws? When it rains, it pours… you know, that stuff. The way certain things seem jinxed, fortuitous, inevitable. What’s up with that? And also, why is it that negative energy attracts negative energy so much more powerfully than positive energy seems to attract the positive?

Already here

A little bit of photo booth goofiness for your Wednesday. It's how we started our morning, at the counter and on the couch smooching and giggling, me and my two boys. (Don't you just love Bean's little broccoli top?)

It is already mid June. I can't believe it really. How the time blurs once the days warm up. Buttercups are everywhere, daisies, the first wild strawberries in little glades at the edge of the woods.

The goose is broody. Bean stuck two hens eggs into the warm circle of her nest and there she sits, some patient instinct advising her to hunker down and wait for new life to happen.

The New Hampshire reds we got in the mail a few weeks ago are feeling plucky with a new set of rust colored feathers. They’re in an outside run now, scuttling about, catching bugs. They’re fun to watch. I love the way instinct summons chickenness for them. It’s evident in all the ways that they are: heads bobbing, peeping to one another sociably, grooming their new plumage, and to think they’ve never had a mother.

We’re so different, with our long babyhood, then childhood stretching out for years and years. I watch Bean learn new words. He repeats them, uses them in context. I am utterly enamored with the way he is right now: full of drawings and ideas. His pictures are jam-packed with action: wheels turning, light switches, fire hoses, robots, homes for little mice.

On his bike he’s become a daredevil, skidding to a stop, making dizzy loops around the road, cutting tight corners, riding over the bumpiest of potholes at high speeds. I love watching him ride. I love his yellow thunderbolt helmet and his lightening grin as he passes by, legs going at top speed. He is perpetually dirty this summer. Jam on his shorts, on his chin. Mud on his feet and grass stains. He goes through two sets of clothes a day, easy. Sometimes more.

In the garden we’re mostly done planting. Bean comes down with me in the morning while Sprout naps, and we get an hour or so in before we hear him on the monitor.

This year's crop: moon & stars melons, sugar babies, lemon cucumbers, zucchini, yellow crook-necked squash, potatoes, rainbow chard, yellow peppers, five kinds of tomatoes, purple cabbage, carrots, broccoli, radishes, four kinds of lettuce, spinach, ashworth corn, onions, parsley, dill, thyme, oregano, basil, rosemary, chives and sage.

As the short growing season heats up, I’ll be planting more flowers, more carrots, more cucumbers for pickling (DH has a ridiculous pickle habit). We never got our act together with the berries, but Bean and I have scoped out a copious patch down by the neighbor’s pond that we aim to visit in a couple of weeks.

We have fun in the garden. I made Bean a tepee out of slender logs. Then gave him a packet of beans to plant, and sunflowers, and pumpkins all around. Today while I was spreading straw he came down to the garden dragging a quilt to hang over the tipi frame. Inside is a quiet secret little boy space full of packed dirt and small rocks, a pine bow for a broom, a magic door. In his bouncy seat, Sprout watches, pleased as peas.

I realize lately that I haven’t written about Sprout much. I expected to have more to say, honestly. I expected it to be harder, to be more of a fight to adjust to life with two boys, but in truth it’s been a breeze. He sleeps. That’s the main thing. And I say this with utter awe and gratitude and reverence because Bean did not sleep so I know. But Sprout sleeps and he smiles and he’s trying to sit up already. He lies on his belly and watches Bean play with matchbox cars and he’s as happy as a little fat clam. He grins and he giggles when you zerber his tummy, and he mostly just feels like he’s been here with us forever. Four of us.

I know this post is all over the map. I've been working on my book every night after the boys go to bed, more words there, less words here I guess. But I have questions for you today. A little bit of informal research.

What does settling down mean to you?

How does marriage change you?

How do children change you?

If you could chose all over again (or if you have not yet chosen), would you stay footloose and single? Why or why not?

It's on, skunk.

I watched the skunk leave tonight, burrowing it's little nose into the wet grass, looking for worms. DH and I went out and blocked every hole under the dining room where it seems to live, with great big rocks. Now my clothes reek faintly of skunk. I sit with one knee up, trying to put more sentence on the page, and become distracted again and again by the aroma.

What if that was the mate? What if there is yet another skunk under the house now, trapped. What then?

It makes me laugh, realizing this is what I will remember from June. The scent of skunk will be forever linked with the summer Bean was four and a half, with the summer Sprout began to sit, with the months money was tight and I started working on my book for real. I wonder if it will really imprint like this?

What will you remember June for?

Hmmmm

Skunks. Dear lord, the skunks. What to do about a skunk living potentially under one's house? There seems to be no clever, scentless way to remove them from one's life. Two days ago we found one IN the chicken coop eating corn off the floor at dusk. DH threw rocks at it, missed of course, sent a rock through the window in the coop. SMOOTH. Yesterday evening he hadn't had quite enough of the rock throwing business and lay in wait a twilight and heaved a veritable boulder in the skunk's general direction. The result. SPRAY. SO. MUCH. SPRAY. I could have told him as much. But boys have a thing with rocks.

As a result, we've been stumbling about in a stinky fog with the windows open, knowing that there is a potentially rather grumpy skunk asleep under our dining room waiting for dusk. Thoughts?

Morning comes

I last night I dreamed that I was teaching figure drawing. This morning I woke up smiling, regardless of the world (another day of rain; uncertainty still.) Then there were chocolate croissants. The most perfectly ripe strawberries. Bean's last day of school. A new friend.

And this. She's right, of course.

Tell me: What did you dream last night? What is the greatest thing that stresses you out? What are three things that made you happy today?

And also this.

My hair is falling out, the last telltale effects of hormones snapping back to a baseline after pregnancy, and I find it everywhere: on my clothes, in Sprout's clenched fists, in the bristles of my purple handled brush. Outside it is gray and cold and raining, the second day in a row. On the windowsill the seedlings are turning yellow, needing to get in the ground, but it’s been so wet, our boots sink up to our ankles. The roosters crow over and over. There is dirt on the floor. Around the lip of the blue enamel pot that holds the rubber tree with its shiny dark green leaves, dust, thick enough to write my name.

Last night Sprout was up, squirming around, uncomfortable most of the night. This morning it’s me that is uncomfortable, here in this thin skin, ready to cry.

Everything is always a risk. Loving. Trying to put down roots. Giving birth. Going out the front door. Getting on a plane to somewhere, and having it crash out in the ocean. Can you imagine? Waiting out there, with your terror, for death?

Of course I know nothing of terror, and yet. It’s scary here too some days. Here has its own kind of heartbreak: our financial situation sucks and it’s quite possible we could mess things up, have nothing, throw in the towel, go. To where? To what? Even when there are cyclamens, and stretching, and good poems there is always this. A shake up, a heartache, a fight, an empty bank account, a splinter under your fingernail, a bitten tongue.

And some days its hard to see that there is anything more than this: hormones and exhaustion and possible loss. Ostrich days, where all I want is to burry my head in deep and wait for moments that are better, sweeter, less filled with tears.

My Bean.

He is a delight.

He draws pictures of mice and their houses, of diggers, robots, pirate ships, tractors and us. In his pictures we have long arms and hold hands. We are bright colors, with long fingers. The grass shaggy under our feet, the sun a tangle of yellow rays at the top of the page.

His favorite pajamas are still the ones with colored hearts on them, but today he told me he didn't want to wear blue and brown plaid shorts to school because "people will think they look dirty." When he said this, I couldn't help but swallow hard. I am not ready. Not for this. Not for peer pressure and teasing, for worrying what other people think, for navigating friends and hurt feelings. It happens so fast.

In the morning he still runs into our room, his feet thudding fast on the hardwood floor, and then he's there between us, nestling close, his hair smelling like sunshine. "I love you," he whispers, stroking my cheek softly. Then in the next instant he is pulling the covers off me: they are a speed boat and he is careening around the sea, crashing into my shins.

He is a boy of a hundred expressions. He growls, grins, giggles, laughs. He cries at the sad parts in books, or when he thinks of the sad parts in books. He is thin skinned, sensitive, empathetic.

"Mommy, Will got hurt today. He fell off a bike." He told me after I picked him up from school. "Were you worried?" "I was nervous." "Did you help him?" "No. The teachers did. I kind of shut my eyes. It made me sad." I looked back into the rearview mirror to see his face. His eyelashes were wet with sudden tears.

He is currently obsessed with things that are "dangerous." Tornadoes, pirates, bumble bees, moose, alligators, monsters, and sharp knives fall into this category in his head. "Tell me what they can do," he'll say. And then when we half-heartedly list potential dangers he'll lean in conspiratorially and say, "What else can they do?" He wants the down low on danger, this kid.

He loves jelly beans, drawing with fancy pens, writing his name, summer, bare feet, being naked, playing with the hose, eating watermelon, anything chocolate, roasting marshmallows, keeping his vegetables separate on his plate, corn on the cob, matchbox cars, building with Legos, and listening to stories.

He is a kid who makes plans. He designs things in his head--pictures how many boards he'll need, and what size nails to build a particular object. He takes things apart and puts them together. He asks a 'hundred and eleventy' questions. All. The. Time.

He is my firstborn. The one who taught me grace and patience as a mama, the one who tempered my hurdy gurdy heart. And I want to pour every day with him right now into a jar of resin: keep him as he is, golden and filled with wonder. I love him so.

Hello June.

June is one of my favorite months: cloud-torn skies, hail, thunderstorms, and sudden rainbows above the wet curled ferns and the newly shorn woolly backs of sheep, their noses black and soft like crumpled velvet, let out to graze in pastures of suddenly tall grass.

Its easy to be grateful in June, to watch the poplars bend and bend and bend in the wind without breaking, and to feel glad. It’s easy to want to be something in June, to want to be alive, and to be living also: to want to push past whatever was holding things back. Tiredness matters less when the clear air is full of swallowtails and the scent of hyacinth.

June, and there are deadlines. Lots of them, for writing, for making ever minute I have with the quiet clicking of the keyboard count. Dare I whisper the word chapter? Dare I say book?

June, and the baby chicks arrived. We pulled on our rainboots Friday morning and went out to the truck across the muddy gravel drive to fetch them from the hardware store. Bean carried them home in a small cardboard box on his lap, peering in, grinning at their soft fuzzy little bodies bumping up against each other and peeping. Now they’re in the garage in a big wooden box under the red warm circle of the heat lamp. Bean pulls up a step ladder and sits on his feet peering over the edge, naming them, and then naming them again, Betsy, Jemima, Ornament, Daffodil, Sugar.

June, and the mercury is still playing shy, the temperature flirting with warm, barely. At the pond, we’re finding frogs now. They plop into the water when we wade through the tall reeds. Above us, flying in wide swooping arcs that make my heart ache with pleasure, bluebirds, streaks of summer sky.

When we eat cold watermelon on a quilt in the back yard, Bean says, “When you eat watermelon it feels like a refrigerator in your mouth.”

Later, looking at the mountains he tells me, “Mommy, don’t you think a monster's teeth look just like the mountains? They’re all jaggedy like that.”

***

June: reading more short stories, getting more words on the page. On the treadmill and the road, running faster, harder, farther. My body is feeling stronger (it’s the first time in my life I’ve done any kind of weights or jump training. Thank you 30 Day Shred.)

Sprout is trying to sit up. Trying to roll from his back to his stomach. This month will be all about documenting those changes (and about getting my camera fixed!) He is such a smiley little dude. Full of patience and grins and squeals. He is the perfect sidekick, grinning at me from the grocery cart or the Ergo. LOVE. What does June look like for you? What are you planning? Doing? Reading? Watching? Eating?

The New Yorker: "Love Affair with Secondaries" by Craig Raine

It’s about adultery and cancer. Two things that seem kind of overdone especially when combined without beauty in the same story, which is how I felt this story combined them. I wanted to like it, I really did, especially since DH said the story sucked and I wanted to have some sort of cool-kid take on it, some sort of highbrow comeback that I could make in defense of the story. But I didn’t. There were a handful of really beautiful lines.

"The slow thistledown of stars, for example, their drift and cling, was something that struck her with renewed force whenever she removed her spectacles—and was looking over a lover’s shoulder at the Milky Way."

And there were some good, if not overstated ones. "It wasn’t his vanity that drove him—it was his mortality. He didn’t want to remain young. He wanted to be alive before he died. That was all."

And in between there was a lot of sort of clever, obscure, disjointed storytelling that walked around the action, never quite in it.

Maybe it a story about mortality, or about truth, or about how each one of us feels faced with the fact that we are just here temporarily in a body that is always dying . Like mayflies, etc.

Or maybe it is about excuses, or about women and how they use men, or how men use women, or about how everyone is emotional and foolish because all we do is use each other. But the story doesn’t really commit.

If anything, I liked the element of surprise. I liked that you didn’t expect the walloping over the head with the umbrella, the mother-in-law kiss with tongue, or the reveal at the end, “—our kid” and all that. But even though I was surprised, and I like to be surprised by a story, it wasn’t enough. The ending was predictable. Maybe because given the subject matter there are only a limited number of outcomes?

Go read it, will you? Read it and then come back here and tell me what you think.

I guess I wanted to say it was a good story because it was in the New Yorker and it should be good, right? And it did have that distinct New Yorker flavor. Dry. Sarcastic. Afflicted. But I think Raine was trying too hard. As though he’s saying, Look at me. Watch how I say what this story is about without ever saying it. Except it was so completely vague and disjointed that it almost felt like you needed one those secret decoder rings you used to be able to find in a box of cereal: if you are hip enough your allowed to get it. That, or maybe I’m still just not one of the cool kids. (One thing I did love about the piece: KENRO IZU, “STILL LIFE 467." Absolutely Exquisite.)

Flexing my reading muscle.

In college I had a writing teacher who made me type out stories I thought were good. Every sentence. Every slender comma, ellipses, period, paragraph, dialogue, description. She said it would help me to get inside the craft of the story. That I would begin to hear in my head the author's internal dialogue; that I'd understand the choices better: the words, the edits, the way one sentence followed the next. I did it. At first skeptically, then diligently. She was right, of course.

Now it's not so much matter of writing the story out. I write enough, and regularly enough, to feel like I understand how to construct sentences. But there is still something that can be learned from reading a story daily, richly, and then putting it on the operating table, putting your finger on it's pulse, examining what makes it beat.

So maybe for a little while I'll try to read a short story every day. Read it, and try to write about it. Try to put words around what makes it work (or not), until I get to the meat of it. Sort of flexing my reading muscle a bit.

*** This morning's read: “An Old Virgin” From DON’T CRY by Mary Gaitskill.

It is a story that asks again and again: what does it mean to be alive inside a body? Reading it, you become the voyeur. There, touching the frail skin of a father, dying; fingering the charts of a 43 year old virgin at the doctor’s office for a physical, who whispers, “just let me catch my breath” during the exam; at a stoplight next to a Hispanic boy pumping with bravado and “so much light that it burned him up inside and made him dark.”

Gaitskill’s gaze sinks into people. She captures them on the page as both entirely physical and also almost painfully ethereal, their spirits bright and sharp at the edges of the story, tangling with it, becoming for brief moments almost mythical.

“As soon as Laura looked at her father, she knew he was going to die. His body was shrunken and dried, already half-abandoned; his spirit stared from his eyes as if stunned and straining to see more of what had stunned it.”

Inside the narrators head, we go into the secret, morbid, sexual places of her mind and come up against our own humanity: which we learn is something exquisitely fragile and riddled with holes leaking spirit and curiosity and abject sorrow.

“When he answered her, his voice was like a thin sack holding something live. He was about to lose that live thing, but right now he held it, amazed by it, as if he had never known it before.”

“An Old Virgin” is a story about regret and forgiveness, maybe; and about the way these two things are always smashed together inside us, never quite reconciled in the bright, messy, and perverse rooms in our hearts.

*** What if you flexed your reading muscles too? I'd love to know what you think of the short stories you read. What did you read today? How did it move you, make you think?

A new productive

Hi. It's a rainy Friday, and sadly I haven't posted nearly as much as I'd hoped this week. Excuses: my camera is broken (alas, DH accidentally dropped it) and every available minute at the keyboard was spent finishing a piece I want to send out today. Also: 7 baby New Hampshire red chicks in a box arrived this morning at the hardware store for us; and in spite of the rain and the rather unseasonably chilly weather, I spent yesterday morning putting seedlings (chard, more lettuce, cabbages, broccoli and herbs) into the ground with Bean. The chicks are now in a big wooden box in the garage huddled under a heat lamp. The garden is a mess of mud. And I'm feeling all kinds of quivery about sending writing out. I love to write. Love to be published. But god, submitting work feels a lot like perpetually hearing the sound of nails on a chalkboard. It's so anti-climatic and off putting to work so hard on something and then to send expecting to maybe hear something back in ninety days or never. Still. If there was just one thing I could do in the world, it would be this.

I've been thinking about my time and how I use it this week. How I find myself many days in a state of harried heartache wishing I were writing while I'm doing everything but. How some days, especially rainy indoor days, the repetition of folding laundry and putting glasses away, making snacks and attaching treads to little Lego vehicles feels just about as futile as a hamster on a wheel.

I think there will always be this. It's what motherhood has come to mean for me. This push pull. This tug, this feeling of being pulled asunder, this way and that by the deep drum beat of my creative self and my love for my boys. And I do love them. Adore. Nothing makes me feel quite the way they do, with their smiles and long lashes. It is just that still when I'm asked about what it is that I do, the word "mother" rarely comes to mind, though this is what I do for a great part of every day.

And because daytime is typically boy time, I've decided to stop wimping out on the couch at the end of the day after they are asleep. Instead I've been writing furiously, and then running three miles on the treadmill. As a result I've felt insanely more productive this week. Maybe more sleep deprived too. But who cares? A piece is finished, and I ran 2 miles in 17 minutes last night, so it's all good. Right?

When do you find time? How? What are the non-negotiable things you feel like you need to do in your life in order to be really living it? How do you fit these things in?