{my topography}

Survived: 7 hours in the car and a new camera

We’re visiting the inlaws in New Jersey, and made our way by starlight this morning down along open highways to get here around noon. Seven hours, give or take, and Bean survived.

So much to post about–perhaps tomorrow when we have leisure time and Bean’s grandparents are doting on him. Noteworthy: we purchased a new Cannon EOS 20D. It takes amazing pictures and yesterday, walking around town trying out the exquisitly rapid shutter speed and the lovely zoom lense, I was giddy beyond belief. Click on the photo below for a slideshow sampling of the pictures we took.

Yummy

See his tongue?? He tries to stand now, all of the time. Munching on the edges of the coffee table, chairs, our knees. His little wobbly legs push him up frantically, his feet tipy-toed. He sways about like a drunk with a hula hoop.

Time to move everything another level up. The surface of the coffee table, no longer safe from little grabbing hands.

Studio Friday: Paytime

I put watercolor paints on a plate and let Bean play. This is what he made. Click on the picture for more photos of us in action.

Self Portrait Tuesday: September Body Part Challenge

My feet, bare, in flip flops all summer. Since I got pregnant last year, they’ve been unadorned—I couldn’t reach my toes, for my belly. Now, I never have the time to fuss with nail lacquer and little brushes. My feet are strong and tan. My toes, nimble. I can pick things up with them, or draw, or write my name. I climb with them, run twenty miles a week. Walk to the grocery store, the farmer’s market, the park, carrying my weight, plus the wriggling weight of this baby boy I have.

His feet, new and soft as cream, just now encountering the downward pull of gravity for the first time. He curls his toes when he nurses, thrusting his feet about in delight. He puts them up high on the handle bar of his stroller, like a lazy teenager with his feet on the dashboard of some too-cool car. And last night, at 3 a.m. he was awake in his crib for awhile, playing chortling to himself softly in the darkness. Then he made a mighty grunt, and pulled himself up into a STAND. Feet quivering, toes down first, and a grin so huge, we could see even in the dark.

The effect that crawling has had on my brain

The boy, he gets into mischief ALL THE TIME. Because our house is small, single storied, and mostly free of hazards, we give Bean more or less free reign of the place, as we go about daily activities. And he loves this. Going from room to room, investigating.

He crawls FAST now. FASTER when he knows we’re coming for him when he is say, elbows deep in the cat food bowl, or happily pulling CDs of the entertainment center and throwing them with glorifying crashes onto the floor.

Mostly, it’s both awesome and amusing to watch him discover his world. Incredible to observe the finely tuned sequence of brain development that led him first to do exquisite “supermans,” then rock back and forth, now crawl. And though he’s only been crawling with agility for a week or so, he is already driven to try pulling himself up into the vertical. Kneeling, balancing, and occasionally falling.

I’m filled with wonder watching his brain absorb all the information he gathers about his environment as he explores it: push and pull, gravity, depth, cause and effect, orientation. And I am happy to be able to be here to witness it each day.

But there are times when I miss the full days of teaching other people’s children. The business of accomplishing things start to finish. My days are so fragmented now. Things are left started everywhere. Half folded heaps of laundry, a half-edited section of writing for my weekly workshop, a collage partly painted.

I can’t help but feel resentment sometimes then, at the way things work out. That DH job affords him six hours of “alone” time, no matter how stressful the market is. Of course we’re both compressed at the end of the work day, and of course the “work” isn’t done. But for me the compression often doesn’t have a release. The day doesn’t end until Bean goes to sleep, far longer than even my longest days teaching.

Invariably, exhaustion catches up with him RIGHT when dinner is done. And then I try to remember that being in the moment is what I’m here for. Even when the days fragments gather under my skin like so many shards of glass, as Bean’s body curls up against mine, I let his whispered breathing and the sweet scent of his hair settle down around me. I try to allow this to be enough.

A time to eat

In the summer, when the heat pushes in through the screens and the crickets and the traffic and the yelling of kids playing stickball in the street fills the air with soundwaves, I don’t cook. The oven makes the house too hot. And usually, I’m not hungry for more than a salad or some grilled corn or pizza anyway.

But come fall, when the skys are sharp and clear with cookie-cutter stamps of clouds–white agains a chilly blue, then it’s time for soups, for scones, for bread.

Idiosyncrasies

Allison tagged me yesterday to name a few of my idiosyncrasies. Simply saying idiosyncratic is a delight, so I had to play along.

1. I don’t put caps back on things properly. I set them on the tops of jars, but skip the screwing on step. This works fine for me. I’ve NEVER dropped a jar because of the lid not being screwed in, but my husband and countless roommates over the years have. I also rarely shut cupboard doors. This drives my husband mad.

2. I have really, really long legs compared to my short little torso. Hence, I never have pants that fit quite like I would desire. Sometimes too long, but mostly too short. It doesn’t help that I can’t be bothered with special dryer settings, or with, god forbid, hanging a special pair of pants over the shower rod. So everything goes on one setting, sometimes to my nicer apparel’s chagrin.

3. I can get obsessed with a new favorite food for like, three or four weeks and then can’t touch it. Last winter, I loved orange juice. I had it every morning, and every other time I was thirsty practically for about two weeks—even tossing in pineapple-orange, and mango-orange for variety. And then, one day, I couldn’t even look at the stuff. Can I just mention how INSANE this made my husband, who kept dutifully buying orange juice for another two months before he realized that there were SIX UNOPENED CARTONS OF O.J. already in the fridge.

4. I like things SWEET. I put 4 raw sugars in a grande latte. I eat honeycomb by the spoonful, and drown my pancakes in maple syrup. That said, I don’t really like candy at all, except Swedish fish on occasion, sometimes jelly beans. Chocolate on the other hand, doesn’t really qualify as candy and is in my book, a food of goddesses.

5. When I sit at my desk, or in a chair anywhere really, I like to pull my knees up to my chest. My feet are always resting on the seat of the chair, and as long as the weather permits, they are bare.

I am tagging anyone who wants to play.

Illustration Friday: Escape

Fall is officially here today, on quiet feet like a cat. Flame colored leaves gathering in numbers on the trees; the sun setting earlier over the lake. During the day, intense heat still in the sun, shivers almost, in the shade. Pumpkins in the fields now are round full orange moons; the corn–higher than our heads.

I can’t believe we moved here 4 months ago. A long and lazy summer of watermelon, and farmer’s markets has slipped by. Bean is crawling now and I can run five miles without effort. DH mountain bikes regularly. This has been our escape–to move here. Such gratitude fills me when I contemplate the difference.

Gravity

Things go BANG and BUMP and BOOM when they fall. Over and over again.

Studio Friday: Tryptic

I like Studio Friday because it’s a peak into other artist’s studios. This week’s project was to show “three of a kind.” Oddly, almost everything around my desk comes it twos or fours or singles. And I sat stumped for a long time before I realized my desk, a second-hand goody inherited from a deceased friend of my husband’s parents, has three deep drawers. I replaced the handles when I got it—the old ones were gaudy and ornate. And it suits me fine.

This is my studio: Along one side of the dining room in our small apartment. Red walls. My desk is nestled below a built-in china cabinet with old leaded-glass doors. I keep them open, and use packing tape to affix notes and quotes, to-do lists and receipts to the glass. Into the latch hole I have stuck two drying maple leaves—the first that I picked up this season, fallen to the sidewalk, vermilion and gold.

I use the shelves in the china hutch for books. I stack my books both ways: spines facing up, and horizontally. And in front of them, mugs and jars with brushes, pencils, pens. An orchid my husband gave me on my birthday, no longer flowering, but still with waxy oblong leaves sits on my desk.

Everywhere, heaps of papers, books, magazines, paints. They spread out in circles around me, like the rings in water after a pebble has been thrown in. I am at the epicenter.

Things I keep within reach: my laptop, my camera (A Nikon CoolPix5000, Jillian, since you once asked), a bar chocolate (this yummy raspberry kind by Lake Champlain Chocolates), my favorite volumes of poetry (The Rag And Bone Shop of the Heart, edited by Robert Bly, Inland, by Pamela Alexander, A Tree Within, by Octavio Paz, and The Complete Poems of e.e. cummings) a bouquet of dried roses from my wedding, and my address book (a Metropolitan Museum of Art item, with irises on the cover).

Things I keep in my desk drawers: Lots of stationary boxes—now filled with scraps, pencils, magnetic poetry bits, glue, staples. A small metal wind-up toy. Silver embossing powder. Thumb tacks. Quarters. Packing tape. Bank statements. Vintage postcards, sparkly ribbon, thread. An old wallet. Burt’s Bees raspberry lip balm. Sharpies.

Since starting this, it has begun to rain out. Hard pebbles of rain falling against the open screens. The night air comes in cool. Tomorrow I will paint I think. Tonight I try to paint with words.