three little chickies

Sometimes a poem

2011-03-24T11:50:00.003-04:00

Sometimes a poem comes out of nowhere and speaks to me.

Last night this one from Rilke found me via a podcast I was listening to. The translation here is particularly wonderful.

Here it is, from Sonnets to Orpheus II:

"Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower"

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I like listen to podcasts at night, just as I'm falling asleep. This beautiful Rilke poem was read by the philosopher and translator Joanna Macy, as part of her interview on Krista Tippet's On Being. You can listen to her read her translation here. Or the entire podcast, here. Both are worth the time.

I hope the poem speaks to you. What else finds you when you need to hear it?

The Rules

2010-11-07T16:38:00.004-05:00

Several years ago, my husband and I found ourselves repeating certain ideas again and again to our daughter, Ada. These weren’t directives like “Eat your green beans,” but more general instructions along the lines of “Stay calm, honey.”

At some point, the most-repeated phrases grew roots. We found ourselves calling them up in so many contexts that we couldn’t help but notice their significance. They started to feel like Rules with a capital R, and we even began calling them that. Naming them Rules felt a little strange for me, but it gave them a value and a shape that made them Real. And I needed them to be real, because it was soon clear that these would be guidelines for good habits for both my husband and me, too.

Like any family, we have regular little dos and don’ts that aren’t written down anywhere but are pretty well understood as law in our house. You heard these standards before, I’m sure: no running, don’t hit people, quiet voices indoors, don’t take your sister’s toys, clear your place when you’re finished, etc…. Such are important simply to ease the motions of living together in a household. And most of them are dictatorial and begin with negatives. Necessary, probably--but pleasant or life-affirming, definitely not.

So we might need the day-to-day standards, but, at least for me, they need a counterbalance so our house isn’t filled with negativity. I have felt how easily I could slip into dictator mommy mode. I admit there are often days that I feel so overwhelmed with the chaos that parenting can bring that it feels tempting to just impose martial law around here. I fight that urge. In the midst of a potential breakdown, I try to step outside myself and see how I might look to someone else if I were to get draconian. I hate that image of myself, and so I resist. I resist and I keep myself from calling up my own enraged voice, loaded with volume and DON’Ts. Instead, I try to get quiet inside, so I can listen to the voice calmed and assured by some of our Rules.

These other Rules feel like big ones, hefty and solid and filling space in the way a good piece of furniture can. I feel as if in cultivating these, I’m constructing a sort of heirloom, one that I can share with my daughters right now, as I practice the Rules on a daily basis myself.

We call them our family Rules, but they seem pretty universal to me, as each one appears to apply in countless settings. I’m sure my husband and I have unintentionally gleaned them from old, old sayings and philosophies, but put together like this as ours, they feel like ours, comfortable and homegrown enough that we can practice them unselfconsciously. I think that’s partly why we’ve been able to stick with them for seven years now.

When we decided to call them Rules, we actually wrote them down and assigned them an order. Eventually I actually framed them and posted them on a wall in the art studio. On some level, I felt strange giving them such an official space. But I also felt compelled to do it.

I grew up a free-range kid; no bedtimes, no set meal times, and lots of unsupervised space. And even now, and even though I am the one who wrote the rules, having a constructed code of conduct for my own family feels slightly foreign to me, and maybe a little threatening. Old habits die hard, I suppose. If, as a child, I had met a family who had a set of general rules posted on their wall, I would have snickered about them and their tightly-wound life. Given the right circumstances, I probably would have even tried to break a few of those rules ostentatiously in front of the parents, just to show off my own free-thinking self.

Clearly, I was actually starved for predictability and routine, and it takes no deep analysis to see that my flaunting rejection of healthy habits or structure was less about “free thinking” than it was envy.

Sitting down to consciously develop “rules” was like claiming new territory for myself. I like to imagine that I have the capacity for a certain amount of structure, but I recognize my own tendency to swing from one extreme to another like a Kirie-pendulum. The structure offered by our Rules literally is a counterweight to my urges to be flighty or self-centered or irresponsible.

I was going to tell you that I cling to the Rules as a necessity, but I don’t really. I don’t need to, as at least one or two of them visits me each day in my thoughts, unbidden. They are becoming /have become part of that internal voice I have, the calm one that knows what to do.

I’m trying to start that voice playing in my kids’ heads. I often ask the girls, midstream in some activity, “What’s the first (or second or third, etc) rule?” Bringing a rule into my consciousness often feels like pressing a pause button for me. It seems to have a similar effect on Ada and Esme, if for no reason other than it makes them stop their current activity for a split second to think outside of themselves.

Over the next months, I’ll share the rules individually. It’s amazing to me how useful they are for me, and many of things I think about during the day somehow come back to one or another of them.

Contrarian that I am, I’m going to start with the second rule on the list. It seems timely, as this summer and this fall have been full of moments of waiting for something to start, something to end--waiting, in other words, for a different time.

But the second rule bucks that waiting. The second rule is “Be where you are.”

Of course you recognize that rule from many ancient philosophies and modern spiritual practitioners, from Zen Buddhism to Eckhart Tolle. It’s not new by any stretch. But in the context of my own set of rules, I find it’s possible to make it personal, to make a practice that I can do outside of the boundaries of any set philosophy.
Here’s what I’ve found about Rule #2: Minute by minute, being where you are is a steadying thing. Strangely, being where I am makes me feel anchored and free at the same time. When I turn my focus to being present, suddenly I find I have a hidden well of quiet, one that runs deep, and is surprisingly full of space. Being in that moment frees me from the constrictions of wanting to be someplace else, sometime else. For those few moments, I can just be. And, even when I am feeling sad or miserable, being where I am surprises me by making me feel gratitude.

I call this one up when I notice myself longing for something different. For instance, my husband, due to unavoidable travel, recently missed a holiday with us. Over and over during that day, I naturally found myself wishing he could be home to share our celebration. I felt the lack of his presence as surely as I could feel the temperature of the air, or the solidity of the empty chair that sat at his place. Rule #2 pulls me away from that longing for a few minutes and asks me to notice the flouncy skirt and mismatched leggings my 4-year-old joyfully wears that day, and the particular expression my older daughter has on her face as she draws a detailed picture of a house filled with princesses. I notice the sound of our kitty as she brings me the catnip mouse I made for her, and the not-so-perfect turkey cutlets I cooked, the creamy potatoes, the crisp lettuce with my favorite dill dressing. When I focused my attention on these details around me, I noticed how tiny and simple and beautiful they each were. They converged for only a short space in time, and if I had been lost in longing land, I would have missed them, too. So I say softly to myself, “Rule #2, Be where you are.” And I am. For now.

What do you think of rules? Do you embrace them or buck them, or like me, a little of both? Does your family have them? What rules or habits do you practice, and how do they add to your life?

Shapes

2010-05-17T20:40:00.013-04:00

I’ve been thinking of lines and spaces lately. Every leafy tree invites me to see it two ways: once as an image of the multitude of greens and branches, then once again in negative, seeing only the jagged splotches of sky between branches and leaves.

There’s one tree especially that I keep noticing for some reason. It draws me toward it every time I pass by it on the road leading northward to our street. It’s an ordinary tree, and I have no cause to notice it. It’s not standing alone, nor is it outwardly unique. It’s just a wide-spreading maple at the top of a small hill near the road. Regardless, something about it has caught my eye repeatedly for well over a week now.

There’s a hayfield next to the tree, and a long greystone wall that holds back the farm beyond and follows the road for miles. So maybe the open space that precedes the tree brings attention to this maple. But there are other maples next to it, behind it, across the street. It is only this maple, with its wide branches, that has captured my thoughts enough to notice it each day, to have it enter one of the bedtime stories I spin for my daughters, to write about it now.

Today I drove past the maple again, and as I approached, it dawned on me that perhaps it’s not the tree itself, but the overall outline of the tree’s shape that interests me. I slowed down and saw the tree in a new way. If one were to follow the top of the tree’s branches--the very points where they meet the sky--one might make a line drawing very much like a dot-to-dot picture that children do in coloring books. This morning I noticed that outline, and I noticed also that it was almost a perfect half circle. That must have some meaning for me. It felt right to recognize it. It was beautiful, round, welcoming--a sheltering arc rising above the field and road.

It took a second look to see it. But something in me must have noticed it right away, and kept calling my attention until I really saw the tree.

Last year I celebrated my 10th anniversary of learning to draw. That sounds too self- congratulatory, so I’ll be more precise. The series of classes I took in 1999 were technically drawing classes, but I wouldn’t say that’s what I found so life-changing about them. Even now I’m not particularly good at sketching, but I absolutely love to do it. There was something life changing, though, in those lessons. I learned to see.

Learning to see? Talk about self-congratulatory. Honestly, though, the world did change for me visually. Everyday things, things that I had lived with or walked past for my entire life--these things suddenly changed. Objects like teapots or screwdrivers, chairs, paving stones, an apple peeler, a pear, a tree--these all shifted from their ordinary selves into lines, and shape, shadows alternating with light. The world undulated with color, and and individual colors broke into strange and exciting combinations. I was practically dizzy with letting my mind re-vise them.

My new perspective distracted and thrilled me for months--I learned all of this while we were living overseas, and it simply added to the exciting, exotic feeling I had of living so far away from home. When we returned to the US, I retained a great deal of my giddiness about “seeing,” but I fell back into a routine and just enough of the magic faded so I could about my life without reeling every time I noticed the color of a glass of milk or the curve of a teacup handle.

In the past few years, I’ve learned a little bit more about how to “see” through a camera’s lens, to recapture an element of what I am noticing in a moment. It’s far from perfect, and I’m not a photographer by any stretch, but some of my photos are good enough for me to enjoy later, and that seems enough for me.

There is a difference to seeing and being seen, and I while I might often have a camera to my eye, I am seldom in front of one. It’s my dread to be tagged in a Facebook photo. I skulk out of view when I see someone swinging a camera around, readying a shot.

I have a disconnect between what I see in the outside world and how I see myself. I look in the mirror, and I think, “Not too bad. Not perfect, but not bad.” I like myself, and for the most part, I like the way I look. However, the scale and my clothing are reminders I need to lose some serious weight, and last month I finally listened. I’m on a good path, and I’ve dropped 6 pounds so far. Again, not bad. I’ve cut sugar from my diet, I’ve been feeling increasingly strong. Most shockingly, I’m actually enjoying working out. I put on my loose(r) pants and head out of the house knowing all of this, wearing my confidence like a must-have accessory.

Last week we visited a goat farm, not too far down the road past the maple tree, in fact. I brought our camera, and got some great pictures of Esme running after (and with) the baby goats. She captured a few for hugs, and so did I. My husband took a photo of me, laughing as I cuddled a soft brown and white kid. I felt a twinge of self-consciousness, then let it go.

I downloaded the photos later that night and discovered, to my disgust, that I still don’t recognize myself.

As fantastic and confident as I might feel, the camera (and everyone else, I presume) sees something different. In fact, people who have known me for only the past 5 years have no other template for Kirie. I’m just that same old chubby mom they see in town (I cringe as I type). I don’t know which is worse--to be only known as the chubby mom, or to be recognized by people from my long-ago life accompanied by a thought like “Hey, didn’t that girl used to be small and cute? What happened?”

I get myself all worked up for nothing, I realize. Do I consider the appearance of my friends? No. These harsh judgements I reserve for myself alone. Honestly, I know that few people even really care a whit about how I look. Oh the vanity.

If one were to look at that photo of me with the goat, to follow the just edges of my clothing--the very points where they meet the sky--one might make a dot-to-dot picture that captures the general shape I fill. It is not a shape I recognize. It is not a shape I claim as my own, obviously.

But like the maple on the hill on North Road, there is something in my outlined and foreign shape, something hidden, something special waiting to be seen. There is more to me than what I must appear to be on the outside.

I am in that in-between time of fat and fit. I am embracing the ambiguity as much as I can, feeling the dissonance of feeling healthy but looking heavy. In equal parts I hate and love this sensation of being in flux. I hate this time, knowing my new feelings are hidden. And I love this time, feeling silently willful, knowing that I can make the changes happen, regardless of how I’m perceived or not. It’s as though I have a secret engagement--one to myself--an engagement that only I and a few people know about. I’ll reveal this new relationship with myself eventually, I know, and I will celebrate.

Greening

2010-04-12T16:40:00.005-04:00

I woke up last week to see the trees in the yard tinted pink and dusty green, on the very brink of bursting into buds. It literally happened in the space between dusk and dawn, it seemed. Spring always sneaks up on me that way, and as much as I try to resist it (and I do, for some perverse reason), I end up giving into a not-quite-but-almost insidious joy that blows in on the warm breeze along with the pine pollen and the scent of green unfurlings.

Poems sneak up on me, too. With perfect timing, this one by Phillip Larkin found me on Sunday.

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Late Winter Bustle and Bluster

2010-02-28T14:19:00.007-05:00

For much of the winter, the winds here have been fierce and seemingly ever-present. When it's really raging, the wind makes a nearly constant droning sound as it courses through the tops of the trees behind the house. For days that sound reminded me of something I couldn't quite put my finger on--something metal and unnatural. Then it hit me--it's like that hollow sound made a marble circling the bottom of a cylinder or metal garbage can. It's an unnerving sound, and yet exciting in that shivery way, too. It makes me want to bustle around the house, making things cozy. My grandmother's old expression forms in my head: "Time to get cracking."

I do bustle. I've noticed that my days have a definite seasonal rhythm, and it's pleasantly reassuring, especially against the backdrop of the wind. Late winter brings a routine that lacks the magic of Christmas preparation, but taps into a deep need for comfort and--there's that word again--cozy. The very first things I do most mornings reflect this. Take a peek in my 7 am kitchen, and you'll see me turning up the heat, setting the kettle on the stove, and, many mornings, starting a fire in the belly of the kitchen woodstove.

I admit I love the pioneer mama feeling I get from doing these things around the kitchen. Is it ridiculous to admit I love bringing in the wood for the stove? Oh yes. But I know I love it only because it's optional. One morning last week, as I was lugging in a bunch of logs, I was nearly giddy with the prospect of feeding the fire. I put the wood into the stack by the stove and paused to admire my industry, stopping just short of hooking my thumbs into my pretend overall straps and rocking back on my heels with a self-satisfied, "Yesirree."

If you met me when I was younger, you would never have guessed that I would be so eager to create an over-folksified version of myself. That Laura-Ingalls appeal has only really surfaced in my adult life. Baking bread, making laundry soap(?!), heating the house with a woodstove--these are all a bit over the top Laura-ish, and doing any of them gives me the same sense of "yay-me!" industriousness. And I'll be the first to tell you that it's a farce. Laura Ingalls, I love you, but I can only go so far. I'm too much a fan of electricity and water and hygiene to do much beyond feign self-sufficiency.

I've been thinking about this lately because some of our mornings are so damn stressful. With the lunches that need to be made, breakfasts burning on the stove, a three-year-old who runs away from me half-dressed when we are pushing to get out the door, and an eight-year-old who always finds "one last thing" that has to be done before the bus comes, tell me this: Just where do I get off thinking that I have time to fiddle with the woodstove to get cozy? At first blush, it really seems that I'm probably adding to my own stress.

But honestly, I think I get such satisfaction from things like this specifically because I do them for no other reason than my own free will. Making a fire when you have a perfectly good heating system is fun simply because it's optional. It's an extra that I do just because I feel like it, and because looking at that little fire chugging along is reassuring. The wood fire is there because I willed it to be. Clearly, it's a sharp contrast to the way my mornings run otherwise, and it's a needed difference that actually reduces my stress. The bulk of time between waking and getting Ada off to school is mostly about doing things not because I feel like it, but because they just need to be done. Starting a day with lighting the stove is like putting a capital at the start of a declarative sentence: I still exist as something outside of the routine; I retain my free will.

I've noticed also that there is a gentleness to the routine of bustling about a woodfire, or kneading bread, it's gentle in the way that smearing cheese on bread and zipping lunchboxes is not. When I'm going through the motions with the fire or the kettle or the flour and dough, I get the sense that I'm tapping into something with deep, primitive roots. I feel connected to a long line of women who nurtured and prodded, and brought forth the morning with the crack of a spark in the stove. The morning routine is lonely sometimes, and sometimes its repetition makes me feel cagey. But there are sisters and mothers, and aunties and grandmothers behind me, tending the homefires as the shadows recede.

What routines do you embrace, or flee? What small actions do you take in the day to connect with something bigger than yourself?

Mind Games

2010-01-12T15:33:00.006-05:00

There is an upside to being suggestible. When I think about my suggestibility, I usually don't think about as a positive thing. Rather, I'm stymied by the countless ways I can arouse anxiety in myself. You see, I count myself among that special group of people who hears about one catastrophe or another in the media, and suddenly finds reasons to believe that I may be the next to experience it. It's not hard for me to imagine, after watching a horror flick, that some ghoul is creaking across the floorboards to strangle me in my sleep. Show me a sandwich that has a bite shaped like the Mona Lisa, and I'll see it, I promise.

Clearly, these are not the upsides to being suggestible. Of course, every cloud has a silver lining, and here is mine: I can play fantastic mind games with myself. I guess you could say that all of that self-induced anxiety is a game, but it's more of a torture. The real games are ones that always benefit me. Here are a few that make life easier for me:

Mindgame 1: Alarm clock

At times, I have terrible insomnia--the kind that interrupts a sleep in the dark hours and pesters endlessly until dawn. Over the years, it's lessened, thank goodness. I've developed a good bag-o-tricks to deal with it. Among my best is this little mind game.

Regardless of the time, I imagine, vividly, that my alarm clock is just about to go off. In the imagined scenario, there is no room for hitting the snooze--I need to be up and ready for some unavoidable obligation, and I need to be ready for a long, long day full of activities. No time left to languish in bed--time to get up, even though the day will be tediously long and full of obligations.

When I do this one right, with convincing detail, I am immediately exhausted. I long to stretch out in bed. My eyes fight staying open. And suddenly, I am back to sleep. Voila!

Mindgame 2: Sitting too long

If you travel, you are bound to have times of sitting and waiting that seem interminable. Being on a runway for hours is probably one of the worst, but even a good transcontinental flight can make you feel restless. Leg exercises may help, but getting relaxed is even more helpful. For situations like this, I call on this mindgame:

Years ago, my brother and I took a train trip across Sweden. As timing had it, we had chosen one of the busiest travel days of the year, and our tickets were for non-reserved seats. Essentially, we were forced to play musical chairs with the savvy Swedes who had reserved seats. Every seat was filled, and so we stood for nearly 6 hours. The only breaks we had were stolen moments when the train stopped to let more passengers on and off. What a relief it was to sit, even for a minute, on those just-vacated train benches. Of course, we were immediately tapped on the shoulder and asked to move by the rightful occupant of said seats. The train ride seemed endless! Being forced to stand so long was a perfect food for my imagination, though.

When I find myself in a situation where I have to sit, I conjure that train ride across Sweden, where sitting was impossible. To do it right, I have to vividly recreate that sense of frustration I felt, that sense of endless standing. Then, I imagine that suddenly a seat is made just for me, one I can keep for the rest of the ride! Oh relief! How I appreciate that seat!

Mindgame 3: too hot/too cold

I'm a Chicago girl by birth, where winters are legendary for their blustery cold. When the wind whips just so, you'd swear you're in the arctic. And the -20 degree reading on the thermometer only sustains that illusion.

Now I live in the northeast, where winter is a different shade of cold--not as biting as the midwest, but a deep-in-your-bones, damp kind of cold. The funny thing is, I sort of love the cold, on most days. However, there are a few times every winter when I feel as though I can't bear it for a second longer. This happened a few days ago after I took the girls to swimming lessons. The pool is indoor, of course, but it's also on a section of the island that opens up onto the bay, and it catches the most direct gusts off the ocean. BRRRR! As we trooped to the car, I pulled out another mindgame to share with my shivering daughters. Here it is:

I imagine that it is one of the hottest days of the year, and we are stuck, our will, inside a stuffy, sauna-like house. There is no air conditioning, no fan, no water to drink. The heat is so heavy it brings up strange smells from the wood and walls, and I don't want to breathe in the sticky air. Suddenly, I discover a hidden (and forbidden) door, a door that leads into a cool room, where the wind is almost icy, and the cold is clear and bright. I step into the room, and the cold feels lovely...such a relief.

This type of imagining works for times that are too hot, too. I reverse the settings, and I can replicate a similar relief in the opposite direction. When I described the scenario to the girls and asked them to make-believe with me last week in the freezing parking lot, the whining (mine too) had stopped altogether, and we found we were all actually feeling grateful for the cold by the time we made it to the car.

If I shrink my own head a little bit, I notice that each of these scenarios involves a sort of bucking of authority to meet my needs. The relief is that much more pronounced because it's a little subversive. Hmmm.

Essentially, what these mindgames seek to do is to force me to appreciate the moment as something pleasurable, not torturous. They only really work if I am really starting to feel tortured by the present situation.

Plato connected pleasure with meeting an intense need. His classic example was the quenching of thirst--how wonderful that first sip of water is after being thirsty. Indeed, these little scenarios of mine do seek to "trick" my mind into feeling that the current state actually does "quench" a need. Instead of seeking to control the situation, I seek to control my perception of the situation. Psycho babble, mindgame, call it what you will--it works.

What mindgames do you play?

One little word for 2010: May it be a year filled with Delight

2010-01-06T08:22:00.014-05:00

Inspired by my friend Irene Latham, last year I chose a single word as a theme for the new year. My word for 2009 was enjoy . It was a great focal word for me, and having chosen it publicly, I thought of that word a lot more in 2009 than I usually would have. Forming the word in my thoughts was like a call to attention, and it forced me to see the happier side whatever situation I was in. Just thinking "enjoy" made me enjoy life more, and that made my one little word take on a significance I hadn't expected.

For my one little word for 2010, I started mulling over choices early, back in November. I take everything so damn seriously, and of course, this was no different. I actually worried, "What if I choose the wrong one?" Ugh. I amaze myself with my own capacity for melodrama.

Fortunately, I let myself relax into the process of considering individual words. Many words stopped by for an audition: focus, dream, here, play, invent, see. Some even had a callback. But the right word was still out there, until it was literally whispered in my ear one evening in early December. Robert Krulwich, of the amazing podcast Radiolab, mentioned how the word "delighted" is woefully underused. It stuck in my head, and I thought of the word the next day as Esme and Ada were grinning with excitement about their new advent chocolates with star shapes stamped on them. A square of chocolate, not even half an inch wide. It was such a small thing, but clearly it produced so much delight. Exactly.

So delight it is, my one little word for 2010. Krulwich is right to say it's woefully underused. I can't think of the last time I heard someone say, "I'm delighted!"

It feels a little old-fashioned, but it's all the more appealing to me because of it. I think it's hard to use the word delight in a time like ours, where campiness and mockery set the tone all too often. Delight is innocent in that it's unabashed. If you are delighted, it's obvious. It floods out of you, into your expression, your posture, your voice. Such clear expression is a gift, to the person feeling it, and to everyone else around as well.

For 2010, I want to be that person, who delights, who is delightful, who feels unabashedly delighted. I want to be in the presence of people who shed their skin enough to feel that, too, to just be filled with it.

To start, I'm leaving the Christmas tree up a few more days, which is a few days later than we would normally leave it up. Yes, the house is chaotic with decorations and new toys and old toys. The crisp clean feeling of a tidy house is still out of my reach. But the tree, which my husband carefully grew for us over the past four years, and which has a sweet little open spot that is perfect for the big straw stars we hang--ah, the tree is delightful. It sparkles against the snow, and it still fits the room, it still feels right there. Frankly, I am still delighted by it. Choosing delight--it stays. I hope to choose such little delightful things again and again over the next year, and notice that flood of feeling that comes each time. I send those wishes to you, too.

What word will you choose for 2010?

2010-01-05T10:53:00.004-05:00

2009 flounced out in a flurry of snow and ice. In its wake, a rush of ideas has been flooding into my mind. I'm welcoming it as much as I'm welcoming the new year.

Like the snow, our holidays were soft and lovely, quiet and restful and--best of all--full of moments where my husband and I would look at each other and feel grateful to be in the moment of such magic. Ada and Esme are at the perfect ages to savor the anticipation of Santa, to wonder at the miracle of how he brings just the right thing, and to enjoy the simple gifts we share during Advent. Ada literally cheers when she gets to eat a candy cane!

This year was perhaps the first that I did not feel overwhelmed with the should-have-dones. I scrapped my big "make a perfect Christmas" list, and decided that just being calm might be the most important ingredient for a good Christmas.

A few years ago, I found myself in a puddly mess on December 17 or so, crying because with my overblown expectations--handmade doll clothes, perfectly wrapped gifts, 20 kinds of cookies to be baked and given to neighbors--there was just no way to do it all. Honestly, my mid-December breakdown was a repeat performance from the years before, too. So, to avoid the personal heartbreak, I decided in November to get ahead of myself and just cut the to-do list from my routine for the month. Things that could be done on a small scale--a candy cane for Advent, a new puzzle, or an afternoon spent making salt dough creatures--these were things I could swing. But with Esme in full-on curious 3-year-old mode, baking cookies by the dozen is beyond me at this point. I give. Say it with me: Kirie is not Martha. In fact, Martha is not Martha. She is Martha plus the legion of staff that is Martha Stewart Omnimedia.

The scale-back experiment paid off, and the holidays were as calm as they could be. And still, I found that the day after Christmas I was exhausted, my mind almost blank. It's a strange sensation for me to be without a plan for some new thing to do, something to work on. I took it for what it was: a rest. A time of going fallow for a little while, to just be.

And you know, on New Year's Day, I woke to the snow and the wind and the great sensation that a new and exciting year was blowing into the world. And like the snow-filled sky, my mind swirled, full of new ideas once again.

Happy 2010! May yours bring you delight.

Remembering my friend

2009-12-09T09:33:00.004-05:00

Remembering, always, my dear friend Kim, who died a year ago today.

Our family had a lovely few days with her family this past summer. At one point during the visit, D. was looking through one of my favorite collections of poems, and it fell open to this one. We all shared an emotion-laden pause, and then read the poem. Ah Kim, I miss you.

Caroline

She wore

her coming death

as gracefully

as if it were a coat

she'd learned to sew.

When it grew cold enough,

she'd simply button it

and go.

Linda Pastan, from Carnival Evening

Panna Cotta inspired by Top Chef

2009-12-04T03:16:00.002-05:00

For some reason, panna cotta appears to be the next go-to dessert on Bravo's Top Chef lately. A few seasons ago, it was the "scallop," whether actual an mollusk or an imitation made from bananas. But this year, chef after chef seems to be making variations of panna cotta. Or attempting them. They mostly seem to fall drastically short of the mark, garnering criticism along the lines of "tastes like a hockey puck."

Having never eaten a panna cotta, much less cooked one, I was nonetheless inspired to make one last weekend. Maybe it was a craving for dairy, or maybe it was just the appeal of such a short list of ingredients: milk, cream, sugar, gelatin, vanilla. Following on Thanksgiving, making something simple and cool felt like a good idea.

Because I've had no experience with it, my notion of panna cotta comes from what I've heard, and some idea that, when done right, it's nourishing in that primal way milk and honey are when mixed together. As for texture, I had the sense that the end result should be a hybrid of gelatin and pudding, with more subtle flavor.

I'll tell you how I made it, and how it turned out. But the most notable thing about cooking this was the peace I found in doing so.

Such a simple thing, stirring milk and cream together. Everyone else was lost in a mid-afternoon nap, and so it was just me and the soft burr sound of the spoon scraping the pan as I babysat the mixture.

I don't often give myself permission to have nothing to do. It's a self-imposed state of frantic, I know. The upside to that is that I am incapable of being bored. One of the downsides is the frenetic thought pattern I make for myself, even when I am supposedly at rest. Ideas, fears, plans, and obsessions flood my mind constantly, often overwhelming me with insomnia. During the day, I feel as though I am constantly moving from one thing to the next. The end result is not a model of productive energy. It's sort of a muddle somedays. Most projects I start never get finished in one sitting, and some never get finished at all.

So finding myself at the stove with a rare quiet around me was a real treat. Even rarer: that silence spread into me, and my mind stilled. I was there, and there alone, just breathing in the cloud of creamy vanilla that rose up around me. The southern window over the stove was filled with winter sun, angling off the glass in a such a way that it fell on half of the saucepan, and made the whorls of milk seem lit from within.

I hypnotized myself into that little pool for the time it took to watch it come to a boil. The watched pot does indeed boil, I thought to myself as I stirred. Leaning on one elbow, I just let myself just give into the whole bliss of doing one thing at a time.

At some point, the milk boiled, and I went into motion to finish it. A stir of vanilla and orange extracts, a quick pour into ramekins, and it was done.

A few hours after dinner, I unveiled the little pots for my family. Ada loved it, which I took as high praise from someone that regularly proclaims "I hate cow milk." My husband and I also agreed it was worth making many more times again, and vied for Esme's abandoned ramekin. (Esme was not a fan--but I'm discounting that, as she is not a fan of most food besides chocolate.)

Top chef or not, I made this version of panna cotta well enough that it is going on my own go-to recipe list because it hit my imagined ideal balance between gelatin and pudding. The cream was neither tough nor runny, but loosely gathered to consistency slightly thinner than a yogurt. It held its shape if you tipped the cup upside down onto the plate and served it that way, but Ada and I both relished scooping it from the little bowls ourselves.

That fragile texture was even better because of the subtle flavor. The orange had cooked off a lot, and what was left was like a whisper. It was hard to place whether it was orange or vanilla I was tasting, and I loved that.

What I liked most was that the whole dessert seemed like a metaphor for the process of making it. How simple it is to imagine taking a few moments to "just be." And how hard it is to do. There's not much to those moments--some sunlight, some stirring--but the subtle flavor of being concentrated on something is something I savor when I give it a chance. And the big thing: it's fragile, it's delicate--like moments themselves. A little something to remind myself...

Here's the recipe I adapted, using a few slightly lighter substitutions from a traditional version:

1 cup 2% milk

3 cups half and half

2/3 cup sugar

3 teaspoons unflavored gelatin (like Knox)

1 teaspoon orange extract

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

pinch of salt

Butter 6-8 ramekins and set aside on a tray. Set aside 1/4 cup milk in a small bowl, and sprinkle the gelatin over the top. Let it sit, with the gelatin floating on top, for 5 minutes.

Mix the rest of the milk and half and half together with the sugar in a large saucepan. Bring it just to a boil, then take 1/2 cup of the hot mixture and add it back into the bowl with the gelatin and milk. Whisk it until it's dissolved, then pour it all back into the saucepan. Stir it all together, add the vanilla, orange and salt.

If you want, you can run the whole mixture through a fine-meshed sieve. I skipped this step, and it turned out fine.

After you strain it, or if you choose not to, divide the mixture evenly among the ramekins. Put them into the fridge for at least 5 hours, or better yet, overnight.

When you're ready to serve them, either leave them in the little bowls or turn them upside down onto little plates. If you do plate them, it sometimes helps to run a sharp knife around the edge to loosen them first. Don't set them into hot water to loosen them--they are too fragile.

That's the basic how-to of it. If you do make it, tell me about how yours turned out. And if you got to sneak a quiet moment for yourself in the process.

Grateful for what might not have been

2009-11-27T11:34:00.004-05:00

It's a time of reflection and thanksgiving, and I remind myself again: it might have been otherwise. I wrote this poem at a time when I was almost consumed with longing and anxiety. Among my desires then: to have a child, to transcend my own childhood and be a grownup, to find some way into what I dreamed my life could be.

Doppelganger

We meet between the glass of frames
And photo paper
And the thirty years
That separate us.

And mostly, you seem
transparent--
Blue eyes looking out
from plans and details
and preoccupations with, premonitions of
long and good
days to come.

In your winter coat and muckluks, you are
bright with snow light
on your cheeks and in your eyes.
And I--
I am there, too.
on my sled,
small and red, veloured and fat-fisted,
not yet a miniature you,
not yet aware of the camera
or the spring that follows.

2
There is a chemistry of shadow and light
on certain nights
when the fan above my bed starfishes
itself across the ceiling,
past the rattling cage of
minutia mind
to the rocky beach
of memory.

I stand on the shore
skipping thoughts along the flashing lake
singing in clean strokes across the water
until they sink
like obsidian into oil.

And here you are again,
but opaque to me
This time.
And it's clear to me that
those captured, auspicious moments
left a world of questions
out
of the frame.

What must you have thought,
worried over, as your own night-
beach tumbled into your room
and roared you awake with its waves?

3
I have learned that
if I touch the glass, or
ruffle through papers
or sing stones over water 30 years deep,
I can imagine you as
Another me.
And for a moment,
I can see the world outside the lens.

And as for the me that was then, well,
She
is lost at the bottom of the oily lake,
Waiting
(for now)
for a tide.

K.R.

originally published in Red River Review

Purple and green

2009-11-23T06:06:00.013-05:00

Spring this year hang on well into the summer, and, in a fitting symmetry, autumn is doing the same thing.

That translates to some really beautiful surprises in the garden, like the few handfuls of supersweet raspberries and strawberries.

And in wandering around the yard, I've discovered some gorgeous and unexpected color, especially purples and greens. Sometimes the purple is seems just a natural bleed out of the red of the summer color, as it does on the setum flowers. But look at the lamb's ear below, and it's hard to pinpoint the season: it seems almost springlike, the delicate blossoms just peeking out from the leaves like a glimpse of a petticoat.

The combination of green and purples resonates with me, maybe because it's got an interesting complexity--not all sweetness and light, but some beautiful shadow, too. I get an almost tactile feeling thinking about them---they just feel good to carry around together, don't you think?

In a nice coincidence, I've had purple and green on my mind lately. My cousin is getting married next year, and she is contemplating using all sorts of purples and green tones in her plans. What lovely ideas she has! She's started a blog called Bridalhood to document her inspirations--and it in turn inspired me.

So I grabbed my camera, and started looking more intently for purple and green--and found it everywhere this fall, in all kinds of interesting contrasts.

The lavender unfurled yet another crop of stems, too, which my husband brought in for me in sweet little vases yesterday. Smelling fresh lavender in the room in November is a little secret thrill.

The thyme flowers bloomed again, too, in tiny violet whispers on the wiry stems. I love the contrast of the glossy green leaves, the spiky stalks, and the almost orchid-shaped flowers which, individually, are tiny enough to fit onto the heads of pins.

Hydrangeas blend the purple and green so perfectly--not only in their blooms, but in their leaves.

I see these fanning out from the hydrangea stalks, and the word varigated swims into my thoughts and sticks there like a little tune.

In fact, I start noticing purple in all sorts of leaves in our yard:

These mates of our pachysandra (I forget their names) are normally a dark green, with cornflower blue flowers, but they've faded out to a fantastic shade of purple/brown.

The blueberry leaves with some raindrops are even more tenderly purple--maybe catching the color of the sky.

And as the sleepy rhododendrons go dormant--their leaves get dusky as over ripe plums. And it's surprisingly beautiful.

So with all this purple foliage and flowers, I felt inspired to make a flower of my own. Here is a paper hybrid of some sort which I fiddled with recently.

I enjoyed shaping the paper, incorporating different papers and inks. I found some old maps of my cousin's home state, and a few pages of interesting text to add to the petals. Finished with a few beads, some wire, and some ribbon--ta da.

Influenza Series, Part IV: The tricky part for me--making sense of risk

2009-11-18T22:52:00.002-05:00

I started writing this series on influenza because I felt compelled to write about my fears--both the reasonable aspect of them, and the more extreme. My goal for each of these posts is not only to show some of the research I've done, but also to let you into the workings of my mind on this. The photos of clockwork gears that you see throughout are my attempt to represent that process.

I said at the outset of this post series that my worries about H1N1/09 are only amplified because of my own tendencies to crave control and fear illness. A fear of illness, is, of course, an ultimate expression of the need for control over chaos. I recognize all of this about myself. I'm constantly grappling with my judgement about risk, questioning whether my worries are based in logic or not.

In most areas of life, I know that from time to time I downplay real risks, as a way of minimizing my worries, and I know that, conversely, sometimes I overcorrect by being too cautious. Fortunately, what was once more of a constant obsession now only surfaces from time to time; when these worries do surface, they don't stay long.

However, in the spring of 2009, the advent of H1N1 brought my anxieties about health into clear, focused energy once more.

I remember I was in our kitchen, cleaning up the dishes from a Sunday morning pancake breakfast when I saw the first footage coming from Mexico City. The headline said something about influenza, and the reporter was wearing a white face mask. My own transformation was extraordinary. A fear that I had set aside years ago came roaring back like a wind in my head, and I abandoned the dishes to follow the story.

As the numbers of infected and seriously ill people in Mexico were reported, I grew more concerned. The new classification as "swine flu" made me think immediately of 1918. I told a few people about my worries for what may be coming down the pike, feeling like a Cassandra.

Meanwhile the world spun neatly on its axis. Spring blossomed in our yard as quietly and gently as every other year. The sky, to my relief, did not crash down. H1N1 continued in its elegant way to infect people all over the world, enough people, in fact, that the WHO declared it pandemic by early June.

For the most part, I kept sane about it. No, I didn't stop traveling, nor going to public places like theaters. But I did have that nagging feeling that this fall may bring a surprise with it.

Now we are well into the fall, and I feel the pull between the reasonable and the extreme each time I consider the "what to do" about the H1N1 situation.

What I'm doing:
I'm attempting to get the vaccine for us. Ada has had one dose, and needs a followup that may come by January. Esme and I have had no luck in locating one, though I check clinics a few times a week. My husband should get one at work, but--like everyone else's--his vaccinations have been delayed.

I'm also practically swimming in alcohol-based hand cleaners. The girls are pretty well trained on washing up after every trip outside, and before meals, and after visits, and on getting in the car...and so on. Ada tries to be conscientious about that stuff at school, as much as she can. And I have her change her clothes when she comes home from school.

When a whopping 20% of her school was out, we kept Ada home for over a week. After 10 days, it was my hope her first vaccine had at least kick started an immune response against H1N1. A leap of faith for me, but...

I beg off shaking hands, saying "Oh, I've got a cold." Inoffensive, I hope--effective? Who knows? But it make me feel like I'm at least doing something...

What I want to do (but don't):
If I think about it too much, I sort of want to hide in our house. I get nervous about going to a big public gathering, especially one where there are lots of other little kids who sneeze, and wipe, and do all that gross stuff kids do (hey, I know--my kids do it, too.) I want to huddle down in our own little nest and just wait it all out. I want to beg or bribe or get that vaccine right now, and cross my fingers and cast some special spell to keep the flu away from us.

You might have noticed that many sensible and rational people, given the same facts, have a less alarmist reaction about getting this year's flu, or getting sick in general. They trust that whatever happens won't be so bad, that either it's no big deal to start with, or, if it does get to be a problem, that someone will take care of it.

Both of these sensible reactions are based on trust, and as I examine my own fears, I realize I don't feel it. At least not in this capacity. My own concern about the influenza outbreak this year is based on fact, yes--but it is amplified 100 times by my own insecurities.

As I've brooded, I've also tried to see my own process of worrying in an objective way. What is setting me off, I've wondered? I've wondered this especially as I find myself watching a newscast and replying back to the television, retorting something a reporter said about influenza. Why am I acting like this? This is not where I want my energy to go--into stridently arguing with a reporter on tv. Or reading every little thing I can about H1N1. When I step back far enough from myself, I can see that what Kirie is doing is called obsessing.

It's hard to admit that. It's hard to say that what I perceive as a real threat might not be as real to someone else. It makes the ground under me feel shaky. But the fact is there: my obsessions might be based on fact to start with, but they spiral way out of reach of normal at some point. And they tend to be related to my own need to control my environment, to create an illusion of impenetrable safety. On so many levels, I crave predictability, because it solidifies that illusion, like a playback loop whispering: all is well; you are safe. all is well; you are safe.

I've said that this year's H1N1 influenza scenario hits all my panic buttons. Essentially, for me it created two perfect storms. One of those storms is, certainly, the reality that this is a pandemic. The other storm is clearly in my mind--the storm of unpredictability and distrust.

The first issue for me is the unpredictability. The virus is unpredictable, and easily spread, even by people who seem well (because it is contagious even a day before symptoms appear). What appears to be one thing: "just flu" or "don't worry, I don't have it!" might be something else entirely. Of course, the flipsides to these (the ones that slip my mind too often) are a) most people who get sick with flu WILL NOT find themselves at death's door, and b)most people who are walking around town are not in a contagious state of influenza.

The second issue for me is the trust. Basically, I don't trust people in general to take this flu seriously. I really don't trust people to wash their hands, to cough in their sleeves. I don't trust that there will be adequate vaccinations for people who want them *before* the virus peaks. I don't really trust that a cold is just a cold at this point. If I hear someone is coughing, I'm assuming it's flu. I don't trust the media to give a clear portrayal of what flu is, or isn't. I don't trust the government to really stay on top of tracking the changes of the virus, to put funding toward a new method of making the vaccine. I don't trust people to believe me. (Ah, the irony!)

I don't trust, I don't trust. I hear these all strung along in my head as I write this and I feel another feeling echoing it: I feel lonely. That Cassandra-like sensation of being disbelieved is, at its heart, isolating. And overwhelming. Feeling isolated and overwhelmed are cues for me that my worries are not completely related to the influenza pandemic alone. Really, my worries are rooted in my past.

A little headshrinking: My childhood was relatively chaotic--my parents, though they loved me, were somewhat absentee. The day-to-day of my life was far from predictable, people's emotions were volatile--my own, my brother's, my parents'. My own physical environment felt out of my control, and very different from that of my peers. I often felt different and alone, and misunderstood by most people. I could not, if pressed, have imagined what my future would look like. I didn't really trust that I would have a real adulthood--because I couldn't imagine what that could be.

Of course, my adulthood did come to be. Sometime in my early 20s I discovered that I could try to shape my own existence a little. And in my grown-up life, I have predictability in abundance. Calm rules the day--literally, it leads the list of our family rules, which we have written out. Sure, there is the messiness of life with little kids, but it is joyful, and welcomed. Trust is the keystone between my husband and me, between my kids and me. I often catch myself saying to them, "You're doing great. You can do that. I trust you." And I do trust them. I have, as an adult, become faithful in a religious sense, and I trust God, too.

So--here is the contradiction, right: With all this goodness, and all this solid trust and predictability in my life, why worry? Why indeed? Because as much good and beauty as I see, I also get glimpses into the underbelly of life, too, and it unsettles me, deeply. There is room for both, I know. A need for both, in fact. I am practicing holding both the beautiful and the dreadful in my mind at once, and letting it be.

It was not my hope in writing this series to spin up fears, but rather to show how the genesis of my own worries about influenza. I also hoped that writing through my own thought process would help bring some clarity to me about why I have become obsessed. If you have gotten this far into my posts, you must see that, as a threat, influenza sits neatly someplace between something very scary and something to be brushed off as inconsequential. When you consider it, it's best to recognize both extremes as unreasonable, and try, as I am, to find some middle way.

Yes, H1N1 is frightening because it does have a potential to become a terrible flu--one that resembles 1918. Actually, that potential is in every influenza. Given those facts, any objective person would admit that flu shouldn't be taken lightly.

But of course, the potential is there for this to NOT become a deadly flu. And the numbers indicate--in fact, they indicated this in 1918 as well--that the vast majority of people who get influenza recover. Given those facts, any objective person would admit that hiding from the world doesn't actually mitigate the risk--the minimal risk.

The scary potential and the benign potential exist simultaneously, all the time, in all actions. Just writing about that uncertainty makes me catch my breath. I refocus, I breathe, I vow to accept that calmly. I have to push myself to remember these things, but I do. I do push past them and go out into the world, send Ada back to school, take Esme to swimming class, make my art, have playdates, Halloween parties, and see my friends and neighbors. To meet me, you would never guess at the contradictions wrestling each other in my mind, but they are there. And someday, I hope, to accept them without anxiety.

If you are interested in catching up with the rest of the series:

Part I: The Introduction

Part II: A Little Primer on Influenza

Part III: The Anti-definition of Flu

Part III on Influenza: What it is not. An anti-definition

2009-11-17T10:26:00.002-05:00

It is the negative definition of flu that concerns me.

At its core, influenza is not a simple disease. From an evolutionary standpoint, it's pretty damn elegant and efficient. And complex.

There is a lot that is understood about influenza and its method of evolving, infecting, and persisting. But a huge part remains unknown. For instance, scientists have discovered the "how" of influenza infection, but they are still working toward understanding what actually happens to the human system when influenza infects it.

This surprises me. When I first learned this, I was amazed that that science hadn't answered this long ago. But there are countless mysteries that remain about the human immune system, its response, and the exact process of many diseases.

A particular mystery of flu is why certain cases of influenza have such horrible systemic complications. These complications, usually involving lungs and circulation, can arise rapidly from flu. These are the most troubling, and the most fatal. There is a point of no return when a flu turns aggressive, and the mystery is often this: it is impossible for a doctor to determine at the beginning whether a specific case will involve these complications or not. This is true even with seasonal flu, but predicting outcomes is even more difficult with a novel influenza.

Before you stop reading and accuse me of being alarmist, let me clarify that in terms of percentages, there is still certainly every reason for to most cases of influenza infection to resolve without any serious complications for the patient. Most people who get flu--seasonal or even pandemic flu--recover without a problem.

The numbers are more complicated than they seem, though: To talk about the scenarios of infectious disease is to talk about variables. The outcome of each case is based a whole set of variables, some of which are unknowable. In a regular season of influenza, some of these variables are better understood. For example, a person with a weaker immune system (think of an elderly or immunocompromised person) will tend to be more at risk for a severe case.

With a novel influenza, the scenario is sufficiently different. There are several new considerations, each which influences the potential for poor outcomes:

First, with a novel influenza, the number of people who get sick is much larger than it is in a regular year with "seasonal" flu. This year, some projections from the CDC estimate that up to 60% of the population in the US will be infected with the virus. This is vastly different from the estimated number of people who get flu in a regular season, which caps at around 20%. More people getting sick means more potential outcomes. That's the first variable.

The second consideration regards who is getting infected. A novel influenza affects entirely new groups of people, people who usually aren't as vulnerable to infection in general. 2009's H1N1 is hitting young adults and healthy children pretty hard. The elderly, who are usually the most vulnerable, are not getting this flu in the same numbers as the younger people in our population. There is some speculation that some older people may have been exposed to some element of the older genetic material of this year's H1N1, and that is making them slightly less likely to get infected. With that said, though, when the elderly do get it, they are quite sick--and they one of the larger groups hospitalized for complications related to flu this year.

A particular variable that concerns me regards the elusive nature of flu as a virus. Consider these points:

Flu is a common illness, but--surprisingly--it's often an unknown quantity. It's not always easily diagnosed at the bedside, as there are a whole host of "influenza-like" viruses. The symptoms of flu can vary widely from person to person, from something that resembles a cold, to something closer to pneumonia. In particular, this flu is presenting with *no* fever in some people. This, again, makes it trickier to diagnose. Even a test for that's done at a doctor's office is not 100% reliable for determining if the patient has flu.

There are several types of rapid tests used in clinics, but they all operate in mainly the same way: they detect influenza viral nucleoprotein antigen. To put it simply, the rapid tests search the sample for elements of protein from the influenza protein. What these tests can't do is determine specifically which subtype of flu a patient has. Unfortunately, samples vary, and not everyone who gets these rapid tests gets an accurate result. The CDC advises clinicians that they should not rule out flu based on this test because there is a possibility of a false negative (the test says no flu, but you actually do have it). And again, there are false positives, as well. The tests that do the actual subtyping of flu are the ones done by the CDC and by state health departments, and these are accurate, but expensive, and time consuming.

Flu is constantly using several mechanisms to adapt itself. Antigenic drift is happening all the time with flu. The flu circulating now will not be the flu that circulates next year, or perhaps even at the end of this flu season, in the spring. That constant change just adds to the uncertainty.

All of this--these variables, this shifting, these spaces in understanding--it all indicates flu is nothing if not more complex than it seems.

Which brings me to the next definition of what influenza is not: It's not "just flu." Though it may be a common ailment, it shouldn't be taken casually. It teeters on that edge of dangerous, even in years of regular old seasonal flu. A novel influenza, such as this year's H1N1, falls off that edge into dangerous territory more often.

Because it is a new virus, with genetic components from avian, swine, and human influenza, this year's H1N1 seems to have triggered a very, very robust immune response in some people, especially healthy young people. Pregnant women also have a huge immune response. Unfortunately, there is a limit to what good that robustness can do. There is some speculation that, at some point, the immune response can actually overwhelm to the body, creating what is called a cytokine storm. Think of it as too much of a good thing. One theory about the cytokine storm is that it creates a sort of "feedback loop" among the antibody response, and that this contributes to the collapse of the respiratory and circulatory system.

There is a lot of work being done on this topic right now, and here is an excellent explanation of what a cytokine storm is, and some great discussion of the topic in general, if you are interested. While the jury is out on the exact mechanism of the cytokine storm and how to mitigate it, it certainly seems to be present in the worst cases of influenza infection. Whether the cytokine storm is a cause of death, or a result of the infection itself--this remains unknown. At this time, cytokine storm remains one of the mysteries about influenza infections, but once understood, this knowledge might make a huge difference in changing the outcome of severe cases.

In 1918, the pandemic was caused by a novel H1N1 influenza. The numbers of people affected with serious or fatal cases was (fortunately for us) much higher than what we are seeing with the H1N1 circulating this year. But there are certainly similarities in the populations who seem to be having the most severe cases. Pregnant women and young adults suffered disproportionate numbers of complicated cases in 1918. And this year, pregnant women and young adults seem particularly vulnerable to influenza infection, and more likely to suffer complications once ill. With all that is unknown about influenza, this much seems clear: this year's novel influenza is more dangerous to more people than a seasonal flu.

And that's why my alarm bell has started ringing...

Some more about that, and the personal reasons this might be affecting me, in the next post.

Part II on Influenza: a little primer to add to the barrage of information you've already gotten

2009-11-17T05:46:00.001-05:00

Part II: Yet another primer on influenza

I know everyone is inundated with information about influenza these days. Still, a little about the basics makes sense in the context of my post, so here goes.

I've seen quite a few gaps in the explanation offered on the evening news, and I'm going to make an effort to fill some of those in. In the process, I hope to perhaps debunk a few of the myths that are circulating about what flu is and what it isn't. Bear with me, or skip ahead to part three, if you like. You may, with good reason, question my medical background and authority to write these definitions. No, I am not a doctor. But I am a great researcher, and what I have compiled here is based on that:

What influenza is:

A super-simple way to think of influenza is as a virus with an outer "shell." The shell is studded with two distinct glycoproteins, one which is sort of long and spiky, and one which is sort of squat and mushroom-shaped. Long and spiky is called hemagglutinin, or "H" for short. Shorty mushroom-shape is an enzyme (also a protein) called neuraminidase, or "N."

When a specific influenza is categorized, it is typed according to the proteins present on its shell. As of this writing, there are at least 16 variations of the "H" protein, and nine of the "N" enzyme. When you see "H1N1," you are seeing a name that refers to the types of surface structures on that specific strain of influenza.

Influenza is also categorized into types A, B, and C. These classifications, which dates back to the 1930s, offer a basic means of determining a variety of influenza, but they are quite general. The H1N1 circulating in 2009 is Influenza A.

When a type of flu is called "novel," as this year's H1N1 happens to be, it refers to a "new" strain of flu, essentially a combination of genetic material that hasn't been circulated before in a human population. The bits of genetic code in the novel flu aren't immediately recognized by most human immune systems. And all of this translates to more people becoming infected. People who study pandemics are especially interested in novel influenza.

How it is transmitted:

You know the basics about this: Tiny airborne particles from those already infected will expose you to the virus. You get these from breathing them in (from someone's cough or sneeze--ick!), or from touching a surface on which these little guys have been camping out. (By the way, they can wait patiently for a host for anything from a minute up to 48 hours, depending on the surface and the environment.) Once it gets into you (through your mucus membranes like eyes, mouth, nose), it basically turns you into a flu factory. The mechanism of how flu infects its hosts and replicates itself (humans and animals) is fascinating and frighteningly efficient. For a great example of a video that depicts it, check out this piece by Harvard's Medical school.

How it changes:

Influenza is a constant invader to humans because it's highly adaptive. First, the proteins on the surface change pretty frequently. Each change makes a slightly new virus, one that is newly unrecognizable to the human immune system. This is why the seasonal flu from last year is always different from the seasonal flu the year before, and so on. In an attempt to help create a wide range of antibodies for those vaccinated, each year's vaccine actually includes bits from several strains circulating the year before.

Influenza has yet another trick: when it replicates its RNA, the virus can exchange bits of genetic material with other influenza variants, even variants that infect primarily animals. This is why some strains of influenza have genetic material from avian or swine flu, or both. This year's version of H1N1 actually has all three.

What actually happens when a person gets infected with seasonal flu:

You know how this one goes, too. The symptoms of flu are generally related to the human immune system trying to expel the virus. Generally, after a 1-4 day incubation period, influenza has an extremely quick onset, that hits a person like a ton of bricks. Common symptoms are the headache, body aches, fever, chills, shaking, cough, sore throat, and weakness. If it's flu, you are flat-out sick in bed for at least 2 or 3 days, and more likely 5-7. Basically, it sucks. It's not uncommon for a cough to hang around after flu for up to 5 weeks, and post viral weakness can linger, too, for several weeks, especially in adults.

And for novel H1N1? What happens?

Well, keep in mind first that H1N1 is an influenza. The symptoms are similar. But because it is an influenza, it also has a range of symptoms and severity. I think it's worth noting that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has stated that a fever is not always present with this flu. The cough seems to be universal, as do the aches, fatigue, and sore throat. The incubation time is similar to a seasonal flu (1-4 days), and the recovery time is similar as well, but a person is contagious for at least one day after the symptoms disappear and--more problematic--a full day before the symptoms begin. Additionally, there is some speculation that the virus continues to be contagious several days after symptoms have abated, especially in children. The symptoms that can linger for weeks include a generalized weakness and a cough.

That is the very basic outline of what flu is. But my concern about influenza, and this particular strain, has more to do with what flu is not, than what it is. And that is the subject of Part III.

Part I: Intro to why I started thinking about influenza

Part IV: The Tricky Part for Me: Making Sense of Risk

In-flu-enza: A post in several parts

2009-11-16T06:07:00.001-05:00

A multi-part post in which I alternately stand on my soapbox and step down to muse a bit.

There was a little bird
Her name was Enza.

They opened up the window,
and in-flew-Enza.
--American jump-roping song popular in 1918-1919

PART I: Flu on my mind.

I've been debating for months whether to add my voice to the cacophonous bluster about flu that fills our media these days. I'm writing about it here because the whole pandemic influenza thing is not a new worry for me. I've been wary of it for many years, probably because it hits all my sorespots of worry and illness and control. I'll get more into that in the third part of this post series. For now, hang on for a bit while I hop up onto my lecture/soapbox and explain a few of my thoughts on it.

If you know me, you might well know that I have been, at times in my life, a fantastic worrier. But I'm also pretty damn willful, and I've been willing myself to let go of that worrying tendency. Over the past five years, I'd say it's actually starting to work.

Sometime in my anxiety-ridden twenties, I discovered completely by accident that I loved reading about history. And it brought an added benefit: visiting and studying the past was soothing, comforting. I am nostalgic at heart, and a sucker for a story--it's amazing it took me until my twenties to cultivate an interest in history. As I read more, I found myself not only drawn into the stories, but also calmed by the greater fact of history: the fact that life goes on.

Of course, looking to the past presents other problems. History is unconcerned with neat endings or safe outcomes. The past is, in its essence, a place peopled with figures who, right or wrong, with dignity or with disgrace, lived--and died. To embrace history is to make the admission that we, too, recede into the past; our lives will become simply remnants of stories, bits of ephemera that fade away.

Did I say earlier that I had willed myself away from worrying? That history soothes? Because that last paragraph is nothing if not melancholy. But as I consider history, I find a strange comfort in the juxtaposition it presents. Thinking about the past offers that rare chance to hold in the mind, simultaneously, the ideas of both mortality and hope.

The events of the 1918 influenza pandemic distilled these feelings for me, when I stumbled onto it. As I learned more about it, I had the feeling of discovery, as though I had unearthed some weird secret of the recent past. Of course, it's getting its fair share of play right now, but for decades, it was a largely forgotten story.

My interest in what happened in 1918 fostered a curiosity about influenza in general. And what I hope to do with this next posts is to share some of my thoughts and attempt to make some sense out of pandemic flu since I started thinking about it years ago.

Pandemics are nothing new. And--this part is important--pandemic does not necessarily mean deadly. Pandemic just means a disease significantly "spread worldwide." Simply because a virus has a high infection doesn't always necessarily mean that it's deadly for many people.

But influenza is a tricky virus, and it *can* be deadly. It's that unknown element that makes it frightening.

The past 900 years of European history is peppered with accounts of entire countries or continents being besieged with deadly respiratory disease. We would certainly consider these pandemics today. Many of these aren't well documented, but the descriptions that do exist bear a striking resemblance to what we know as novel influenza. Of course, the most well-documented pandemic in history is the one of 1918, which killed upwards of 50 million people worldwide. As a comparison point, consider this: 675,000 Americans died as a result of the 1918 influenza, more than twice the number of Americans who died fighting during World War I.

When I first encountered them, these figures stunned me. I mean, come on. Flu. Everyone gets flu once in a while, right? A sore throat, a fever, a few days of rest---and it's gone. Flu is no big deal, right? I was incredulous that the flu actually killed so many otherwise young and healthy people. My initial, childish reaction to these accounts came from fear and ignorance: I scoffed at the limits of medicine at the time. What a long way we've come since then, I reassured myself. Nothing like that could happen today.

Still, my curiosity had been piqued, and I read anything I could about 1918. And then anything I could about influenza in general.

The picture that started to form in my mind was less ill-informed, and more frightening. The pandemic of 1918 was a perfect storm of circumstance, and it was not unlike what is happening now with the 2009 H1N1.

I want to be clear: I'm not implying that history is repeating itself. The H1N1 virus of 2009, while similar in makeup to the virus of 1918 , is not the same virus, and the scenario is obviously different. I do not believe that the strain of influenza (Novel H1N1/2009) circulating at this point in time will kill 6% of our population. I do not believe we are seeing the beginnings of story to rival The Stand, or the bible (how strange to see those in a sentence together). Still, some things happening now with the current strain of H1N1 give me pause. And my alarm bell, though admittedly prone to go off, has started ringing.

Part II: A Primer on Influenza

Part III: An Anti-definition of Influenza

And to skip to the reason on why I, in particular, am concerned:

Part IV: The Tricky Part for Me: Making Sense of Risk

Halloween Redux 2009

2009-11-01T08:38:00.012-05:00

It's funny how I can spend over 4 weeks sewing a costume that gets worn for fewer than two hours. And stranger still--I still think it's worth it. For the details of the whole sewing process, see here. Or here, for the planning part.

Ada loved her costume! She swished and flowed and floated around the house with a few friends who came for a Halloween lunch of macaBoni and cheese, and slimeade.

After a couple hours of "swimming" around with the tomato, the kitten, and Esme (who wouldn't dress up for lunch), Ada and her friends decided to become kids again, and we put the costumes away for the afternoon.

Esme enjoyed dressing up, too. Though from the photo below, it's hard to guess! She was itching to just get out and march through the neighborhood. Esme's real love was the candy, I have to admit. We are in the midst of bargaining now to limit how much she eats, and I have designated tomorrow as the official toss-out-the-candy day. (I will probably stash away a couple of little chocolates for them as treats, but don't tell!)

Aside from their playdate with friends, the best part of Halloween was handing out the candy. They loved to see all the other kids and Esme, to my delight, even gave away some of the candy she'd received. All in all, it was a frightfully good Halloween.

Mermaid costume endnotes

2009-10-31T09:37:00.000-04:00

Mermaid, mermaid, blah, blah blah. Anyone who's talked to me in the past month has had their fill of hearing about sewing this costume. Still endnotes are productive for future projects, and for anyone interested in sewing something similar--maybe I can save you the time of reinventing the wheel.

So, here are a some notes on the costume making, for those of you who are interested in such things...

A few lessons learned:

Ada's scaly blue tail was a perfect fit, but because I sewed a blue sequin border where the blue tail meets the fin, we lost some of the stretchiness of the blue scaly fabric there. As a result, Ada had a bit of a challenge walking.

I made the cape with the idea that it was going to be cold, and, for the first time in decades, it wasn't. The evening temperature was around 68 degrees! Fortunately, the cape is something that will work for magician play, or fancy dress, and it's reversible. I'm hoping she gets more use out of it.

As I was attaching the bodice to the scaly tail, I realized they didn't match: the bodice was too wide, and the tail was too narrow. After some reading, I realized I could probably make a few darts in the bodice to decrease the waistline. I had no idea how to do this, so--more reading. After some fiddling around with samples, and lots of ripped stitches, I got four darts into the waist, and--big grin here!--it worked.

The biggest time-eater was sewing a lot of this by hand, from attaching all the sequin tape to putting the layers of the bodice and tail together. My hand sewing is atrocious, but maybe it got a little better with the practice...one can only hope.

The fin was tough to fit onto the scaly tail--it flattened out at first, so I sewed a little triangular piece to each side to make it more circular (essentially I made two gusset-like pieces, I think), and then suddenly it had dimension.

I did decorate an old pair of shoes for the costume, too. I used pale pink sequined tape, glitter, and some little shells. But because I glued all of this onto the shoe--they were too stiff! Ada shuffled around a bit and admired them, and then we decided to just keep them as a decoration.

My favorite parts of the costume:

I really love the entire cape. It's hangs well because it's got some weight to it. I used a heavier silk lining for the dark blue, and then I used batting between the layers to add warmth and heft. And I was pleased with how the ruffled collar came out. It was my first stabilized collar, and yay! It worked. My favorite part of the cape, though, are the plackets on the cape armholes. I taught myself how to make these, so I don't know if they are technically right, but I think they look really nice, and they make the cape look that much more elegant on Ada.

I lined the entire costume with a green stretch satin, and I loved the color so much I wanted to pull it through other elements. I made the piping for the arms and neckline with some of the sparkle organza wrapped around the green satin. I really liked this, and I'm going to find a way to use this fabric again.

I also used the satin to make a little tape to ruffle out around the edge of the bodice. It's tiny next to the piped border, but I think it's a sweet little detail.

The tail is really fun, and was neat to watch come together. I used four colors of an sparkly organza called "fairy dust." To make the tail, I used an interfacing base, and then added layers of different colors. Then, for the flowing part of the tail, I used unfaced bits of organza just cut in wispy shapes. We lost a few of these on the trek through the neighborhood, but that's okay--it still looked fishy!

If you are sewing your own mermaid costume, I would be happy to offer any advice--drop me an email!

Mermaid costume in process

2009-10-29T04:15:00.000-04:00

If you've spoken to me in the past two or three weeks, you know my studio is awash in mermaid-like fabric.

Here are some peeks at what is happening at the sewing machine:

This is a partial view of the tailpiece. Stretchy blue, and a neat compromise between lycra and vinyl, it's perforated with little half moon shapes, which seem to perfectly suggest scales.

I attached the tail to the bodice with a little piped border. In the process, I learned how to make darts to pull in the bodice fabric. Everything has a little stretch, so the end result should be snug on Ada, but only to the point of fitting well.

This sparkled organza is flowing and crisp at the same time, and it makes for a perfect tailfin. I'm putting together pieces of blue, green, white, and pink, and layering them. The base piece has interfacing sew in as a base so it is pretty stiff, but the other pieces are loose. My goal is to attach them to the tail in a a V-shape, then add a border along the top to neaten the edge. This element has taken longer than I anticipated!

The part of the costume Ada loves best is the sequined bodice. I am sewing sequined trim tape to the top in strips. Talk about taking longer than I anticipated! I have been up late many nights with a needle and thread as I catch individual sequins and anchor them to the satin. To save some time, (and to be sensible about who is wearing this thing), I decided only to sequin the front of the bodice. The back will remain plain satin, which will be much easier for Ada to sit in.

There are other details I'm working on: shoes, a shell necklace, and a cape (it's cold on Halloween night!). I'm hoping I finish them.

And all of this because....well, because it's fun to try to learn to do new things, and Ada's face when she sees each step completed is a fantastic motivator. She appreciates all the things I make, and she is learning how to do these sorts of things herself, too.

I'll post the final results this weekend!

Because the mind of a toddler is ever-changing,

2009-10-27T08:37:00.007-04:00

a wise grownup should not commit to a handmade Halloween costume.

Halloween is not a huge holiday around here--that is to say, we don't go all in for the decking out the house all things spooky, and most years, my husband and I don't dress up.

But the entire month of October is filled with costume-making activities for Ada and Esme. We actually sometimes start the sketching and fabric hunt as early as August. Ada and I love making designs and poring over fabric colors and textures. And by October 1st, the studio is noisy with the whirr of the sewing machine, and my under-the-breath mutterings as I stick myself with pins or rip misjudged stitches.

I rip a lot of stitches. As soon as the fabric gets into my hands, the costume becomes less about Halloween fun, and more about how I can learn from the sewing at hand. I get obsessive about trying new techniques, experimenting with lining, or seam finishes, or little embellishments. I have to stop from time to time to remind myself that this is just a costume, and that Ada will love it regardless.

I admit I almost feel guilty about how much I like the whole process. If one of my friends coos over "what a good mommy I am" for making the costume, I'm quick to correct her that this is really not the altruistic act she thinks it is. Once that fabric hits the sewing table, the costume really becomes selfishly and deliciously mine. As obsessions go, it's pretty tame. But it's a bit magical just the same, I think--the sensation of the fabric changing form is wonderous. With some cutting and stitches, it goes from a flat, smooth square into something with dimension. And if I am lucky, it somewhat resembles what Ada requested in the first place. Win for her, win for me.

This year, Ada has decided to be a mermaid, and true to form, I have gone overboard (very punny). I will post more about it in the next few days after I've taken some decent photos of it in process, but for the meantime, think: Sparkles! Turquoise! Texture! Oh, and a lot of pin sticks for me.

As for Esme, well--she is a toddler, and her interests change from day to day, or sometimes from hour to hour. I had the ambition to make her a fancy, fringy, leather-skirt-and-vest kind of costume costume when she first declared she would be a cowgirl, but five costume ideas later, I gave up on sewing anything for her this year. That same day, we stumbled over this Dalmatian costume at Old Navy, and we decided it was perfect. Esme has worn it for many days now already. My only fear is that she will decide that, come Halloween, the Dalmatian costume is too "everyday." Ah well.

Ada's costume is draped over the back of my sewing chair, singing its siren song.

Must. Finish. Soon. Ada reminded me at breakfast that there are only three days left before she needs it. Wish me luck!

Balancing Act and a Time Audit

2009-10-14T13:26:00.007-04:00

Like every other woman I know, I spend altogether too much time trying to "achieve balance." The fact that that tired phrase includes the word "achieve" is telling. It's held up as a goal for the modern woman; being balanced is an achievement, balance is a treasure we "find."

I've been thinking of this a lot lately. I go through projects in fits and starts, and sometimes I berate myself for not being able to do all the things I want to do in a day. But recently I started reevaluating my standards for completing things. Last month, I caught myself ending a string of days with a sigh of resignation that I "didn't do enough." That was a clear signal that something was indeed out of whack: my perspective.

I love the idea of having a balanced life, a picture perfect combination of rest and activity, of giving to others and cherishing myself, of order and chaos, of consumption and saving, of social activity and alone time.

And why wouldn't I love that idea? Consumer media feeds my desire of such a life with images of a sleek woman in a lotus pose, or a neatly put-together "mommy" type person vacuuming her home with the super-efficient Dyson, or whatever. I'm admittedly hungry for approval, and so a perfect patsy for advertisers who prey on that need. I buy into it, and chase after balance in my life.

The funny thing is that as much as my imagination would like to run with these images and flesh out the details of such a "balanced" creature, I cannot. I can picture pieces of that life, sure: the put-together Kirie, lithe, made-up, wrinkle-free. I imagine patient hours with my kids spent in spotless spaces of my kitchen, my studio. Nutritious dinners, which I have prepared, are eaten, without complaint, by our daughters, and evenings with my husband are quiet and long.

Nowhere in my imaginings are the real nitty-gritty of day-to-day. Into what spaces does the balanced woman squeeze the following?:

the endless washing and folding of laundry
the scrubbing of dishes
the tidying of toys and books and markers that creep under chairs and couches and everywhere else
the reading time--how one book turns to ten books, and afternoons are dreamed away with a curious toddler cuddled in a lap
the continual process of reorganizing spaces--drawers, cabinets, shelves
the packaging and mailing of gifts and letters
the coaxing of said toddler into naptime, or bedtime, or getting dressed time, etc.
the visits to friends' houses, the entertaining when a friend visits ours
the baking--for school, for friends, for our own cookie jar
the endless sweeping and vacuuming
the workout--and recovery!
the self-care time, from a simple shower, to a self-manicure, to keeping my eyebrows neat
the fixing of all things broken--from the leg of a Playmobil deer to the toilet paper holder that's come out of the drywall
the cleaning of spills, from milk to scat
the spontaneous walks or outings or explorations that lead us away from the house for untold hours
the late night "pop ups" from the kids, with worries about monsters, or excitement about caterpillars
the mommy-time reading--from books, to blogs, to the newspaper--that fills my mind as I move through the other tasks of the day
making any kind of art at all--from music to painting
the phone calls to and from friends
the slow and savored time spent gathering fruits and flowers from the garden
the whole chase of groceries, from shopping to putting things onto shelves
the minutes (or hours) that can be lost because you sat down, and were too exhausted to get up to finish any of the above...

What of these? The advertisers have left these out, the most pleasant, most repetitive, and most necessary parts of the day.

I give up. The logical part of me sees this list and recognizes there is absolutely no way I could complete all of this in the space of a day, or even in a week. I would be crazy to even attempt it. So no more berating myself for not doing it all.

My daily schedule is like a balloon, with finite space in it. Squeeze one end, and the excess air will have to go somewhere. If I take time to do one thing intensively, it will steal time from somewhere else in the schedule. It does not all fit into the small space I've been allowing. So obvious! But I'm only just now starting to recognize that.

Perhaps, over the course of a month, I do have some kind of equilibrium. Regardless, the majority of my tasks these days seems to focus on making order or the illusion of it. Instead of fighting it, I'm trying to accept it as part of life at this stage. As I get older, and our kids get older, I imagine that will shift slightly away from chasing after toys and spills, and into the very different focus that teenagers bring. I recognize that my mix of activities will always include some need to control chaos around me, as well as my need to create new things, whether it be a painting, or a quilt, a costume, or a song. These are endless chases of their own, each pleasurable and challenging in their own way.

With my revised view of balance, perhaps my goal instead should be to look at whether my life is balanced as a whole, as a long line of days that each offers opportunities to indulge in the repetitive or the generative. It seems to me to be a much more forgiving and reasonable perspective. Maybe, if I see it that way, I will start to see I've "achieved" the elusive balance already.

The shifting nightscape of my insomnia

2009-09-20T09:27:00.024-04:00

I sometimes have insomnia, the kind where you find yourself wide awake at 2 am, mind racing.

The river of thoughts that rushes through me at these hours used to be frightening. I would torture myself with a full spectrum of what-ifs, which spun my nerves more tightly with each round, until it was all I could do to lie flat on the mattress. During the first years of our marriage, my poor husband would sigh as I slid out of bed and fled toward the study. There, I would turn on a light and read or write, and wait for a feeling of "normal" to pull me back into my life.

This habit of getting up and doing something became an easy habit for me, and one that only made my insomnia worse. If I could grab a last hour or two of sleep before I showered for work, I felt like I had "slept." To my surprise, I managed; in fact, I thrived during the day. The light itself was a tonic, a revelation that everything was okay. And in the middle of the daylight I marveled at how clean and safe everything seemed. It felt impossible that the shadowy loneliness of my wee hours could coexist with the happy days I experienced. I look back at that time, and I know that I must have propelled myself through the world on sheer nervous energy.

The funny thing is, I never dreaded going to sleep. I loved our room, our home, our cozy life. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, and my dreams were mostly rich and sweet. It was the slow, dark hours I hated, while I worried myself into a frenzy, my mind buzzing at the low frequency of the traffic on the interstate outside our loft.

In college, years before I had my own sleepless nights, I shared a dorm room with a girl who had chronic insomnia. She was the first person I'd ever met who talked about it and accepted it as a part of her life. When I woke to use the bathroom at the end of the hall, the half-light from our window revealed Lisa in the bed across the room, her eyes wide open and fixed on some spot on the ceiling. Almost always, she would roll over on her bed to greet me in strangely chipper yet sotto voice, "Hi Kirie!" Amazingly, sometimes she would start to engage me in conversation, as though I had just returned to the room after a class.

Lisa was probably only 20 years old, but she was as sensible as a real grownup. She never complained, but instead just took her insomnia on her own terms. Her solution: the radio on her Walkman. During those post-midnight hours, she tuned her radio to AM talk radio hosts, and they lulled her off to sleep just before light each day.

Knowing what I know now, I probably would have made a point to waken just to talk to her. The hardest part of my own insomnia was the loneliness. The otherworldly feeling of the wee hours comes not from the darkness so much as the absence of other people. No wonder Lisa welcomed my waking so eagerly. How I would have loved to wake my husband to talk with me on those interminable nights in the loft!

My insomnia pursued me through several moves, the arrival of our oldest daughter, and some practice with meditation. But, by some stroke of grace, once I got into my mid-thirties, the river of thoughts started bringing fewer and fewer anxieties with it as it coursed through my 2am bedroom. The darkness started feeling less oppressive, the dusky forms of our dresser or the curtains less threatening.

I stopped retreating to a lighted room, and resolved to instead feel the night settle around me each time I woke at odd hours. And on many of those nights, something resembling a calm came to me. Sometimes, I would even find that I could get myself back to sleep. By some small miracle, more and more of my nights were spent sleeping. Insomnia has now become only a sometime companion for me, and for that I am grateful.

When the formula in my life is right, the river of thoughts resumes its path through my night room. But bobbing along with it now are ideas, plans, things to puzzle through. When I wake up at 2 am these days, I am not buzzing with what-ifs. I am dreaming of projects, I am mind-writing, I am hearing music in my head. A few weeks ago I even caught myself practicing the fingerings for a song I'm learning on the piano. It is still otherworldly at night, but now the world feels charged with possibility instead of dread.

When I was younger, waking to the knowledge that I was the only one conscious left me gasping. And far from comforting, my husband's rhythmic breathing made me only all the more aware of how far away he was when sleeping, as though he had receded from me and into his dreams. My panic was practically tangible, like a whispered, frantic mantra of "I'm alone! I'm alone! I'm alone!"

Something has shifted since then, certainly. And perhaps it's because I'm distracted by my burgeoning list of projects, but I no longer feel so lonely when I'm up with my thoughts. Or perhaps I feel more secure in my marriage; fifteen years with my soulmate has taught me something more about trust, and I no longer feel he has fled from me in his sleep. The house itself offers its companionship. Far from frightening, the house at night envelops me, welcomes me, and nurtures some excellent ideas for all the things I enjoy making.

There is still the silence, but it is laced with the sounds from the woods outside our window, the foghorn on the bay, the thrum of the cats as the sleep on the bed. When I do want for a facsimile of human interaction, I find I crave voices. Last year, I realized I could, like my old college roommate, listen to stories through headphones, and I started using my ipod during my night wakings.

Hearing the whisper of a storyteller is intoxicating. I've found that with these voices in my ears, I'm soothed to sleep, but at the same time, inspired by the stories themselves. I've been discovering an unexpected energy in the spoken word, an energy that carries over into my perceptions of the next day. And, most surprising, I have actually started relishing my sleepless hours as quiet opportunities to just listen and dream my waking dreams.

Repost: The sky was blue on September 12th, too...

2009-09-11T07:38:00.002-04:00

Like so many other people this week, I found myself lost in thoughts of eight years ago, remembering. Indulge me as I take a detour from the tone of my normal postings, and reflect on where I was this week in 2001...

Do you remember how blue the sky was? All along the east coast, it was a stunningly clear day, bright and clean, and a welcome reprieve from the summer. A perfect fall day. Normal, everyday, happy. Until. Until the phone call from my husband that sent me to the television, and we saw the second plane hit.

You know the story from there. We all do. The phone lines were jammed; the news, stammered by reporters as stunned as we were, became an instant addiction. The world tilted for me as the pentagon was hit, then as the impossible happened--the towers fell. I was convinced then that more terrible things really could happen, and would keep happening. Anxiety, not a stranger to me on any day, was overwhelming that afternoon. The day was wrongly beautiful. The sky, eerily silent and empty of any planes, was sharp with blue and cloudless, yet the birds and crickets continued to sing, the sun continued blithely across the sky.

Lines from Auden's poem, Funeral Blues, kept popping into my mind:

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The sky was perfectly clear on September 12th, too. And I was, admittedly, at a safe remove. I was near Washington DC at the time, but not in it. But "safe" was something I wouldn't feel for a long time. The low drone of fighter jets crossing the sky all night woke me for weeks, and comfort eluded me for much longer.

2974 people died in those attacks that day, and our world did indeed tilt off its comfortable axis. Peace to their souls and their families...

Because I am learning to focus

2009-09-01T11:25:00.001-04:00

I'm learning to focus on what I like to do, and (at least in terms of art/craft), I am going to start delegating the things I don't truly enjoy.

With some shame, I admit it: I don't really enjoy quilting. Well, to be more exact: it's the the quilting part of making a quilt that I don't like: you know, the part where you stitch the top, batting, and back, together. I love the feel of a finely quilted quilt, and I know lots of talented quilters, but I don't enjoy it enough to put in the time to do it well. There. I said it.

I do love making the quilt top. I seem to always come up with a plan for a quilt design, and I have many quilt tops in the works, but doing the actual quilting has been such a task that I've postponed finishing the pieces I've started.

This summer, in the middle of my frenzied organizing/cleaning/refreshing/repainting, I discovered a beautiful quilt I'd made for Ada with the many of the same fabrics from her baby quilt. Above is a photo of the baby quilt, which I did for her while I was waiting for her as a baby. During that waiting time, I had so much frenetic energy that I made dozens of projects for her room, including the twin-sized quilt I found in the armoire this summer. As I examined it again, I realize had made a good start on it, with putting the layers together, and beginning the quilting, but there was a lot of work left on it.

Ada found me with the newly-found and unfinished quilt, and looked at it with such longing. I wanted to finish it for her, but frankly, the idea of cramming it into my machine to try to quilt it left me feeling overwhelmed. Suddenly it came to me: There are people who do this sort of quilting professionally. What if I found someone to do this for me? And guess what?

Ada's quilt was finished by a lovely lady with a longarm machine and a talent for fixing my assembly boo-boos. Ada and I are both really pleased with it. Ada and I worked with Sharon to pick a design for the edges--Ada chose butterflies--and wow!

Now I'm ready to move on to piecing Esme's baby quilt, which has been on hold for, oh, about three years. My new friend Ms. Sharon will be doing the quilting part, and suddenly I feel the inspired energy to pick up that project right away. I think knowing I don't have to spin my wheels with the quilting has made me feel more free to enjoy the process of sewing the patchwork.

What's funny is that feeling okay with delegating is a huge deal for me. I'm a do-it-yourself kind of girl, and delegating runs counter to that. Or maybe not. Because--especially with artwork--if I can peel off a few things that I don't love or that take more time than reasonable--then I will have more time to do things with my husband and girls, and more time to make things and do things that really make my heart sing. With that in mind, I am going to embrace a little delegation so I can really enjoy the work in my hands as much as possible.

Message from a Cornet Case

2009-08-28T15:57:00.007-04:00

In some of my favorite types of fantasy stories, a person is able to bend the constraints of time and space and communicate to their future or past self. I find this notion endlessly fascinating—what would I say to the Kirie of 20 years ago? What would she have to tell me? Would she look at the 40-year-old Kirie with skepticism, or admiration, or worse—shame? Just imagining the possibility to encounter my future or past self sets me aflutter with excitement. I hope that’s something I have in common with the Kirie of 1989. Enthusiasm seems to be a common thread in all the times of my life, and it’s my aim to buoy that feeling forever.

Over the past few months, I’ve revisited an old enthusiasm of mine—a love of music. As things happen, we recently got a piano, and both Ada and I immediately started lessons. Ah, wonderful thing, that piano! Ada and I literally debate about who will get the next turn to play, and by my best guess, is that at minimum, we are playing an hour a day, every day. Ada is playing with equal parts precision and passion, and it is a pleasure to listen to her play. Esme has given the music a try, too, but she is still a little small to play the keys. Her contribution is mostly singing with gusto, and dancing with abandon to our songs.

I have never formally played piano before, but I have been an avid admirer of those who can. When I was a teenager, I loved to sing and to act and (try) to dance, and I was often around amazingly talented peers who could do all three with skills beyond their years. One girl in particular was especially gifted not only with a hauntingly lovely voice, but an innate sense of music that allowed her to play and compose rich, beautiful songs that seemed to come from some special place that only she could access. Vickie was so talented that when she would perform or practice, I literally felt chills run down my back. I was in awe of her then, and it pleases me no end to think that she still is composing and singing today.

When I started lessons on the piano, some element of myself felt as though I had stepped back in time, to that space when self-made music was such a part of me. How much I had wished I could play piano so that a real song would come forth, something I could sing to, and carry in my head all day. As soon as I started working with our piano teacher, Ellen, I had the sense that that long-closed door had opened wide for me again.

Ellen understood immediately why I was looking to learn piano. Certainly, my interest has nothing to do with performing recitals or padding a resume or impressing anyone. Rather, it’s that I want to find another way to let some beauty into my life. Music is its own language, and while it’s been awhile since I’ve used it, I’ve been longing to return to it for years.

Ellen’s teaching approach has been to work with me to learn the basics of piano, but also to let me push ahead, to play with composing and improvisation and things a beginning student normally wouldn’t do. It is thrilling! At night I am dreaming of music, and in the day, my fingers are playing the notes on imaginary keyboards, somewhat obsessively. And it is such a pleasure. I’ve been working out very simplified versions of songs I love to sing, and I found out that I can play a few songs from basic beginning songbooks. It is so fun to sing and play with the girls—and this after only a month of lessons!

Ada, too, is learning the basics, as I said, with precision. But Ellen also has her feeling the passion that goes with writing music on her own. With Ellen’s help, Ada has written—with notes and time signatures!—small songs about flowers, and butterflies, and our cat. And in the process, Ada’s learning is progressing exponentially. She’s not only reading the words, playing the song, the rhythm, and singing—she is able to read the notes as well. I was bursting with pride when, after her third lesson, she was able to effortlessly identify each note on the treble clef scale by name. She is a quick study, and she is falling in love with the music, too. I couldn’t be more pleased.

And, as things so often do, the music has multiplied. We’ve been playing rhythm instruments like wood blocks, maracas, the triangle. And I’ve pulled out my old cornet, a two-toned beauty that I played for six years when I was a young girl. I surprised myself, when I could immediately play songs for the girls, and I was able to teach them how to “buzz” on the mouthpiece and get some nice blares out of the instrument. Imagine the sound of an elephant’s cry, and you’ve heard Esme’s playing. Not bad for a two year old.

It was with the cornet that the message arrived. On Sunday, as I opened my battered cornet case, I found the most amazing communiqué from my past self. On a 4 x 6 note card, scrawled in green ink, was a to-do-list that was so typical of me that it might have been written last week. But the date on the top of the card was Thursday, August 7, 1992.

In August 1992, I was on the very brink of a life change, but I didn’t know it. Those days full of routines marched me closer to a series of important days arriving only months later: The day when I would leave an abusive relationship, the day I would meet the man I would marry, the day I would graduate from college. And all those days flowed toward lovely today…but what was I to know of that future as I contemplated what needed doing on Thursday, the 7^th of August, 1992?

On Sunday, August 23, 2009, I sat on the floor of my studio with my open cornet case and I mused about the oddities on the old list: 5 loads of laundry? And this before being married with children. And tanning? What was I trying to do to myself? Nylons?

Mostly I wondered why this list was there, nestled carefully in with the mouthpiece. I flipped the card over, and some childlike attempts at musical notation answered my question. It was a song—I had been writing down the notes of a song, clearly something I could play on my b-flat cornet.

So I picked up the cornet, and played with some surprising ease the song I’d tried to capture in late 1992. And as I did so, a bouncy, 22-year-old Kirie materialized along with the ending verse of Chet Baker’s “How Deep Is the Ocean.” --The verse? "And if I ever lost you/how much would I cry? How deep is the ocean/How high is the sky?"

Yes, that fits. Message received. I think about that Kirie who comes back to me with those ringing notes, and I smile to think about how intense I was! How dreamy! I loved that song then, and hearing it fresh from the bell of my horn, I love it still. And that younger Kirie, as clear as the ringing notes, tells me to play the music, to hold onto that childish dreaminess. If I could send a message back to her, it would be: Thank you for visiting me! Please know that I hear you, and thank goodness I remain as enthusiastic, dreamy, and intense as ever. Thanks for the memo, sweet girl. Hang in there—your dreams are going to come true, and some wonderful amazing things await you.

As for how to deliver that message—I leave that to playing the music and seeing where it takes me.

Mid-July update, and Esme's first faces

2009-07-12T12:37:00.012-04:00

As with all summers, this one is flying by faster than I had imagined it would. I've only a moment in between projects, so I'm making this my shortest post ever.

I'm still in home improvement mode, working my way around from room to room, refinishing, re-organizing, repainting. It's pretty gratifying. I've been doing a little (very little) writing, some painting (on canvases), and I'm in the throes of finishing a quilt for Esme. Ada's baby's quilt was done on time. Esme's has been delayed for two years already! Time to get it done. Plus, it's just so inspiring to work with the fabric.

Of course, I am still making little things for an Etsy shop-in-the-works, and things look good on that front. Next week, I will be listing my first paintings for sale.

Esme and Ada are little artists themselves. Esme has been practicing circles for a few months now, and just recently started adding features to make faces. Here are two of her latest beauties. She asked me to put one on the wall, which I was proud to do. We keep looking at it and smiling!

More to come from the blogfront soon. Hope your summer is full of happy moments, too.

General Guidelines for Girls and Lipstick

2009-06-30T09:13:00.003-04:00

When you choose a lipstick shade, make it one or two shades more intense than your natural lip color. Or, for a more dramatic look, choose a brighter color.

If you aren't used to wearing makeup, get some help from your best friend. She will give you an honest opinion of how it looks.

Be aware that you may have admirers, and you should treat them with kindness. After all, your beauty is irresistible!

If you are having someone paint your nails, it is a good idea to have something good to read while you wait.

Your smile will always be your best beauty accessory.

A Small List

2009-06-29T09:55:00.010-04:00

1. Rainy weather is good weather. A cool front has settled over our island, and the weather has been extraordinarily cool and rainy for weeks on end. I love it. I'm not in good company, though. Each trip into town, I invariably run into someone who moans and groans about how awful the summer is so far. I hold my tongue and make sympathic-sounding noises, but really, I want to say: "Ah, but don't you love how cool and green the mornings are? Look how much money we are saving on air-conditioning! Isn't it better to have this than a drought?"

I keep my silence because I could go on and on, enough to alarm my fellow islander. In fact, I am surprised myself at how much I love the weather. I especially love the strange feeling of mystery that comes along with the unseasonable foggy days. There is none of the melancholy that comes with the autumn fogs, no whisper of fading or death that the fall inevitably brings. Instead, there is just this pure, green, freshness in the fog, and it's exciting in some way, like something powerful and interesting and new is right around the corner.

I've also caught myself spending more time at the window, especially when it rains. My favorite thing to watch is the quick moving storm that drops rain so thickly that sometimes it looks like a curtain, and then, just as suddenly, it fades to an airy, lacy spray. On those afternoons, as soon as the sun smudges yellow against the clouds, the girls and I shout "Rainbow weather!" and run out into the yard to find one.

I have been walking in the mornings, and the air is heavy with the smell of honeysuckle and mimosa. The humid air doesn't discriminate about which scents it carries, and it's an olfactory map of our neighborhood. I like to imagine that if I close my eyes, I could tell by the faintly sick and musty smell of the turtles that I am near the pond to or by the wave of the smell of horses, that I am near the little rise in the road. On clear days, the water of the pond flashes blue and bright, and the leaves are silvery in the sun, and that is lovely too. But as I said, there is something special about the dense feel of the air and the light on a misty day. I think it makes me want to walk around in it more, and that can only be a good thing.

2. We are in a fix-it mode, as our house is about to celebrate its 4th birthday. It's clear that we need to attend to the little things projects now in small increments, or suffer the house needing more extensive work later on. Among our projects are cleaning out the garage, painting the outside trim on the doors and northern windows, cleaning the windows themselves, hanging blinds, repainting trim and doors inside, and repainting any areas that have excessive wear. The list keeps growing, but I must admit that doesn't detract from my happiness when I cross off an item I've completed.

The biggest and most intimidating is the painting. I might enjoy painting a canvas, but I am really poor at painting a wall, on which you are supposed to eliminate brushstrokes. I'm practicing and hoping to get better as we work our way around the house. My husband is much better at making it look neat, so he gets to do the second coats. It's slow work, and the rain makes me space out the steps--prep, tape, paint, paint again, touch up. In between each of these is the cleaning up, and the waiting for the paint to dry or the rain to stop or in some cases, both. It's paying off, though. The laundry room is done, and bright and happy in an orangey shade called Nasturtium (honestly, though I hate the vagueness of paint names, I love the names themselves. Regardless of how it actually looks on the wall, nasturtium has sweet ring to it, doesn't it?). I did the laundry room first because I spend enough time there, and it may as well be cheery and clean. Plus, it's a good testing ground. If I ruin it, I'm the only one who would really notice. I'm glad to say that it came out perfectly. Yay me. Now to get the stuff in there folded, ironed, and put away.

The front door was a more obvious place to begin, and we've been working on it in little phases. As of this morning, it's done! I just put the finishing touches on the front porch by polishing the aluminum threshold. I put away the polish, and felt the good gratification of a job well done when I stepped back and saw our red door and clean white trim. I think I'll keep walking back over there to give myself a mental "pep talk" when I feel like quitting...

3. In all of this, I have been writing in the lucid way that comes when you are writing in your head. The repetitive motions of moving the paint brush, wiping window sills, or pushing an iron are all equally monotonous, and in that, they are equally freeing. Ideas, phrases, and sometimes fully-fleshed out paragraphs come to me while I'm engaged in non-writing activities. And it is writing. I've always believed it so. When I was teaching, I even took the risk of telling my students that "writing in your head" counted. It does count, because even when it's in your head, it's clearly writing, differentiated from regular thinking because it's formed with expression and structure and-- and this is the the biggest difference--an inescapable desire to save it onto paper. Of course, when you're writing in your head, you are the only reader, but it's important to remember that the self is a worthy audience, perhaps the most valuable audience you have.

Now don't go imagining that I gave credit for "writing in your head" when I was teaching. As I would point out to my students, while writing in your head counts, writing counts even more once you put it into text and share it with someone. It was my hope that giving them permission to ponder and listen to their own writing voice would improve their confidence. I like to think it did. When I read my students' work, it was obvious to me which students allowed themselves the space to form their writing before they actually wrote it. Their writing was that much stronger, their "voice" that much clearer.

My voice is coming clearly to me these days, as I wind around the pond. I'm eager to share some of it with you in the next few weeks.

Open Heart Letter 4: to my Mom

2009-06-14T12:33:00.015-04:00

Because there is not enough space and time, this is a short take. For all the love I have for you, Mom, it would eat the bandwidth of the internet...

To my mom:
As I write this, the kitchen is filled with the scent of peonies, and I cannot walk into the room without imagining you are here visiting me. How I wish you lived closer to us so we could spend time doing just the very basic ordinary things of life. We could pick the flowers in the garden together, fill the vases, wash the dishes, knead the bread. These are simple things, but I know how much you appreciate them and the space to enjoy them. It is one of my dearest wishes that you have that opportunity to take a breath and just be in the now, relaxed and free.

I know that when I was a very little girl, you spent many hours in the now, keeping house, baking bread, trying new recipes. You sewed my Halloween costumes and bedspread (and matching Holly Hobbie curtains!), dusted and vacuumed and helped me make lemonade for selling in a tiny stand at the end of the driveway. My mind was a fertile place of imaginings, and you kept me safe and cozy and let me wander in my own little world. In the process, I know you inspired my love of a homelife, and it continues today.

Of course, in those intervening years, you lost your own time to do those things. The business you own with Daddy actually owns you. It is a harsh master, and you have been in its service at the cost of your own desires. For all the good and opportunities it has brought you (and many, many others), it costs you a little bit of your dream each day. I ache to think of it.

What I admire is that in everything you have done for others, in all you have sacrificed, you remain sunny, bright and lovely. You did not have the best start in life, you have been handed a fair share of meanness in a variety of settings. But you rise above it all, and shine. It's funny: you are not unlike the peony in the garden, flourishing unexpectedly in the sand. You are quietly strong, filling the space around you with beauty, generous with yourself. You are unforgettable, and once someone meets you, they instantly love you.

I am constantly astounded by how many people flock to you. Each sings your praises, and makes a point of reminding me of how special my mother is. "I know!" I say, and I do. I think it is wonderful how you shine so clearly. "I am so lucky," I tell them, and I mean it. What a great gift I have in life to have you as my mother. I don't fail to think of it every single day.

Amidst all of it, you remain unsure of your own value. Humble as always, you doubt your own worth. You fear you haven't done enough. You, who is always, always doing things for others. I will be quick to remind you that you are so very much more than you do, you are extraordinary. And if you didn't do those things, you would still be extraordinary you. You are bright, and dedicated, and enthusiastic. Your optimism is contagious. Your energy is sometimes intimidating! You are lovely, and funny. You have many obvious talents, and just as many undiscovered! (While you doubt it, I know you have a great eye for color and an aptitude for art if you would let yourself try!) I wish you could see yourself the way others see you. I will not tire of reminding you that you are very, very special. Oh, how we all love you so very much!

It's a great coincidence that your given names describe you so well: Bonnie, of course, the beautiful. And Angela, the angel. You're those things, and so, so much more. I love you. I can't tell you that enough. But that won't stop me from trying.

I love you.
love,
Kirie

Coming Along

2009-06-07T10:41:00.006-04:00

I am a good cheerleader for myself. When I'm working on a painting, you might hear me talking to myself softly, saying, "Well, he's coming along."

The he in question here is Zeus, a lovely dog who belongs to my friend Dana. And while I don't know Zeus well, he is pretty strongly set into my thoughts these days. He comes along with me wherever I go; you might see me staring out into space sometimes lately while I try to figure out how to capture the brindled colors of the fur near his right eye. The photo above is a not-quite finished version. But it's close. This morning I've been puzzling over the details of his snout, Dana's hands, and those tags...If I am lucky, I will grab another hour this afternoon, and he will be done! What fun it has been getting to know him.

I must say that it amazes me that he even looks like a dog. I am not an artist by training, but I am one by will. This year marks 10 years of my practice with drawing and painting, and I feel as though I have more projects in my mind than ever. And lucky me, a few of them are close to completion! Zeus shares my thoughtspace and studio with 3 other paintings that are also "coming along." It is a quiet thrill that I carry them in my head as I go through my day...

UPDATE
Esme's naptime gave me chance to put the finishing touches, et voila!

Here is Zeus, just waiting to be signed and put in the frame. It feels great to finish a project.

UPDATE Again! Okay, I'm obsessed. Here he is, done, framed, signed. Whee! The last step is to get some nice giclee prints done so I have some copies. Now to get the skin tones blocked in on the beach painting.....

Not sparing myself the humiliation

2009-05-28T18:42:00.010-04:00

Is it not normal that I love embarrassing moments? Regardless, I do. I love them especially if they happen to me. That’s not jinxing myself, I hope, because I don’t need a ton of them. What I’m saying is that I just really value the collection I have. I love having those memories because they make me laugh at myself. I think there is something wonderfully freeing about re-envisioning yourself doing something ridiculous. And I love laughing. Give me a good and funny story, and I will laugh about it for weeks.

Today my friend La Belette Rouge posted a hilarious account of a recent embarrassing moment, and so I’m taking her cue and posting an account of one of my own moments of humiliation. I have quite a few, but this one is near the top of my list. It happened in 1993, and it has been worth years of laughter for me:

A little background first. I did not grow up a sporty kid. I wasn’t completely a klutz, but I have never been on a team sport; I don’t have that natural grace of someone who is a practiced athlete. But I do love trying new things, so over the years I’ve enjoyed a few attempts at more or less adventurous activities like rock climbing, or kayaking, or skiing. It bears mentioning that I didn’t try any of these until I was into my 20s, when any hopes of being a “natural” had long dried up…

Anyway, I had an amazing opportunity to visit the Olympic sites in Norway in late 1993, just weeks before the opening ceremonies. My parents took us to Oslo with them, and then, in the interest of skiing, my brother and I made a trip to a town just north of Oslo, a place called Oyer, in Lillehammer, Norway.

In preparation for the trip, I had gotten an adorable little ski jacket and snowpants, great goggles, ski-cap, etc. I was prepared to be cute if not good at skiing. I danced around in my little size 4 outfit and dreamed big--who knew? Maybe I would be good at this sport!

We stayed in a strange little hotel that had giant keys for doorknobs and a stagnant pool that felt like the set to the horror film. I couldn’t help but conjure images of trolls with big hands turning those key-shaped handles and languishing in the scummy pool. But I digress.
Bizarreness aside, there was an air of magic to the whole trip, and I felt like I was about to discover something special on my first skiing experience. Yes, that’s right. My first skiing experience was to be on the same hill where there would soon be Olympians competing….what an honor! What a thrill!

The grand plan was for me to get a lesson from an expert Norwegian and learn the right way from the beginning. Ah, plans. The first problem was that we arrived an hour early for the lesson. I figured I would play around on the bunny hill, just getting used to the feeling of skis on my feet. My brother, of course, was an excellent skier already. He had been on the high school ski team for years, and he didn’t want to waste any time waiting for my lesson. So off he went.

I put on my skis in the warm little ski hut, shuffled outside, and found out that skis are HEAVY. Or these skis were. I had been expecting to “shhh” across the perfect snow, but I felt myself fighting just to move forward. I really needed some practice, so I headed over to the tow-rope that went up the bunny hill.

The bunny hill here was actually a bunny hill. It was small, and seemed accessible, and it was populated by at least 20 little kids who flew down the hill effortlessly. Some of them had to have been younger than 3 years old, and most of them had no poles at all. These were clearly the future ski instructors of the area. I was intimidated, but I pressed on to the tow-rope.

This tow-rope was a pretty simple contraption—a continuous rope that was punctuated by little buoy-shaped pieces that you were supposed to grab, slip between your knees, and rest on. The strong motor in the wheel-house did the rest.

The little skiers grabbed the rope as easily as they cruised down the hill. I watched them for a few minutes to see their technique, and then I made my first attempt.

I got in line, grabbed the rope, sat, and ….tipped over to the right. No go. Maybe I didn’t have that buoy-seat right. Try again. And again. Same thing.

By the fourth time, I was getting some good advice from a few of the kids. "Let your skis pull you.” “Keep hanging on.”

All good advice. No go for tries 5, 6, and 7. Now a little crowd gathered. The wheel house guy made a point to stop the rope completely when it was my turn now, and made it go very, very slowly. Still, I fell off. Great. My cheeks may have already been red from the 10 degree temperature, but I can assure you they were warm with my blushing by that time.

Mr. Wheelhouse stopped the rope, came over to me, and explained, in very slow and deliberate English, the method the kids had shown me a few attempts earlier. He went back to the wheelhouse, turned on the rope, et voila: I fell off.

At this point, a weird American guy I had met earlier at our hotel showed up and tried to rescue me. He had registered very high on my creep-o-meter when I’d spoken to him before, that feeling just increased as I saw him him charging up the hill with a here-I-come-to-save-the-day grin on his face. My stomach curdled a bit.

Creepyguy had taken off his skis to get to me all the faster, and he was running. Before I knew it, he was standing next to me in line. When the time came for me to try yet again to get on that cursed tow rope, Creepyguy stepped up behind me and, without even asking, sort of bent down, leaned into my back, and tried to push me up the hill. (If he had asked, what would that have sounded like anyway--I cringe just to think of it.) Despite his best efforts to shove me, I didn't budge one inch up the hill.

I had been laughing and smiling, and even waving a few times to the growing group of gawkers, in that sort of self-effacing “got it under control” kind of palm salute. But I swear, this time I was close to tears-- you know the kind, the ones that start as a laugh but end in big sobs. So, with Creepyguy still at my backside, and with the rope tugging mightily at my knees, I started the big laugh-cry. Then I lost control again, and tipped, but this time, I fell onto my back and into the center ditch between the up-rope and the down-rope.

I lay there like a overturned beetle, my arms and ski-heavy legs flailing above me. That was it, I decided. I think there was pointing, and I know there was laughing. I was going to be done with this and I planned to beat a hasty retreat to the spooky hotel.
The only upside was that at least Creepyguy had stepped to the side. So I lay there, planning my escape for what felt like a long time like a sad ski-beetle, laughing those big tears down my face until Mr. Wheelhouse came to help me up. As he reached to grab for my arm, he got a good look at the bottom of my skis, and he smiled a big smile that showed all those lovely Norwegian teeth.

“Miss, it is your skis! They are iced.”

I had no clue what that meant, but within a minute or two, I had a ski instructor at my side, removing the skis to show me that the bottoms were indeed coated with a good inch or two of clumpy ice. Instructor Arne (to be pronounced AR-Nuh), was to be my very own instructor, and he quickly fixed me up with a freshly waxed pair of skis that were not warm enough to gather an icy coating, and what do you know?

I got up the tow-rope.

I put my humiliation out of mind for my hour-long lesson. During my lesson, I managed to get down the hill several times, too, without injury or incident. Arne, poleless as the two-year-olds whizzing around, skied in front of me, going backwards at high speeds, and insisted I grab for him if I felt myself falling. Arne, wherever you are, you were nice, but that is just not a position I want to get into, ever. I think the thought of plummeting down the hill in his embrace was enough to keep me upright.

The lesson ended in time for the sun to set at 3:30 pm, and my brother met me at the ski house as I was returning my skis. “How was it?” he asked.

On the scale of embarrassing moments? I give it a 10. And worth 16 years of laughs, at least.

Now your turn: What is one of your best embarrassing moments?

On Memorial Day

2009-05-25T17:11:00.004-04:00

Memorial Day is a day of grilling and celebration, children eager for the end of school, pools and beaches newly reopened. It's a time to celebrate the beginning of a vibrant season.

Of course, we all also know the bigger significance of the holiday, but it's not the focus of the "celebrations," is it? Perhaps it's too much of a contrast with the liveliness of the world at this time of year. I find it hard to focus on the real meaning of Memorial Day, too. It's heartbreaking.

For those who have served and returned home bereft of friends who died in the field, the day must feel otherworldly. Their focus must frequently fall on remembering, not just today, but every day. And what is today like for those families who have lost someone? What must it be like to watch the little flags waving along a parade route, to see the fliers advertising Memorial Day sales on watermelon or hotdogs or lawn furniture? How little the normal world recognizes the bizarre contrast between picnic parties and remembering those who won't return home to share another family holiday.

Life certainly goes on, and celebrating summer is important, of course. But I'm making a point today to stop, with gratitude, and recognize that today is also about the people who willingly step into harm's way to serve in the military. Think what you will of the war in Iraq, or Afghanistan, those who serve there are made of something special to do what they do.

Last year, I received from a dear friend of mine a book that details the heroic service of just one of the many Marines who have served in Iraq. The book is called The Gift of Valor. In it, author Michael Phillips draws the vivid portrait of Marine Corporal Jason Dunham. Heartwrenching and illuminating, the story of this brave young man and those with whom he served stays in my mind. It is worth the time to read to get a feeling for the type of work that our military service members do every single day. While not all of them have to make the sacrifice that Jason did, they are cut from the same cloth: they will step up and give whatever they have because they have sworn to, because they have a sense of what it means to honor their commitment to each other.

These are huge thoughts that try to flee my mind because it's just too hard to hold onto them for too long. But I pull them back and back again today, and I'll say a prayer of thanksgiving to know the brave service members I do. I'll say another prayer of thanksgiving for the service of those like Corporal Dunham.

The vets will raise their flag in our small-town square this afternoon, and certainly their thoughts will honor their friends who didn't get to come back and mark the beginning of another summer. I will join them, with my hand on my heart.

Single shot on Saturday: tableau

2009-05-23T14:15:00.004-04:00

My gardening husband came in with this bunch of hydrangeas this afternoon, and it begged for a fuchsia vase. Something about this unlikely pairing with the shells and the bowl of garlic is so pleasing for me. How I love little treasures put together in a corner of the house...

Poem for a Wednesday

2009-05-20T10:14:00.005-04:00

For today, I present you with a poem about juxtaposition by Fleur Adcock from her collection Poems 1960-2000.

It's the sort of thought that I've been preoccupied with lately: how can kindness and cruelty dwell so closely in the same spaces in our hearts? What do we conceal of our baser natures to prove our goodness? What does our "goodness" cost us? How does one accept the ruder truths of self?

I turn these age-old questions over and over in my mind like a well-worn stone.

“For a Five-Year-Old”

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
It might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful had,
to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
four closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

--Fleur Adcock

Why I'm not "Just Sayin..".

2009-05-18T10:09:00.013-04:00

I'm in a soapbox mood today, so indulge me.

I am a big lover of so many things, as you probably know by now. There isn't a day that I wake up to weather I don't love, there isn't a time of day that is less beautiful than any other to me. I try to take everyone at face value, to appreciate the wholeness of a person, even the rougher spots that we all have, and sometimes show.

What really gets under my skin is people trying to "get under my skin." I have, at certain times of my life, been a magnet for critics, would-be Henry Higgins, evangelists of all denominations. Maybe I wear my heart on my sleeve so obviously that I look malleable, dewy-eyed and innocent, just waiting for the "right" idea to make me real.

Once, about a year ago, I was in the local mall with the girls when I was approached by a very aggressive salesman. He waltzed over to me from his kiosk, gave me a sympathetic cluck and a tilt of the head, and said something to the effect of "poor mama, you look so old and tired." Somehow, by putting me in this sad little category, he got me to slow down enough where he could step in front of me, and block my way. The moment he got me to stop, he gave me the hard sell on hand cream. $40 dollars later, I walked away with some lotion, a green vinyl bag, and a bruised ego. The cream, by the way, was crap. Which matched the way I felt. I took a small comfort in knowing that at least he failed with his attempt to sell me eyecream "all those wrinkles, ma'am!"

In each day, each of us is bound to cross paths with people going through trials, sometimes acting out aggressions or envy or need or disappointment. It is taking me years to see it, but these actions don't really have much to do with me, other than the fact that when do I encounter them, I often take them too much to heart. Could you guess that for days after that fleecing at the mall, I would stand in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to gauge the extent of my wrinkling? Ugh.

As I said, I have worked for years to accept the wholeness of people, the good and the bad, to look past faults and transgressions, sometimes to the detriment of myself. I think I've done this in part because I long for that universal acceptance myself. It's an unrealistic thing to expect from everyone you meet, but still. It's a fantasy I'm working to let go of. I remind myself that there will be no unicorn appearing in my backyard this afternoon, either.

The world is full of the need to project the mean, the critic, the unaccepting. The worst is when these are couched in the guise of "friendship" or "help" (like the lotion salesman).

Rhetorically, these attacks seek to throw the equilibrium of the listener. Kindly delivered, they are like poisoned apples. Seemingly harmless, but meant for injury. Sometimes these friendly attacks come as "No offense, but...," which of course is just a warning of impending offense. That "but" seeks to absolve the messenger of responsibility. It's a gentle delivery, as the messenger hopes to injure but still remain in the "friend" category. Nowadays we call those kinds of friends "frenemies."

The latest type of rhetorical poisoned apple is "I'm just sayin.." Instead of prefacing an attack, it comes at the end, as a way of softening the blow. Again, this sort of expression seeks to remove the messenger from responsibility for his or her own hurtful words. In person, it might be accompanied with a sheepish shrug, or a little kick at the ground and an "aw shucks." It's an I-just-can't-help-what-I-feel sort of expression.

To these expressions I say this: Bullshit. I think we should be responsible for our words, for the nastiness we throw out into the world.

If a person has the chutzpah to let the words out of her mouth, then she needs to own them, good or bad. If you want to sell me some hand cream, don't make me feel ugly to do it. Own it. Sell the product, not a poor image of me to myself. If you want to attack me, just do it. Don't preface it with a request that I forget you said it. Don't end it with the lie that you can't help your feelings. That you're "just" saying. Because, friend, if you're "just sayin," your words are poisoned. And you put the poison there.

I'm asking too much to remove these time-honored means of attack and persuasion from language. I'm probably asking too much of myself to disregard them entirely. But I am promising that I won't ever use them. And I'm promising that when I am sent these poison apples, I won't bite. You shouldn't either.

Things that Go "Thump" in the Night, and What I Might Learn About Myself

2009-05-11T08:11:00.000-04:00

My Etsy shop is in the works, but delayed. All the good things I've done to stay on track notwithstanding, sometimes someone puts a wrench in the works, and tosses your world upside down.

Several Saturdays ago, I was exactly on schedule for my shop, with a planned opening on April 22. The weekend up until then had been sunny and carefree. Ada and I made beaded necklaces while Esme napped, and before we had dinner that night, I surprised them with a box of percussion instruments I've been collecting. We danced and sang and ignored the carpet that needed vacuuming, and it felt wonderful.

A few hours later, while I was watching tv, someone attempted to kick in our back door. Which is in the television room. Where I was sitting not 8 feet away.

Since then, I've been plagued. The incident was not isolated to my home; there were several attempts at houses next door and across the street. Our house is a fairly "hardened" target, and, as I keep reminding myself, this creep did not have any success here. The cops were here in 3 minutes, and stayed guard around the neighborhood.

However, I have been siderailed. My plans to do my shop and work on the writing projects I have been on the backburner for a few weeks now. In the meantime, all of my frenetic energies have gone into maintaining a normal family life with dinners, baths, playtimes, and homework.

Anything left over has gone into fortifying our security here. We are a good team, my husband and I, and I feel more successful with each effort, both the routine-keeping and the security-planning. Our neighbors are amazing, each working through this themselves, and reaching out to the other to assist and reassure. The police are sensitive and responsive, and all of this combines to give me renewed optimism.

The incident was one moment. I didn't even see it happen, rather, I heard it. A single, sickening thud that could only be a man's foot on my door. But it is a moment that lasts and lasts, and follows me with what-if's.

The few nights of sleeplessness have passed, but my sleep is now rich with dreams that are teaching more about myself and how I'm dealing with my own feelings of vulnerability and fear. I'm finding little insights hitting me throughout the day as I'm discovering the many layers of emotion I'm carrying: I am stunned, outraged, mournful, angry, agitated, and determined. I've surprised myself to find that of all of these, I am mostly determined and angry. I am, day by day, forcing myself to return to my plans, to reclaim the thing that thug did almost get away with: my confidence.

The past week brought me back to painting and making earrings, and this next week promises more painting and some fun sewing projects, and a writing workshop with a friend. And I am loving all of it.

In the middle of it all, I am pondering my reactions, especially the anger part. I have always imagined that come across as a peaceful person, enthusiastic but generally harmless, mild as milk. Perhaps there is more to me than I once guessed. I have been gravitating toward this owl painting lately--there is a little more work to do on her, but she is vivid for me already, and she, too, seems to be more complicated than I had originally assumed.

The Etsy shop will be stocked soon, my writing will become a priority again within the week. My caged-tiger self will someday stop seeing danger in every shadow, I am certain. One moment won't control my perceptions of the world, but it might have awakened me to how I see myself. I refuse to lose anything from this incident, but instead I am going to gain something from it...that's the biggest surprise of all.

Three Things for Thursday

2009-04-16T08:39:00.010-04:00

Three reasons my blog has been post-less for almost two weeks:

1. Easter. Yes, it's crazy, but Easter has turned into the mini-Christmas around here, with all the sneaking and intrigue of playing Santa. It literally takes weeks to pull off such a feat successfully, clandestine visits to candy stores, toy stores, etc. By the time Easter actually rolls around, I am exhausted! This year, I found (okay, set up) an email address for the Easter rabbit, so Ada and Esme could ask him whatever questions they wanted. Of course, there were requests--a glow worm for Esme and a crib nest for Ada's baby. The Easter bunny came through in the clutch. And the girls were delighted. If you want the Rabbit's special email address, let me know. I just know he'll write you back!

2. I am still plagued by the irresistible urge to clean and organize corners of the house from end to end. I do each piece in little bites of 10 or 15 minutes, and the result is that it takes a long time. And it makes a HUGE mess. Invariably, 15 minutes into a project, I am interrupted, and what used to be at least hidden behind a cabinet door or stuffed into a drawer is now strewn about the room in piles. I leave it there to attend to whatever urgency is calling me, and, well--it's not pretty. Eventually it gets put back, hopefully in some order.

All that noise about breaking some eggs to make an omelette is at least partially true. I can say that over the past month I have made some good progress: The study cabinet is clean, and so is our desk. All of our camera equipment is organized, and I can actually find what I want quickly! I have filed the contents of the inboxes (high five myself for that one!), and Ada's school records, drawings, and homeschool materials are sorted by subject and age range. With all the "new" space, Esme now has her own little section. That was the fun and gratifying part. For more grungier work, I excavated under our family room couch and found some long-lost toys and an old, dried out lemon (don't ask--I have no idea, and I am as grossed out as you would be). In between all this, I've sorted through Esme's old winter clothes, changed in some of her hand-me-down summer clothes, and organized her closet. One night I pulled out the dvds, and now all of them--even the new ones that seem to rattle around the tv for months--they're are all filed away into huge albums. I have to say it is calming to see the absence of junk lying around in all the common areas (at least non-toy junk).

The pantry is still calling to me, as is my own closet, and a stack of Ada's artwork that needs to be put into a binder. But the current hot project is the studio closet, a monster that I'm battling with for the next few days. To make space to store materials that are just getting into the way, I decided I needed a set of shelves to fit into the space under the eves. Why not drop everything and build them? Uh, lots of reasons. But it seemed like a great idea. In execution, it is taking so much longer than I anticipated. That, and I'm suffering under the pressure, literally. Yesterday I gave myself a massive blood blister on my thumb while tightening the bit into the drill. Cringe with me, please. And then I stuck myself with a splinter--under my nail. Yes, there is a reason that is a technique used in torture. Still, yea Kirie! I sucked it up and put another leg onto shelf one. Only two more shelves and 12 more legs to go....

I promise to post pictures when I'm done. Assuming you care. Please say you do...I have spent altogether too much time on this. And too much time writing (and talking) about it. If you made it this far, thanks for being so patient!

3. In the midst of the half-way projects and hopping around for Easter, and several other writing projects I'll share with you later....I've been prepping and creating some items for an online shop I'm opening in less than a week. I've been intending to open an Etsy shop for a year, and I have finally assembled almost all the pieces to do so. The shop is going to be called Spangletree Studio, and I'll tell you more about it soon. Suffice it to say that I feel like a Santa's elf, sewing and painting and bending wires and sanding little doors....it's going to be fun. I can't wait to tell you more about it next week! I'm holding back just so as not to jinx myself...

I miss my blog. I also miss reading my bloggy-friends. I promise to get back to a regular posting and blog reading schedule starting after April 23.

Whispering in my ear--Can you miss someone you never met?

2009-04-03T03:44:00.003-04:00

A little background:

I have a thing for stories, as you might know. And as much as I like to read, I love to hear a story, too. My mom would read to me incessantly when I was little, and long after I knew how to read to myself, she continued to read aloud to me. She read, late at night and her head nodding with fatigue, through many series--Little House, the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew. It must have been exhausting for her, after long long days at work.

But how I loved it! We shared the story together, discovering it, though in a way it also seemed almost to spring naturally from her as she spoke the words. I especially loved how her voice wrapped around the characters, made the pictures move in new ways, different from the way the pictures formed when I read to myself. Listening to those stories was pure pleasure.

I still love to hear a story. It's probably why I am an NPR addict, and I am usually a rapt listener to anyone willing telling me a narrative of their life, or even what happened to them that day. I love to hear it.

So it's not surprising that I have affection for audiobooks. I may have resisted the ipod for years past its introduction, but at the prospect of hearing podcasts of This American Life, and the Moth, and StoryCorps, well--I caved this winter, and now I'm often found wearing my earbuds, a story whispering into my ears.

The past few months I've been mining itunes for good audiobooks, and listening to a mixture of oldies and some new, more pulpy stuff. Heart of Darkness was amazing, real and thick and haunting in a way that, shamefully I admit, it wasn't before I heard it read to me. After Conrad, I wanted to go for something lighter, with the thought that it would be good to listen to while doing chores or exercising. My choice was James Patterson's Beach Road, which definitely falls into the pulpy junk pile, was disappointing and grungy.

So, in an attempt to find a middle ground, I stumbled across a mystery by Kate Wilhelm, a writer I'd never heard of before. Of course, I’ve since come to find out that she is prolific, talented, and lauded by many. I’m thrilled to know I will be able to explore her books for a long time to come.

For now, I am into Wilhelm’s books featuring character Barbara Holloway. Just as I did when I was a little girl, I still enjoy a series of stories. Mysteries are especially great in a series. While they can be cute and fun, a series can also leave lots of room for development of character and place. More importantly, they leave room for ambiguity and growth, and maybe that's why I like them so well. That, and the fact that my mom and I can exchange them between ourselves and have our own little book club.

Anyway, Kate Wilhelm's series about Barbara Holloway are like pearls on a string, each one smooth and well-constructed from the inside out, glowing. I started accidentally in the middle of the series, with The Unbidden Truth. Read by Anna Fields, it was engaging, lively, haunting. I was hooked.

I say hooked, and I mean it. As I listened, I was almost addicted to hearing what would happen next. In particular, I was drawn to this narrator, Anna Fields. Like my mother, her voice made the story move, wrapping itself into the plot and the characters so that it really did feel as though the story was being spun exactly as I was listening.

I was so taken with Anna Fields’s warm and mysterious voice and the way she gave life to Wilhelm's characters, that beyond finding other books in the series (which I did), I wanted to see what else she had given voice to.

A Google later, I learned that Anna Fields was the stagename for Kate Fleming. Like Kate Wilhelm, Kate Fleming was prolific, narrating over 200 books. And clearly, she was talented. She was asked to narrate the 9/11 Commission, and awarded honors from her peers. I also learned, with heartache, that she died in 2006, tragically trapped in her Seattle studio during a flash flood.

All of this background leads me to confess this:
In some strange way, for the past week or so, I've been feeling a certain loneliness knowing she is gone. I was puzzled over this melancholy, but I finally put a label to it: it's that I miss Kate Fleming. I know, I know--I didn’t know her at all, she is a disembodied voice in my head, and yet, I miss her. The intimacy of audio can foster that kind of connection, I suppose. I think of the way she could get inside a character, and get inside my head, and I know that the world has lost someone special.
Is it possible to miss someone you didn't know? Perhaps.
I suspect I have this lonely, loss-filled feeling about her for another reason. Because while her voice is firmly in my head, I have the sickening outside knowledge that at the same time she was making those detailed recordings, her fate was rushing toward her in a way she couldn’t know. She is stuck there in time, unknowing, but vibrant and powerful with stories each time I listen.

We are all like Kate Fleming, in a way. We are firmly in our own reality, with the voice in our own heads shaping and moving the story of our daily life forward. And it feels so permanent, like something recorded and tangible, something to be accessed again and again. But it’s not. For each of us rides on an unstoppable river--or that river flows toward us, I don't know. But I do know that the permanence of things is an illusion. Like anyone else, I shove that knowledge down each day to some hidden place so I can "get on with life." I only recognize the pull of the river again, if only for a moment, when I encounter beautiful and fleeting, something perfect and special. Something like a perfect whisper in my ears as I'm lulled into another storyland.

Because bread alone is not enough

2009-04-02T15:25:00.008-04:00

We attended a dinner party last night. And because bread alone is not enough, we brought....poetry.

I really did bring a loaf of sourdough bread that I baked in the afternoon, but my husband and I both felt like it was a great idea to give something that would last. Plus, it was the first day of National Poetry month, and what better way to kick that off. Our Argentine hosts appreciated the gesture and the significance, and we had some lovely conversations last night.

Here is a poem that's been wandering around in my head lately. It's from Linda Pastan's recent collection Queen of a Rainy Country, which is filled with poems as rich as this one.

Rereading Frost

Sometimes I think all the best poems

have been written already,

and no one has time to read them,

so why try to write more?

At other times though,

I remember how one flower

in a meadow already full of flowers

somehow adds to the general fireworks effect

as you get to the top of a hill

in Colorado, say, in high summer

and just look down at all that brimming color.

I also try to convince myself

that the smallest note of the smallest

instrument in the band,

the triangle, for instance,

is important to the conductor

who stands there, pointing his finger

in the direction of the percussions,

demanding that one silvery ping.

And I decide not to stop trying,

at least not for a while, though in truth

I'd rather just sit here reading

how someone else has been acquainted

with the night already, and perfectly.

Linda Pastan

The Eco-bat. Because sometimes I fold things other than laundry.

2009-03-27T12:48:00.006-04:00

Meet the Eco -bat. He's the second iteration of an origami pattern I found in this fabulous book: Advanced Origami by Michael LaFosse. His forms are so charming--it's inspiring. Of course, my bat didn't come out as well as his, but after only a year of folding paper, I'm not all that advanced...

I love to play around with papers and fabrics--it's a texture thing, I guess. For this little bat, I was going to use some luscious Japanese washi paper, but the color and feel of a brown paper bag struck me as an interesting compromise. He's recycled, technically, so he's an eco-bat.

I have a ton of ideas for folding different animals. I'm a long way from making my own patterns, but with each model I attempt, I know I am getting better at approximating the folds. What is so exciting to me is the step-by-step nature of origami. If you follow each step with precision, you can end up with something entirely different from the simple piece of paper you started with. It feels like a kind of controlled magic.

Eco-bat started as a piece of 8x8 paper from a grocery bag. I steamed, starched, ironed, and re-flattened it, and then I followed the 49 steps to get his form. I wish I could say I could do something like this in one sitting--but he served as a bookmark in the origami book in between several stages. When I finally put the eyes in yesterday, I was pretty happy with the end result. The first bat didn't take the folds as well. If I had the patience, I would do a third and fourth, and each would probably be a bit better.

But my origami bat needed to be completed soon--he's a gift for my dad, who is a bat aficionado. I'm sending Eco-bat off this weekend to his new home.

Spring Vacation

2009-03-20T11:28:00.011-04:00

We are back from a lovely break to Miami. Sun and sand, then some misty rain--good food, a visit with family, and it all equals a great break.

We aren't habitual "spring-breakers," so even a three-day getaway was a real treat. Not unexpectedly, the highlight was seeing the girls enjoy the beach and pool.

Other highlights:

1. Ada has turned into a little mermaid, swimming strong in the water. She can float and swim well underwater! A great accomplishment from a girl who couldn't get her face wet last October.

2. Cuban food. Plantains, rice, chicken, pork, garlic. Ah! I must try to cook some of this myself.

3. Esme surprised us with her language skills. On our first afternoon there, Esme was approached by a little girl in the pool. Somehow, Esme recognized that the girl was speaking French (she was!), and so Esme launched into French herself, saying, "Je m'appelle Esme." (My name is Esme.) Baby French being what it is, the girl answered with "Quoi?" (What?) Esme continued to repeat herself, and since her French is limited, so was the potential friendship. Regardless, it was amazing to hear. Especially because Esme changed the pronunciation of her name from our Anglicized (Ez-mee) to the French (Es-may).

We have spoken a little French and Spanish with her, and she's picked up some phrases from Dora and from Hi-5. But who knew she understood it this well?

4. Our hotel, the Sagamore, bills itself as "an art hotel," and it is. It's a gallery in itself, filled with provocative and pleasing displays of art in all media, from digital screens to sculpture to collaborative projects in the stairwells. What a pleasure it was! The picture above is of the girls in one of the many gallery areas of the hotel.

5. I am not now the svelte creature I have wished to be, and yet, I had a wonderful time despite my misgivings about being in public in a bathing suit. South Beach may be reputed to be home to the super-fit and glamourous, and there were some beautiful people around. But, as in all places, people appeared in all sizes and shapes, and they were all lovely in their respective confidence. By the end of the trip, I was no longer expecting the thin police to step from behind a palm tree to ticket me for being fat and ugly. In fact, instead of being disheartened about not being a skinny-mini, I feel excited about continuing my workouts and enjoying just being me. This is progress, and definitely a highlight of the trip for me personally.

All in all, a wonderful trip! Now, tell me about your vacations!

An Irish poem for the day

2009-03-17T05:11:00.000-04:00

In honor of St. Patrick's day, here is a selection from a fantastic collection I have called 1000 Years of Irish Poetry: The Gaelic and Anglo-Irish Poets from Pagan Times to the Present.

This one is by a poet named Valentin Iremonger (1918-1991). His poetry has a decidedly different feel from the ballad-type poems so often associated with Irish poetry. His profession was official that of a diplomat, though his life as a poet was significant. One source I found credited him (along with Samuel Beckett) with introducing modernism to Irish poetry. I am so taken with this poem, and with several others of his in this anthology, that I am going to be on the search for his collection, Horan's Field, and Other Reservations, which is out of print.

Here is his poem, "Spring Stops Me Suddenly," a poem full of sound, light, and layers. I was so taken with the melancholy playing behind it, like a lilting Irish voice over the mournful pipes.

Spring Stops Me Suddenly

Spring stops me suddenly like ground

Glass under a door, squeaking and gibbering,

I put my hand to my cheek and the tips

Of my fingers feel blood pulsing and quivering.

A bud on a branch brushes the back

Of my hand and I look, without moving, down.

Summer is there, screwed and fused, compressed,

Neat as a bomb, its casing a dull brown.

From the window of a farther tree I hear

A chirp and a twitter; I blink.

A tow-headed vamp of a finch on a branch

Cocks a roving eye, tips me the wink

And, instantly, the whole great hot-lipped ensemble

Of buds and birds, of clay and glass doors,

Reels in with its ragtime chorus, staggering

The theme of the time, a jam-session's rattle and roar

With drums of summer jittering in the background

Dully, and deeper down and more human, the sobbing

Oboes of autumn falling across the track of the tune,

Winter's furtive bassoon like a sea-lion snorting and bobbing.

There is something here I do not get,

Some menace that I do not comprehend,

Yet, so intoxicating is the song,

I cannot follow its thought right to the end.

So up the garden path I go with Spring

Promising sacks and robes to rig my years

And a young girl to gladden my heart in a tartan

Scarf and freedom from my facile fears.

Seized

2009-03-13T09:34:00.006-04:00

Maybe it's that we've seen robins in the yard, or maybe it's that I've been catching whiffs of warmer weather on the breeze from time to time. Most likely, though, it's that we've collected the detritus of papers, toys, and whatnot that can accumulate when you spend all your time inside. Whatever it is, I've been seized by the urge to clean, clean, clean.

I feel a bit like a flasher, showing you these unmentionables: but here is just one tiny piece of my clutter: the cabinet in the study. It may have been orderly in the fall, when school started, but entrophy has set in, and it's an avalanche waiting to happen...

In the process of cleaning, I'm turning up all sorts of doodads that I missed, and discovering that there are more things in this house than I have use for. Old wires from dead and long-departed cellphones--what am I keeping these for? Old sandals whose soles are worn to holes--what am I thinking? It's as though I'm waking up from a clutter hibernation, and lumbering into the light, I'm seeing a feast of MESS. I've thrown myself into cleaning it to the point of dreaming of how I can organize the attic, the cabinets in the bathrooms, the pantry.

All of these are somewhat, if not completely, futile projects. With a toddler following me most of the day, all organization is up for grabs. And the off-limits places like the attic, well--to even think to organize that will mean a day of a babysitter. I can think of a hundred other things I'd rather do while the sitter is here, couldn't you?

This is a long way of saying that I've not abandoned the blog, though I've only posted once this week. It's that I'm up to my rubber-gloved hands in sudsy water and piles of recycling paper. I will be posting again more starting this weekend!

Space Between

2009-03-08T08:41:00.017-04:00

I took this shot from the bridge the other day, hoping to capture what I see as I drive off the island every day. I was surprised to see that the camera saw more bridge and less vista. For the camera, the water is just an afterthought, the spaces between the railings simply placeholders.

Of course, I take the bridge for granted. I must, since I don't even notice the railings when I'm looking out. What do I see is the shifting mood of the bay below, the craggy islands. On the rare occasion that I'm in the passenger seat, as I was on this day, I drink in the view and let my eye follow the bay as it runs back out to the shimmering ocean. I watch the strange map-like lines that the ebbing tide draws on the surface of the bay. I squint at the tiniest rocky islands, hoping to catch a glimpse of a sunbathing seal.

The space between the railings reveals so much, a whole world away from the soaring bridge itself, and it might as well be. God willing, the bridge and the water will continue to remain oblivious to the other forever. There is a space there between them that won't be crossed.

We live on an island, and the ocean is, clearly, the defining factor for our town. Given that, then, it's amazing how little contact we have with it. Sure, we swim and play in it, and fish and boat on it. We can even scuba dive and see up close those who live there. But all of our forays into the sea are, inevitably, only momentary daytrips, with no visa extended. As close as the ocean may be, it is other.

When we moved here, we lived closer to the bay, and I would sometimes lull myself to sleep by imagining all the life teeming beneath the water just a few blocks away. It was thrilling and a bit terrifying for me to think that deep at night, deep in the dark, dark water there they were--the tuna and the scup, eels and dogfish, the skipjack tuna, alewives, squid, herring, butterfish, occasionally a shark--these and countless others proceeding with their watery lives just steps from my door. Even my mammalian cousins, the dolphins and seals--even they couldn't begin to comprehend my life, or me theirs. We are, as they say, oceans apart.

That impenetrable distance fascinates me. What gets me most is that it's a distance not of space itself, which is physically crossable, but a distance of consciousness. I think that's what gives me the shivers. It feels dangerous somehow, to be dwelling so close to a deep unknown. If I dwell on it too long, I'm overcome with a feeling that must be something like a fear of heights--all that abyss looming. It makes me feel the smallness of myself, vulnerable and anonymous.

When I was a child, my mom took me to visit a college friend of hers. They lived on an open, windblown piece of land in Ontario, Canada. We were only there for an evening, as I recall, and the details have fallen away from me. But I do have a vivid memory of hearing their neighbors--a wildlife preserve. Actually, it was a sort of safari-type place, with all sorts of "exotic" (read: nonnative) wildlife. And as we stood on their porch, I remember hearing the roar of lions, who lived within shouting range of their backyard fence.

A simple thing, that roar. In a zoo, it's innocuous. When you hear it while standing on a front porch-- well, I was chilled by it. The funny thing is that it wasn't the prospect of a lion crossing the fence that was disquieting. Honestly, I didn't even imagine that fear. What got me was the same thing that gets me when I think too much about the mysterious lives that are lived under the surface of the bay--it's the vast otherness that makes me catch my breath.

You may know by now that I can get sucked into dwelling on something, and for some time, my thoughts will continue to go there. During those times, I welcome a distraction that brings me away from that edgy feeling of isolation. My mind does eventually quiet, of course, and runs on to other obsessions.

I think back on that visit to my mom's friend, and I wonder what it would be like with the constant presence of the lions, announcing itself again and again in the night. Would it be like having a relentless reminder of how small I was? Or would it fade into the distance like the static noise of the waves and the fog horn, the shock diminishing with exposure, until I would have to force myself into noticing it?

In reality, I know that life is balanced someplace, very neatly and incredibly, between noticing the spaces we live in, and noticing the spaces we do not occupy. Were it not, we would all certainly be insane.

My photo of the bridge reminded me of that so clearly. It is interesting and sometimes disturbing for me to shift my vision, as the camera does, from one focus to the next...knowing all the time that I will never really be able to see the whole perspective, that I, too, will always remain other.

In Like a Lion

2009-03-04T08:21:00.012-05:00

The storm of this past Monday (nicknamed by our local news people as Megastorm Monday) was a real nor'easter, and we got hit with some bluster. It brought us all a snow day, which we all enjoyed so much that Ada told me that night, "I hate to put this great snow day to bed." My thoughts exactly. Above is a shot of Esme contemplating walking into a snowdrift...

While we were watching the reports of the storm's approach, I told Ada that it looked like March was roaring in like a lion. She was puzzled and then delighted as I explained the old saying to her. She looked up and me with a big smile and concluded, "Well, Mommy, then March will end like a lamb. And it will be spring."

I love watching her discover the old nuggets of expression people have been using for years. Call them trite, but many of them give a sage order to the progression of life. Even if I don't embrace the social values embedded in a few of these gems, I admire how effectively they convey those beliefs.

My mom has a wealth of these, and they come to her (as most of these do) by way of a grandmother. Here are a few of my favorites:

"Rain before seven, sun before eleven." My August birthday is at the height of thunderstorm season, and as I child I would chant this to myself if I woke early to a rain shower.

"Whistling girls and cackling hens, both will come to no good ends." My grandma would say this to me, conspiratorially, as something that her mother said to her. But my grandma and I were kindred spirits, and superb whistlers, if I do say so myself. She was so amazing that before she got dentures, she could whistle two tones simultaneously. Ah! I still aspire to such a grand thing!

"An apple doesn't fall far from the tree." An oldie, and one everyone knows--but not as true as we imagine, which explains some people I know...
Wild apples, the kind grown from seed and not grafted, are notoriously heterogeneous. This means the seed that grows from a fallen apple is likely as not to be absolutely different from the tree on which it grew. It may not fall far, but chances are it will be something altogether other from its parent tree. Incidentally, this is why wild apples are so persistent. Consider for yourself how this might apply to the ways you differ from your parent tree...

What are some of the expressions that have been repeated in your family? Now's the time to delurk! Really, I'd love to hear them...how I love your stories!

Yet Another Call to Now

2009-02-27T09:01:00.006-05:00

My blogging is off schedule, as I am thick into several projects these days. Amidst it, I've been reading a book by Kim Stafford, Early Morning. Kim Stafford is the son of poet William Stafford, and his book is a rich narrative of the very complex relationship between the two writers. I am enjoying it no end.

Sometime next week I'll write much more about Kim Stafford's book, but for today, I give you a particularly buoyant poem by his father, William Stafford. He is one of my absolute favorite poets, because so many of his poems sing as well as this one:

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

whereever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life--

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

William Stafford, from The Way It Is

My hands

2009-02-24T10:36:00.002-05:00

I've been thinking about my hands lately. They're small. They are plain. I don't do well with polish or long nails because they chip and peel, and sometimes I bite my hangnails. Gross, I know.

I wear three rings--my wedding ring, my engagement ring, and a cocktail ring that belonged to my mother, and before that, my great grandmother.

I've been thinking about hands lately because I take such terrible care of mine. The skin on the backs is often rough and cracked from too much cleaning without gloves, and they are cut up from working with paper crafts. They are a mess.

For years, I've been telling myself that my hands are like this because "they're useful." It's the height of Midwestern haughty to tell yourself that you're hands are busier than someone else's, to act as though your rough paws are that way "on purpose."

When I was 12, there was a girl in my class named Lisa, who had long, perfectly shaped and polished nails. She made a show of it, tapping them on cans of soda, complaining in typing class about the risk of breaking them. She would sit in class and scrutinize her nails, turning her hands this way and that--palm out, fingers outstretched, then palm facing in, her fingers curled down and nestled together. Bringing her hand toward her face, she'd make little tsk sounds, examining the moon-shaped nails for chips or other imperfections. Sometimes I'd watch her and wonder what it felt like to have those colorful additions to my fingers, lively and bright as small birds.

I was plain, my hands matched my clothes--sort of tossed together carelessly. I had a small wardrobe, and I basically wore the same things over and over, rotating each weekday. I had one small ring that I wore: a treasure that had been my mother's when she was little girl. The band was gold, and had some detailing. But special part for me was the emerald-green glass set into it. I wanted desperately to believe it was really an emerald, and I must have said it was. The glass, though, was obviously old and scratched, and clearly not an emerald, and I was teased for wearing a ring from a gumball machine. Having messy hands didn't do much to enhance it, I imagine.

The funny thing is that I have always loved the look of my hands. I like the bend of my fingers, even my bizarre, hitchhiker's thumb. I really like the color of my nails without polish; their pinkish-lavender moons remind me of the inner layers of tiny seashells. I love how they fly over the keyboard, and I like the short nails on them. They feel so, well--me. Perhaps I romanticize them because I'm defensive of that little girl whose hands told so much about her life.

Thinking about all of this makes me ask why I continue to neglect caring for my hands? The smallest things would make a difference--wearing rubber gloves to clean, putting on moisturizer at night, trimming the hangnails (or just using cuticle cream). I resist. I do believe it is part of a story that I tell myself about the "busy hands." It's a story that carries into other areas of my life--the same reason it is easier to do something for someone else than it is to do something good for myself. It's also springs from the fear of becoming too outwardly focused; I harbor an irrational anxiety about turning into an adolescently mean girl, my perfect nails turned talons to sharpen on the weaker spirits of women plainer than myself.

Like I said, it's an irrational fear. I don't think mean and beautiful necessarily go together. I'm not the meanest of sorts, and I love feeling beautiful. I love makeup, and good skin. I love clothing, even if I don't always dress much beyond my LLBeany -uniform. I am somewhat vain about my hair, and I have shoe lust as much as the next woman. And for all that, I have never felt myself becoming that bitchy-type teenager, though there are some days I wish I could call her into service to give my confidence a boost.
The bottom line is that I neglect myself because I labor under the most common of burdens: When it comes to meeting the needs of those around me, I feel as though I should come second--or fourth, or last. It's pervasive. I serve my plate last at the dinner table. I wash my clothing last. I "sneak" into the study to do my writing only after I've done (yet another) load of laundry. I get to my artwork only after I've done a project with Esme. If there is a good side of the apple, I give it to one of the girls and eat the bruised side myself. I bathe when everyone else is clean, and if my clothes get ironed, it's only after I have finished all the other ironing (not often!). You get the idea.
It is good to be able to set aside one's own needs. It is often necessary as a mother to do so, I realize. But I have taken it way too far, I think. Must I feel a guilty twinge at such a small thing as when I put moisturizer on my hands? Because I do feel guilty, even for doing the simplest of things for myself. Probably the saddest thing is that the guilt isn't coming from anywhere else but me. There is a part of me that is self-defeating. This part of me is convinced that I am not worthy--of time or respect or care, I don't know. But it's there. I see it in the way I treat myself, in the way I treat my hands.

I'm not alone in this. There are lots and lots of other women who must feel this way, obliged to be last on the list, whether from fear or self-loathing or a firmly-instilled (and misguided) sense of "what makes a good woman." I wonder if they think about this, and if thinking about it makes them as lonely as it just has made me...

I started this long post talking about hands, and it is to my hands that I look now: the way that I treat myself is, in fact, in my own hands. As this year progresses, I am seeing more and more that through simple changes, I can shape the way I see my own life. Perfect or imperfect, I create all sorts of things with my hands. It's time to create something for me.

The Kindness of Strangers, or Seven More Things to Make Me Love NYC

2009-02-20T07:36:00.000-05:00

Please note: this post will be filled with more than my average use of the word "wonderful" and lots of gratuitous and sometimes cheesy-sounding "yea!" Please chalk it up to my infatuation with the city.

New York has a special place in my heart, and we were lucky enough to spend our Valentine's Day weekend there. NYC is like my Disney World--a special place, filled with interesting people and things to do. And the best part of it: the people who live and work there. Here are some of the highlights from our trip:

1. Dinner out. A lovely evening at Park Avenue Winter. Because our babysitter came with us to the city, we were able to leave the children with her at the hotel. In other words, my husband and I ate dinner alone, at a gorgeous restaurant on the Upper East Side. Park Avenue Winter is a seasonal place, which means that it changes decor and menu each season. A few weeks from now, it will rechristen itself Park Avenue Spring. What fun it would be to visit it with each incarnation. Our meal was delicious, and we ended the night with a long, pleasant walk back to our hotel.
When we visit a wonderful city like New York, we aim for restaurants away from tourist central. Our concierge helped us find Park Ave Winter, and she was exceedingly nice about it, spending a good deal of time with me on the phone last week as we weeded through the myriad choices. She even sent us champagne at the restaurant! Thank you to Norva! Yea for Park Avenue Winter! Yea for babysitters!

2. Cupcakes. We were greeted at check-in with treats from the fabled Magnolia bakery. Ada and Esme were nothing less than thrilled by the luscious chocolate cupcakes and red and white versions of the black and white cookie.

3. Chinatown. Our favorite place, our "must see" place of NYC, is Great NY Noodletown. It's in Chinatown, and we have visited it unfailingly for each visit since 1994. If you read any review of the place, you'll see mention of the hyped salted seafood (shrimp and softshell crabs are popular), and the restaurant's namesake noodles. Believe it. It is wonderful food, cheap and authentic, and worth a trek to find it. We like to order the chow fun (thick noodles), roast pork (swoon-worthy), and lo-mein with ginger and scallions. There are tons of other delights on the menu. Go visit and discover some for yourself.

For me, the highlight of this visit to Great NY Noodletown was meeting Sandra, a lovely woman who was sitting at the table next to ours, where her daughter was making little stars from paper strips. Sandra shared a few multicolored strips with our girls, and soon we were talking, exchanging emails, and learning how to make a rubberband star, too. Before they left the restaurant, Sandra made a few recommendations for our future visits to Chinatown. In particular, she recommended little egg-shaped boiled dough cookies from a street vendor. We said our goodbyes, and she and her daughter left. To our surprise and delight, she returned a few minutes later with bags of cookies for each of us. Here is a picture of the rubberband star Sandra's daughter showed us how to make:

4. Bryant Park was in full fashion week regalia. While we didn't have time to linger, we did manage to see some beautiful people, beautifully dressed. People watching is so fun, watching fashionable people, so much the better.

5. F.A.O. Schwartz is still a wonderful place to visit. On Sunday morning, Esme's eyes grew wide with excitement when she heard there was a place in New York where you could dance on a "floor piano." A short taxi ride later, we were in toy-wonderland. Esme and Ada explored mountains of stuffed toys, elaborate displays of Playmobil, and of course, the piano. They danced on it, and when it was over, Esme was tearful about leaving.

We managed to visit the baby clothing section of the store, where Ada was in heaven. She found a hat and blanket for her baby, which the salesgirl carefully wrapped in striped tissue and bows. Ah--the perfect souvenir for Ada. As we were leaving, Ada had a sudden fear of the escalator, and I accidentally got on with Esme before I noticed her hesitating at the bottom. Before I could even say, "wait a second, honey--I'll be right there," the salesgirl from the wrapping counter gently escorted Ada up the escalator behind me.

6. A particular highlight for me was on Sunday night, when I met up with my dear friend Kristen, a long lost friend from grade school. Too often lately, I've caught myself extolling the wonders of facebook. Sunday night's meeting was a prime example of the wonderful reconnecting I've been doing. Kristen is as interesting, funny, and fun as I remember her being when we were ten years old.
We could have easily stayed at the tapas restaurant, chatting well into the wee hours, but Ada and Esme were wearing out our babysitter. So we met our little girls in the hotel restaurant, where Kristen and I entertained them with a version of the Presidents' song that we learned in fifth grade. Ah, joint humiliation! Only a true friend would agree to that to amuse some sleepy kids!
We parted that night with a new understanding of a new/old friendship, and with excitement for the new path our friendship will take. It was a fantastic night for me.

7. The above mentioned tapas restaurant, Euzkadi, was very reasonable and had delicious small plates and wine. It was a perfect backdrop to meeting an old friend. In my excitement, I left a favorite hat and scarf behind when we left. And do you know? When I phoned the restaurant to see if they had found them, a kind waitress named Danielle offered to pop them into the mail for me. They arrived here, via priority mail, a few days later. Yea for nice people!

I may have grown up thinking I was a "city kid," but our kids are definitely small town girls. We are always encouraging a wider worldview for them, and we make a point to go to cities on a regular basis, not only so the girls can experience the beauty of them, but so my husband and I can remain sane. Small town living is great in so many ways, but, counterintuitively, the city is a place to recharge.

I did notice that I had a sense of wonder about the place. (Can you tell?) As cosmopolitan as I consider myself to be (okay, well, sometimes), there was a moment when I felt as though I had stepped into a wide-eyed role in the musical Oklahoma: When I saw the "newfangled" televisions and credit card touch screens in the taxis, I caught myself humming, "Everything's up-to-date in Kansas City/They've gone about as fer as they kin go." It's been awhile since we've been to big civilization, and I missed it.
We are already talking about our next trip there.

2009-02-13T05:02:00.001-05:00

If you've read more than a few posts here, you know how much I love poetry. When I was teaching, I was adamant that I wasn't "teaching poetry," but rather introducing some poems to people who hadn't read much poetry for pleasure--my students.

While most of my students had a good sense of poetry, some of them really believed that poetry was written with the intention to confound kids in school. They believed that most poems existed in some weird vacuum, useful to "artsy teachers" and maybe a few overly sensitive people.

My mission became focused: I had to debunk these assumptions about poetry and the intended audience. So I started bringing in poetry from current sources, from songs, from contemporary anthologies. Little by little, some of my misbelieving students woke up to it.

One of my favorite moments in the classroom centered around some poems I brought in for Valentine's Day. I taught English at a university where the student population is overwhelmingly male, and a few of these young men had asked me for suggestions of good poems for a girlfriend. So I created my own little anthology of love poems, some of which we read aloud in class. Among them was the poem "Variation on the Word Sleep" by Margaret Atwood.

When I finished reading this, there was a palpable hush in the room. I looked up from the paper and saw some of the guys shaking their heads slowly, or nodding in appreciation. As class ended, a few of them asked me if they could keep the copy of that poem. And I knew that some of them had felt the living, moving force of a poem that spoke directly to them.

Here is that poem, in a new context, powerful and important as ever. Happy Valentine's Day Weekend!

Variation on the Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

Margaret Atwood

Open Heart Letter 3: To My Husband

2009-02-11T11:52:00.001-05:00

Over the years we've given each other countless little notes, most of which are too private to share here. But I must include him in the open heart project, because, you see--he opened my world.

Here is a little note to the biggest love in my life.

My dear husband:

When we met, the color of the sky literally became brighter for me. It was as though a film had been peeled from the glass, and I could see the richness and the depth of the colors in the world. All of the cliches of being lovestruck applied: the birds really did sing more sweetly, every love song spoke about us. I knew from the moment we first kissed that my life was about to change.

Sixteen years later I smile to think of that kiss, and thrill to think I was right. What a gorgeous world we have made together. I am, in every sense, the luckiest wife in the world.

Of course, we are not always stepping to the same rhythm. We have had our disagreements and fights. But the trust, the love, the oneness we have--it remains, true as the earth beneath us. We walk together, in the same direction. And with each step I take in this world, I reconfirm that there is no better partner, no bigger love, than you.

*The photo is a heart-shaped piece of labradorite he brought back for me on a recent trip to Africa. It is my favorite gemstone, fiery and modest at once.

Another house story

2009-02-10T13:37:00.004-05:00

You know, as I was re-reading this last post on the tent house, I saw in myself the shadow of someone I recently described to a friend in a not-so-kind way. How easy it is to throw stones, especially if you live in a glass house!

Here is a snippet of my own experience as the newcomer the neighbors wondered about. I recently wrote this in an email to a friend of mine to describe one sort of "welcome" I received:

We live on a little island. Our town is immediately recognizable as the classic New England village, with fewer than 4000 people in the wintery off-season. I discovered when we moved here that many people had the curious habit of rocking back on their heels and saying with smugish satisfaction, "Yep, I'm born and bred." I had to hear that from four different people before I figured out that they meant "I have always lived in this state." Some of them have always lived on this island, in fact. When I heard this born-and-bred expression from the fifth person, I wanted to say, "yeah, I happened to have been born and raised, too. It's pretty common for humans." But I bit my snippy tongue.

These multi-generation islanders don't always take kindly to people like me, who move here from parts unknown to promptly remodel a decrepit house beyond recognition. When Ada was four, I once had a well-meaning woman (4th generation town resident, thankyouverymuch) visit our home for tea. It was the strangest thing--I had asked her to come because she was always seeing Ada in town and giving her little trinkets, etc. She went so far as to write an editorial in the local paper, saying she had found an angel named Ada, and she wanted to become her adopted Aunt (I was a bit uncomfortable at her blithe use of adopted, let me tell you--let alone that she wrote the editorial at all). She started referring to herself as Ada's "Aunt Nancy," stressing that Ada pronounce it "Ah-unt", a challenge in itself since Ada was used to my midwestern twanging of the word to "ant." In any case, we kept up the pleasantries for a few months, and at some point I asked her to tea.

She came, a vase of lilacs from her garden in hand. It was one of the odder encounters I've had, though. I love having tea, and we had a little spread with cookies, etc. It was a bit of an effort for me at the time because I was pretty pregnant, and Ada had a bladder infection and needed "to go potty!" every 5 minutes. But we managed, and I recall being pleasant and welcoming. Nancy, however, seemed suddenly much colder than she had when she talked to us in town. The kicker was when she sat at our dining table, waved her hand around, and said, "I know there are a lot of people in town who don't approve of people who move here and do (here's the wave) all this. But I'm more open-minded." I don't recall how we ended tea, but she stayed for almost two hours total, I think. Funny, it was such a strange visit that if she hadn't left the lilacs, I swear I would believe that I dreamed it. She never called or spoke with us again. Some of it must be that she changed jobs, and we didn't see her in town. But there were no more calls, either. I left a message on her answering machine a few times, still nothing. I still have the vase and some trinkets, so I know she really did come. Did I say something wrong? I have no idea. I do know that I was one of those "new people" she referred to.
I felt a little set up--she knew where our house was before she started talking to me in the grocery. Did she just want to see the inside of the house? Maybe--but what a lot of effort. So bizarre. And our house is just a remodeled 1980 cape, not a mansion, or even very large or anything worth wanting to see...

If you read my post about the tent house, then see my anecdote about curious "Aunt Nancy," you must see the contradiction. I recognized it when I reread my post this afternoon, and I am stunned by it. It is embarrassing to be caught as the judgmental one. I am blushing as I write.

I considered deleting the tent post before too many people saw it, and saw me for the mean person I can be (a shameful blush again). Should I perhaps try to convince you otherwise by making excuses--Do you care that my house isn't a sixteenth the size of that guy's, or that we built it green, or that I was the general contractor myself, accountable for all the ruckus we may have caused? Would any of this convince you? It doesn't convince me. I myself built the custom house of my dreams, albeit smaller ones. The dreams of Mr. Tent house are just bigger.

So, at the remove of years out from my own arrival here, do I now have I the mindset of the oldtimer myself? Or am I still the new and ostentatious neighbor renovating at will and whim? I have no idea.

If I let myself think past my humiliation, I do know that I am capable of holding contradictions in my own perceptions, and I see the dangers in assuming that I am free of judgment myself. As open-minded as I proclaim to be (just like Aunt Nancy), I'm a prisoner of my own limitations, my own assumptions about other people and their desires, their actions. It's okay to admit this weakness; recognizing it in myself will make me a stronger and more empathetic person.

I am pretty sure that won't be going to tea at the "tent house," under the guises of a welcoming party or not. But I do think I should prepare my own mind for being truly open to new people and their experiences, as different from mine as they may be....

I am a work in progress.

A Tent House

2009-02-10T12:09:00.003-05:00

Not the kind of tent house we make around here in our nest. Ours is made from my grandmother's quilt and the cushions from the sofa, filled with board books and stuffed bears and dogs, and little bowls of cheerios and chocolate chips. That's a tent house.

This white form behind the trees also is a tent house. Because we live in a cold climate, building a new home exposes it and the crew to extreme weather. This, in turn, causes delays. If you've ever had any work done on your home, you know what I mean.

But this home, situated on the water and boasting at least 6 acres, must have an owner who is determined to avoid delays and weather. This owner has contracted to have an enormous plastic tent erected around the entire structure of the home. A few years ago, a similar home was built on the lot next to it, with the same tent method. The kicker is that the crews on both of these homes work on continuous shifts, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Huge work lights illuminate the site and drive the neighbors batty. There are local discussions of noise and light disturbance, and the owners are being asked to take breaks during evenings, weekends, and holidays.

I'm showing this to you today because I'm nosy, I'll admit it. I am curious about who that owner might be. I'm curious about what sort of life must produce the need or desire or right to build in such a way. I drive past this tented project from time to time, and each time I marvel at the the size of this project. It seems a certain kind of hubris to building such an ostentatious home so ostentatiously, especially in these times. I wish the owner well, but I wonder if building a house this large will generate a happiness that fills it completely...

Look what I got in the mail!!

2009-02-09T05:05:00.000-05:00

The fabulous Bari J. sent me this bag last week--Look at the theme "Three Little Chickies." I'm crazy for this bag. I have a thing for trees in art, and this bag is every bit as lovely in person as it is in this photo. It's got lots of sweet detailing, like extra pockets inside, and a key holder, and a brooch attached to the tree.

As it happens, it arrived to me on my blogoversary. How perfectly fitting.

Bari has great line of handbags and accessories, and she's designed a luscious set of fabrics for Windham that will be arriving in stores this spring. How lucky am I that she designed this bag just for me?!

The Tale of Mr. Mouse, part 2

2009-02-07T03:34:00.005-05:00

The Mr. Mouse story continues...here is the first part, if you missed it.

Anita was breathless from screaming. She caught her breath and looked furtively behind her toward the house. Had anyone seen her? Heard her? She was humiliated at such a reaction. First, because Martha would be disappointed in her--"Really, Anita. Such drah-ma." And also because, as unrealistic as it was, Anita felt responsible for keeping all of the house tidy and orderly, including these bins. It was a poor reflection on her as a housekeeper to have a mouse infestation. She vowed to herself to get rid of the problem before Martha found out about it. So Anita indulged her stubborn side by standing perfectly still on the path in front of the bin, her baking tray poised and ready to clobber any rodent making a run for it.

If her heart hadn't been pounding so hard in her ears, Anita might have heard the rushed breathing of Mr. Mouse as he struggled to gain composure. Calm, he thought. Calm. Smell the food, breathe the air. If he could only lie down in his bed again, he promised, he would never, ever invade the humans' garbage again. Through the slats, he could just see the tips of Anita's sensible shoes on the path. His little heart beat mightily in his chest and he wondered if he would have the chance to keep that promise.

Anita stood still for 15 minutes while her adrenaline rush subsided. Deciding she didn't want another face-to-face confrontation with the furry creature--had it been a rat, God forbid?--she headed toward the house, tray swinging, her head down with determination.

As Anita retreated, Mr. Mouse felt relief and then profound exhaustion. It was nearing sunset, as far as he could tell, and his wobbly legs reminded him that he simply couldn't cross the yard again. The garbage bin was to be his bed tonight, like it or not.

He rustled around in the heap and pulled a few cupcake wrappers free. Laying them underneath him as a relatively neat little mat, he gave into his wobbly legs and curled into a ball. As he drifted to sleep, his thoughts ranged from images of Anita's square-toed shoes, to image of his baby sister swaddled in flannel, to oozing pools of pink frosting, to strange, squarish forms that floated in the sky and blotted out the sun. He woke several hours later to the hollow sound of his old companion (but not friend), the short-eared owl, and he realized that he was hungry. And for once, food was plentiful.

Though the cupcakes had lost some of their appeal for having slid into the mess of other garbage, they were soft and fragrant and sticky. His paws were still covered in icing, in fact, and there were bits of cake stuck to his left haunch. A bath, he decided, would be a good start to his meal. When he was done, he was clean, and now hungrier than ever. Martha's cupcakes were legendary for a reason, and once he started, he couldn't stop himself. His promise to leave human garbage alone notwithstanding, he dug into the remains of coffee cake, and cupcakes by the dozen, until his belly was so full he was certain he wouldn't fit through the slats to leave in the morning. Exhausted and almost sick with sugar, he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep for the rest of the night.

Anita, for her part, had been busy for hours in the night as well. She had spent hours touring the grounds with dozens of mousetraps. By the time she went to bed, she had armed almost every place conceivable: the pantry, the basement, the attic, the garage, the stables, the greenhouse, the wine cellar, the root cellar, and the chicken coop. All except the garbage bins. She was embarrassed about it, but she was afraid to go out there in the dark, worried that that creature might run out from between the slats, perhaps across her foot this time. It gave her the shivers just thinking about it. That trap could wait for daylight. She fell into a fitful sleep, full of strange dreams of a parade of cupcake floats and squealing rodents.

Three Little Chickies is 2!

2009-02-05T06:34:00.002-05:00

Today is my "blog-o-versary," and I'm celebrating! Yea!

So silly, but I love my little blog. This past year, I've made new connections through it, started telling people about it, made good on commitments to make things, and found a sort of rhythm in almost daily! writing. All of these are unexpected bounties from a venture I started on a bit of a whim two years ago.

I stumbled into blogging by accident. In fact, until January 2007, I knew of one blog--Dooce. And when I remembered to read it, I loved it, her sharp wit and fierce stance. But it didn't feel like something I could do. If it had dawned on me that I could write a blog, I would have said right away that I didn't want to write like that myself, actually.

In January 2007, we were readying for Ada's homeschooling, which was to begin that summer. We were dealing with sleepless nights, as Esme was only a few months old, and I was hoping I could find a little time to get back to making stuff in the studio. I had crafts on my mind, and I wanted advice...

On a Google search for ways to use chalkboard paint, I found a link to a mom who had painted entire walls of her home in chalkboard paint, and written a lovely post on it, called "Cover the World in Chalkboard Paint." On closer inspection, I realized that this woman, Blair, was writing a blog called Wise Craft. Not a commercial and herculean blog like Dooce's, but a little blog, a blog in the sense that it was less about who read it, and more about the she who was writing it...does that make sense? It felt like something I could do. As I looked through the photos of things she'd made, I saw that these photos homey and personal, not unlike the ones I took.

And I started looking at the links there. Exploring blogs. Discovering a new bloggy language. I was hooked.

And so emerged 3littlechickies, on February 5th, 2007. Here is my first post. Almost 200 posts later, it is a different thing from what I imagined it to be. As am I.

I'm so glad I started this journey. I like what I'm creating here. I like it even more that you're reading it, and therefore creating it, with me.

The Tale of Mr. Mouse, part 1

2009-02-04T06:16:00.000-05:00

I am still at work finishing Mrs. Mouse. She is a soft brown velveteen, and she's nice to hold. She's also patient. For the past three nights I've managed to get out my sewing kit, but not I've not actually sewn her. She just sits contentedly in my hand while I've gotten caught up on past episodes of Lost.

It looks as though she might be staying here for awhile. She and Mr. Mouse have definitely become good friends.

I don't believe I've told you much about him yet.
Mr. Mouse has been around our home for almost 3 years now. He manifested after Ada and I started talking about him in stories...he just showed up one day in full form. (Well, he showed up without a leg--Ada couldn't wait to play with him until I was done sewing.)

He has a strange history, this mouse. You see, as the story goes, he belongs to Martha Stewart. Yes, that one. When she was four years old, Ada had a fascination with Martha, from her magazines and her show. Through that, Martha somehow entered our story of a mouse. Before we knew it, there were other important characters finding their way into the bedtime stories I'd spin, and soon, there was a whole fleshed-out universe of Martha, her compatriots, and Mr. Mouse.

Would you like to hear how Mr. Mouse arrived in Martha's life?

Mr. Mouse used to live in the woods behind Martha Stewart's house. He lived in a hollowed out stump on the edge of the forest. He lived alone, and he spent a good deal of his time making his house comfy with castoffs--winecorks for chairs, bits of old flannel for blankets, a wobbly table made out of a champagne cap. The pride of his little house was the spiral stair he had created along the wall by notching and chewing spaces in the rotting wood. It took him ages, but when he was done, the steps spanned more than half the house, circling up and around to the splintery wood outcropping that served as his bedroom. He loved to trot up the stairs, nestle into bed, and dream of making things and going places.

On a particularly damp and blustery afternoon in February, Mr. Mouse caught the scent of cupcake on the air. It was strong enough to wake him from a sound sleep, and he scampered down the stairs to the doorway to get a better read on it. He took a few steps outside and debated facing the threat of an open yard to find the source of that smell. In the spring, especially, hungry hawks made the rounds over grassy spaces, looking for food. Mr. Mouse didn't want to end up taking an unexpected flight in the talons of a starving bird. But that day, he wanted cake more than he wanted safety. Taking a deep breath, he ran for it.

Mr. Mouse didn't know it at the time, but it would be worth the trip. Martha and her housekeeper, Anita, had been baking cupcakes for hours. Martha's original plan had been to bake 200 cupcakes cupcakes for the staff, crew, and audience of her television show. She liked to use her own kitchen; it was so much more relaxing than her television studio. Unfortunately, the cupcakes weren't working out. The baby pink sugarpaste hearts kept sliding off the too-loose swiss meringue frosting. It just wouldn't do. So, out to the trash heap with the cupcakes, all 200. (Well, almost 200. Anita secreted away a stash to share with her friends after work.) Mr. Mouse would have 189 cupcakes for himself, if he made the trip.

At top speed, Mr. Mouse could cross from the woods to the the trashheap in less than 10 minutes. He'd been up late the night before, though, scratching a pattern on the wall of his bedroom, trying to recreate the image of his brothers and sisters nestled in their childhood den. He loved to draw, but the scratches never came out as well on the bark as they did in his mind. Frustrated, he'd finally fallen asleep sometime after the short-eared owl had stopped shouting its lonely song.

In any case, today he was overtired, and slow. The grass was wet, but not yet the soft damp of spring. Instead it was old winter grass, yellowed and scratchy, and it resisted him. Between the thickets of grass were patches of ice, and big lumps of earth that the skunks had overturned while looking for grubs. Here and there were also scattered twigs and a few large branches that a recent windstorm had strewn about. Each of these things posed an obstacle for a little mouse. Though his nose implored him to run, his little legs were weak, and he slowed to a walk. In doing so, he looked up, and saw, for the first time ever, Martha's house.

Strange how we don't look up. You can go through your daily life never noticing the tops of the trees, or where the telephone wires intersect, or the shape of the spaces in the sky through the winter branches. For his part, Mr. Mouse had never looked much past the tops of the grass blades, as he usually took this path to the garbage at night, in a dead run.

There, looming god-like above him, was Martha Stewart's sprawling home. He gave a start when he saw it, and literally stopped in his tracks. While he lived near humans, he didn't live among them. He was a woodland mouse, not a house mouse. He ate humans' garbage, and was a fine connoisseur of their cast-off food (sweets and fried things being favorites), but he didn't know about their homes. Martha Stewart's home filled him with a mix of fear and curiosity. Who know there could be something so BIG, so angular and imposing? Looking at it so intently on that cloudy day, Mr. Mouse's vision got a bit blurry, and the house seemed to thrum with energy. What was it?

As Mr. Mouse was contemplating the foreignness of the house, Anita was crossing the yard with the last tray of cupcake discards. She hated to toss them, but she couldn't save all of them, either. First, Martha wouldn't have it. Secondly, she snuck enough treats each day that her pants now needed elastic waists, a shameful fact she'd finally admitted to herself in December.

As Martha had instructed, Anita had not bagged the cupcakes for the trash. Instead, she carried them, tray by burgeoning tray to the third bin in the waste area. Martha had devised three categories for non-recyclable trash, and they were organized in much the same way all things "Martha" were organized--with precision and labels. Set squarely into huge beds of pebbles were three slatted box containers, each weathered entirely grey except for its shiny chrome label. The first was sensibly labeled "Compost," and was filled purely compostable-material such as vegetable peels and coffee grounds. The second bin was for real garbage (tissues, #5 plastics, and other unmentionables). The third and largest bin was ambiguously labeled "Items that might be compostable." Anita visited this bin the most, for reasons not unlike today's cupcake fiasco. With surprising deftness, in one swift move she hefted the lid of the bin and the tray, dumping the last of the cupcakes. They tumbled down the heap to join the remains of failed coffee cake, soggy teabags, and spoiled pizza dough. She was just turning away to head back to the house when Mr. Mouse streaked past her foot and dove between the slats and into the mess.

Anita screamed. As her tray clattered to the stone path, Mr. Mouse dug faster than he thought possible, through a flurry of cake and goopy icing, furiously moving his feet until he could get a foothold. A new character had entered each of their worlds, though neither of them knew it yet.

Evening Feeding, a work in progress

2009-02-03T10:26:00.000-05:00

Surprising after yesterday's mammoth post, but it sometimes happens that I quiet the words in my head and on the page. My hands busy themselves, and my mind is silent.

Here is a painting that I've been working on for years (years!), glazing and reglazing very thinned layers in oils. I usually have four or five paintings on the go, and this is my favorite. It gets pushed out of line by the other paintings because I'm so invested in it, and I want it to be "perfect." I'm working on letting go of that.

From time to time, this painting calls to me to finish it, and I think I will answer it soon, paintbrush in hand. Just thinking about it makes me smile.

Its working title is Evening Feeding. I'm looking for suggestions on titles--ideas?

On the blog, part 1

2009-02-02T08:56:00.009-05:00

It's the week of my "Blog-o-versary," and I've got blogging on my mind. Okay, I've frequently got blogging on my mind anyway. Just ask my family. Ada routinely points out when something would be "good on the blog." And now I have people actually asking when I'm going to post, which I find oddly thrilling--as though someone has ordered a subscription to my "magazine."

Except this isn't a magazine. Or a diary. Or a gallery. Or a conventional conversation. Or an essay. I would like it to be all of those things, and it has shadows of each playing behind it.

What is this blog, anyway, and why am I so heady for writing it?

The first thing I can say for sure about it is that I am writing almost every day now, and that is the biggest boon of this blog. There were many periods of my life in which I wrote on a daily basis: As an undergraduate, I majored in English (quelle surprise!) and wrote papers constantly. For various other jobs I've had: I wrote ad copy for a publishing copy, and promotional materials and procedure for a university, and a human resources manual for a private company. In graduate school, I wrote countless papers on rhetoric, composition, education, and all sorts of topics related to these. And I started writing poetry. In earnest.
In between these times, I've written overly long letters to friends and intimidated them unintentionally by the length of my notes--a few people been apologetic that they can't write back at such length.
Even when I was teaching English, I wrote the assignments with my students--that is to say, I assigned myself the task of writing the same topics the students did--a very worthwhile exercise for determining if an assignment "worked" or "flopped." In the same vein, I wrote daily "feedback" for myself to recap the day's discussions, and to figure out if I was taking the class in the right direction. I also wrote massive letters of feedback for each student, and my assignments were written with the detail of a novella (quelle surprise, you say).

During that time, we also started the process for adoption Ada, and as part of it, I was asked to write a brief history of myself. You can imagine how shocked the social worker was to receive my 26-page, single-spaced piece. Brief it was not, but important for me to write, yes. And important that Ada have it one day for herself, to see me at that moment, on the brink of parenthood. The real audience for that history, as I pointed out to the social worker, was me. And future Ada.

I am verbose.

But for a few years, I was silent, at least in writing. My letters dwindled to postcards, my poems dried up. My essays and pontifications in writings....gone.

Some of my energy went to making art--sewing, painting, etc--but much of it went to folding clothes, cleaning bathrooms, morning sickness, and just life. I wasn't able to blend the writing and the doing.

Enter the blog.

As you know from this post alone, I continue to pour my heart out. From a rhetorical perspective, the blog is a perfect space for this type of writing. My friend La Belette Rouge wrote an amazing post today on writing her way through something without knowing her destination, and that is what my blog posts are so much of the time: writing through and creating a space.

Having a blog has allowed me to literally create a space (with images, spacing, color, photos, etc) in which I can pour my heart out and find out where I am in the world. In that regard, it's like a diary. But because of the audience of you, dear reader who has made it through this meandering, this writing has more of a shape. It is shaped like the space between me and you.

I am a generous and more selfless in real life. But on paper, I am a selfish writer, going on and on. I have never meant to intimidate with the length of the letters or the posts I write. I write and write to capture the play of words that run through my mind all the time, like insects beating against the night window. Like a lepidopterist, I pin the thoughts to the wall of the blog and examine them to see if they are light and lovely like butterflies or dark and insidious like moths. They are, invariably, both. And some fly away. And as with all collectors, it is really only me who is most pleased by my collection of words... I look back at what I've captured and I see myself.

If you have made it this far through this post, I thank you for sharing this odd and sometimes disturbing or tiresome collection. ...

She arrived on Friday.

2009-01-31T11:48:00.005-05:00

She arrived on Friday, elegant and polite, but needing assistance and some clothing. You see, she's fallen on hard times, and her arms and legs were loose and not fully attached. She couldn't manage to sew them herself, and she'd heard it said in the forest that I was kind to mice...

And so I let her in.

I am under deadline for another project, and so while I offered her a cozy place to sleep, I have to beg off stitching her arms and legs until Monday. She agreed, and nestled into her nest in our dining room clock.

She hasn't yet shared her name with me, as she is quite shy and a bit embarrassed. But she and Mr. Mouse found lots to talk about, squeaking into the wee hours last night. I think they may be fond of each other, truth be told. Love at first sight? Time will tell.

Open Heart Letter 2: To Judy

2009-01-28T13:41:00.008-05:00

As part of my open-heart project, here is another letter to someone I love. I open my heart to her and to you.

Dear Aunt Judy,

My relationship with you begins in the void before I was born, through my mother. The chemistry you found as roommates makes you more sisters than sisters. And as my aunt, you prove once again that family is a choice, a construct.

Your gentleness has been an ever-present influence in my life. I may have taken for granted your presence when I was a trying teenager (and I admit it--I was!), but I see as a grown up how much your temperance and goodness affected me. As you know, my household as a kid was one of extremes, without too much structure or boundaries. That was a good and a bad thing. What you and Tom brought to my life was a sense that normal things like meals and bedtimes are comforting. That simple rituals of eating together and cleaning up the dishes together are pleasurable. In my home now, we eat every breakfast and dinner together, we cook together, we clean together. There is order and balance here, and I recognize the patterns from your home in mine.

Despite all the things we've shared together, there are countless things I haven't told you yet. Of course, I could never list them all, but here are a few:

Do you know what it meant to me that you, a young mother, busy with work and little kids, would make the long drive out for each and every show I was in? I felt so very loved to know that when I stepped onto the stage, you would be in the audience, warm as the spotlight, clapping for the performance, regardless of how good or bad it was. So many plays, so many events. And you shared them all with me. I don't know that I ever told you how much I appreciated it then, but I did. It was a real gift for me to know you and Tom were out there when the curtain went up.

Do you know that I think of you every time I make a bed? That's funny, huh? I remember making up a bed with you somewhere (maybe you were helping Mom out?), and you showed me how the top sheet faces right side down, so when you fold the cuff, it's neat and tidy, and the edging faces the right way. I cannot lay a flat sheet on a bed without remembering that.

I know we don't chat on the phone all the time, but I do think of you almost every day. So many things make me think of you--here are just a few things that bring you into my mind immediately: seeing fat little squirrels, like the ones you feed in your yard; the feel of a warm sunporch; any Celtic music, of any persuasion; any Schnauzer (how I miss Fritz and Ernie--what good dogs!); seven-layer salad with cheese and olives; any kind of object with an owl on it--I know you don't collect them anymore, but they remain stuck to you in my mind.

If I close my eyes, I'm right there at your table, eating a meal off the cool, thick Pfaltzcraft dinnerware and laughing at Tom's wry comments. I'm back in the kitchen on Camp St, or I can feel the soft carpet of the staircase (with its landing that I loved!). And there, clear as day, is the backyard and its burgeoning garden, the sunporch, the bookcases and cabinets of photos and treasures. And what treasures abounded there.

The "new" house is as warm as the old. That weekend Ada and I spent with you was so fun--we are eager to do that again. Ada still talks about what happened with the whipped cream on the blueberry cake. I had chastised her when she went to wipe a dollop of whipped cream off the cake with her finger. And Tom joined in, saying, "No Ada! Don't do that! Do THIS!" and he proceeded to take a handful of it himself. Oh, how we laughed. Her eyes were glowing with love, seeing that a grownup could play like that.

This from Tom, who taught me that smart is funny and disagreement can be safe. That love can share the same space with two very different political views. Tom, you opened my mind to listening to differing opinions, to respecting dissent. Without that, I would have missed out on so many wonderful relationships with people who share a good heart, though not my politics.

I have so many memories of birthdays and Christmases with you. The longer visits, the weekends at your lovely homes linger in my mind. All the big events in our lives, the weddings, the giant birthday celebrations (and birthday/anniversary celebrations), assembling wedding invitations and preparing showers and graduation parties and holidays. Washing dishes together after all of these, and lazy breakfasts after late nights, where Sara and Debbie and I had listened to you girls "cackling like hens" until the wee hours.

These are simple memories of family events, and everyone has them. I am glad that my memories of family events are of you.

As I said, while we are born into one family, I think we can also choose the people who make up our real family, our family of the heart. You helped teach me that. And that ultimately freed my perceptions enough that I was open to the idea of adopting a child. In no small part, your commitment to me led me to understand how fully I could be a parent to a child who was not physically born to me. I can never thank you enough for that.

We choose our real family. I know that if I were given the choice, I would choose you, again and again. Thank you so much for being all you are to me. I love you.

love,

Kirie

A Conversation in the Car

2009-01-27T15:50:00.005-05:00

Ada: Mom, what's that smell?

Husband: Hmmm. I think that's Mom's perfume.

Kirie: What's wrong, don't you guys like it? It's one of my favorites, and I've been waiting to wear it, and today just felt like the day.

Ada: It's too strong.

Husband. Yes, too strong. I don't like it.

Kirie: But doesn't it smell warm and, you know, exotic?

Ada: Mommies don't smell exotic! Mommies need to smell like mommies, Mom!

So much for exotic. And warm and spicy. The perfume in question is Yves St. Laurent's classic, Opium. I have loved this scent since I was 12 years old. It's one of those great scents that changes moods all day long--powdery, sandalwood, sexy, cinnamon, cumin, green-sap and sugar-musk, then powdery again, where it lingers like a sweet memory for a few days on your clothing.

I fell for Opium when I was in junior high. My music and voice teacher wore it as a signature perfume, and because of that, it signified all that was special and dramatic to me. Stevie was vivacious and beautiful, with a huge, bell-like voice and the presence to match it. Though I've worn the perfume long enough to establish new associations to it, the first note always sings "Stevie."

So, phooey to my clan--I'm still going to wear it. Just not for long roadtrips in the car.

Later I prodded Ada a bit on what exactly Mommies smell like. Her answer: soap and milk. And that is definitely not exotic.

The photo is a rare shot of me, taken by Ada. She points out that "You do not look exotic in that picture, either." No kidding.

A poem for Monday

2009-01-26T11:27:00.003-05:00

An old favorite of mine, all the better when read aloud:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, and have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can food fell, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights of the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright

wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

This is a good poem, I think, for midwinter, for a time of difficult economy, for a conflicted heart.

Hopkins himself was a complicated man--manic, simultaneously anguished and joyful, isolated and longing for connection. Some of his poems virtually sing, as this one does, with the internal sounds shimmering through it like water. Others capture the deep melancholy he felt so often toward his later years. I think the flux in his life translated into something almost tangible in his writing. I love this poem for its alchemy of juxtaposition. What do you think?

My first negative comment arrives

2009-01-25T10:20:00.009-05:00

I have long been wishing for comments on this blog. In the past few months, I've finally received some, and along with them, I've made treasured connections with other bloggers whom I respect and admire. Yea for the comment feature!

But until this weekend, I hadn't personally experienced the bad side of putting oneself out there--the negative comments. On Sunday morning, I found my first bad comment, posted on my post "Thoughts on the Inauguration, part 3." Boo for the comment feature!

Clearly, this is not the kind of comment I've been wishing for. I figured so few people see my blog that I wasn't really at risk for such a thing. And, truth be told, it's not the most evil of comments. It's just self-serving and insulting, which I suppose are two qualities that make for a "negative comment."

I read it with surprise and a bit of dismay--why target me? Especially when this person found my blog on a quest to find out how to make a chipmunk costume, of all things! My second reaction, which followed quickly (and I admit to my childishness here) was "Bring it!" I love a good debate. Ask any of my former students about how I love to play with argument. But, after a minute's thought, I abandoned the idea that a "debate" with anonymous would be a good or productive thing.

I have, in my life, experienced more than my fair share of angry, judgmental, abusive language. I know how hurtful words can be. It took a great deal of work for me to distance myself from people who practice this kind of verbal abuse, and I guard this distance carefully. Seeing that nasty comment brought back some icky memories for me, reminding me that "Yes, Kirie, there are still mean people in the world, despite the little bubble you've created for yourself. And yes, mean people still suck."

I can't have it both ways, I know. If I write about my thoughts, and I enable the comments (and wish for them!), then I am bound to get friendly ones and rude ones. Thank goodness I've not experienced rude comments until now. I think that if I receive comments like this in the future (and I'm bound to, right?), I'll be taking my actions on a case-by-case basis. In this case, I did respond, if only to say my piece. You can see what I said here. For the next nasty remark--perhaps just a delete. Silence is a forceful weapon.

Now, my dear readers, how do you deal with the negative commenters on your blogs? Or if you don't have a blog, how do you deal with the negative commenters in your life?

Six Little Things About Kirie

2009-01-23T09:30:00.011-05:00

Two games in two days! Fun!

I was tagged by my friend Paula at American Koukla for this one. It's simple--list six random facts about myself.

1. Like most people from my fifth grade class, I can recite the entire list of US Presidents in chronological order. We learned it by singing a song of all the names. We would stay in at recess and sing and sing and sing until we knew the whole thing by heart. I think the song was called Presidents' Rock or something. I've tried to find it, but had no luck.

The song was catchy, and I don't think I'll ever forget it (at least the Presidents part--the little intro ditty and bridge have escaped me). Being able to recite the Presidents is a great little party trick. (At which party, I'm not sure. Probably one where the other guest would have an appreciation for a someone able to recite the first 100 digits of pi.)

The sad thing is that I really didn't know much about any of them until I got a lot older and started reading biographies.... Still. It impresses Ada to no end that I can do that. Now if I could just start memorizing pi.

2. I can change the oil on a commercial diesel truck.

Me, in the junior high years.

3. When I was in junior high, I lied about having a two-story house to a few kids at school because I was embarrassed that my family was relatively poor. By my faulty logic, I had put associated two-storied homes with wealth. And I had associated wealth with happiness. In junior high, I felt like I was on the wrong side of both of those, so I lied. After I told that lie, I worried that someone would find out and call me on it, but none of the kids I tried to impress ever came to my neighborhood. I now live in a two story home, which we built ourselves. Sometimes I think I've tried to overcompensate...

4. I am drawn to read the backs of shampoo bottles and cosmetics when I am showering or getting ready for my day. I know what each says, as I've read it a million times, but I read it again anyway, almost every time. I am a little touched in the head with OCD, I think.

5. In high school, we moved to a new house, and I got a new room. During this time, I went through a phase in which my entire room had to match--the wallpaper was white stripes with pink and blue squares, my lamps were matching shades of pink and blue, and the striped Marimekko bedspread reflected exactly the stripes of the wallpaper. I hung empty, white acrylic frames on the wall, around an all-white, non numbered clock from Crate and Barrel. As often as I could, I would wear pink or blue pajamas that matched the color of the lamps and squares. Did I mention I might be a bit touched by OCD? I'm actually a lot better since those years. More nights than not, even my pj tops and bottoms don't match.

6. I have small feet. While I can wear a small women's shoe (a 5 or 6), I can also fit into a larger kid's shoe. Each summer Ada and I get a few pairs of matching sandals or clogs from a store like Payless. It's very fun to go out and about with our matching shoes. Ada's now looking forward to the fast-approaching day when she can share my shoes--she's got her eye on a lovely pair of hand beaded kitten heels in blue (also my favorite shoes!).

Now the tag part: Honestly, I don't know enough bloggers well enough to tag them for this--the ones to whom I would passed this along have already done it. So I will tag any of you who chooses to answer in your blog or in your comments below. I hope you take me up on it. I wish someone had tagged me sooner--this was fun!

Photo Tag--Yea! I'm It!

2009-01-22T12:46:00.002-05:00

Lovely and wise Julianne at Potpourripromenade has tagged me with a game. Here's how you play: Show the fourth photo in the fourth folder in your photo files. Then tag four more.

Here is mine:

In this photo, Esme is celebrating her first birthday, and she's busy choosing a toothbrush from the Tol table. The Tol ceremony is a Korean tradition for babies on their first birthday. In Korea, babies are dressed in the hanbok, and there are tables groaning with amazing ceremonial foods for celebrating. The Tol table is laid out with items that symbolize different professions or blessings for a person's life. A few items on the traditional table are:

bow and arrow: the child will become a warrior
needle and thread: the child will live long
jujube: the child will have many descendants
book, pencil, or related items: the child will become a successful scholar
rice or rice cake: the child will become rich (some resources say choosing a rice cake means the child is not smart)
ruler, needle, scissors: the child will be talented with his/her hands
knife: the child will be a good cook

The child is seated on a cushion in front of all of these items, and the first two things he or she chooses are supposed to predict the direction of his or her career or life.

We are not Korean by culture or birth, but when we adopted Ada from Korea, we decided to incorporate many Korean traditions into our family celebrations. Not being raised with these traditions makes it difficult to to it entirely authentically, obviously. But it also affords us some flexibility. For instance, at Ada's tol party, we added a few extras to the tol table, including a thermometer (for a doctor). Ada, being herself, first chose the thermometer and then the needle and thread. On the video of this event, you can hear me lapse into a throaty cheer, not unlike a good Yiddish mama, "She's a doctor! And she has long life! Yea baby!" I guess I channeled Barbra Streisand for a minute or something.

For Esme's tol table, we added yet another few choices: a small plane (pilot) and a toothbrush (dentist). She chose the toothbrush first, and then a measuring cup (a chef, perhaps?). Ada likes to remind Esme that she's "going to be a dentist who likes to cook." Time will tell. She does like to brush her teeth and floss an awful lot, come to think of it....

Now to tag four more:

3continentfamily

American Koukla

Word Lovers Unite

and I know she's been tagged already, but I second it:

La Belette Rouge

Tag, you're all it!

Thoughts on the Inauguration: Part 1

2009-01-21T07:42:00.002-05:00

As I joined the millions of people watching the inauguration of Barack Obama yesterday, my mind was flooded with so many thoughts--flashbacks, lamenting, celebrating, looking ahead. I made an attempt at articulating them in one cohesive post, but they work well as stand alone thoughts here. So three thoughts for Wednesday:

I watched the inauguration in our family room, surrounded by Esme's menagerie of plastic farm animals. Esme followed the first part of it, but needed to go down for a nap, so I missed part of Obama's speech. As I was carrying Esme upstairs, I thought about how amazingly fortunate I am--I am living that American dream, completely pursuing my happiness, unfettered.

Sure, my carpet isn't vacuumed, and I don't have a paying job now. But I personally have so many, many blessings. So why do I feel so excited about a change?

Because it's a change for everyone--everyone should have the chance to pursue a dream as I have been able to. My dream is fairly modest--to have space to think and love and create. I know that other people dream of things as basic as having days off, or healthcare, a car to drive, or the privilege of legally calling someone their spouse. It is my wish, my fervent hope that everyone be able to achieve these, and much, much more. May we all be able to pursue our dream of ourselves to the fullest. I believe President Obama when he says he will help us toward that goal.

Thoughts on the Inauguration, Part 2

2009-01-21T07:39:00.000-05:00

I was fortunate to be at one other inauguration--George W. Bush's first swearing-in in 2001. It was a snowy, slushy day, and a trek to get there by car, and changing Metro lines.
But it was moving and worth weathering the chill. I did not vote for him, nor have I been a fan of Mr. Bush's policies, and yet, I was so pleased to witness a cherished tradition of turning over the helm. How fantastic is it that we can make such a full and peaceful transition between administrations, without fear of some kind of mutiny or martial takeover? We take these peaceful transitions for granted. And they are a real sign of our healthy democratic system. Yesterday we saw the joy that can come with a transition, and the grace with which Mr. Bush left his post. The beauty of such a process is not lost.

Thoughts on the Inauguration, Part 3: On Mr. Bush

2009-01-21T07:38:00.002-05:00

As much as I did not agree with many of the policies of Mr. Bush, I feel that I have to say that I did not feel great antipathy for the guy. He is, as so many of his supporters pointed out, a "good man," described often down-to-earth, or folksy. For lots of people, Mr. Bush passed the litmus test of "Would he be fun to have a beer with?"

The problem was that for such an office as the President of the US, we need to elect someone who was not "one of us," not a drinking buddy who knows about as much geography and world affairs as the average guy. Bush has the average mentality; I believe he's as self-serving as most people we run across each day, his smugness is common among the middle class. Had you been contemporaries, he would have been the class clown or the jock in your high school. I'm certain you can easily name at least 15 people you've met in your lifetime who have exactly the same personal qualities as Mr. Bush. But what we need, for every President, for every election to higher office, is a Great Man.

Mr. Bush supported poor policies and failed so badly a lot of the time because he was too average. He was too easily swayed by the people around him, the agendas he followed weren't motivated entirely by the greatest good, but were self-serving. This is not to say he was evil or mean. Unlike many people, I do think he has a good heart, and he really did want to do the right thing. But he literally just couldn't see the whole picture. Bush isn't, and never pretended to be, a thinking man. He was an average guy, and he wasn't up to the job. I wouldn't be, either. Can you honestly say you personally know anyone who would come close to having all the qualities needed to be a good President?

The point of this is not to be harsh to Mr. Bush. Holding down arguably the most difficult job in the world, he was faced with a perfect storm of difficulties. I do think he struggled mightily at times to do his best. It just wasn't enough. He was in over his head.

I started to sing a gentler tune about Bush just before the election of 2004. Ada heard me say that I would definitely not be voting for Bush. She said, "You sound angry. Is he a bad guy?" I realized then that I was angry. But I was angry at his some of his policies, and his seeming nonchalance. He was the same as countless guys I've met over the years--smirky and knee-jerk, but underneath probably well-meaning. I didn't hate him, any more than I hated any of those other smirky guys.

Once I admitted that my problem with Bush was more about what he lacked than who he was, it was clear to me that he wasn't really a "bad guy." Certainly, I didn't want Ada to grow up making snap judgements like that. So I decided then and there that I had to let go of my anger at him. I told her what became my line for every time I was dismayed about the decisions of his administration: "President Bush is not a bad guy, honey. He had his turn at being President, and he did his best. But now it should be time for him to be at home in Texas with his family. He's a good daddy, and a good husband, and now he's going to let someone else take a turn at being President." Yesterday, that's exactly what happened. I wish him well.

President Obama is having his turn now. Unlike Bush, he does have all of those elusive qualities that make a "Great Man," and I believe he will wear the mantle of the Presidency well. I confess to having some misgivings about putting so much pressure on him--he is human, and we may discover that like us, he, too, has feet of clay. The problems our country faces are huge, and (as he has pointed out) there are no quick fixes. Will expectations of Obama exceed his capabilities? Perhaps. Regardless, I am hopeful that Obama's mettle will carry the day. His character shows in his bearing, in his rhetoric, and I think he will also do his best. And that will be more than good enough.

Praise Song for the Day

2009-01-20T16:08:00.004-05:00

Because I could not wait for the official transcript, with proper breaks, etc. as written by Elizabeth Alexander, I am posting this lovely inaugural poem as it was transcribed to Congressional Quarterly this morning. I'll update with the newer version once Ms. Alexander makes it available. The next version will be even better--the breaks say so much... but this is great for now.

I, for one, think this hit all the right notes. What do you think? Here it is:

Praise Song for the Day

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other,

catching each others’ eyes or not,

about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise.

All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din,

each one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem,

darning a hole in a uniform,

patching a tire,

repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere

with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum

with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer consider the changing sky;

A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words,

Words spiny or smooth,

whispered or declaimed;

Words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone

and then others who said,

“I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain,

that many have died for this day.

Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,

who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce,

built brick by brick

the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day.

Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love,

love beyond marital, filial, national.

Love that casts a widening pool of light.

Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

Elizabeth Alexander, delivered on January 20, 2009
at the inauguration of President Barack Obama

Inauguration poetry

2009-01-19T09:24:00.005-05:00

Inauguration day is almost upon us, and what an exciting ceremony it is bound to be, all of it. In particular, I've been reading with interest about Elizabeth Alexander, the poet chosen to write the inaugural poem for President Obama.

She is an exciting choice for an inaugural poet. She's an embodiment of connections between multiple disciplines. Not only is she a poet, but also a playwright. She's a professor of African American Studies at Yale. She's written on education, poetry, identity, art. She's taught in many venues, from both high school and college. She knows how to connect the dots. That Mr. Obama chose her shows that he values poetry, that he knows how to connect the dots, too. He "does nuance."

Politics aside, I am thrilled that Obama is including a poet at his inauguration. Ms. Alexander will be only the fourth poet to participate in an inaugural ceremony, a fact that leaves me disappointed, but not surprised.

I'm going to stop here and say that this is the third draft of this post, the others all ending up in a vitriolic snit lamenting that that Americans don't generally read or enjoy poetry. That we have had only four inaugurations with a poet to mark the occasion is a sad thing. But someplace in the second version of this post, I decided that I'm not going to dwell on that (at least not today).

Today I'm going to celebrate that poetry is going to be present tomorrow at the ceremony. Of course, the day is about so very much more; but the presence of a poet says a great deal about the changes that are bound to come.

As way leads to way so often, I recently stumbled across a poem that speaks to the excitement ushered in with the inauguration of another President, in another time not so long ago.

I give you Linda Pastan's "Remembering Frost at Kennedy's Inauguration," from her book, Queen of a Rainy Country

Remembering Frost at Kennedy's Inauguration

Even the flags seemed frozen

to their poles, and the men

stamping their well-shod feet

resembled an army of overcoats.

But we were young and fueled

by hope, our ardor burned away

the cold. We were the president's,

and briefly the president would be ours.

The old poet stumbled

over his own indelible words,

his breath a wreath around his face:

a kind of prophecy.

--Linda Pastan

2009-01-16T13:29:00.005-05:00

I've been up in the night this past month--insomnia, mine and Esme's, alternately.

Esme sometimes whispers to me in the dark, "Mommy, I'm scared. Protect me." I rock her and tell her in reassuring tones that the day and the night are exactly the same, and the morning light will reveal that.

But I will tell you the whole truth, one I can't express to her yet--I do think the night is a different from the daytime. I'd go so far as to say it's like different country sometimes. Not scary, but mysterious, secret. Being awake when the rest of your world sleeps around you is to feel like a fugitive from your regular life. After a long night like that, the next day surprises me with its normal rhythms. Doesn't it know my secret, nighttime life? Doesn't it see how different *I* am for having been awake so long?

Sleep-deprived, I wade through the day's routines, stopping from time to time to marvel at the difference the daylight makes. Sometimes I even feel as though the lack of sleep sharpens my feeling for the day, for its ordinariness.

A wonderful poem that evokes some of this is Debra Spencer's "Day Bath," from her collection Pomegranate. The last line in particular captures the feeling that resonates with me after a long night....

Day Bath

for my son

Last night I walked him back and forth,

his small head heavy against my chest,

round eyes watching me in the dark,

his body a sandbag in my arms.

I longed for sleep but couldn't bear his crying

so bore him back and forth until the sun rose

and he slept. Now the doors are open,

noon sunlight coming in,

and I can see fuchias opening.

Now we bathe. I hold him, the soap

makes our skins glide past each otehr.

I lay him wet on my thighs, his head on my knees,

his feet dancing against my chest,

and I rinse him, pouring water

from my cupped hand.

No matter how I feel, he's the same,

eyes expectant, mouth ready,

with his fat legs and arms,

his belly, his small solid back.

Last night I wanted nothing more

than to get him out of my arms.

Today he fits neatly

along the hollow my thighs make,

and with his fragrant skin against mine

I feel brash, like a sunflower.

Hearts in the snow

2009-01-15T07:02:00.005-05:00

On my way downstairs yesterday morning, I caught a glimpse of something unusual in the driveway.

I have love and hearts on my mind lately, and not just because of the upcoming Valentine's Day. I love how our minds manifest things--perception is everything. Yesterday the world offered me hearts entwined, and I accepted them!

On this day, I give you a poem of connection--like these hearts, like my love and I, like the world and all of us...

You Are Me

You are me and I am you.

It is obvious that we are inter-are.

You cultivate the flower in

yourself so that I will be beautiful.

I transform the garbage in myself so

that you do not have to suffer.

I support you you support me.

I am here to bring you peace

you are here to bring me joy.

- Thich Naht Hahn