Thanksgiving

Hi. Today I am writing. All week I've been writing. Hence the absence here.... which makes me sad/happy, as usual. I am stopping in though to say: thank you, thank you. What you give to me with your comments, your friendships here, your encouragement is something I cherish.

Today I am wondering (as I prepare for a kind of anticlimactic day tomorrow, now that both sets of friends who were coming to dinner have canceled due to the flu...) how do you celebrate Thanksgiving? Is it a holiday that you love? What makes it special? What ritual or tradition do you have that doesn't, maybe, entirely, focus on an enormous meal? I'm so looking forward to reading your replies as I feel like I really want to change this holiday up around here. I'm hoping for inspiration.

The temptation

...to eat him WHOLE is rather persistent. Can you blame me?

(And also: she's back. O happy day. )

Here & now

A week of friends, and bonfires and playing in the leaves. A week of making choices and getting on top of the laundry situation and soaking up back to back days of slanting shadows and mellow sunlight.

Now: Penguin Café on my headphones. Writing a novel makes everything twirl in my head.

Life is full, and there is a feeling of tenderness just below the surface. It’s hunting season. We put the light on in the coop to trick the sleepy hens to lay some eggs. In the dark we fold into each other and whisper, reconciling the smallness of today with the possibility that tomorrow will be great.

We’re all hugging ourselves in the dark; hugging each other; hungry for something. Or at least I am, he is. Lots happening in the present tense right now, but I miss being here.

What matters to you today?

When spooks and ghosts and robots are seen...

Bean's Robot costume, in progress:

Two words: foil tape. Love it.

Today, this:

What is it to feel unrealized, other than strangely exquisite? It is the soul's plea to matter. It is the exhausting submersion of caring for others, sometimes at the expense of our own creative spark. It is age and mortality settling upon us like a kneading cat, prodding us to Hurry up and do something. Make something. Be something.

From the exquisite, talented Kate at Sweet|Salty

It's this same voice in my head that drives me to do crazy things like declare my NaNoWriMo goal, and to long with my clunky, wanderlust heart to hang glide someday; live somewhere far from here; to keep doing things that terrify me, or are hard, or are brand new. Because if not this, now, then what? Tomorrow might be dust. Tomorrow might anything. But today, this. We hold it in our hands.

And also this: two cups of french press coffee + cream and a new friend = a very good thing.

At the coffee shop: almost a poem

She walks out the door ahead of him; long white hair blowing into her face as a truck barrels past. I watch as she turns back toward the door, and at first her face is carelessly content; then she sees him and her features soften almost imperceptibly. She looks up to where he’s paused there on the landing, readying himself to tackle descending the stairs. Does she know that he is dying? Does he? He has the same sparrow like grasp and yellow skin my father had when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The same hunched shoulders in a flannel shirt. The same slow deliberate effort to carry on with the minutia of the day. Coffee in a paper cup; the laces of his leather boots tied in double knots.

He holds the metal rail and takes each step at a time. Then he puts his palm on her shoulder, and they turn, go.

Unbidden, there are tears.

Across the street I watch a man in a wool jacket gather small bouquet of chrysanthemums and yellow leaves. At the edge of the park he pauses for a moment, then tucks them into the slats of a metal bench and walks on.

Timing is everything

Hi Monday. Apparently I hit publish last night before bed, and this odd collection of urls and lines of text went live yesterday night sometime. Oy. ( I'm glad you liked my 'experiment,' Denise.)

I did want to share all sorts of things I've been crushing on lately though, including these poems, and enough gorgeous pink blooms here to almost make me weep. Also, this inspiration to play around with some stenciling. (I've always had a crush on Banksy.) And this artist's interpretation of the "Missed Connections" section in the paper, which is where I go, too, when I'm looking for a new story.

Speaking of a new story, I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year. You all remember my failed attempt in August, I am sure (which was kiboshed by a heaping helping of freelance copy-editing.) This time? No excuses. I need to get this story out of my system. I need to get this story on the page. I need to see my words accumulate following NaNoWriMo's instructions:

"Do not edit as you go. Editing is for December. Think of November as an experiment in pure output. Even if it's hard at first, leave ugly prose and poorly written passages on the page to be cleaned up later. Your inner editor will be very grumpy about this, but your inner editor is a nitpicky jerk who foolishly believes that it is possible to write a brilliant first draft if you write it slowly enough. It isn't. Every book you've ever loved started out as a beautifully flawed first draft. In November, embrace imperfection and see where it takes you."

So basically, it's ON, November.

Also, I got a part time job at a place that is very close to my heart--doing something I've never done before, with lots of opportunities to learn new creative things like In Design which will, in part, help to pay for my writing habit. So this coming month it's all about time management and balance. A week or so ago, at the suggestion of my very dear and very organized friend, I watched this lecture on time management, and I'm inspired to try to keep a time log this week to attempt to become more aware of how I spend my time. I'll likely be posting more on this at the end of the week..

This week is all about getting ready for Halloween around our house. Carving pumpkins. An obscene amount of foil tape and a pretty cool robot costume in the works. It's also about finishing two short stories and getting an essay submitted so that I have a clean plate for November's novel insanity.

What are you up to? Where do you think you spend your time? Have you ever kept a time log? Where do you know you need to become more efficient?

Morning Poem # 6

Patience is granular like sugar, and every child hungers for it the same way that tongues crave sweet, darting out from parted lips, darting like small boys into traffic or towards sharp sticks, always used with the poorest of judgment (which is also how wars begin)

and if it had color, it would be milky and soft, and quite the opposite of the vermilion rage that springs with sudden heat and sting like a rash along the slender, tender curve of a throat provoked for the hundredth time by the lollygagging, jelly-boned determination to find exactly where the line is drawn;

and it is feeling the clean hard click of teeth meeting and words held or shoving fists into pockets or maybe after gripping a sticky palm a little too hard, it is to inhale again softly and notice the way the chickadees have returned to the woods, and how the light is mellow like honey in a jar

Endpoint + Ladybugs

The ladybugs have arrived. They come every October, en masse through the slanting autumn light, their small vermilion exoskeletons plunking into the window panes, flitting through briefly opened doors, gathering at the corners of the ceilings in every room. They come like clockwork, when the days are short and the light is like amber in a jar, before the hard cold. They bring promises, nostalgia, delight. Bean bursts into laughter as they land on his pants, his hands, his shoulders. He extends his arms carefully, watching them crawl about then lift off, their small buzzing wings carrying them in drunken zig-zags towards the house, where they seek dark nooks to overwinter. Their arrival marks the end of autumn and the beginning of the long season of snow and cold and boots and socks at the door.

Things are ending now, and beginning. When I wake up the valleys are blue and soft with mist, and the last yellow poplar leaves twirling to the ground make my heart ache: such a certain, gorgeous loss. Which is how I feel now, at the brink of things: new community, new friends, new work.

I want to say that it feels like the end of an era, but I’m not sure what I mean. Just that things feel like they are starting to be different. And it's good. But also, change is always awkward and slightly devastating, even if its just something temporary (a trench coat left hanging at by the door after the wearer has gone ahead wearing something startlingly bright and full of promise.)

There's always that moment of hesitation, a glance backward, even as I'm plunging on ahead.

I miss, for example, the days when I was new here, when I had such a voracious voyeuristic enthusiasm for sharing my life and reading about other peoples lives. Those were the days when this blog was my lifeline to a reality I'd thought I'd maybe lost, having just had Bean and moved north to a place where I didn't know a soul. But now, four, almost five years later, every day is filled with little boys and writing, work, and new friendships, and life has somehow begun to shift more and more off the screen and back into the three dimensions of day-to-day.

And somehow this feels bittersweet.

How do you make these things coexist, reconcile, balance in your life?

8 months old

Dear Sprout, I owe you a love letter big time, but somehow every time I sit down to write about you I end up staring at the page and grinning and I never get more than a couple of sentences written.

Somehow I can't seem to put into words how utterly smitten I am with you. But I am. Over and over again. You are the best surprise I have ever had, hands down.

I'm so happy you picked us. I'm so happy you are here.

You are crawling. You have two teeth. You are pulling up on everything, always standing, always trying to get to wherever your big brother is at. You are HUGE. 95 percentile. 12-18 month clothing. And it's not all chub, either. The nurse had to re-measure you at the doctor's office today because she didn't think she'd gotten your length right. You are just shy of 29 inches.

You say dada and mama now. You giggle. You reach up to me to be picked up. You crawl after me all around the house. You love to eat, and you want whatever we're having. You put everything in your mouth.

You are (almost) always happy. You spend entire days smiling. You hardly ever cry---but you have perfected a lovely indignant grunt/squeal to let us know when your big brother is squeezing you too tightly.

I haven't written you letters every month the way I did with your brother because I am in utter stunned shock at how time is whirling by. I cannot fathom how you got to be this big.

I loved you from the moment I met you. I loved every single minute of you as a newborn. I've loved every phase you've entered, even with the sleep deprivation (and the short term memory loss) that invariably occurs as you go through growth spurts or cut new teeth.

As a baby, your brother taught me how to be a mother. You are teaching me daily how to mother with grace and delight.

I adore you. I adore you.

Happy eight months, little dude.

Love, Mama

Learning to fly

We make paper airplanes. A fleet of them tossed into space after dinner, twirling, looping, landing on the hardwood, on the couch cushions, on the edges of ledges and windowsills. Our hearts on our sleeves, laughter filling the living room, as the cold autumn night crowds in around at the windows and Sprout chases after each one, newly crawling, hands going fwap, fwap, fwap across the floor. This is my life, I think. These boys, these moments. What does it matter that I’ve missed a deadline I wanted to meet, or that tiredness makes me stupid some mornings? Everything that really matters is in this room tonight. “Here, I’ll show you how fold one,” I say to Bean, not really believing that he’ll be able to follow my lead, and remembering second graders I’ve taught who have burst into tears with frustration, not able to follow the same sequence of folds.

“Really?” he grins. Then he sits on the floor with a stack of paper, his legs folded behind him on the floor like a little frog.

He watches intently, copying every fold.

First a rectangle, then the nose folded in to make opposing triangles, then the whole thing in half, then the wings folded down. Symmetry and sequence matter now. He breath is shallow, intent.

“Let me try it again,” he says after we toss our new planes high and watch them land. Sprout squeals in delight. A candle still flickers on the dinner table. Night is here, making the window glass into mirrors that catch our grins.

I watch him as he makes another, all himself. The entire sequence of steps folded from memory, after only being shown twice. And his plane flies beautifully. It lifts improbably, air pushing up under the flimsy paper and carrying it up to the ceiling before it swoops down, twirling in arbitrary circles before landing at his feet.

His grin is bigger than the room.

My grin is bigger than the room.

This boy, this beautiful boy of mine, teaches me so much. He challenges me at every turn to grow, to become more organized, more intentional, more prepared. He is my mirror, revealing the fragile and haphazard parts of my being that dangle and drag like dropped stitches. Where I am weakest, this is where parenting him forces me to grow the most.

I can’t coast, parenting him. He never gives me the chance to sit back on my laurels and get comfy. He questions everything. He is always pushing me to the edge of my comfort zone. He’s a kid who seems porous to me: the entire environment saturates his little being. He soaks everything up. Watches everything. Asks about everything.

He sees a thing once, and remembers it, classifying it with other similar things: the makes of cars, the inner workings of tractors, street signs, logos, maps. He has a particular obsession with learning new words and he insists on using them again and again until they blend into his daily vocabulary. Words like scenery and astounding, and investigate.

He is never content with the simple answer. He is always full force, full throttle, determined. He is fragile. He is allergic (to dust, grass, pollen, pets.) He is picky. He is persistent. He is easily overwhelmed by sensory stimulation. He exhausts me.

And I’m starting to get it: this boy of mine might be one of the most profound teacher’s I’ll ever know.

Wishstuido

I have a post up here this week. Go check it out! It's about balancing motherhood and writing... something I try for again and again every single day... How do you find balance?

October Light

There is something about October light.The way the skies are stormy and squalls blow in with snow flurries in the mountains and sleet sticking to the grass. The way V's of geese and airplanes look like embers against the sky as the sun sets. The way every leaf becomes fire falling to the dying grass.

I took these pictures tonight, right at dinner, as the sun burst from under dark clouds. It was another long night again last night. Sprout might have an ear infection--that or he's just in a new sleep phase and has discovered his ears (he was tugging on them a bit today.) I watched every single green digital number in the hour flip by from 3 to 4 a.m. and this morning I was no less of a mess than yesterday and yet somehow the day wasn't all that bad.

It was a day where I tried to just let myself notice the small moments and breathe. Mostly I succeeded. And I cleaned the house. What did you do?

Not a morning poem at all

So. I think my short-term memory and my general ability to hold my shit together may be forever altered by the permanent lack of sleep that has become a fixture in my life, post babies. Exhibit A:Last week I left my cell phone on the roof of my car and drove away. I watched as it flew off and did a lovely flip in the air before landing on the road behind me. I pulled to the side, cursing, with Bean wide eyed in the back seat, and threw on my emergency blinkers (do they have some other word? I'm sure they do, but I cannot remember it. See--shit has been lost, people.) I then dashed back to retrieve it, hoping that at the worst it would be scratched but still functional. But of course, it landed in the effing middle of the road and an SUV ran it over just before I was able to dash out into two-way traffic to rescue it. SMASHED beyond repair.

Bean kept muttering, "This is terrible. This is soo terrible." All the way home.

Maybe this happens to everyone, and perhaps it is what some people gently refer to as GETTING OLD, but I'm only THIRTY ONE, people, and I and should have more of a capacity to remember things and generally keep my shit together than I have recently demonstrated.

Exhibit B: This morning I put my coffee cup on the roof of my car.

You'd think I would have learned, right?

Nooo. I drove off in oblivion only to slam on the breaks and come to a lurching stop at the bottom of our rather steep driveway as my coffee cup hurtled down my windshield. What the eff? Then I had to listen to Bean mutter about how his view was ruined by my frozen coffee splattered across his window.

It's a little bit more than my view that's been affected, BUDDY.

Exhibit C: While I remembered HIS jacket and hat and mittens for school this morning, I somehow managed to leave the house without so much as a vest, and it was COLD this morning. As in the first frost of the season happened last night. This situation was then made worse when I went to buy bagels and proceeded to spill the entire contents of the worst latte of my life (from here--don't ask me why I even ordered one!) onto my lap.

Cold? Check. Wet? Check. Shit completely lost? CHECK.

Please tell me this changes. Please.

Another image poem

anatomy of my heart today: PS--Your comments on my post earlier meant the world to me today. Really. xoxox! C.

Drawing blanks

And I can't find the words to write about it. Dislocated. Nostalgic. Missing the way I used to be, as irrational as that seems. Feeling anxious about the future. What if I'll never be the things I dream of? Shit. Even I know that sounds ridiculous, and yet that voice is there in my head. A rejection letter in the mail. Not enough sleep. Whatever.

I am missing the connections I've made here, Internets. I know it's my fault that they've dwindled as I've been caught in this weird place of cat-got-your-tongue moodiness that is my present. Damn. I want to share my life with you more, again. I just don't know how to put words around it. What if this lasts? What if nothing turns out? This is the voice in my head today. Even with sun, even with coffee, even with sitting alone upstairs in a cafe.

Do you ever feel like this? Like there are no words?

What are you afraid of? What will you regret, if you never do it or become it?

Morning Poem # 4

The clouds are gossamer and the moment never lasts If we take daddy’s ladder, he says, looking out the window at the way the sky is rent, gold light spilling through the torn clouds, then we could put it on the top of that tall, tall hill and reach the sun, it would be hot, but I what I really want is to catch a cloud.

I would sleep with it at night, it would be soft against my cheek, and in the morning I would take it for a walk.

His cheeks flushed still from sleep, his hair still tousled, soft. On the couch pulling on corduroys for school, he stretches fingertips to toes touching both sides, so tall, and while he’s grinning big and wide, the cat arches her back by the door, the pot fills with water, the morning sky grows clear.

Red: a poem in images

Morning Poem # 2

Things I don’t know how to do: I don’t know how to shuck an oyster, deep-sea dive, wear a space suit, read tax code, or order drinks at a bar. I don’t know how to play ping-pong or play with the small irrelevant moments of time that are handed to me to make into something useful; mine. I don’t know how to hang glide, or feel content dangling mid-air in uncertainty between projects or moments, waiting for things to take place or unravel. I don’t know how to fish, or reel myself in on a slender line or balance in thigh-high waders surrounded by the splashing my boys make in my life, always with the compulsion to throw rocks, and yell; always driven to try for whatever it is they cannot do.

Morning Poem # 1

Seismic waves traveledfrom the place where things were tilted and tossed; where a warren of market stalls collapsed under concrete; where yesterday mangoes and coffee, lemon grass, coconuts, bushel baskets of gnarled ginger and sugar were haggled for and exchanged, hands touching other hands each belonging to someone with loved ones, or now without, to here. The waves spread out in circles, and every pebble, every small speck of sand moved silently, in a minuscule way to these vibrations. Silently, and unseen, the waves traveled through the bedrock underneath my long dirt road and all the while I was just here caught up in doing things that matter only a little: spreading butter on the fat crumbs of toast brushing cat hair from my sleeves kissing someone in the warm cocoon of bed before the day started at it again, with inclement weather and dirty socks and dishes in the sink, and gratitude is hardly enough.