{my topography}

Saturday mosaic

The boys are checking out tractors. Three generations of men with long eyelashes scoping out farm machinery, their fingers nestled into warm jacket pockets, the air still stupefying cold. It’s nearly April, and the mercury can’t make it up above forty for more than an hour in late afternoon. Just long enough to get the sap to start running, before it freezes back up.

I’m in the dining room where the sun makes a pattern of rhombuses: bright and shadow across the table, and the woodstove fills the room with snug heat. The cat sleeps sprawled in the sun, while around the house wind moves incessantly, like restless spirits.

If I look hard, I can see the small buds on the trees growing rounder—as though the woods have been stained with a faint and hazy hue of red. And though it snowed yesterday, the ground is scabbed with mud and melt. Still, it’s cold out. Bitter in the wind the way it was in January, and my body has grown sluggish and soft from all the weeks indoors.

Today we ate toad-in-the-hole’s, ripe mangoes, yogurt and honey, hot coffee. Then packed snacks for a road trip to anywhere, but here. Spring fever has made us stir crazy, and we went looking for sugar makers and for barnyards with animals; for wind-whipped ridges and different sky lines; different windows to look out of, at the very least.

In a neighboring town we licked freshly poured maple candy off our fingers after pulling it from the snow in long golden ribbons, our cheeks chapped in the wind. People serve bread and butter pickles here, during sugaring, and home made doughnuts. Then we ducked indoors at a café where the floors were old pine in wide planks and the lattes were thick with microfoam and the coffee and foam was poured into a perfect bloom at the brim of every cup.

On the way back the sun made us squint. This American Life on the radio, Bean napping. We stopped at the carwash, and DH pointed the spray gun at the wheels, trying to dislodge a winter’s worth of frozen mud hugging up against the rotors. Small things, really, but a change of scenery; a couple hours to elope from our everyday where spring still hasn’t come and the laundry has yet to be done.

Glimpses from Sunday ::

We sip pink homemade smoothies with striped bendy straws. Bean grins up at me. We clink our glasses together. “Cheers,” he says.

Against the window, white snow falling sideways. A jar of golden honey on the counter. I’ve been curled into the corner nook on the couch all day with my laptop. Achy: pms and the flu, what a whopper. I’ve burst into tears at least a half dozen times. DH looks at me like I’m from the moon, then offers to make tea.

The cyclamens on the windowsill are a riot of pink, and in a circle around my small boy: fluorescent green Post-it notes, crayons and stickers. There are logs on the fire and the room is filled with a steady heat and the smell of smoke, faint, the signature of winter, still here, though today sunlight until 7 and at dawn, mourning doves on the ground below the feeder.

It is time to force branches of forsythia, and to visit our neighbors to inhale the sweet heady scent of maple sap and steam by the evaporator. Time to buy Bean a new rain slicker, boots. Mud from here until April.

What are three blogs you’re enjoying this month? I’m craving new inspiration, beauty, curiosity, and delightfully precarious sentences.

Breath.

Morning crowds up against the glass like a dark gorilla; icicles hang sharp and pointed against the rosy pale of dawn. Day has come too soon all week. I’ve been fighting it, staying up late and then hating that first milky light spilling across the sky; never feeling like I get everything done. Then I roll over in bed and fined my little one’s soft head snuggling towards the nook of my neck. He’s come in sometime in the middle of the night on footie-pajama feet, nuzzling his way between us among the flannel sheets. He smells like heaven.

I breathe in and then exhale on the yoga mat, my limbs uncoiling, ligaments taught like the cat gut strings of a disused mandolin. Downward dog; breath for five inhalations, five exhalations my awareness scattering like chickadees and then narrowing back in towards the oval blue of quiet thought. Warrior pose: feet driving down into the floor, gravity pulling at my legs.

Then I’m sipping coffee and eating toast while driving away from home. The fields are crystalline. We’ve had a lot of snow, and the view of the mountain from the flats where the cows eat sweet grass all summer takes my breath away for an instant. The whole jagged edge of it is lit with the bright gold of day, snow capped and rocky, with the pale sky stretching up and up and up above it, the clouds like discarded garments hanging tattered at the cusp where world meets air.

Inside the classroom day begins with a hundred questions. They’re all there before me, nineteen kids, all wanting to tell a story at the same time. I’m like a dancer now or a magician, the multi tasking never stops. I’m bending to tie a shoe while listening to a story about a pet that has died, while answering a question about where the story-picture paper is kept. My mind becomes pocketed, punctuated, perceptive. I am no longer aware of my breath, and then I ask them to gather. I sing a song of peace in Latin. Dona nobis pachem. I feel my pulse slow. The children begin to gather, their voices joining mine until we’re all singing, breathing together.

I come through the door my body thrumming like a tuning fork. If I stand still I can almost feel it vibrating. My hands maybe quiver, and I’m starving. I crave solitude, but my small boy tumbles upon me, offering kisses. I sit down to eat at the butcher block island. Dry Italian salami and cheddar cheese with herby crackers. I open a bottle of temparnello, just to breath in the sharp sweet scent.

In the dark I spoon around him. His wide shoulders and the curve of his back almost a part of my body’s own geography when we sleep. My skin and his. Thisclose. Our hearts following the same quite choreography of breath.

A mini photo documentary of my day:

Another morning to myself. Sitting in the sun at the table writing with the cat.

Re-reading shreds of story, and trying to figure out a better system for filing story ideas, works-in-progress, etc.

Back from a run. Downward dog.

Listening to good tunes on my iPod while soaking up the sun. Post run cool down.

Making a post-run smoothie. Frozen peaches, raspberries, strawberries, wheat germ and yogurt.

Celebrating right now

For DH’s birthday: I woke up to make pancakes and pick fresh flowers before heading out the door for work. In the evening we went out for dinner at an lovely little Italian place. Good wine. Excellent food: smoked/grilled fresh mozzarella with eggplant; pumpkin ravioli with duck; veal saltimbocca. Bean was a delight. A perfect example of manners and peaceable dining. He noshed on the pumpkin ravioli and daintily pretended the breadsticks were chopsticks. A perfect evening.

DH’s birthday comes two days after our anniversary—not our wedding anniversary, but our first-got-together one. Eight years. Pretty cool to know someone for nearly a decade, and to feel like time has flown.

Is this what it feels like forever? Time speeding up exponentially with each rotation of earth around sun? Until decades tumble down upon each other, and thus is a life? Is this really how it goes? Each moment so full, so poignant, so messy and rich and joyous, that it all seems like yesterday. I look at Bean, our shiny-eyed rascal of a boy, and I can’t see a baby in him any more. He’s all little boy. Rough and tumble and sweet. It makes me catch my breath.

We spend so much time looking forward to things, and then, so much time looking back. The moments in between, before the fruit is picked, before the seeds are spit. Sheer present; so hard to hold.

Back from camping

Perfect weather. Fun in the water. Beach reading. Stone skipping. Sticky marshmallow fingers. Rowdy neighbors (totally annoying.) Stars above us. Campfire smoke in the air. Pancakes with fresh raspberries. Time out on the water canoing. (Bean FELL ASLEEP in the canoe~ twice!) Overall, a wonderful first camping adventure with the little guy.

Weekend mosaic

A trip to the farmer’s market yesterday; fresh baby artichokes, the sweetest cherry tomatoes, currants, and fresh-baked bread. Wandering amidst stalls of blue hand thrown bowls, golden bouquets of sunflowers, savory samosas, and throngs of kids and dogs. Then sore muscles and satisfaction: finishing the hen house and putting in ten-foot posts for the garden fence. Hours in the sun, mud stained.

This is how he spells his love: wresting cedar posts into position, mixing cement, and framing out the door for the coop, using the funky top-half of a Dutch door that I’ve had my heart set on. These are not his projects, but he makes the so, for me. And I can’t help grinning watching him move, biceps sweat slicked, scratching our initials into the cement of the final post.

These are the days that imprint like sun spots on my memory. Iced espresso and buttered cinnamon toast carried out on a white metal tray for an afternoon snack. Bean with mud on his knees, loading gravel into his dump truck. The field windswept and freckled with daisies and black-eyed-susan’s, and the sky above blue with a ragged tatter of clouds. The beginning of things to last: the phantoms of future raspberry bushes, an asparagus patch, bowls of new summer lettuce, and pastel eggs nestled into hay.

How did you spend your weekend?

4 days off

have made all the difference.

It always stuns me when I realize how entirely a lack of sleep and stress affect my life. How I feel completely altered, weaker, fragile at the center like a soft-boiled egg with days-on-end of stress and poor sleep; and then after a few days of extra naps and time spent in good company (family and friends, both) and suddenly I feel different. Whole. Laughter rises up easily and often like finches on the early summer wind. I remember how much I love making love in the afternoon with windows open for a nap, after. Family time suddenly feels precious and sustaining, not debilitating the way it can feel when I’ve given everything already and the dishes still need to be done.

This weekend has been full of frisbee tossing, and cutting grass. Renting a tiller to cut soil for our new garden. Listening to night rain, and having our hair tossed by afternoon winds. Getting the box ready for new chicks (coming this Thursday!) and taking Bean and his two-wheel bike + training wheels to the playground bikepath. Watching him fly by, all grins. Making pasta al dente with fresh red sauce and sausages, salad with new mustard greens and fresh corn off the cob. And writing: good solid pages of fiction. I cannot wait for summer.

Two weeks of school left (back tomorrow) and then off to the writing workshop with Pam Houston (! I know, I can’t believe it either!) A week to myself on the coast writing and soaking up other writers, and then the wide swath of summer streatching out ahead, humid and lush, to linger, to sweat, to write, to grow a garden.

I have plans: many rows of corn, mounds for squash and pumpkins (DH’s favorite), strawberries, peas and lettuce, green beans on poles making an archway for Bean to hid beneath, sunflowers, potatos, radishes, carrots, tall tomatos bursting in the sun. I know so little about gardening really, though I’ve always coaxed a patch of vegitables out of some corner of our urban yards. Now, it’s nearly a quarter acer of soil we’ve set out to till. I’ve never composted, but want to learn. So much to be patient about–the eager part of me wants it all now: the tall rows of sweetcorn. The scarlet runner beans and holyhocks along the fence. The chickens feathered and scratching underfoot as we picnic outdoors like we did at lunch today.

I forget when I’m stressed to that teary weak point of nothing, how much I love to just ramble. To post about the cluttered mosaic of our days as a family. To make sketches in my flora notebook, or linger by the window watching the humming birds that are nesting in our lilac trees. And I miss all of you. Over the span of time I’ve had this blog, so many people have become bits of what make me whole, remind me of what I want, keep me inspired. What are you up to?

Tell me: five things you did today.

Ingredients for a perfect Saturday:

Waking up to sunshine dappling our sheets and faces with zig-zag zebra stripes as it slips through the slats on our bedroom’s wooden shades, we stretch and lazily stumble out of bed. I haven’t slept in all week, and suddenly 7 a.m. seems decadent. Bean is big-eyed and delighted to find himself smack dab between Mommy and Daddy, and he starts the day as usual, with nonstop chatter. “Want to make a dort,” he says, not quite getting his ‘Fs’ yet. He slips down under the covers between DH an I, squealing with giggles when we reach for him.

At breakfast I read a New Yorker piece aloud and DH and both of us are laughing as he makes iced espresso in tall pint glasses. Then the boys head outside to mow the lawn. “It’s gonna be loud,” Bean says, his eyebrows furrowing. I hold him in my lap while DH pulls the cord and the lawnmower starts up with a purr. I can feel Bean’s body startle slightly, but then his boyish passion for all things motor takes over, and he scurries after DH as he makes looping arcs around the yard. The first mowing of the season. The grass smells sweet and sharp, and the sunlight prickles on my skin. Along the house, dandelions bloom in a row, weeds for sure, but both DH and I love their sunny lion’s manes, and so he doesn’t mow them down.

Then we head off to a Touch A Truck activity put on by Parks and Rec. Bean is in seventh heaven. Eighth. Ninth. He cannot believe his luck: they’re serving chocolate ice cream cones, AND he can climb on the diggers and investigate every button and knob in the cement mixer and fire truck. His grin is impossibly huge. We meet up with friends, and chat while our kids dance to the music booming from the local radio station that has set up in a corner of the parking lot under the pines. We try to wipe ice cream off of faces and fingers whenever we get a chance, but it’s a loosing battle. Bean clutches his too-big plastic construction hat, and murmurs about diggers all the way until nap time.

Nap time. DH leaves to help a friend, and Bean and I eat lunch and settle in together among down comforters and striped sheets. One of those dreamy, sweet, snuggled afternoon naps that stretch on and on. We’re drowsy and sleep for hours. HOURS. Three to be exact. Maybe more. Finally I roust myself from my stupor, and soon after Bean sits up tousle-headed and grinning. We fold laundry. Or rather I do, as Bean figures out the best possible angles for launching himself into the baskets of folded clothes.

Now I’m sitting with a stack of fig bars and an iced latte in my quite studio. Outside DH is mowing the back yard and Bean in his lady-bug boots and his safari hat, is causing certain mischief. I love the hum of the lawn mower, and the way the light looks out the window. The hills are finally soft now—the twiggy skeletons of branches hazy with delicate new green. Leaves just barely unfolding, clouds in perfect sheep like clumps across the wide blue sky. I’m heading out now to start in on a flower bed. Turning soil, and tossing rocks. Then dinner at a friend’s house: pizza, wine, letting the kids twirl. Such a good day.

How did you spend your Saturday?

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.