Tuesday, Tuesday

The day promises to be many things including unbearably hot. Bean woke up with a fever and has spent the morning hugging a bowl. Sprout is unusually clingy, and didn't go to sleep until after 9pm last night (highly unusual for him.) I still want to post pictures from our beautiful fourth of July... maybe later today if we all survive. Here are few highlights from the Fourth.

Oh summer, I have such a love-hate relationship with you.

Crushing on this right now. Sigh. Plain old air conditioning would make me happy too. (It's already 80 degrees, with 80 percent humidity.)

xo, C.

Fishing at home

I discovered a blog this past week that I am absolutely smitten with, that has made all the difference this week in terms surviving summer and having some fun while we’re at it. It’s by a dad, Joel, who is also a designer, artist, crafter, and kid-toy-making genius.

Using Joel’s design as inspiration I sent my husband and Bean out to the garage one morning (while Sprout napped and I snatched an hour or two of writing time) to make a pole using one of the many sticks he has managed to collect.

Side note: have you noticed this about boys? How they seem to have a perpetual thing for sticks. How it’s almost innate, the desire to pick up sticks and wield them about as swords or javelins or flags or walking sticks? Also rocks. My boys, both of them, have this inherent love of gathering rocks, throwing rocks in water, collecting them, kicking them, stowing them in pockets (alas, so many end up in my washer.)...more.

Preoccupied

I want to show up here again, with a open heart and the hundreds of stories that have been piling up; soon maybe. For now, my cards are close to my chest still and my fingers crossed; I'm feeling everything: delight, anxiety, wonder, hope; and I"m grateful for summer sunshine and berry season.

Also we've been undergoing a major redecoration/reshuffling of bedrooms. A peak at the boy's new bedroom:

(I am so loving them in matching jammies...)

Also: Tell me, what do you do to ground yourself when faced with uncertainty?

Trail running

The first time I ran to be alone with my fierce pummeling thoughts, the anxiety in my chest, the tears slick on my cheeks. The first time I ran with my hair down, floating behind me like a mane, up the grassy shaded path, up, up the hill, up higher until the blue of the mountains in the distance were swallowed by the leafy canopy of forest. I ran until my mind narrowed to only this: to my feet hitting the soft mud of the trail, crushing wild daisies and fragrant grasses; to the sound of the stream rushing downhill beside me as I ran up; to the almost instant giddy feeling of freedom that bloomed in my ribcage as I ran hard until I could hear my heart in my ears, surrounded by maples and underbrush and the liquid warble of wood thrushes.

The second time we ran together, sweat slicked, quiet, quick footed. I ran ahead, dodging low-hanging branches and he ran after, following where my feet landed among rocks, missing puddles, leaping mossy covered logs. The second time I ran ahead, but not too far ahead, and often I’d turn to look and grin seeing him there just over my shoulder; and I’d grin also to myself, feeling my own ease and strength and I ran fast up the hills, muscles bunching and releasing through the underbrush, darting with agility between tree trunks and over fallen branches ahead of him. And this is something that we have always been: athletes together and it’s a thing that has often saved us, brought us back together, gathered us into the same moment.

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I want to do more trail running this summer. It’s a rush to pound up the single track traversed last by deer or the wild singing coyotes I just heard out my back door, and to leap in quick zig-zags on the descent. It brings my mind right to the moment, focuses me only in my breath and feet and muscles, leaves me empty of the impatience that has painted my recent days with tension as things unfold the way they should, though often beyond my control.

And maybe that’s what this is all about for me: being in control in a way that is finite and defined. Also, it’s just straight-up awesome. It's nothing like running on the gently hilly dirt road where our three mile run has become something so regular my mind dances off, seeking distraction from the repetition. If you can, if there is any way at all, grab your running shoes this week and go off road. Even for a short distance. Even for only ten minutes, or five. Run where the trail is uneven and unpredictable. Run where the woods smell sweet with leaves and summer. Run where the heat is lessened by shade; or among grasses waist high where you cannot see your feet. Run, and then tell me how it was. (I dare you.)

Summer Routines & Rhythms

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’m going to survive this summer and how my kids are going to survive this summer and how, optimally, hopefully, we’ll do it with a bit of grace and perhaps even some pizazz. So. To that end I’ve been trying to tackle the work-play rhythm I mentioned in my last post, and I’ve come to a few ideas (and I’d love to hear yours on this topic too!)... More...

There is an art to this

There is an art to this. To waiting, to being present in uncertainty when moments are only whatever it is that they are until the next moments arrive.

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Today writing terrifies me. It terrifies me because of the way these stories last, the way we tell ourselves stories in order to be who we are, to become who we are becoming. It makes me ache, to see the small uncertain snapshot of myself as I am right now: here at the dining room table, in a room so humid the pencil digs into the soft pulp of the paper like a finger nail scratching at mosquito bitten skin.

Outside it is pouring and green and warm. Water drips from the gutters in irregular staccato and farther out the rain falls steadily with a rushing noise that fills the valley, the house, the sky with sound. Upstairs, in his crib, my son is sleeping, likely on his belly with his cheek pressed softly into the matted sheepskin he’s slept on since the day he was born. He’ll sleep for another hour and then wake and my day will circle about again, and I will become something less productive and possibly more real.

In thirty years what will these moments mean?

Today I re-read, slowly, meticulously, intentionally, every line Joan Didion’s piece, “On Going Home,” examining each comma, each particular use of parenthesis, each use of metaphor and observation, and found myself nearly in tears at this last paragraph, knowing as I know, that her daughter died at 39.

It is time for the baby’s birthday party: a white cake, strawberry-marshmallow ice cream, a bottle of champagne saved from another party. In the evening after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face, where it is pressed against the slats, with mine. She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that. I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her a funny story.

What can I promise? What do these moments hold?

Big shoes to fill

Also: go take a peak at Liz's sweet Ellie Jane. Welcome to the world little one!

Sweetness

The last few posts have been so moody and somber...but all kinds of lovely has been happening too: sunshine and a warm wind; chalk drawings and skateboarding in the garage; meandering walks down to the pond; homemade pizza with friends.

And today: a trip to the farmer's market, just Bean & me..to meet my lovely friend & her little boy. A cinnamon danish; boys on bikes; exploring by the lakefront; sunburn; an old-fashioned root beer float.

I can't quite describe how lovely it was to hang out with just my big boy. I hardly ever get Bean one-on-one these day's and he's so charming and smart and articulate and full of mischief.

When we came home we spent another few hours out doors with T and Sprout planting shrubs and building a trellis using saplings (can't wait to show you pictures.) Bean loved dragging the saplings down from the woods after T cut them down, and Sprout was pleased as punch to take up occupancy in the holes we dug for the shrubs.

Tomorrow, a laid back Father's Day (will share the super simple + sweet project Bean & I worked on!) with more outdoor projects planned (unless it rains...)

(More on how the first week of summer vacation went here.)

A small thing

Into the road without hesitation,the other side as certain as the grass and hawk weed parting there, for the brief passage of fur, ears back, paws leaving and returning to the surface of the soft and grassy earth. And then I was there behind the wheel; unprepared for its smallness, for the sudden quiver and tenderness there in the road among the potholes.

There was an instant; a fraction of a second really when we both wavered, I could feel it. I could feel the inevitable, sliding of the future toward this instant, now.

I could see the rabbit's honey eyes, his small slight body, ears erect, brown, no bigger than a loaf of bread.

I hit it. I couldn't help it. It happened so fast.

I cried the whole way to the store; the boys all watching my display of emotion anxiously from the quiet of the truck's cab.

When we returned I couldn't help but look, there, at the side of the road among the quartz pebbles and daisy petals, blood spilling from it's small crushed skull, wasps and flies already there, and later, when we passed again its small body and been lifted into the hazy summer air.

tender.

I don’t want to write tonight, but there is nothing elseno solace anywhere except here with the blinking curser the darkness pulling close around the corners of the room and damn, I want to be like boho girl tonight: I want to be able to say that I’m experiencing tender emotions and am working through this gently but I don’t know how to do this; how to say this or to be gentle in this process of being wherever I am feeling right now.

I always feel like I need to have an answer and keep my chin up. I’ve somehow become so disconnected from my emotional life that all of this could be entirely hormonal and Id never know it was that time of the month.

The truth is days like this just add up—one small iteration, resentment, and minute heartache after the next and then wham! it hits like a stupid ton of bricks, and now, in these post Kickstarter days when everyone and their mother among my of ‘real life’ friends reads here, it feels…

Oh damn, the truth of it is I grew up in a family with a mother who struggled with depression; who was overtaken by her emotions; who became them, day after day sometimes, silently leaving the rest of us out—and I see myself in her some days.

And also this: my father always thought that my mother should chin up, and because my father was my favorite person in the world when I was a kid, I learned it well, and here I am chin fucking up.

Except I want to be the girl who can bring a little grace to this. I want to be able to say that I’m working through this stuff gently. I want, maybe most of all to say that I know how to be gentle with myself—but I do not.

I have no fucking clue.

I want the days back when I could write here without people from the context of my daily life wondering why I haven’t told them about whatever I’m writing here.

I’m mourning the anonymity I had once here.

I want to know why things are so small and so big at the same time. I want to know why men—most men anyways—always see things so impossibly literally and then walk away just when you want them to stay (though of course when they do return it’s the very last thing that you want.)

Sometimes. Tonight. Maybe.

So whatever. Bring on the concerned emails. Life just bites sometimes as it currently does and I don’t want to have to explain myself, and truthfully I might not know how to explain myself. Tonight I’m just sad, and hoping that when the morning comes I’ll feel better.

A peak into the garden

Peace and grace

Yoga tonight. YOGA. I didn't even know this hole in my life existed until I was there in the little second story studio doing downward dogs and listening to the collective exhalations of twenty other people. "Think of going out into your life with peace and grace" the teacher said at some point, and I was suddenly, inexplicably close to tears.

Peace and grace.

Somehow my life has moved away from this drastically. The past several months have been about chin up, mind over matter, power through it, action.

And oh, how I've missed this: being quiet with myself. Simply that. Simply breath, and wonder, and feeling tears spring up suddenly from both relief and uncharted sadness. I've always prided myself in being tough and resourceful. I've always been someone with brains and enough street smarts to figure things out and when the going gets tough I roll up my sleeves.

And for years--whenever I intermittently practiced yoga--I always brought this attitude to it: power through.

But it was not about that at all tonight. It was simply about this: about considering breath, and karma, and returning to breath. Peace and grace distilled into the fluid motions of warrior to downward dog.

I'm going to try for more of that this summer....and I want to know, where do you find or bring peace and grace to your daily life?

How this began

Going through an old hard drive tonight I found this poem written May 5, 2004... three weeks before I'd find out that I was pregnant with Bean.+++

Today I heard that the Voyager satellite, sent up into space the year before I was born, is now nearing the edge of our solar system. Some scientists think it will encounter a shock wave, before going into the space beyond. My life feels like this, nearing it’s known edge, careening, orbiting, drifting off course around some other center I have not quite named or found, but feel. I expect to be thrown up soon, with force upon taking the risks I know I should take but do not yet understand. I imagine that amidst the white-hot vibrations of shock it will be the memories of things, the words and honey comb and lightening storms, that will cradle me. Giving birth, when the moment is right to a new self, among the nebula and stars. +++

I had no idea how spot-on I was. A poem, like a tear in the stage curtain of the present, and there I was behind it, peeking through.

I also found this, from August, 2009. A quickly scribbled note about a conversation with Bean:

"I fell from the sky mommy. I was a star, and I fell into your tummy." If you look back, can you find any inklings, notes, or snippets about the time when life as you know it now began?

evening|summer

As the sky grows dark, the twilight feels heavy like velvet, and sweet like licorice. Fireflies come out, and Venus too, above us blinking from among the pink and pale indigo of heaven. So far up, she twirls, casts off the sun’s bright light, and sends it back to us like a love letter; a secret message.

It's nearly dark and maybe we all make wishes looking up. We see fading contrails; the sky turning to night.

Bats swoop as we gather around the fire with marshmallows on hand-carved sticks; the boys run laps around the house then ask for seconds, thirds, their faces sticky sweet. Sprout eats corn off the cob, then goes docilely to bed, his hair smelling like vanilla and wood smoke; his arm hooked around my neck, a small piece of heaven.

We eat until we’re full then lull; find conversation; lull again. There are kebabs with pineapple and purple onions; fresh corn with butter; grilled nan; steak.; brownies for dessert; wine.

The kids head indoors and their laughter floats through the open window and yellow light spills each rectangle onto the bluing lawn.

I spill wine on my jeans, my feet are grass stained, the boys are covered with dirt and it is perfect. Guitar fills the night air with lilting notes; our faces are light by flame, thrushes call until the sun's long gone.

It’s summertime. Here, this, finally.

A story chameleon

I slip among the cushions on the couch with a book and the edges of everything else grows blurry. Reality becomes the story on the page. I am no longer here, even as outside things are moist and green, and the lawn mower thrums loudly as T. cuts back and forth across the grass. In the air beyond the feeder with it’s shiny red metal flowers, hummingbirds zigzag, lilt, swoop, defying gravity. I look up intermittently and the clock’s hands make no more sense than reading words in Japanese. Hours slide by. I don’t move. This is what happens when I slip into a book. I have no moderation, no ability to read a page, then leave off. It’s such a crush: this thing I have for words.

Story captures me so entirely it almost becomes a full body experience. I dislocate. My feet grow cold from staying in in one position so long, knees up on the couch by the window as the morning slides towards afternoon.

When I read I become unavailable, altered, distant. T. can ask me a question and I’ll look up moments later having absolutely no idea what he said. I am a story chameleon, becoming blue, or thrilled, or besotted with wanderlust at the story’s slightest suggestion.

I am almost unbearably suggestible when I read. Hardly a skeptic. I go to books to be altered. If the sentences are good, I’m a believer.

I just finished Breath by Tim Winton, and god, I love his stories. Raw, intimate, wild. Read the whole book in one sitting.

What are you like when you read? Also, what’s the most recent book you haven’t been able to put down?

Uneven

Oh my. I seem to have distressed a few of you (thank you for your sweet emails.) Things are just fine. Promise. Things have a way of turning out, even when sometimes they don’t (at least not in the ways that we expect or hope.) Tonight I mostly want to tell you this: when I show up here, it is sometimes with cool palms, and a quiet heart; each sentence following logically after the next. But other days I come with flyaway hair and muddy feet; my heart in a hundred directions; my words haphazard. In times like these, it’s about trying to put a finger on the pulse of this moment that matters. I want a record of the in-between-times. The times of limbo, of breathlessness, of waiting, of wanting, of fleeting wonder. These are the moments I want to look back on because these are the moments I forget.

Today the irises revealed sleek purple buds by the front steps, and I know that in mere months the summer that is just now blooming will be gone.

The leaves will turn the color of flame and rust and fall to the ground. Sprout will be talking (he already is saying words—a new one pops up every day now, in that two-syllable repetitive way that toddlers have of talking. Banana becomes “na na”’; water, “wa wa”) and all the things that are uncertain now will no longer be.

But just as surely as this is true, it is also true that new unknowns will crowd in, playing a forever game of musical chairs in my head.

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Today, this: the four of us in the garden, up to the gills with dirt. The season's first sunburn. Lemon ice water. An impromptu trip to the general store for milk & ice cream sandwiches. Also laundry. I somehow can never quite seem to get a handle on that.

blur

Diptychs are contagious.

Wishing I could show up here every day, but this week: everything has come pouring down. Highs and lows. Utter crazy, uncertainty, heartbreak, possibility, sweetness. It's almost more than I can stand, so I escape into the fleeting instant of watching an oriole swoop and land. Such sudden orange among the green. Yes my heart thunders. Yes to this life.

Still, I brim with impatience for all that is unfinished and unknown. My breasts still ache (no one tells you this about weaning, but it's not pain free. That is also an understatement, fyi.) My heart aches for things that are irrevocably different now (with people I love. Sorry about the vagueness.) My quads ache for want of use. I haven't been running much and miss it something fierce, but there are so many things now up in the air with the tilting, diving flight of the orioles that running comes last. It shouldn't, but there it is, a fact. Time isn't on my side this week.

Next week: JUNE.

When did that happen? How? Has anyone else felt like this year is plunging ahead at a vehement pace?

Tonight heat crowds the room. 90 tomorrow. The lawn is still unmowed (another thing fallen off the end of the priority list this week) and I am applying for things and chasing down dreams, and damn, I know I'm being vague but tonight it's the best that I can do.

Joyful fleeting things

Today I am giddy. A new pair of pretty red flats. A to-do list ACCOMPLISHED. An exciting, thrilling possibility waiting to be explored. SUN. A raspberry Italian soda + chocolate croissant. I am absolutely loving this song right now. Holding my breath. Finding four leaf clovers in the lawn. And reminding myself: what if there is no emergency?

So I'm weaning Sprout. He's the same age more or less that Bean was when I weaned him--and he was ready. He'd been nursing only at night before bed and in the morning upon waking... and my trip to the city was the perfect time to make the transition. He never even fussed. Just snuggled in with T. in the morning and went back to sleep--and now we have this lovely snuggle time in the morning when he's still all warm and sleepy and our cheeks press up against each other, and then Bean comes in and the three of us snuggle and chase the tails of our dreams while T is in the shower. That first morning time with both of my boys is often my very favorite part of the day.

But oh my. I have two little boys now, suddenly. It's the end of babyhood in our little family. Blink, and here we are, four of us, all bipedal, grass stains on our toes. I can't quite describe what it feels like to be here at this point. To know our family is complete, to know who my kids are, to be US. I always pictured this, but had no idea what I was picturing, you know?

Here we are. Two boys with impossibly long eyelashes, and thousand dreams like dandelion fuzz blowing on the wind. I can't even imagine this fall. Can't fathom what we'll be like by summer's end.

Yesterday I went down to the garden for the first time and was stunned by the knee high grass. In my absence the wild has taken over and reclaimed the little plot of land I've been tilling each season. Saturday: the garden and I have a date to get down & dirty. But my whole life feels like this--when I look back on the past ten years, it's exactly like looking at the garden suddenly verdant and overgrown with weeds and volunteers (tomatoes, peas) that I never expected, and yet there they are. It will be like this from here on out, won't it? Every decade faster than the last.

Tell me, what is fleeting and joyful right now in your life? What do you want to remember about today, this May?

A weekend away and the photos I did not take

The lilacs are fat; my boys cheeks are sticky with apricots; the lawn is overgrown. Today T. wraps his arms around me at the table. We sit side by side, plotting our next moves while our boys escape out the front door and head to the sand box together. We can see them from the window. They sit side by side in the sand; hair blowing back in the dandelion-down strewn wind. They giggle together, and seeing them this way makes everything worth it. They’ll always have this. I went to NCY for the weekend with a lovely friend whose sister has an apartment on the Upper West Side. I haven’t been to the city since Bean was tiny; and my camera battery died before I could foray out to take many pictures. So instead I offer this:

The pictures I did not take.

The green Central Park lawn strewn with picnic blankets, and above it two bright yellow balloons lifting up; floating beyond the buildings at the tree line and into the blue and cloud flecked sky.

The two girls with red hair ribbons tied around pigtails, running among the picnickers with a pink and blue kite on a short string; feet bare, knees skinned, the littler one stopping to just stare for a while at the bobbing improbable flight of the kite in air lifted by the sheer momentum of her sister’s strong brown legs.

The desiccated crumpled body of the baby blue jay on the sidewalk beneath a tree, legs drawn up, blue-gray feathers crushed into the cement; and the look of revulsion that the lady had, in her enormous black Prada sunglasses, dark skinny jeans and ballet flats, her skin pearly, her hair frosted, her stroller a Bugaboo Frog. She skirted the bird and shuddered, then walked quickly on.

My friend’s face; beaming with emotion that mirrored the sun yellow of his fleece, the two of us seeing each other for the first time in ten years (except in photographs). His profile against the backdrop of the dancing fountain at Lincoln square: curly eyelashes, dreads pulled back, a smile playing on his dark lips,

The view from 230 Fifth at night; an indigo sky and lights scattered like a diamonds in a jewelry box. The Empire State building right there, smack-dab, lit in green and yellow; potted palms, crowds, champagne. Hair blowing in the wind.

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I wore a wicked dress, you guys, and I looked amazing. Super heels, a tiny chocolaty shoulder bag, smouldery eyes. I had a few twenty-five year old boys in a state of euphoria and then shock when I spoke to them, then offered up my wedding band as proof. To further the short circuit in their minds I murmured this: “I’m a mom, too.” Best expression ever. Utter disbelief painted over sheer attraction. I couldn’t stop grinning and thanked them after they docilely hailed us a cab.

I needed this. I needed to encounter a part of myself I haven’t seen much of since becoming a mother. Wine, French food, a hot dress, crowds parting just so I could pass. Who doesn’t need a day like this to remind them of what they are?

As though everything that I am is contained in a composite shell of moments hauled about to contain the soft-bodied hermit crab soul that is mine. Right now it feels like I’ve clambered into some new place. Inside a Fibonacci spiral, the sound of the city comes rushing back. It’s endless traffic and hubbub and movement thrums in my eardrums still. Be still my restless heart. Still I am happy to be home.

An ending & a beginning

The world is suddenly green. The drenched trees lost their blossoms as quickly as they bloomed; petals fell like a party dress to the grass. Now everything flutters with the minute iterations of leaves. The grass is suddenly shaggy and surprisingly long; as though it’s from a Jack In the Bean Stalk fairy tale while hummingbirds zip among the rain drenched azaleas and lilacs fill the air with heady sweetness.

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This weekend big things are happening. A Field Guide To Now on Kickstarter is ending tomorrow. 28 hours left. (Become a backer if you haven’t. This is IT!)

I’m leaving on a weekend adventure today with my camera and some pretty shoes in tow. I won’t be here when the project time runs out, but I want to tell you how grateful I am. I am astounded, joyful, terrified, delighted, eager. This is such a big deal… and YOU made it happen.

Thank you.

xxxo!