{my topography}

A fun weekend

New baby chicks & new bantam chickens from a neighbor (we named the rooster Guisseppe!)

A new bike for Bean.

New plants in the garden.

Sore muscles.

A night with just DH.

And only four three weeks left of school.

Weekend snapshots

(Bean took this one.)

The world has turned green. Less than a month left of school. The morning sun is waking me up, and I’ve been heading out to run more. Still not feeling totally in harmony with myself yet: still too much on my plate. But more days and more moments where the the orbit of things aligns with my own twirling self.

(Btw: The Cure was a wild, loud adventure that included getting lost when leaving Montreal–4o miles east, before we realized we were supposed to be going south. Oy. And the next day was a blur of tiredness.)

I am hoping to update here every day this week. I have a thing with perfection. I don’t like writing here unless I have long moments to spend, delving into the deeper fabric of my thoughts. But I miss the daily practice. The flawed jotting of notes, of small moments, of daily life. When I first wrote here, I wrote all the time… but somehow I seem to have upped the standard on myself, and now I’m dragging my feet, feeling like if I can’t post a brilliant post, I should’nt post anything at all. What is with that?

A post in pictures

Artichokes for dinner: a Bean favorite. Mine too. We eat all the way to the heart, dipping each leaf in lemon butter; then wonder at the purple and pale green thistle center.

It’s suddenly warm here. Days perfect for drinking fizzy water and limes. Days for getting first sunburns, working in the garden. A week of vacation: to catch up on writing and sleep and time with my boys.

Bean and I spend every second outdoors in the afternoons, ambling through our meadows, taking stock of everything that is new and green and budding. He found these old baskets from last autumn’s crysanthemums on the brush pile we’re preparing to burn. Natraully, they offered endless entertainment.

Made the first batch of sun tea this week. The temperature has hit 80, and it’s almost soporific. Just two weeks ago I was wearing down and socks, now I’m barefoot, my toes badly in need of a pedicure.

Writing, upstairs, alone in the house, I heard a thud. Unmistakable, reminding me of a childhood in the Rocky Mountains in a big-windowed cabin and my dad, holding stunned birds in his quiet palms. They always flew away, and compelled, I went downstairs and out the screen door looking. It was there, below the frong windows, wings spread wide, eyes closed. But I scooped it up gently, and held it. (My dad always said holding the birds helped them with the shock.) And eventually, he started to blink, and move about, then perched for a while on my thumb before flying off. A small blessing.

Wildflowers suddenly everywhere, and insects. I’m so damn grateful to be through with winter.

We hung Bean’s first tree swing yesterday. So much nostalgia from childhood: my feet scraping the blue bowl of sky.

I found two today, the first of the year. I think of them as my writing talismans. Last year they brough so much: my writing group, Pam, a piece to be published this summer in the Sun. I’ve pressed them in my new Molskine.

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.

Sundown

Took my camera with me to the waterfront with the boys for a walk.

Got the skunk scent out of my cat with a natural enzyme spray: no tomato baths necessary!

Woke up today with a splitting headache. Now I have a fever. I can thank the kiddos at work for this one. I am so ready for warmer weather. For being able to throw open the windows. For anything other than ice storms. I so hoped to post something longer today–I was facinated by your comments about the idea of living ‘perfectly’ and wanted to write more about what I meant. About trying to live the way one always hopes one will—someday, although the doing of that in the moment seems to get put off for lesser (and greater) things.

But now that I’m sick all I really want to know is: what movie should I rent tonight?

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?

Inspired.

I’ll be back by the weekend.

Weasel

A weasel found it’s way into the coop, the way only weasels can. Murderous and thrilling at the kill, it went after every hen, the sick rooster (who was getting better!) first, taking their heads, leaving blood splattered across the glass panes on the door. When I came home DH was in the coop gathering up the decapitated bodies, already frozen. We’re not sure when it came, how long it stayed, how it got in even. Flatlanders, the two of us. We should have known the signs broadcast all over last night: the scent of musk; the skipity tracks in the snow, not a squirrels, and too small for a drowsy skunk or hibernating raccoon.

Two hens, that’s all that’s left, of six, total, including the ailing rooster. It’s what happens, here, anywhere, the food chain and so forth, but it still sucks. I pulled on rubber boots (new ones, pretty with black and red and white flowers) and old fleece gloves and raked out loads of blood flecked hay and scat. We almost had it cornered (I keep wanting to call it a him, but who knows? And it gives me the shivers to think how naturally I assume the gender of a killer, even animal, and small with a mink black coat and a rust colored underbelly.) Both of us feeling fierce enough to kill it, and I grazed it with my boot, but it made a get-away out the door, and when we followed it’s tracks, we found it’s likely living under the shed on the other side. Vermin.

I knew it could happen, even when we got the half-dozen of them, itty-bitty and peeping, just a day old in the mail. We picked them up at the post office, and I kept saying maybe we should get more, in case. Now there are two, and while I cleaned the coop they sat on the roost above my head, the one shoving it’s head into the soft feathered underbelly of the other, twittering in that low, purring way hens do.

This is what we picked, choosing rural life. The likelihood of weasels, tracks zig-zagging the snow. Now that the January cold has set in, this is the season of hunger for small warm blooded things that do not sleep in the ground or in nests or burrows until spring. We wanted to feel closer to the land, and I keep an animal tracking guide on my desk. But I’ve grown lazy and fat and distracted in the warmth of my house, writing heaps of paragraphs furiously (for a deadline: this Saturday) and eating pineapple upside down cake (for my birthday.) I grew up on the stories of Sterling North, and when I am outdoors, the land sings and I feel it in my bones. I love the barren maples and the way the ice is dark and slick over the places where water and mud used to bisect the trail.

So even as I’m feeling like punching the wall and I’m googling weasel traps, I’m already planning for more: hens, chicks, beehives, lamas, a garden. Maybe not all this spring, or even this year, but over the course of the years here. Because even when I’m dizzy and distracted, as I am right now: balancing on the very tiniest rung of the tall ladder reaching up towards the sickle moon of my dreams, these things pull me back. Nothing like chicken manure and a mess of bloodied feathers to pull you back into the right-here-now of life.

These things are my Polaris, giving the twirling compass of my heart a north to true towards in the dark winter days when I’m crazy with words and to-do lists and hectic schedules and friends I haven’t kept in touch with; or in summer when the evening sun hangs in the sky until almost ten and I’m drowsy and sun drunk and undirected. Still. I’m sad tonight.

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 and leafed through it. Then, while reaching to put it back, this little gift was sitting right there–where the magazine had been.

I’ve always adored Rosa for doing this kind of thing and have secretly wished I’d someday be the recipient of a little random bit of whimsy. But to find it today was simply perfect.

I was so exhausted, bummed out, and feeling defeated in general. Let’s just say it was a looong day.

So we went climbing and it was glorious, and now I have a little magical bag of glittery gold fairy dust and I can’t stop smiling.

And so the week is gone

I’ve been sick. A major yucky head cold + fever combo that has left me wimpy and whining watching re-runs on TV. I hate being sick. Especially around the holidays. To distract you from the abundant LACK of posting going on around here, pretty pictures:

My boys whispering in the early morning light, while I got up, snuck downstairs and slipped something into Bean’s advent box.

Breakfast this morning. The thrill (yes, it really is) of going to the coop and getting freshly laid green or blue shelled eggs has not warn off. Talk about fresh.

The kitchen, post breakfast. The penguin’s name is Snowflake, and Bean is in love with him.

Feeding the sheep & lamas is a regular weekend activity. I love the lama’s eyelashes, and the way the barn always smells sweet with hay and is warm with animal breath. Our neighbor’s always put on a full nativity play in their barn every year. All the local kids act out the parts, and everyone sings carols and eats cookies & goes sledding afterwards. So fun.

Getting the newspaper on the way back from our walk. We sled down to the bottom of our drive, then pull the paper up.

My little mischief maker, “helping” me make Christmas cards.