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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Gallop, gallop, gallop

Whew. Met the deadline, but now: getting ready to leave my classroom in the hands of a sub. A very capable one at that, but still, do you have any idea how hard it is to clone yourself? That’s what writing lesson plans for an entire week feels like.
Too darn busy.
Hence the almost absence […]

Fairy dust and climbing shoes

Another really long day.
And then, the best thing ever. We started our climbing class tonight, and as an early birthday present DH got me a new harness and shoes. In between trying on pairs of shoes–and while waiting for the sales guy to dig through his inventory for my size–I picked up a climbing magazine […]

Puny

I have unreasonable expectations, constructed on scaffolding I can hardly climb, and from up there I sometimes get vertigo. When I sit down to do art, I feel them creeping up : that I’m not doing more, or better work. That it’s not good enough. It’s so lame, this inner voice. So useless, yet there […]

Leap

I sat down tonight to paint the way Bean does–with color first, then the image taking shape. I had no plan, no illustration in the back of my head, just the commitment to take a small corner of time out of my day to do art this month. It feels good to keep returning […]

My secret inner superhero

The other night I was talking to a friend. He said, “I don’t know, I guess I still feel like somewhere inside me is an inner superhero.”
I’m right there with him.
I still have that feeling: like one morning I’ll wake up and miraculously be able to live full throttle—without the shredded edges of tiredness […]

Create, live with abandon.

The snow is falling outside, making everything like a milky dream. The trees are flocked with white, and I can’t remember the scent of summer: cut grass, ripening blackberries, dust rising up from the dirt road; in the same way I can’t really remember what last year was like, so much uncertain, heartache like broken […]