{my topography}

After a few days off I’m back to writing, fingering the blueprints that make me who I am. I’m going back to my childhood in the Colorado mountains, and to the stories of my parent’s love and faith. I’m looking for meaning in their loneliness and isolation; I’m looking for maps that can help me to describe the context of my own life.

Sometimes it feels impossible to make words describe the things my heart needs to say. Sometimes, barely, the right ones arrive on the page in the nick of time to save me from the heartache of knowing but not being able to explain.

Following the path of the dead

Opening and folding,
flush petals move towards sun,
where warm life stretches to the boundaries of stem
pulling nectar upwards against gravity.

In the moonlight
moths flock to the ghostly silhouettes
of backlit petals.
Their wings beat aimlessly,
falling for the sham of appearances.

Hovering at the edges
at twilight times, at dawn,
worlds open and close
like the finning gills of fish,
pummeling the air like the call of a coyote.

Here perceptions shift ;
the shape of the sea star gathered up
becomes an interior space.

A wonderfully constructed story that it forces you to become attached to the strange habits and foibles of the lead character, Christopher, who is autistic. Without being pedantic or obtuse, the narrator’s voice is exacting and transparent, bringing you into a world where the color of cars passing on the street decide the mood for the day: red cars, good mood. Black cars = bad mood; and where the mysterious death of a dog leads to an unraveling of family complexities. It is a book about love and loss, and it made me contemplate again how people make sacrifices for the ones they love, and how misunderstandings almost invariably arise when words are not enough. Hadden’s experience working with autistic youths gives his character’s voice validation, and he writes with a lithe humor and sensitivity, even when exploring issues of depression, anger and self doubt. A quick, easy read, THE CURIOUS INCIDENT pulls you from one chapter to the next with wry observations about human nature, wit, and well constructed sentences.

Ikea furniture is always packaged flat—for easier transport, and because it requires less packaging this way. It is up to you to haul your boxes of furniture home, usually tied to the roof of your too-small car or shoved precariously in the back, with the trunk open, and when you arrive, you stumble inside with the long cardboard rectangles containing what will be your bed or nightstand, and begin the hours-long process of assembling things. It takes a lot of patience, and with any luck, your techniques improve as you go along.

You take a heap of flat boards, pegs, an allen wrench, and follow the schematics that, if they have words at all, are printed in fifteen different languages. You are aware that what you’re doing is a little bit like magic. You are turning the nearly two-dimensional stack of wood and particle board, glass and wicker, into something three dimensional and useful.

You build a wicker backed chair, after putting the legs in place wrong twice. Your cat will later love to sharpen her claws on its rattan and soon it will no longer be presentable, but when you first put it together, all you see are its clean lines and lovely promise. You imagine dinner parties, and sunny mornings over coffee.

Or you put together a glass-topped table that will for years, show every condensation ring but you still can’t be bothered to buy coasters. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to make sense of the arrows and dotted lines: connect region B with point C using tool A. It might not be fine furniture, but it’s a start, and though you dream of owning REAL furniture, the kind you see in the windows of the home wares store you walk by every day, you’re happy with these flat-package creations for the time being.

This is pretty much exactly what the process of acquiring a sense of humor is like.

If you’re me, that is, and you were raised in a home with two of the most earnest, somber parents on the face of the earth. My home was also devoid of TV which contributed to a) the blossoming of my wild and vivid imagination an b) the utter absence of pop-culture sensibilities and all the accoutrements of humor that come with this terrain.

For me, sarcasm, silliness, wit, and comic timing did not come preassembled: an already functional part of my personality from day one. In fact, for years I was almost entirely lacking of anything that could possibly pass as an acceptable sense of humor.

Unfortunately sarcasm is still mostly lost on me. And, though you can slay me with a good play-on-words (my father, in all his etymological neerdieness would, on a cheery day, toss out one after another at the dinner table, and you’d have to be well versed in homophones and double-entendres to find them laugh-worthy, which I was), no amount of hanging out with boys has helped me to understand why it’s SO FUNNY to repeat one liners over and over again.

But I am gradually starting to get the hang of funny. It’s taken years for me to assemble, but I’m finally starting to get that it’s okay to JUST TAKE THINGS LIGHTLY sometimes. To NOT be serious every single minute. Years for me to finally understand that having a sense of humor, first and foremost, means having fun. It means giving yourself permission to make a fool out of yourself—to jump into things, arms and legs akimbo, laughing all the while.

And Bean is like the schematics that come with the furniture. He makes being silly easy. At 13 months, he watches everything I do, and then replicates it, often with unbelievably comic effects. He’ll take a sip of water and then let out this delightful, over-exaggerated sigh, and everybody just dies laughing. Or he’ll hear music and start wiggling his booty around with complete uninhibitedness. Finally, I’m starting to see that this is what humor is all about: over-exaggerated uninhibition. Gusto. Glee.

So we make time for this every day: we sit on the floor, roll around some, and act silly. I’m hoping that by the time he’s big, both of us will have a rip-roaring sense of humor.

Syrup making in an outdoor evaporator, old iron spiles, sap dripping into galvanized buckets with lids to keep the squirrels out. Standing around with people we barely know (our neighbors to the west) it feels so easy to be ourselves. To laugh, to throw the slimy tennis ball for their spaniel, and lick syrup from a paper cup, still hot, unselfconsciously. We share conversation the way two friends might a sandwich, snatching juicy bits here and there while Bean crawls about on the wood pile and gets licked by the dog.

“Doggy,” he says, over and over again. “Doggy.” And we can’t help but laugh with wonder and scoop him up. He’s starting to talk!

All weekend a friend has been visiting, and our house is full of the quiet harmony that occurs when someone you love is around. An extra set of hands. Dishes done. She laughs at all my husband’s jokes and and Bean adores her. Between us we’ve probably had six bars of chocolate. And in the moments in between everything else, we’ve been sorting out our souls over cups of tea or red wine , talking until we’ve gathered many bright words like handfuls sea glass.

Hair cuts today (I got bangs—see above), and playing in the late evening sunlight at the waterfront, chasing Bean about the lawn and drinking up the light.

Out in the field of trampled grass we sit under a gray bucket of sky, looking towards the roofline of our house, angled and steep against the gentle slope of the hill. Redwing blackbirds call from their perches on budding branches. Maple sugaring tomorrow with the neighbors, and the electrical wiring is done, the walls finally framed. Drywall this week, then paint. These things feel like progress but there is always more to do.

This early part of spring is always a time of disbelief for me. So long since foliage was familiar, I can’t remember the soft outlines of trees, fuller with leaves, nor can my memory slip comfortably around the color of bright green grass or blossoms. Yet it is only a matter of weeks, a half a calendar’s page of days before the landscape’s contour changes. When the peepers come and the new sap stops dripping into the buckets in the sugar maple stands, it will happen. It is the same way with the house now. We walk the rooms, so accustomed to the film of drywall dust, the nails underfoot, the exposed studs. Picking paint samples is an act of faith. But soon we’ll have floors, the kitchen cabinets in place, tile underfoot in the bathroom.

Before and during feel so much longer than the after, when in reality, of course, the opposite is true.

The sun made me happy today. Bean & I went to the park and I think he felt it too: that glorious springtime light splashing our cheeks and making shadows look like blue cut-outs in a collage. We squinted and laughed and climbed the jungle gym and then went for a latte and a vanilla milk.

He’s becoming his own little self. Thoughtful, interested, pointing out everything. It seems like this past week all of a sudden he’s started to notice the most minute details in things. He points to airplanes in the sky—and last night we came home late and I cradled him in my arms so he could see the big night sky and he pointed up at the stars and started babbling excitedly, turning his head as we walked up the steps to the porch, so that he could get one last glimpse before we came inside.

I sit at the dining room table with a good mechanical pencil and some soft lead. The house hums with the regular quiet of evening. Into the corners of my mind the hubbub of the day still seeps, like spilled ink soaking into a paper towel. I give myself a task: focus wholly on these two little boots. Let my eyes move along their contours. Stay focused. Follow with my hand.

I sketch the outline of each boot. My mind slips into a place between thinking and not—a place without language where I hover like a humming bird, millimeters from a flower anticipating sweet nectar. I start painting the shadows.

I’ve been trying to do this more: directing my focus towards everyday objects. To notice how things are. To try to accurately observe. Everything doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be.

I’ve begun to notice this week how often I put value on moments, on whole days: “this is horrible,” I hear myself saying, or “I hate this.” Often I am overcome with these emotions—the value I give the moment obscures it.

The shadows are hard to capture. The quality of shiny rubber catches the light. The boots are still new, only used indoors by Bean’s small feet. He’s walked about in them like a bowlegged cowboy, high stepping, with a big grin on his face. Soon they’ll be muddy, their sheen tarnished with a glaze of puddle mud.

The shadows are important. They give depth and angle. Without them the contours I’ve drawn will look distorted and not like the boots at all. It is the shadows that bring dimension, and I’m starting to understand that about my life too. It is hard for me to allow the shadows to simply be, without resenting them, or allotting them a value. Hard to come face to face with my sorrow, anger, or aggression, without letting these emotions spill over my entire perception self. Hard to let them exist alongside my breath, without holding my breath.

I’m not good at allowing these emotions to rest in the open palms of my soul, without clenching my fists.

Some nights when I paint, I let things distort, grow wild, brilliant, abstract, but tonight I want to capture things as they are. Tonight I want the chiaroscuro to be as it is, there on the table before me. Light where the bulbs above my head illuminate the toe tips. Dark where the soles touch the table top. Light where my breath comes freely. Dark where my mind comes up against the sharp edges of undefined worry.

I recall reading about this years ago when I was trying to learn how to be mindful, rather than just being mindful. I never got it then: this process of acceptance. I never understood how hard it is to sit side by side with frustration, with self pity, with a knot of anger, and allow these things to be without allowing them to flood the page with darkness. To accept them, but not to give them reign. To see them as they are, without the distortion.

I go back over the boots, working with watercolors, adding layer upon layer of red pigment to create the shadows. I begin to notice that there is shape to the shadows. They have borders. I focus my mind on the page. The meaty part of my palm rubs up against the fresh paint, smudging it. A trail of dark pigment flecks the outer edge of my hand.

I realize that often in these past few days, when work has been highly stressful for DH, I’ve allowed myself to absorb his aggression and frustration. I’ve internalized it and allowed it to spread: an unidentified fear spilling across the page of my heart, and my whirling hormones (after two years, nearly, my cycle is finally returning) have added to the blur.

When I look closely, this is what I see: the boots. Two tokens of puddle-stomping joy to be had by the small boy who I love. My anger: not really mine, but absorbed from the environment of stress I’ve been in this week. My worry: money, always money. My fear: that I am not good enough.

When I observe closely this is what I feel: breath. Tension. Focus. Acceptance. Release. Here are the boots, and my soul as I see them tonight.

By the calendar, spring is here now. Yesterday the equinox, and today, a few moments of daylight more. But at this latitude it is still cold, and we are feeling cagy. Bean and I went out into our tiny urban yard today: a mess of lumpy lawn, a broken mower under the deck, the tall gray picket fence leaning in. He raced about on the uneven ground, falling often, laughing, bringing me dried leaves (this is what he does now—bring me small things he finds: lint, a scrap of paper, leaves. And these thing suddenly are precious.)

It was good for me, after days like the past handful, to go with Bean outdoors and watch hid body fill with bubbly wonder like soda in a cup. Good to remember how easy it is pocket these small instances of joy.

We twirled until we were both dizzy and then we sat and watched the world spin. I could see his eyes still tracking the orbiting yard around him, and the grin on his face wide like the grin on mine.

It’s been an interesting week of sinking deeply into words, and now I’m longing for easier things: for messy collages, for magazines, anything where the image does all the work, and words are only for decoration. I’ve realized how important daily writing is for me—not just morning pages (though they help); doing the kind of writing that requires me to return to previous work again and again, crafting sentences on a daily basis makes it possible for me to refine meaning: like making maple syrup, so much sap evaporates before there’s real sweetness to be had.

This push I’ve had to write fits with the season. This piece of Earth has turned it’s axis again toward the sun, and everything feels it: receding ice, new shoots, and randy stray cats who come yowling around our door looking for handouts. The shift in season also reflects another internal shift—my body is going though some sort of hormonal reordering, and my moods are wildly flailing all over the board.

So it was good to go outside in the cold bright air, soak up sun and twirl.

I tried to think of something clever to write to describe the weekend, but I couldn’t, because all I’ve been doing is writing and I feel squeezed dry tonight. (The yeast infection, the serious shin splints and the ridiculously cold weather haven’t helped.)

Every spare second for the past three days, writing. I have about 10,000 words of stuff that in the good moments I think is actually decent. Then there are the moments that I feel like flushing it all down the toilet. These moments occur in abundance. But it’s some kind of progress. The deadline is tomorrow, so it’s up to the stars then.

The highlight of the weekend: see below.