{my topography}

At the doorway

So I finished, and I’m happy with the manuscript I put together. I wrote well, I think. My body aches from poor posture, and hour after hour in front of the computer.

Getting these applications finished is a milestone for me. I’m standing at the doorway to something I’ve wanted for such a long time, and finally I’ve given myself the all-out green light to go ahead and be a writer.

It still sounds a little scary to say that, to admit that’s what I’m doing by sending this fat envelope off. Like releasing a flock carrier pigeons, hope takes flight on a hundred wings tonight.

Breathing space

Snowmelt dripping

Tattered clouds

Setting Sun

Snow angel

Evening light

Walking home

Noticing

The morning sun is gorgeous and golden through my window, another day with possible moments of sun makes my heart sing.

I’ve been wanting to write about all the good things in my this past week, but my mind’s been in a vice grip, focusing on these pieces, focusing on the work that I must do.

Today, when I stumbled out of bed, dizzy from the dry heat of our room, and aching from the awkward pillow angles and small kicks to the rib that comes with sharing a bed with Bean, and when I sat down at the computer all I wanted to do was exalt the sun. I’m ready for spring, and though I learned last year that spring here comes in April, not March, longer days are coming now.

Fog fills the valley below the house, and the light is bright and golden.

Yesterday I strapped on a pair of snowshoes, and with Bean on my shoulders, we climbed through drifts to the top of our wooded hill, where the fort we’d made together in summer, had become shelter for small animals, with many sets of tracks converging there. Bean looked at a larger set of tracks and said, “Bunny tracks!”

“Are you sure,” I said laughing at his sweet certainty. “They could be squirrel tracks.”

“No, der bunny tracks. Dat squirrel tracks,” he said pointing earnestly to a smaller set of tracks leading right to the base of a tree.

Where did he possibly learn to make a conjecture like that? He’s grown an entire inch this month. Really. And he’s becoming such a wonder of a little kid. So full of ideas, and so affectionate. Now anything he likes, he showers with kisses: the penguin picture in the magazine? “Hug!” he says, then reaches out to wrap it in his arms, kissing the picture softly.

It’s been a week of happiness, which almost surprised me. February has sucked so much out of us, winter has, responsibility has, stress has, that it felt almost accidental to be in the place we worked so hard to be in. One of real pleasure. Making love in the afternoon and then watching the snow fall outside. Going on a date: fish & chips, a walk in the cold to a coffee shop under the stars, and then cuddled in the movie theater to watch Music & Lyrics (such a feel-good movie!) Hanging out with our kid, clearing paths around the house with the snow blower through three feet of snow.

But mostly, what’s marked the difference this week is we’ve given each other a little wider berth, more space to say things and not be immediately misinterpreted. More time to notice all the sweetness that still gets packed in: making pancakes, racing cars across the wide expanse of floor, DH’s new guitar which makes him grin every single time its mentioned, or sledding down the driveway. Little moments that I almost stopped noticing until there was time to breathe, to be more present and less hurt. Life is good.

One down, two to go

This is what my desk looks like right now.

I’m submitting a series of three essays. One is finished, and damn good, I think. Two to go, with a bunch of raw material to work from. Harder topics though.

I’ve been sitting nearly all day, playing chicken with words. When I couldn’t stand any more hunching at the computer with the cat on my shoulders (that’s where he’s taken to lounging. I’ll get a pic one of these days) I put on a jacket and went out into the freezing cold. The wind chill was brutal, but the sky was blue and it felt good to be out with my camera, feeling my lungs work and my boots crunch over frozen snow.

Now back to the second essay with some dark orange infused chocolate and perhaps some chai.

A week of mornings..

Monday:
I’m stumbling to break into a new routine of writing in the morning before my thoughts are shattered with day. Now I wake up with dreams still trailing through my mind like the tails of wild horses, and there is nothing I can hold onto for sure. But it is a quieter time, now, with the restless cat circling my knees, as the before-dawn light spreads out above the blue of land and fog like a pale smudge of jam. I’m ready to at least sit and follow the words across the page.

*

Tuesday:
It’s early and I’ve wrapped my wet hair in a fleece blanket to stay warm. The house creaks as the heat comes on. Outside the mercury hovers near zero. Already daylight is smudging the clouds with pale gray and rose. I do not want to be awake today, tiredness clings to me, making my vision blurry.

*

Wednesday:
This morning the white-bread toast is gummy and the tea too sweat. I brought a handful of pecan halves upstairs, but I’m not interested now, in the dark before dawn when the temperature dips and the house is still.

*
Thursday:
The morning is frail and dark. My body aches from a lack of sleep, and my dreams tumbled around my mind like rocks in the dryer. Now day, and I’m anxious. No clean laundry, not enough time to accomplish the things I need to get done.
*

Friday:
Morning, just six hours after crawling under the heap of down comforters and closing heavy lids. Morning and the sky is so beautiful, I wish I could capture it just once the way it really appears, for those fleeting moments of dawn before day. Moments when everything still rests, and branches are quiet angled lines against the delicate expanse of sky.

This morning toast with raspberry jam, and hardly anything to write or say, except to keep the momentum of early morning waking. So I sip coffee from a tall mug and hear my baby’s voice rise up, waking his daddy, and greeting day, and though I’m tired, I’m grateful.

officially freaking out

I’ve mentioned before how scheduling isn’t particularly a strength, and though I do own a calendar, I don’t seem to know how to use it. I’ve been going through this week happily thinking I had the ENTIRE WEEK of winter vacation (next week) off to work on my grad school application (20 page manuscript, shudder, cough) but um, it’s due on MARCH 1st which is actually in the middle of next week. Crap. Um. So.

I need you all to cross your fingers for me and tell me nice things and forgive my absence a possibly give me critical feedback if I get up the guts to post any of the work I’m submitting (some of the original ideas came from here actually.)

Can you do that? Because right now I feel like I totally suck and I have to teach two more days and I feel like I’m coming down with the stomach flu and by tonight I’m supposed to do wildly impossible things like email one of my profs from college a ’statement of purpose’ so that he can write a recommendation that’s up to date. Yipes. The stomach ache doesn’t help things. And seriously, why the fuck wasn’t I able to actually LOOK AT THE CALENDAR, before assuming I had 10 days to get this done, when really I have, oh, FOUR. Oh, and I have to be observed teaching tomorrow and I haven’t written up the plans for that (part of our yearly eval process.) Crap. crap. crap.

A reader’s life…

Before reading I listened. I was the eleven-year-old with scratches on her knees, perched on the armrest of my dad’s tan Lazy Boy, listening to Huckleberry Finn and The Yearling. I was a late reader; a kid in the ‘special’ reading group. But those early years when reading wasn’t really mine, gave me stories in a different way, and for this I am grateful. Listening to a book is different than reading one. There is nuance and rhythm to a text read aloud. I think every author secretly wishes his or her book will be read this way: aloud, into the quiet of a room with crickets calling through the open screen, each word received by eager ears. I was such a captive audience then, unable to skip ahead when I was bored or didn’t understand. I learned to stay with texts. I learned to love words, and book after book, my appetite for words grew. Eventually, when I did learn to read, I remember feeling a little bit in awe that I could just pick up a book, open it, and the entire story could be mine.

Now I watch the first graders I teach start the year barely able to identify all the letters in the alphabet, leave in June sixty-pages deep in an adventure story, and I’m still a little bit in awe. I teach kids how to break words apart and reassemble them so that sentences become whole. I teach them how to keep a story map in the back pocket of their imagination, how to watch each character for signs of change, and how to delve deeply into the world of images they know to construct a new world specific to the book, but I do not really teach them how to read. The stories teach them, just as they taught me: how to read, and also how to write so that the words I type take on the shape of what matters in my life.

The first book that had this affect on me was Isabelle Illende’s memoir, Paula. I was eighteen when I read it, and living in Germany for a year before college. By then I had read and loved many books, but never had even remotely imagined writing them. Paula was my first encounter with creative nonfiction and reading it changed my understanding of what was possible, or even allowable in writing. It was the first time I had considered that my life—right there on the train with tears streaming down my cheeks as I finished the book, surrounded by tall men in shearling hats speaking a dialect of German thick with consonants—was story. A year later, I enrolled in my first creative writing class.

Many of the authors I discovered throughout college who still matter to me, are writers who are present with their sleeves rolled up, in the middle of their stories. Tracy Kidder, John McPhee, Annie Dillard, Terri Tempest Willaims, Susan Orlean, Barbara Kingsolver and Joan Diddion, are several authors whose work I have read, and re-read, marking the pages and underlining text, in the process of cultivating my own voice as a writer. Each brings a distinct perspective to their writing of life as it is happening to them in the moment. In Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Diddion took risks that made the hair on my neck stand up. She dared me over and over again to be more honest in my writing, and I copied sections of that book line by line, to better understand how such writing was constructed. Doing this made each comma, each period, each word, newly significant. Reading like this, through writing, allowed me to feel the meter and meaning of her prose in my hands, in my wrists, in my heartbeat.

Because listening came first, a part of me is always listening when I read. What draws me to a text might be its topic or title, but what keeps me is its tenor; the way vowels play together among words, the way meaning is made from each small parcel of lines gathered together with just the right punctuation. As a result, though I have been an avid reader of memoir and essays, nature writing, travel stories, and ethnographies, since college, my nightstand is always an eclectic a jumble of novels and poetry.

Sometimes when I walk in the woods behind my house, I realize after it is already too late that I have walked through a spider’s web spanning the seven or eight feet of path; tiny gossamer threads invisible to me until I feel them. Long after I’ve continued on, I’m still brushing away the sticky threads that linger, clinging to my cheek or hair. Reading is like this for me. A line, a character, a scene, small fragments of the prose I’ve read remain in my mind long after I’ve put the book aside. Annie Dilliard’s essay “Total Eclipse” is like this. Though the first time I read it was nearly ten years ago, I still get caught in its imagery: I cannot imagine an eclipse without imagining hers. Countless other texts have had this affect as well. Certainly Flannery O’ Conner, William Faulkner, Sue Monk Kid, Robert Bly, Mary Oliver, and William Stafford are a few writers whose names can be found along the spines of many volumes on my bookshelves; the words and characters they have created dance up before my memory like sunspots, keeping me company, giving solace, or taking me for a wild ride.

I always have at least two books with me, (right now it’s Gilead and The Year of Magical Thinking; before that, What We Ache For and The Memory Keeper’s Daughter) so that I’m ready for when a few moments land back to back, as my toddler sleeps in the car, or while waiting at the dentist’s office. Also because I’m a mother, and a teacher, and my time is flecked with interruptions, I read copiously Online. Being able to peruse Anne Lamott’s essays at Salon.com, or David Sedaris’s most recent humor at The New Yorker Online, makes me giddy. Like the orange sections offered to runners at each marathon mile mark, the essays and reviews, political commentary and prose I read Online, are moments of sheer sweetness wedged between the must-do things of daily life: email and lesson plans for the week.

Now when I try to remember what the actual process of learning to read was like I cannot put my finger on anything specific. No ah-ha moment, no instance when words clicked into place, and suddenly became story. All I can remember is that before, the words of Frog And Toad flipped about on the page like fishes, and my parents were the keepers of the wonderment contained within each book. After, the stories were mine to devour whole, and hungrily, I did. Reading is still like this for me, vital and sustaining. It has become something almost reflexive, like breathing.

Sun high on the meridian, humidity making my hair curl and the cat nap, a sprawling stripe of fur on the windowsill. Reason enough to head down to the local hardware store for a blue plastic kiddy pool. Cold water splashing on our sun-hot skin. A perfect afternoon.

2 Years Old

Happy Birthday Little One,

You are two today, bright eyed and full of laughter. When you woke up this morning, you called for Daddy, and he brought you to bed between us, where you snoozed dreamily for another hour, content in a cocoon of love and warm breath between us. When you woke for the second time, we sang happy birthday to you, and you grinned your sunny grin, your bottom incisors just cutting through your gums, and said, “Make birthday cake?”

Birthday cake is what turning two is all about for you. Especially when it’s made with chocolate frosting. You call it “Chocit iting,” and tonight the three of us made your cake together: your great grandmother’s pound cake recipe with chocolate cream cheese frosting and fresh strawberries. You licked the batter off the whisk, and the icing from your fingers, and when it came time to blow out your candles—two, and one to grow on, you took the job quite seriously. Your eyes were so large, in the semi dark. Your breath so full with two year old wonder.

You have become such an incredible person this year, full of inquisitiveness and delight. You want to understand how everything works, you can use a real screwdriver correctly, and reprogram every possible item in our house with buttons (the thermostat, by climbing up onto the back of the chair; my laptop; daddy’s computer; the answering machine…) You are a nature lover, a collector of small quartz rocks and tiny acorns. You are tender, and you hate see me sad. You reach out for us now, saying “Hug!” when you want to be wrapped tightly in our arms, and you gather up your stuffed animals and cars and trucks and even picture books, to give them hugs as well.

It would be okay to have you stay this way for another year: so sweet and rosy and full of wonder, despite your temper tantrums which mostly leave Daddy and I hysterically laughing. You delight at the world. “So pretty,” you say, noticing the moon, the setting sun, the rising stars, with your arms outstretched, and eyes wide. We love you so much, your daddy and I, despite the fact that having you has stretched the fabric of our love for each other in a hundred new directions. You make us laugh a zillion times a day, and make us stop and ponder too, how great a gift our life is.

Love,
Mommy

Birthday photoset here.

Snowday # 2