{my topography}

Twirling in a burlap sack

Or something.

This week has been hectic, and I’m grumpy that I’m turning into one of those depressing post once a week bloggers. I love coming here and finding all of you and your comments and your stories, and I have a zillion posts that I write in my head… you know how it is.

This week though, in particular, has been like a bizarre synchronized swimming competition and I’ve barely had time to come up for breath. It shouldn’t really be so hectic–my in-laws have moved here (and though they don’t have appliances so they’re here all the time for meals, they help A LOT with Bean and such) and my class at school has finally started to come together as a group. There have been no more incidents of scissor throwing or wailing or refusals to say, sit in a chair, or come to the meeting area, and today a parent came in and built an exquisite terrarium for us.

At home we have a toasty warm new wood stove, and the hills are turning to burnished red and saffron. When we take walks in the afternoon we walk through armloads of fallen leaves the color of gems, freckled with rainwater. The rooster has begun crowing. The skies at dusk are purple like the stain of a grape, with gauzy gray clouds smudge across the mountains. It’s a good time of year. Time for apple pie, and café au laits and pumpkin cheesecake ice cream.

But I still have this feeling; like a dervish. Twirling, my feet barely touching ground. I know the real reason is that I haven’t connected back with my writing for several weeks now, and the threads that connect me to the stories I’m constructing have become fine and tenuous like spider’s webs. But every morning I wake up still tired, and every night I go to sleep with my mind a kaleidoscope of fragments. I have forgotten the geometry of being divided in this way: mother, writer, teacher, spouse.

In a conversation with my mother yesterday, she was saying how so many women she knows are on a quest to find the true things that they love. A calling. A direction. A depth of purpose. I laughed, relating my own woes. Mine has never been a lack of purpose or direction or enjoyment, it’s always been a lack of time.

“If I could do every day twice,” I said, “then maybe, just maybe I’d get everything done that I long to do.”

How about you?

Snippets

Several of you made me promise I’d tell you when my piece hit newstands in Mothering Magazine. The editor says nice things about it here.

And also–I need your help: Dh’s b-day is this weekend. Any fun ideas?

I’m just gonna look at you

“I’m just going to look at you,” he says climbing up into the big chair across the room where I’ve suggested he sit so that I can get writing done.

It is early. Just before 7 a.m. and the sun is falling in a bright triangle through the window across my cheeks as I write. Beside me, a steaming milky Americano and honey toast with almonds.

He’s up early with me for some reason. I’ve never entirely figured his sleep patterns out. Later to bed doesn’t necessarily correlate with a later wake-up time, and now here he is across the room from me, curiosity taking over his finger tips. I decide to be content with this. Him, there, occupying a small space across the room, and take his lead. I’m just going to look at him this morning. To return this small gift of quiet attention he’s offered up.

His growing gallops by me like a colt. Each month he grows a quarter of an inch, and stands proudly at the corner of the wall in the kitchen where we mark his growing off with pencil tics and scribbled dates. But it is more than growing tall that he’s been doing, it’s growing deep. He is becoming such an expansive, inquisitive, soulful child, and all I want to be is right there watching like I am now. Soaking up his tousled hair and morning breath.

“The moon can come to your door,” he says biting on honey toast and looking out the window towards the rosy morning light spreading across the sky. Last night the moon white and round, hanging like a plate on the dark wall of the sky. Then it was swallowed by the shadow of the earth.

His red socked feet point toes towards each other. Beside him on the end table is a white china cup of frothy steamed milk. Above his upper lip, a mustache of foam. He clambers off the big chair, and trundles to his room to fetch some new picture books I brought home last night for. He comes back carrying two.

“I lost my bread!” He mutters, going back to retrieve his toast from whatever nook he stashed it in and returns with it clutched in his fist along with another book. “I’m gonna read this book first,” he says.

I watch him explore Ten Nine Eight. A Caledecott winner with bold drawings in vibrant hues. He turns to the back first. Opens the last page, then remembers that we read it last night and this was the end. He turns the book over to the front. Looks at the front, then looks at the back again, checking. Finally he nods and starts in at the front again, page by page. “The end,” he singsongs at the end.

The next book is Apple Pie Tree. “Apple pie sound really good,” he says. Then looks up. “We should make it.”

A few pages later he looks up and says, “I don’t know the words of this book.” Then, when I say that the pictures tell the story and that he doesn’t need to know the words yet (the book is new, I’ve only read it to him once,) he returns to the pages, turning each one slowly. When he’s read through four books, he jumps off and says, “I’m gonna go downstairs and bike around,” and off he scurries.

Dh has woken up. I can here him in the shower, water splashing, singing. Morning has splashed over our house in an unexpected tumble this morning. Not the quiet solace I was imagining, but maybe something better.

I wanted to say how deeply and completely happy your comments made me yesterday. It is so nice to know I’m not entirely writing into a void. Such a gift to know that my words are heard, cared about, mused at. Thank you.

Rabbit-hole days

I’ve been feeling empty word-wise, and it almost feels like a betrayal. Flat screen, flat words; the keystrokes brittle and familiar as I pound out paragraphs. Especially here, I feel a new emptiness. The recent combination of less comments and more visibility has made me hesitant to write about the small mundane things in my life that I’ve filled posts with before. I’ve started to wonder if people care what my days consist of, the moments packing in one after another until the bushel basket of each day is full to overflowing.

Maybe it’s a feeling of overextension. I’ve written so much from my point of view, I feel like I have nothing new to say. It’s the end of summer here. Leaves on the first of the sugar maples are turning fire engine red and burnished orange. We’ve had a few damp days, humidity hanging in the air until afternoon thunderstorms send the moisture raining down in sheets.

When we walk in the meadow, insects scatter. Fat grasshoppers, praying mantis. I’ve been looking for monarch caterpillars to bring into my classroom and at first thought they’d made cocoons early and had already metamorphosed and flown south; no sign of them on the milkweed clustered along the edge of the lane down to the pond. But looking closely I found some, so tiny they were barely visible at all. Just as long as my pinky fingernail is wide. Little horns and stripes, eating holes stained white with milk on the fat green leaves.

I gathered them up, a dripping milkweed caterpillar bouquet, and carried them home. Now they’re eating their way through leaves and leaving poop at the bottom of a glass jar on my windowsill. Tomorrow they’ll travel to school with me; and soon, they’ll grow accustomed to the eager eyes and hot breath of children. So will I.

See? This is all I have to say. Summer has done me in. I’m languorous and scattered. In my studio I’ve started a new canvass, several feet wide. I have more energy right now for color, for wild brush strokes and the haphazard following of whimsy that paint provides, than for the record keeping of my days. I’m thinking though that with this exhaustion of my own perspective fiction will come easier. I find myself looking forward to when I can sit down to write through another lens, a different window. To hold open the doorway to another person’s heart, though invariably, it leads back to the corridors of my own. But I haven’t had time yet to sink into even this.

My new routine hasn’t taken shape yet. I need a week, or two, to fall back onto the trampoline of early morning writing and jam-packed days. Until then, I’m all over the place, trying to get other things done. Stacking a woodpile, replanting azaleas, buying paint to redo the livingroom in sunny acorn.

And because I’ve been lackluster about posting and even more so in commenting on all of your blogs, there’s been a lull in this small corner of the interweb and I miss your comments, your snappy, snarky, encouragement. Perhaps all this to say, I’m ready for summer to be over? Ready for a shift. A new direction. I’m not sure. I love the sun-drenched days, and I feel nervous about winter. But I feel like I’ve slipped down a rabbit hole, having sunk so entirely into the present of my days.

Here goes…something

Every year the fledglings learn this: at some point the nest of twigs and thistle down and the blue ribbon from last year’s presents is not enough. The dappled rustling shade of further branches beckon. The wide arc of sky, streaked with wind and sunbeams becomes a daily siren song. And then the day arrives when they must make a willing leap into the empty air despite having never flown before.

It feels like this, linking my writing over at Parent Dish to here. At once both terrifying and certain, it has always been the natural order of things. The work of showing up at the page here was always with this is in mind. Writing here was an attempt stake out a claim on behalf of my writing within my own heart. A way of saying yes, this is possible, this is the future of my longing.

You have to start somewhere to get to somewhere, and this is where I began, words running long across paragraphs, photographs, no-post days.

It’s incredibly vulnerable to think that more people from my ‘real life’ and my work life will inevitably find me here and find the archives of fights with my husband, the heartache of winter longing, the sallow listless words just before spring, and the posts filled with poop and wonder and breastfeeding that have been my personal history as a new mama.

I didn’t have to link here. Yet not doing so felt like it would be a cop-out. The finch opting to hop about on the forest floor instead of taking flight. It would have reeked with self doubt, not to stand by what I’ve written. The many thousand words here are deeply personal, but also good. I’m proud of how this almost-daily practice of finding something to say here has shaped my writer’s voice in a new way. Your comments, and the emails I gratefully receive, have given me the first inkling of audience, and also courage to say more. No point stopping now. No point hovering at the edge of the quivering twig.

Tumbling towards start

The last few weeks of summer before the start of the school year make me feel like a tumbleweed; aimless and windblown, with so many things up in the air, and without the routine of work. I laugh, realizing that I’ve arrived at this point: ready to go back. I miss a routine, even though I’m not good at exacting one upon my cantaloupe eating summer days.

Over the vactation I’ve managed to slow down enough, unwind enough, to start missing the days of waking up early to sip something warm and write before heading off to work. Now more than ever I need that structure. I need to get started on the forty pages I’ll be exchanging with my writing group in December, and starting this week I’ll also be posting over at Parent Dish.

I like the tingly feeling I get contemplating how with each progressive step I’m sinking more deeply into my commitment towards writing. And also, trepidation.

There’s no better way to get started than to simply sit down and get started, this much I know. But I have a particularly hard time with this. Introductions. First days. First words on the page. First weeks of a new routine. The beginning of anything is something that time sets me on edge and makes me resistant. I drag my feet. Think up every reason in not to jump in. And then, invariably, I finally do.

But what is it about starting that’s so hard? There’s something in those first moments that’s raw and unpredictable. It’s an act of throwing yourself off the cliff, of leaping into the blue space of air and unknown. My heart thuds in my chest when I sit down, poised, ready, my fingers hovering above the keys. Does this happen to anyone else?

I�ve been trying to find equilibrium these past few days: feeling at once propelled by an awful sense of guilt to get things done, and lulled by the happy-go-lucky whimsy of summer. Moments of sheer delight stacked back to back against the metallic shards of self contempt. I’m not good at this.

All month I’ve been feeling the pressure of lists of things I should be doing: making dentist appointments; editing the final draft of a piece and sending it off; finishing the half dozen books I’ve started this month; running more. Then, when another blue-skied summer day passes and I’ve done nothing from the lists, surliness spreads across the surface of my mood like an oil slick. At night I toss in bed, piecing together bits of plot for stories I can�t bring myself to write; then I wake exhausted. Short fused. Critical.

But today it dawned on me that I don’t have to get anything done for these few short days of summer that are all mine. All year I zig-zag through the day at a breakneck pace, waking up before the sun climes through the bare branches the silver birch outside my studio to make coffee and write, before heading off to a classroom full of lively, scrabbling kids. My days from September to June are oversaturated with accomplishment. I multi-task until the moments are frayed. I get things done.

Summer is the only time I can ever lick homemade raspberry popsicles, fool around with Wordpress themes, or spend twenty minutes with Bean on the looking -for four-leaf clovers. It’s the only time I can read the New Yorker at the kitchen counter over toast and an iced latte for breakfast without having to be anywhere else. The only time I can spend the afternoon with DH, pulling down a dilapidated shed or stretching garden fencing. Summer is the only time when the hours swell with fragrance and the lazy hum of bumble bees; when words fall short.

So this week I’ve been trying to exhale and forget my damn lists. Forget arranging words into neat paragraphs. Forget the voice in my head that keeps whispering that I’ll fail if I’m not throwing myself at everything I want, right now, with the fierceness of a matador.

I’m not sure where I got this voice. Or when I started letting it have such power over my days: staining perfectly good moments black. But I’m ready to try to be less complicated for the few remaining weeks of summer. To try, at least, to remind myself that if I spend a whole afternoon flicking through the Wordpress theme browser, and making an utter mess of things, it’s okay.*

Right?

Midsummer moodiness

Somehow, the summer is slipping by. Without warning it is more than half over really, and I’m feeling moody about it. The sky has been a mosaic of torn clouds this week. Strong winds and rain have been thrashing about wildly like a greenbroke horse. The night sky burnished with sheet lightening, thunder always rolling low in the distance. It’s that time in the summer when I start to think about it ending, and I feel a certain abject sorrow thinking of it.

Like driving again after living through a car crash, the prospect of going back to work and living through another winter makes me white-knuckled and anxious, albeit in a hazy popsicle and sun-stupored way. Last year’s autumn and winter left scar tissue running the length of our relationship: mine and DH’s. We survived, but sometimes the ache of it painted entire weeks with indigo and gunmetal gray. We came out of it, one bowl at a time at the pottery studio, centering, finding each other among strangers, with slip on our hands and glaze splattering our shirts. But it took until after my birthday to feel like we’d make it to the next.

Now roses are blooming hot red and hooker pink, their petals promiscuously soft, but the slugs are eating holes in the leaves. We still haven’t put in a garden fence, and the ground where the beds have not been turned has begun to reclaim its meadow-ness, grasses and tiny fingered ferns and sturdy-rooted dandelions sprouting up through the rubble of tilled soil. I wake up and spend my days sprawled out reading novels which is something I almost never do, and cannot quite get accustomed to. Hours in a book, interrupted every fifteen minutes by Bean who lopes about the yard with his bubble mower or a watering can.

We got him a set of trains and a an oval loop of track and they keep him occupied for nice long stretches of time, during which I get hauled into whatever place is inked out on the pages I’m turning. I get pulled in so easily, my whole day takes on the hue of the story, as though my life were a cotton cloth saturated in the dye of each story’s language and emotion; little ripples and circles left clean, like tie-dye, where necessity forces me to resurface.

Small things bring me back to the moment. Making alphabet soup. Lying in bed with DH, my head pressed into the soft place where his arm and shoulder meet and his heartbeat thrums so loudly in my head, all at once I start to think it is my own. Or sitting on the planks of the small dock at the neighbor’s pond with Bean, our toes in the water, listening for frogs and splashing, while above us swallows swoop and dive. But in between these things, words are running a haphazard narrative inside my head. Stories are bunkering up against each other.

Last week I finished Pam Houston’s novel Sight Hound, which I wasn’t entirely drawn into at first (many narrators, one of whom is a dog) but found myself sobbing by the end, grateful for it’s right-there in plain sight way of talking about risk and faith and grief. Today I finished As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. DH’s ninth grade copy with his ball point pen notes in the margins.

I read it in two days, though I didn’t expect it to. There was a certain terrifying tension to it. Faulkner’s language is so heady and convoluted and looping that the act of reading it becomes part of the story. You become torn, and belligerent and hateful and grieving because the language makes you feel these things. Like a rip tide, it tows you under. One sentence looping back on itself again and again until you can no longer read it and have it mean anything at all, or another so abrupt, so sharp with colloquial timbre that you have to catch your breath. I want to go back and read the whole thing again, because I felt myself pushed to the very edges of comprehension, as though it were my gut and not my mind to towards which the story was aimed.

I’m also reading Homeland, a collection of short stories by Barbara Kingsolver. My everywhere read. The one I snatch at in all those in-between moments. Each story yanks me into the very center of it’s truth. I read them hungrily, picking over the skeleton of the story, trying to understand how it is made. The gathering of small details, the weight of lines, or the way the author’s voice rides up high over the words of the narrator like radio stations overlapping.

Yet with all the book reading and the lolling about, I haven’t been able to stay focused on writing. There is something in my aquarian nature that is both sanguine and ambivalent. This, combined with Bean’s intermitent pestering, and it seems it is nearly impossible for me to effectively structure my days. I get disoriented in summer, with all the basking and book reading and love making and such, the heat rising up early and abating only after the thunder and rain have rinsed the grass and sky.

Anyone else feel like this, midsummer? What are you reading? Doing?

Reasons to celebrate

I’m home, drenched with gratitude. The outcome of my week away was more bountiful than I could have ever imagined–she asked me to continue working with her in a private, advanced writing group that meets a few times a year, and exchanges manuscripts routinely. I’m beyond thrilled, beyond words even. Without a doubt now, I will be focusing on writing with my whole heart now.

I have to say, I feel like I owe you—Internets—one heaping helping of gratitude. You have, again and again made me take my writing seriously. Thank you for all of your comments…(Do you know how much I love them? A TON! ~ On that note, sorry about the funky commenting problems. Just hit “submit comment” ONE TIME, and it goes through, even if it tells you it doesn’t. Still don’t know why—though I’m trying to figure it out.) Thank you for all your emails, your encouragement and companionship from the very depths of my heart.

I started this blog two years ago this month, and I’ve benefited from the community I’ve found through it immeasurably. I laughed aloud when I went to look back at my first posts. See this one? Some things have come full circle, non? ( I never went that summer. Something about having a six month old prevented me. I think I’d delusionally signed up to CAMP with him and DH for the five days, in a two person backpacking tent, in a campground full of middle-age, new-age types who were seeking an ‘experience’ while there. We didn’t make it past night one.)

Anyhow, if I were a dog I’d be thwacking my tail into something rather hard. Since I’m not, I can’t stop grinning. Spent the day picking wild strawberries with Bean, wandering newly mown paths through our meadows, and yesterday, happily reunited, the three of us took a four hour nap in the sun. Life is good, good, good.

Writing assignment # 3: An alphabetical story

(The first letter of each sentence is in alphabetical order. X or Z may be left out, but not both. One line must be one word; one must be 100)

Zig zagging above us, the bats move through the fading light like acrobats. Yellow light stains the mountains, but in the valleys evening makes the shadows long. We’re in the lower meadow, picking sweet corn from the garden when we see them. Very slowly, we turn in unison, though neither of us has said a word.

There in the shadows, a doe and two fawns step from between the maples and the birches, heads low, grazing on wild strawberries and newly waist high grass. She lifts her head from time to time, sniffing, but we’re downwind. Reaching for me in the semi dark, I feel his hands fold around my shoulders, and I sink back into the warmth of his chest. Quiet.

Purple spreads across the darkening sky. One by one the stars come out, and fireflies start to twinkle at the edges of the lawn. Night folds her quilt of dark around us. Meadowlarks and the last of the swallows dart towards the pines along the drive.

Leaning back into his chest, he smells like grass and salt and honey, and I can hear his heart beating like a distant drum, until gradually an entire chorus of night sounds begins to build around the rhythm of his pulse, steady and persistent; bullfrogs calling from the pond below our meadow punctuating the higher more urgent trilling of the peepers and the tree frogs, with a bass that reverberates slightly in my sternum, and above them the insidious sonic treble of mosquitoes who are, as of yet, simply circling, while the bats swoop low, just missing our upturned faces.

Kissing him is suddenly worth more than spotted fawns, and I turn. Just then the coyotes that we’ve heard nightly begin to call. I pull back. He tilts his head like a dog, listening as their wild yapping reaches fever pitch. Goosebumps spread on my arms. Fleeting like shadows, we see them at the edge of the woods, crossing the upper meadow. Even as we’re watching, they disappear, melting into the night, their song ending suddenly as it began. Disentangling, we turn towards the house where light spills onto the lawn in golden squares.

“Come on,” I say.

But he pulls me back, his hands running up my shirt. Another moment in the dark, and we’re falling into the knee high grass.