{my topography}

From here

Standing at the kitchen sink this morning rinsing a glass, I was thinking about blogging. About this blog, about how I started it for one reason, and have continued it for another entirely.

The sunlight in the morning has made all the difference lately, and this morning you could see new grass on the lawn, bright green, almost transparent in the light. I made a double shot of espresso for an iced latte to-go, and thought about how my life is different now than one year ago, or two. This blog has become a record for me, of small things. I go back and look at what the weather was like two seasons ago. My mind, full with the present, is fickle in the light of the past.

When I started to write, I was a new mama and every single aspect of parenting felt like fraud to me. It took me more than a year to wrap my head around the idea of being someone’s mother. My heart on the other hand, only required a nanosecond of adjustment: when he was first there in my arms, warm and wet and wide-eyed, he was instantly mine.

Still, I started this blog because I felt some urgency to document the affect becoming a mother had on my life, as though it had been tucked precariously into the nook of a slingshot and then launched, suddenly, all of a stumbled moment. For the first year I diligently wrote letters to my small boy, a baby yet, whose miraculous feats of sitting up, crawling, and walking became also benchmarks for my own life.

Then gradually I stopped feeling that raw ‘new mama’ status. I went from being a ‘first time mom’ to just a mother. My baby was suddenly a kid who could talk and was potty trained and climbed trees. I stopped recording the little things. Each day, exponentially, the things he says astounds me: so much so that at the end I can hardly remember all the delight of talking to him about the way he sees his world. He has become someone that I want to know; someone I love to lie with in the newly growing grass on the back lawn drinking fizzy grapefruit soda and eating blue corn chips.

Now when I write it’s hardly ever about Bean, not really intentionally, but just because my focus has shifted: towards writing and work and the multifaceted inner topography of emotion I’ve been exploring this year.

But oh, he’s a love. He’s SO BIG now, you would hardly believe it. So articulate and observing and funny. It’s like his personality can no longer be contained on the page: I sit down to try to capture a few phrases that he’s said to me, and my mind is instantly crowded like a sky full fluttering parrots. One thing I do know: he still sucks at sleeping through the night.

Really annoying strange stuff is happening in blogland

I don’t get it. My blog has disappeared several times ENTIRELY in the past twenty-four hours. WTF?

Where the edges became frayed

I’ve been shy here, lately. Perhaps dodging myself a bit. Not really sure how to pick up where I’ve left off—I’ve been so sporadic with posting lately—yet I really am missing the regularity of sharing moments and comments. I’ve been fragile this winter.

For the first time since November I felt like I could breathe in again this past week without anxiety fraying the weft of my heart. Miraculously (maybe) or intentionally (with great effort) I’ve stopped feeling like if the world will clatter to a halt around me: a mess of splintered parts if I stop doing everything I do for a split second.

Depression, however fleeting, put me right up against the edges of things: the tattered cuff, the broken branch, mud-spattered snowmelt at the edge of the road. It stained my heart ashy, the color a clouded sky turns after dark.

Not something I was used to, wide awake at night, each day starting out with tight breath and tears close.

I think it had something to do with the fierce longing that I have so often voiced, that eats away at me like a smoldering fire if I’m not careful. A longing to be both here and somewhere else: making a homestead, doing the exact opposite of that (whatever that may be.)

It also had to do with the fact that I was feeling imbalanced at work: I was giving too much, yet not willing to give it. Lately I’ve been feeling less depleted there: allowing myself to focus thinking critically about learning, and children; somehow honing this as a craft.

Perhaps this was what was hardest for me: reconciling the fact that I am still a teacher even as I long with my whole being to be able to write full time. I let myself start hating my work simply because it was the thing that was stopping me from doing the work I was yearning to do. It almost felt like a betrayal to dedicate myself to my work at school, not that that rationally makes any sense.

I realize now that really I was making myself bitterly unhappy because everything in my life was skewed. I resented my work, and myself for doing the work, and this resentment had a corrosive quality like salt and lemon juice. Everything felt scoured and sour. I felt inadequate as a writer, without enough hours in a day, and that inadequacy burned a hole in the very center of my creativity.

Recently, gradually, I’ve been letting myself sink back into the small fragments of my life, not yet whole the way I wish it could be, but certainly a mosaic as it is. I started doing some running again, down our mud slicked road with grooves down the center six inches deep. I started painting. And I got word that I’ll be teaching second graders next year which excites me. I like teaching older kids. I love watching them become thinkers, with writer’s notebooks and organized work spaces, and I like them more than I like the younger ones who need so much reminding about things like nose blowing.

In the end I keep saying it was the winter, and I keep feeling like since the arrival of the first mellow (if not warm) days, my mood has evened out and I’ve become more peaceful. But I cannot say for sure. What is it really that ever makes us sad? I don’t think it can ever be defined entirely by the narrow perimeter of the weather, or for that matter a job or another human being. Somehow, achingly, each arrow of sadness is drawn from the sheaf of our own unquiet soul.

In the spaces between

The roads have turned to mud now: layers of ice-hard earth thawing to slush, sticky and trampled. The yellow evening light is speckled with the flutterng wings of bugs, newly hatched, air eddying around their tiny exoskeletons.

We go for a run, just the two of us, conversation filling in the spaces between hard breathing uphill. A chainsaw whines and the scent of fresh cut wood makes my nostrils flare. Our feet sink a little with each step; muscles suddenly thrumming with heat and momentum. The air is soft, and while the snow still lingers at the edges of the fields, the brown grass lies exposed to the sun most places.

“Every step I take my feet sink,” DH says. The setting sun is at our backs. The sky is like the water I dip my brushes into: a bowl of pale ultramarine and pale saffron spilled at the horizon.

We’re holding hands. It’s the end of our run, and we’re walking back along the muddiest part of the road. In our heads both of us sing, every step you take…

Neither of us sings it aloud, but I know we’re both tuned in to this same static. “Did you just sing that song?” I ask, to be sure.

He nods, laughs. Even more than me, he’s the one doing this: filling in the spaces between thoughts with the flack of a thousand sitcoms, commercials, songs, clichés.

We do this all the time. Pop culture interference broadcasting stuff into the spaces between our thoughts. A word triggering the memory of another. Phrases tumbling unbidden into the twilight in spite of us. Turbulence in the spaces between. It’s a lovely day.

In my palm I feel the heat of him there next to me; so much between us unsaid.

What were like, before it was like this? Before thoughts were so commonly shared: before mass media and marketing, email, texting, technology instantaneously and exponentially making each thought at once more available and more clichés. In the spaces between, there was once an arc of silence. A breath beat without stimulus.

Now our minds hum constantly with unbidden music. Random access memory. Filler.

Without it, what would we be like?

Hieroglyphs of a turbulent heart

Every guy I have ever dated has been the same in one way: they have all been inclined to read my journals. Fools, all of them, for flipping through the blurry pages of my inconsistent heart.

One day I’m only able to see the sun. Everything is bright: my future, the mangos split into perfect segments on the table, the way my son laughs, the way words fall readily into place. Other days my heart plays wild gypsy music. I howl at the moon, lust after long gone loves, linger in the blue light of my laptop screen parsing stilted fragments and run-ons into barely sentences.

In college I remember a boyfriend flipping through the pages of a journal that I’d left tucked into a bag in his room. His jealously about the way I’d described my ex was palpable, his eyes were sparks, he couldn’t take the fact that I would write about anyone other than him with shards of longing, or affection, or anything other than contempt. He was actor. The kind of man who would turn anything into a passionate fight followed by passionate reconciliatory love making.

The fight about the journal was the most bitter. I wouldn’t back down, or say it wasn’t true, or do anything to soothe his wounded ego. And all I could say was, idiot. Why’d you read? My heart is ambiguous, turbulent, and true. Every day the world is a different hue.

This is the way I write here. Each post is a splattered blueprint of my everyday heart on the page, and you’ll get a wildly irregular and possibly skewed perspective. I want to sink into the moment, that’s why I write. I want to remember the way today a warm wind woke us up in the morning, and how it rained all day—leaving the rivers choked with snowmelt, slipping over their banks into the brown meadows of trampled grass. I want to remember the way I feel when we fight, or when I am abundant with joy, or when I am occupying the fragile thin edge of loneliness and longing that circles my life, that makes me hungry.

Today I am trying to get myself motivated to go for a run. Exercise is one of the keys, often missing, that makes my life feel whole. Yesterday I lay in the sun outdoors for hours, under the trees on the newly drying grass, just inches away from melting snow. My skin was singing with sun. I felt a smile blooming somewhere deep inside my solar plexus. Everyday is different.

Nearly

The beginning of spring looks like circles in the road, and ours is a mess of them. I’ve always wondered about this: how potholes form, always round like bowls, instead of square or jagged. The car groans going over the bumps. The tires gather mud, and getting in and out every day my jeans are graffitied across the calves with the tell-tale marks of rural living: mud.

I walk out to the upper meadow. The snow is hard beneath my boots, and I barely break through the surface crust of ice crystals. Below I imagine nematodes and newts and other small crawly things hibernating in quiet coils waiting for the sun to make their blood stir.

I always feel like I blink, and spring has blossomed. It’s the shortest of season’s here; with everything bursting into bloom urgently, the growing season so short, autumn already nipping at summer’s heels by mid September. So I walk out to the edge of the woods along the meadow where the limbs have falling during the recent ice storms and the ground is a patchwork of melted places and white, and I sit and listen for spring.

Even before the snow melts, or any blade of green pokes up anywhere, the birds come back, and hearing them I feel like helium is being pumped into my lungs. Like my feet might just lift off the ground with the promise of someday wild strawberries and late warm evenings and supple grass.

Sometimes in the car I tune the radio to a station from Montreal, just to hear the lilt of French and listening to the birds feels like this to my untrained ear. Ornithology would give me the proper nouns and verbs for all the twittering: the ruckus chatter of a flock of dark winged birds sitting high in the branches of a tree at the opposite edge of the meadow; the repeated trilling of others. I know enough to know these birds aren’t here in winter. Not chickadees or the red sparks of cardinals that dart through the snow to the bird feeder, but birds with songs that come from the south, where the sun has already warmed the ground and the daffodils are up.

It’s a long month, March. It tries my patience, and I feel myself picking fights simply because I’m restless. In bed I can’t sleep and I can’t shake the off-kilter feeling of whatever we’ve left unsaid. I sigh in the darkness, “I’m sad,” I murmur.

He’s asleep, barely, almost, and is annoyed. He was annoyed before bed too—at the cat for dogging him around the house, meowing, wanting something, catnip maybe or fresh water… spring.

“Shut the hell up,” he growled, turning on her abruptly. Her tail twitched like rope. She backed up to a safe distance. I backed up too, still as permeable as I’ve always been. I can’t seem to stop him from soaking into my pores. Even when it’s not a big deal like tonight, when he wasn’t even talking to me, just somewhere near me, blowing off steam.

In bed I’m still percolating and I can feel him sigh, the covers shifting slightly. “What?” he says. “What’s wrong?”

But what I want aren’t words now, this late. Really, I’m not sure what I want, more than spring, more than warmth, more than maybe his arms around me unbidden, reassuring.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

The room is dark. So dark I cannot see the opposite wall. The wooden shades are turned so the moonlight is blocked, and under the flannel I feel my heart beating. My mouth is hot. “No.”

I really want to be tucked up against him and I know I’m the one who started this. I’m like those damn dime store carnations that soak up dye, turning unnaturally bright blue or fuchsia at the slightest suggestion. I can’t shake the feeling something’s off. It could be anything. A hundred things. Likely nothing. I do this, waiting for spring; waiting to be able to inhale air that doesn’t cling in my lungs, thermal and dry.

“I felt like you were mad at me before we came to bed. We didn’t spend any time together today. I feel like we never got a chance to talk, and now you just turned away from me, pulled the covers and went to sleep.”

In the hall the cat moves towards our room on silent paws, her purring announcing her approach. She chirps, an eccentric little meow of greeting, then circles the bed, purring, wide eyed in the dark, tail jerking back and forth.

I lunge for her just as she’s slinking under my side of the bed. My fingers graze her fur. She’s doing this on purpose. The cat should have been named Loki. I bite my lip. I want her out, to fix whatever angst is zinging back and forth between us like static, making the hairs on my arms stand up.

It takes both of us hurling things under the bed for her to give up her antagonizing perch just out of reach and make a run for the door.

He’s impatient with me and it’s past midnight. I follow the cat out the door and slip into my small boy’s double bed, but cannot sleep. Before I left he said, “Why do you always have to drag things out?” Like I am doing it all on purpose, this restlessness, this sabotage of sleep and tenderness.

I had no answer and so I went, but craved his arms even while smelling the sleep-sweet scent of my three year old, arms flung wide across the bed.

His room is filled with light when I come in, bare feet crossing the wood floor, avoiding the places that creak. I switch off the starshaped light above him, then lie in the semi dark, the moon flooding his un-curtained windows, and wait for sleep.

But it doesn’t come. Illusive, like the first weeks of spring, sleep hovers at the periphery of my senses. I feel myself slipping towards it, but am yanked back, again and again until I get up once more and trundle back to his warmth. He’s moved to my side, and is asleep, holding the covers where my body would be. I nose my way in, pressing my lips against the heat of his chest, and he wraps his arms around me fiercely until I can feel the outline of every muscle in his back. And as we’re lying this way, the heat between us making the windows fog so that in the morning we’ll find condensation in upturned moons at the bottom of each pane of window glass, we hear the coyotes.

First one, a long low howl that makes my spine prickle and my eyes widen in the dark. Then many. They are running up the ravine along the edge of the lower meadow and the woods. I picture their tracks on the snow, a pack chasing the moon, chasing a buck, hungry like we both are for a riper season.

My cat got sprayed by a skunk.

Help.

She smells awful and is currently spending the night in the garage with a bunch of old towels (sprinkled with catnip to sweeten the deal) until I have the time to figure out what the hell to do with her. How do you wash a cat in tomato juice?? Any and all suggestions welcome.

Lists, naps, and a month of living ‘perfectly’

I wake up from dreaming of the Arizona desert and a professor and his wife I don’t actually know in real life. The phrase “sand frills” sticks in my mind, something I’ve invented in sleep: as in, the canons and mesas give way to sand frills. It almost works to describe the way the sand is funneled and scarred with gullies and rivulets, flash floods scraping rivers into dry mud and red rocks. I wake up with an ear ache, the pain sucking at my right ear like altitude.

I slip away from the others, still sleeping: my small boy with his arms flung side to side like the oars of a rowboat, a contented sleep smile staining his face rosy; and my husband who was feverish last night and who wears and orange t-shirt and twitches inadvertently. It is the last day of vacation and I wake up mid day from napping with the sun slanting through the slits of the wooden blinds, dust motes rising and twirling in the air.

Yesterday I napped too, alone with the cats. Both of them curled nose to tail on the flannel. When I joined them, the apricot one chirped a welcome to me. At night she follows me around the house as I turn off the lights, bank the fire, get ready for sleep. She meows plaintively then, wanting one thing: a pinch of cat nip that makes her whirr like a summer fan and fall to the floor like a dervish in a state of ecstasy.

Today I wake up at 2:37 p.m. dreaming of people I don’t know. For the longest time, or what feels like the longest time, I am convinced that I do actually know the man, who in my dream was a professor, we both were it seems. I try to pull my mind from the shallows of near sleep, where thoughts dart like the shadows of trout, illusive and just below the surface.

Gradually I stir, hoping that if I move, inhabit my body again, feel my fingers and toes, I’ll be able to place him and his wife, dark olive skin, but I’m only more confused and the pain from my ear creeps down my neck. When I put my hand up to my throat I find the glands on that side are swollen. Everything participating in the purposeful choreography of falling ill just as vacation is ending, of course.

When I climb from the bed I move the covers, I move my knees, and my ankles and the soles of my bare feet make contact with the wood floor. I can feel the grooves between the planks. The round circles where penny sized tabs of wood cover screw holes. For a minute I sit there at the edge of the bed with the dust motes circling my tangled hair like a halo and am stricken.

I think of all the screws. Thousands, maybe a million, although I can hardly imagine what a million screws would look like, each one made of dark metal, machined somewhere in a plant in Idaho or Tennessee or Mexico or China. I am astounded considering all the people who contributed to my floor in this way: the workers in protective goggles and gloves sorting and correcting package weights; the fork lift driver; those at the shipping yard and at the hardware store, and also the men who likely knelt a million times or more to place each screw, thankful to have an electric or battery operated screw driver.

The floor is old, and when we bought the house, the finish was almost black with age. It didn’t gleam, and by the windows in my studio, a lot of water damage. Someone left the windows open more than once during a summer rain. Now it gleams, sanded and finished twice over. Our sweat. Our bending knees. My feet make contact with the floor. I pull myself to standing. I pull on jeans. I pull on a white terry sweatshirt that I’ve just put through the wash with a few tablespoons of Chlorox.

In the dryer I added a Mrs. Myers Clean Day geranium scented dryer sheet. The smell made me happy. It spelled clean and not cloying, though not natural either. The house is clean now, at the end of vacation. My life feels in order. I’ve spent the week putting things in order: paints on the shelf in my studio, carmine and cobalt and cerulean. I’ve scheduled things: doctors appointments, dental check ups, hair cuts, meals with friends. I’ve crossed things off my list: updated accounts, passport papers, green peppers and Irish oats and oranges for squeezing. On the bag they say “Take home and give us a squeeze.” Like some sort of huggable small trolls nestled together there in the orange webbed bag.

I’m reading Don DeLillo’s book White Noise, and am fascinated with the way he uses lists to tell the story. Lists spiraling and deepening, a little the way Tim O’Brian did in The Things They Carried. This month, March, is a month of lists. It’s a month I’ve decided to live contentiously, focusing on the small things like replying to emails regularly and packing my lunch for work the night before. I get so outside myself, tilting towards the big picture, towards the hungry heat of my passions, that I forget to be here much, and here has a way of getting crowded and overwhelming as a result.

In O Magazine, someone wrote an article about “A Month of Living Perfectly” and I laughed, because it was my idea, the very thing I said to DH. “What if we spend March living the way we always say we want to live? No waffling.”

He nodded over toast. He wasn’t really listening to me. It was the end of February and the snow had numbed his brain. It keeps falling, by the way, falling nearly nightly. Making the woods white and glittering and the driveway slick when it melts and then turns to ice in the dark. But now March is here, and I’m going ahead with my proposition, ready, set, go.

If you were to live “perfectly” for a month, what are the top five things you would do every day?

It’s alright

We’re good. Better. Hours outdoors snowshoeing, just the two of us, the sun filtering through the trees like gold onto the snow. Conversations over wine and salad about astronomy and politics and five year plans. A few extra minutes in bed together, lips brushing against warm skin, after sending Bean off to play in his room. Holding hands while walking around the grocery store. Taking the time to remember what it was like when our universe was just us. When he was my only focus. When I was his.

And yeah, the jealousy is still there. But I also know that I’d be heartbroken without this. Without the maples drenched in snow, the tiniest of new red buds just showing. Without this house that smells sweet with the heady aroma of brownies and hums with the rhythmic whir of the dishwasher. Without these boys: the big one and the small. I know this. I know there is an arc to everything, and that I’m on mine, and I’ll get there. And I know that this is my story: this juxtaposition of homestead and wanderlust. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But thank you for your reminders. I needed them.

Here again

Outside, in the quiet winter cold, a dog barks again and again and again. A series of three staccato yaps, then a pause, snowflakes swirling in the silence before it barks again; left somewhere outdoors, hot breath making the fur wet around his mouth, icicles gathering in shaggy snarls.

In the sky, the moon, rinsed in the shadow of a recent eclipse, climbs higher up the edge of the dark.

Inside, I almost hold my breath. Heartache coiled in my chest again. I’m restless.

It is still winter here, and I’m home after a week away, where I was submerged in desert sunlight and words. The yearning to be at the next place in my life is fiercer than ever now; to be doing this writing thing, full tilt, without anything else. To be writing every day, without a day job that leaves me feeling like one of those tabs of fish food you throw in the tank for the fish to nibble relentlessly while the owner leaves for a vacation.

It is still winter and stumbling about the internet I find a classmate from my year in college who has published her first collection of essays, and also has the job I wish I had, in the thick of the Manhattan literary world, among tall buildings and subways and martinis. I bite my lip seeing her book jacket, her shiny hair.

I hate the color of this thing that creeps up in my solar plexus. I hate the way jealousy makes me feel small and suffocated, and the way it makes me ask a hundred stupid what-ifs, as if time weren’t irreversible, as if I weren’t here in the thick of this winter snowstorm with a three year old tucked into flannel sheets upstairs and a husband suffering through another bout of depression.

Maybe this is the thing I hate the most. How he won’t admit that his entire way of inhabiting the world hinges on finances; on what he makes or looses for the week in the market, the charts and numbers blipping by him faster than a heartbeat. He won’t say that his life is empty of things that make his heart tremble with passion; he won’t say that he keeps putting these things on hold to maintain our status quo, to keep afloat, to put in a home gym and a flat screen TV, to do whatever comes next in the acquisition process that never ends but never makes him really happy either. He doesn’t see it this way. But I feel his emptiness like a dry heat licking at my skin, making my knuckles crack, my lips grow chapped.

Winter. It seems to always find us here, under sweaters in different rooms with hardly anything to say. It’s been three weeks of tight jaw muscles, and shorter conversations. We hug each other by the kitchen island over Saturday morning pancakes with maple syrup and bacon and hot coffee, but there is always something that makes one or the other of us pull away abruptly, as though magnetism, like heat, is scarce on these cold days and longer nights.

The only time I really see his face bloom into an unguarded smile is when he is with Bean. Then it spreads across his cheeks like the unexpected tiny rainbows from the prism hanging by a ribbon in the window, and a small sharp sliver worms its way into the very center of my chest. I can’t help but wish his smile would bloom like this for me.

But we’re like hungry dogs, circling, ready to snap at the slightest provocation. It is as though we’re both looking for a reason, for some release of tension—both of us craving the pulpy mess that exposes our hearts and leaves us pressed close together with heat between us. Maybe this makes no sense. Of course it makes no sense. But why else do we do this at-once push and pull?

When he’s around, it’s all about pull-your-hair-out-crazy mood swings, and this week has been his worst week ever in the stock market. Everything tipped in the wrong direction, keel up, toppled like dominos. And at the end of a day I can’t help it, I turn away, heart pounding. I’ve already given nearly every shred of patience away to six year olds who play modern warfare games and miss their mothers living in other states. It’s almost like a reflex: the way I avoide directness, intimacy, while feeling like everything between us is flayed: muscles, tendons, hearts, tears always at the back of our eyes.

But then when he’s gone all I can do is watch the clock, the minute hand dogging the hour hand until he’s back, craving him like homesickness.