{my topography}

Doing

Doing so many things, there are hardly enough moments to pause with cup of tea and post and read my favorite blogs. To sum things up for the past few days:

* Painted my studio blue this weekend, and rearranged furniture. Today Bean stepped in the drying paint tray and then onto the hardwood floor. “Uh oh, mama! Uh oh!” He wailed. I promptly scooped him up and tried to pass him to DH over the top of my work table. He planted his panted on feet squarely on DH’s jeans. Naturally, following the utter rediculousness of this particular train of events, DH tossed his jeans into the sink (as per my instruction–hot wanter will remove latex paint, if treated immediately) without removing his cell phone from the pocket. I’m sad to report it didn’t make it, but because we know we’re prone to bizarre accidents like this one, we have cell phone insurance, so it’s all good.

* Threw some new pots at the studio tonight and finally figured out why my back has been hurting for weeks: hunching over the potter’s wheel.

* Signed up for a writing workshop right after school lets out with one of my most favorite authors. Whoo hoo! (I’m not telling whom just yet as I’m still feeling a queasy mix of utter excitment and terror at the prospect of workshopping with someone I so admire.)

* Got back into the groove of things at school today. Suddenly the kids all look tall to me. Like second graders. They get jokes now, and can work independently. It feels good to be here, at this point in the year. To see the product of all my hard work in the faces of my eager kids. We wrote an acrostic poem today that I simply must bring home and post because it is brilliant.

* Mopped the floors for the first time (almost, well, no not almost…really, for the first time) since we moved–over vacation, and did aproximately nine million loads of laundry. DH folded the entire mountain today while I was at work–and put up all the dining room window trim that’s been missing.

Whew. I’m sure I’ve missed a zillion other things but my brain is zinging from a lack of sleep. I miss blogging though. Miss hearing from all of you. What have you been up to, since spring has come?

When being Mommy will no longer be enough to keep him safe

He sat up tonight in bed, after I’d tucked him in and he was breathing steadily and I’d gone next door to my studio, and yelled, “Mommy, mommy, come in here!”

And when I did, he said, “An alligator is trying to come in here.”

His eyes were wide in the dark.

Now comes the hard part, doesn’t it? Now begin those moments of helplessness that unravel in every direction: nothing I can do to stop the ugly parts of the world from rising up to meet him. Nothing to stop the fear he’ll know, or the anger, the assaults, the guilt, the loneliness, the anxiety that invariably tattoos the skin of our existence as human beings.

Until now, he’s been so small and so close to me, the world could barely wedge itself between us. I was his world. There were no alligators. But now, suddenly he’s twenty six months old and listening to everything that’s said around him, taking it in, digesting it, and the shield I make around him with my fierce she-wolf love, is permeable. His dreams are colored now with language. Words paint the landscape of every waking moment. Everywhere, he follows me about, almost breathless, with a question, an observation, some piece of whimsy. He copies everything. He says everything.

I kissed him a hundred times, pressing my face against his warm cheek. Then sang the tumbling notes of a lullaby I made up recently, to which he seems to know all the words, and requests nightly. But after I’d left the room, left the hallway, left the house with an armload of books to trade for store credit at Barnes & Noble, he woke up. As if he knew I’d left.

He pattered from his big-boy-bed to the doorway of my studio, where yellow lamp light exchanged space with the darkness pressing close, and called for Mommy.

After DH called me, saying he’d been waking up every ten minutes, troubled, calling out for me (which he has never, ever done before), I drove home anxiously. Skimming through blinking yellow lights, listening to haunting jazz tunes from faraway places. Saxophone, played well, always breaks my heart.

I came upstairs as soon as I got home, and found the two of them lying in the dark of our bedroom. DH was awake. Bean was asleep, spread horizontally across my pillows. I bent near his cheek and whispered, “I’m here now, baby. I’ll watch over you. You’re safe.”

But how long will I even be able to say those words?

Intention

Time to return to the things that matter. To wake up bumble-headed and still trialing the wild ponies of dreams, pour tea, and write. To show up, because this is what I want to do with my life. Even when showing up means having a staring contest with the page, while the birds sing jubulently outside; and dawn spreads across the gravel and the new buds and the eaves. I’m determined, because I have to be, because this is what I’ve chosen. Some days I come away with nothing. Other days, a few sentences, like a pocket full of sea glass shards. Or poems, that tumble from nowhere before I’m even awake.

Two versions of Worship:

I kneel down at the arbor of another day
kissing the small pebbles of wonder that press into my knees,
the palms of my hands, the soles of my feet
I gather the petals that have drifted earthwards
from the quivering globes of roses,
and press them to my heart

April 24

**

my heart is like a music box; many
pronged tin cylinder, twirling
making steady, frail music rise
joining the windstorm of my soul
where the notes are torn and the song
becomes wild and tumultuous
and I feel very small.

April 25

“Look where I pooped,” he said.

So, apparently, while I was away on my glorious weekend adventure, Bean and DH had a great deal of fun wielding hammers, hauling measuring tapes, and in general, doing boy things. DH reports that at one point he was doing something in another room and he heard the back screen door open and shortly there after Bean yelled, “Daddy I pooped on da step!” As proud as could be.

And indeed. He had.

About a week ago, when the weather had just turned from miserable to tolerable, Bean and I were outside cavorting about in the meadow. Since we’ve been potty training, and since he had not gone in over an hour, I decided it was time to show him one of the most fabulous things about being a BOY. That he’s entirely equipped to drop trou and pee anywhere he so should choose. Without the mess of squatting, and quite possibly peeing on one’s shoes, which, being a girl who has climbed my share of mountains, and hiked my share of back woods trails, and taken endless road trips where there are no bathrooms between point X and point Y and the distance between the two is at least two hundred miles, I know all about.

The sheer glee of that yellow arc.

He was hooked.

He started making a getaway to the back door whenever the urge to pee struck. “Mama, I peed on the step!” he’d yell, until I explained that I’d prefer if he’d pee, NOT ON THE STEP, and that any old bush or grass patch is far more acceptable.

But the poop thing. Totally unprecedented. And miracle of miracles: he didn’t step in it.

Are all little boys this enamored with this going outdoors business?

Such goodness

The windows are still open at ten thirty, and the air is warm and soft. Finally the spring peepers have arrived, and on our way back from clay class tonight, DH brought the car to a slow crawl as we drove past the boggy swamp at the edge of our road, where their treble chorus was rising up—spelling out all verbs and adjectives of amphibian delight.

I have vacation this week, and despite the fact that I have either the world’s most persistent head cold, or allergies, or both, my good mood cannot be dampened. First off, I just got back yesterday from seeing Blue Poppy and Lizardek for the weekend, which simply put was AMAZING. It felt nothing like driving off into the backwoods on narrow twisty roads to meet perfect strangers, though DH kinda thought that was exactly what I was doing. “Are you SURE you want to go hang out with people you met through BLOGGING?” He muttered before I left.

Going to meet these two incredible women for the first time in person, felt like going to see people I’d known forever. We slipped effortlessly into conversation over tea and wine and toasty sandwiches. We hiked tall mountains to take in the wind breathtaking expanse of mountains and lakes, and we lolled with BP’s butterscotch hounds in the sunlight.

They are brilliant, funny, exquisite, generous women. I totally heart both of them. I’ll stop now, since I’m sure you get the idea.

Driving home, I opened the sunroof and sang at the top of my lungs with the radio, singing in my own way, a million arpeggios of gratitude, and came home to an immaculately cleaned house, and my two favorite guys. Both were sporting wind-tousled hair and smudges on their pants. Doors were hung in my absence, puddles were stomped in. The perfect start to a week off.

Giddy

Soaking up sun. We walk, his little hand in my big one. A constant narrative tumbling off his tongue like the little stream we stop to wade through in the field. No clouds, all day. And I can’t keep from smiling because I’m off to see Lizardek and Blue Poppy. Certain delight.

Soaking up sunshine

It felt like spring today, for the first time. The mercury climbed to the upper fifties, and the sky, this afternoon, looked like heaven’s housewife had hung all her downy comforters out to be tossed by a mischievous wind. The sun shone down with real heat.

I came home from work, threw on my black rubber boots, grabbed a yogurt and fled into the sunshine with Bean at my heels. DH followed suit soon after, carrying his signature pint glass of iced espresso, his muscles rippling divinely under the blue cotton of his t-shirt. Barely t-shirt weather, but I’m all for it.

We rambled haphazardly, following our marmalade streak of a cat, Bandit, down into the lower meadow where the apple trees grow, and where, in summer, the grass is waist high. Now it’s trampled and brown, and the apple trees have the tiniest of budlets just beginning to push from the ashy maroon bark. I ran back to get the pruning shears and with a sudden zest, we initiated the immense task of taming the mess of wild grape vines growing like kudzu between knobby, overgrown and half-dead branches of our many apple trees.

It was pure delight to be there with my two guys, cutting back dead wood, with apple sap on my fingers, while Bean chased the cat in widening orbits around us. DH pulled out the chain saw, and we made an afternoon of clearing fallen branches and logs from the edge of the woods—piling them in a bonfire heap. Then we lay down in the grass and watched the sky spin. Like looking up into the deep blue curvature of an enamel bowl, flecked with milk.

The robins are back, and their warbling became a forte trilling as the sun neared the edge of the woods. Bean couldn’t get enough of playing outdoors. All he wanted to do was run, twirl, climb, muck about, and I can’t blame him. The slow start to spring has had me antsy. I can barley imagine foliage. It feels like snowflakes have been permanently imprinted on my inner eye.

When it was dinner time we sat at the table bathed in sunlight, with the windows open, and ate an artichoke together, Bean on my lap. Our fingers were a mess of lemon-butter for dipping the tender parts. Bean shares my affection for this oddly sweet flower, and together we nibbled the heart right to the pithy thistle down, and then reluctantly sat back, licking our fingers.

A good day.

Also, I couldn’t resist snagging this little personality exercise from Le Petit Hiboux. I’m curious. What’s your take?

Life is happening right now

He told me he loved me, for the first time, yesterday. Driving home on our washboard bumpy dirt road, spread thick with mud like peanut butter on an open faced sandwich, he said, “I yuv you mommy.”

I said, “What?” Not really listening, caught up in the replay of a Teri Gross interview with the late Kurt Vonnegut on NPR.

“I yuv you,” he said with a rosy, jelly-smudged grin.

It felt, then, like summer sunlight. Like lightening bugs flitting about the lawn on a late August evening; like standing at the top of a very tall mountain, above the clouds and suddenly breathless; like finding ten perfect unbroken sand dollars in a row at the beach;

“I love you too,” I said. “So much.”

In my chest, I suddenly felt the fluttering of a thousand mariposas.

It’s bizarre sometimes, how things you were sure you were set on, when they don’t come to fruition, make room for other things to come into focus, unfurl, blossom. Every so often I feel like I get the chance to pan out and see the full three-ring-circus that is my life. The rest of the time, I’m there in the midst of it, too close to the action for perspective, twirling with the raspberry stain of my love smudged across my sleeve, and a thousand fragile things gathered up in my arms: my child, my work, my many foibles and distractions.

Finding the small envelope in my mailbox gave me this unexpected opportunity for perspective. It made me step back and really admit for the first time, how utterly overwhelming the past year of my life has been. I’m a chin-up kind of girl, and I’ve been trying to tell myself a hundred happy-ending stories, but painted over the stress of raising a toddler and renovating our own home, has been the pale hue of trauma after the shooting that took place at the school where I work in the beginning of the year. Terror pressed into the supple limbic portion of my brain that cannot speak and only feels, with sudden abrupt urgency, and altered the certain fundamental aspects of the way I live and trust and respond in the world.

I’ve been navigating my way out of that maze of reactions the entire year, and somewhere in the process, when I applied to grad schools, I entirely forgot about the school I’d researched last year that really belonged at the top of my list. Forgot, entirely.I was so shocked to realize this, it made me no longer sad about the small envelope bearing the word regret. Instead I finally gave myself permission to slow down a bit. Permission to have the summer here, with my family and a box of mail-order chicks, and watermelon seed spitting contests and writing workshops, and to take out West to run a half marathon with my sister.

Permission to not compete with the peers in my life who are at different places in their lives, because in the end, our lives are tangled up with entirely different sets of stars. Can’t you picture that? All of us, like marionettes with fragile golden strings stretching up into the dark indigo bowl of heaven. Have you ever looked up and tried to count all those stars?

Like dislocated limb, I’ve been dangling on the peripheries of my life all year. I’ve spent many months trying to find that groove where the cartilage of necessity and the bone of loving and dreaming meet. It has been painful. My senses of safety and inner equilibrium have been precariously balanced amidst a heap of responsibility and guilt and worry. My days are scribbled with the irrational ink of worry. I’ve burst into sudden shocked tears when a glass breaks. I’ve had entire fights, painful and raw and startling, that midway through, I can no longer recall the initial provocation.

Somehow, receiving that letter didn’t shake my belief in my writing at all—the way I imagined it would, before it came. Now, from this vantage point I don’t think my writing was the reason I was rejected at all. I think instead it was because my readiness to be there wasn’t self-evident in my application, or in my hurried recommendations from professors I hadn’t worked with in years.

I don’t know if I would have been ready, honestly. It would be a little like jumping off a bus moving at full speed, and because I’m that chin-up kid with a big ego, I’m sure I’d make it work somehow, despite the inevitable scraped knees and broken arm. But this way I’ll have some time to really find my footing, rather than plunging blindly into a new stream with flooding banks, which graduate work in writing invariably is.

So I’m looking forward to summer now, more than I was. (Also because eight inches of sleety frozen crap is in the forecast for tomorrow night. Somewhere, some very drunk weather gods are having a hell of a good time at our expense.) Some part of me feels like hugging this other part of me that has reached out and offered permission to just be here right now; at the beginning, instead of rushing pell-mell ahead. I know how that sounds, but I can’t think of any other way of describing how my drive to accomplish things can a perilous and ruthless taskmaster, who crowds my days with post-it notes and plans, and forgets life is happening right now, and how relieved I am to have to slow down.

Life is happening right now.

He said “I yuv you mommy,” and he was beaming.

That’s enough.

Grin.

Mail.

The small envelope arrived. With it a thousand other possibilities, and certain (if not temporary) heartache.