{my topography}

I feel my pores open soaking up particles of light. Above me on the hill, the tiny newly greening leaves are making chlorophyll. Each one, still small and delicate, fluttering, transparent in the slanting afternoon sun. I am pulling nails from boards, my body becoming familiar with the weight of the hammer, the torque of the rusted nails coming out through old holes. For the first time since the house was officially ours, I am here alone, surrounded by calling cardinals, nuthatches, bluebirds, chickadees. The air I full of song and silence. Wind rushes up through the valley, circling the house.

Every time I come here, every single time, my heart sings. I know this sounds cliché, and maybe it is—for don’t all cliché’s originate in some utterly profound truth? My love for this land has saturated my lungs, my muscles, my soul.

Each day is a choreography of patience and longing. Every minute we can get, one of us is at the house, and the push to finish is almost unbearable. Inside our heads the jangle of other desires: to mountain bike with the onset of warmer weather, to lie about on the lawn, soaking up the soporific sunlight, to wake up in our own house. Instead, our small apartment always feels like the walls are folding in on us; the counters in the kitchen too narrow and always full with things that don’t belong there: mail, pens, an odd wrench or screwdriver, a bottle full of bubbles. We wake up at night to the sound of the neighbor going or coming late, crashing up the stairs, her small dog yipping in the shrill way that small dogs do; or to the pulse of red and blue lights of a cop car or ambulance.

As I pull nails, my skin grows hot, and my thoughts wander. I’m still sifting through my impressions from my mother’s visit. Trying to locate the source of my emotions: anger zinging up like a hornet bite, loss, frustration, gladness. Our relationship has never been easy. Always there’s been an undercurrent of some unvocalized tension. When I think back over her days here, my heart fingers moments like Braille, trying to find words for the things that might have occurred, or didn’t.

Here’s the thing: for whatever reason, my mother doesn’t know the language of celebration. She cannot simply say: ‘this is so beautiful!’ or ‘I am so happy you are happy.’ Instead joy is always burried under other words, like a vein of iron running through a in stone. Also: I always feel like there is comparison in her words: “I’d never do it this way,” she said a dozen times; and I’m not sure what to do with this at all.

I make progress with the stack of boards. 150 year old six-inch wide planks, faded to gray, originally from a barn in Addision County. We’re not sure what we’ll do with them—but for now we’re keeping them: removing the nails and stacking them in the garage where they’ll be dry. I try to do the same with the granules of confusion, resentment, frustration that I feel now, a handful of days after my mother left. There were bright moments, and her love is evident, but her pessimism has this way of tangling everything inside me. Her answer: I’ll see it differently when I’m her age. And I’m sure will, but it that doesn’t change how I feel right now.

With each nail I pull, I consciously allow myself to release whatever unnamed, unsaid tumult has been lurking below the surface, and replace it with sunlight.

Spring up here in the north part of the country is a gradual unfolding. Each day, a little more–but not all at once the way I always felt it was in Connecticut. Maybe I was too busy to notice before? The lilac blooms before they’ve burst. The way the grass is suddenly lush. The outlines of branches no longer stark, but soft and blurred with buds and blooms.

In the backyard at the house, a riot of forsythia. Birds everywhere making nests. And the sheetrock is finally up!

I’m ashamed to admit–I actually know next to nothing about web design and I barely understand how my publishing platform works. Are you surprised? Yeah, I’d like to learn–but seriously, where would the time for that to be found?

So instead of learning, today I am begging. If someone has the fancy shmancy web skills to help me integrate a gallery to display my artwork into wordpress, I’d grovel willingly at their feet. Doesn’t sound enticing enough? I can throw in a year of free hosting from Wired Hub. Better?

Email me if you’re interested.

And for everyone else, this is the best I could do. Enjoy.

I remember going down a water slide for the first time: I was six or seven, it was the apex of summer and very hot. We were in L.A., at someone’s backyard pool, with the babysitter. I didn’t know how to swim—or at least, I didn’t know how to swim without support (I remember clinging to plastic milk jugs to buoy me up—the cheap version of waterwings, for sure.)

“Go for it,” she told me casually from the edge where she dangled her long legs in the water. Her toes were painted red. I adored her. “When you hit the water, hold your breath and kick you feet, and don’t stop kicking.”

I believed her entirely.

And I wanted to go down the slide so badly. I imagined its blue fiberglass hull was the back of a dolphin. Resolute, I climbed up the rungs of the ladder; up to the top.

I could see over the fence from there, into the neighbor’s yard—I could see their turquoise pool and waterslide, and beyond it, another pool in another yard. This is what certain neighborhoods were like in L.A.: back yard pool after pool, separated by high fences or concrete walls. A patchwork of postage stamp yards—with a stitching of bougainvilleas and roses between them.

But we didn’t have a pool. And we didn’t live in a neighborhood like this. My dad always had a fierce attachment to having land (something I seem to have inherited), so we lived on two acres at the top of a mountain in Northridge, with a wild yard full of bamboo and prickly fruit and loquats. Instead of having pools, our neighbors kept horses.

So the whole pool thing was wildly exotic to me. A dream come true. The perfect antedote to the oven-hot of mid day. The perfect balm to scratched knees and boredom. The perfect escape.

Once I’d decided, I went for it, just like that. No second guessing. No long minutes wavering at the top. I climbed up, crossed my fingers, and slid down—the speed sending me hurtling towards the water, replacing breath with giddy glee. Then I hit with a splash and sank. Down I went, and down, and down.

But I held my breath.

And I started kicking.

And suddenly I was moving up and up, towards the blue bright surface where the water and air pressed together in a thin line. Then I burst through, gulping and ecstatic. I was swimming.

I’m still like this. When I decide to go for something, I simply do. I don’t waver. I don’t linger at the top wondering what if?. I just jump in.

Then I hold my breath and start kicking—which is pretty much where I’m at right now with my whole job search. I went to a school today that I’d love to teach at—close to home, and rich with opportunities for professional development. But it’s in the most competitive district in the state—and they’ve received close to 200 applications for just that one position. So I’m mostly just holding my breath. And kicking.

And keeping my fingers crossed.

An empty page; rough sketch paper, then black paint in arcs. I have no idea what my creation will be. I rip paper, and find I’m drawn (after all-day rainstorms,) to the bright images of peoney blooms in a glossy magazine page. I press the shreds of the hot pink pentals onto the page, then swipe them with the slick sticky gel on my brush.

I let myself create a mess. Nothing makes sense. The images are incongruent, random, and incomplete. I add ripped bits of sentences I copied from online dictionaries about this word: wild (n) deviating widely from an intended course.

Then I talk on the phone with my best friend, my head and shoulder cradling the receiver, letting my mind travel elsewhere; letting chaos ensue on the page. When I look down and realize I’ve rubbed a lot of white paint onto the images a short brush, and suddenly a humming bird arrives. It’s flight path off kilter, angling down. This is my creation: a zig zag of wildness, this uncontainable, too-fast flutterer, almost like my heart tonight. When I allow the wild part of my brain to take over, creation invariably happens.

The theme at mamasaysom this week is wild. Go have some fun here, or here.

I drive my mother to the airport early, and on the way home stop for straight-from-the oven croissants and scones. I get a small coffee in a paper cup with maple syrup and cream, and snatch a little solitary time at my computer, nibbling on a date scone with lemon icing. It is only a matter of minutes before Bean and DH burst from the bedroom, tousle headed and ready for the day, but right now our tiny house is quiet, save for the cats who race in circles around the room.

Having a mother, and being a mother is a polarity I thought about often this weekend—How someday, invariably, my boy will grow up and his thoughts and ideas will shear away from mine like an ice berg from the polar cap. With unswirving certainty he’ll find criticisms of me; see me as different from him in fundamental ways.

Blood is a limited connective tissue—biological relation is only a small part of who we become, and I felt that this weekend, talking with my mother. Sitting next to her on the couch, I see small pieces of myself: my cheekbones are like hers, my nose. Occasionally, I hear a phrase, or a handful of sentences she says that wrap their way around an idea, and resonate with me. But most of the time her conviction, her intensely burning idealism, and her far flung beliefs: in palmistry, astrology, anthroposophy, cosmology, numerology, cause me to veer the other way. The outlines of our differences are stark.

I lean towards relativism; my reality shaped more by day to day experience than by esotericism. I value truth—both sacred and factual, as it resonates for me, but I don’t expect other’s to see it as I do. There are as many ways for knowing god as there are people; similarly for living a good life or raising children.

Childrearing came up a lot over the past few days, and I found myself always second guessing the things I’ve grown accustomed to trusting. Her perspective on raising a child is based on the implementation of a strict rhythm: meals and bed times marked indelibly onto the meridians if the day. She values a certain stoicism too: crying it out is a method that works for her, and doesn’t rip apart her every nerve.

The teacher in me has already for years valued the way children thrive in the security of a structured day—and routine is an important, predictable background onto which the daily activities are superimposed. But I also feel like there is a place for the willy-nilly glee of deviation; of following a whim, of breakfast in bed, of dinner out late on occasion, or skipping a nap for the sake of an adventure.

I try to exhale and shake off the residual tension that’s found its way to my shoulders and heart over the past couple of days. Outside rain is falling again and the cherry blossoms are just about to burst into bloom. Suddenly the house is filled with shrieking, and the patter of small running feet, coffee being made, the cats being chased round and round the kitchen island. On the counter, the bright orange roses my mother brought home for me from the market. We’re both growing.

The past few days have been piled with small fragments. Tesserae. A jigsaw puzzle in a box. The deadline for the house is rapidly approaching: five weeks until our lease is up here. Five weeks to do: drywall mudding, paint, floors, kitchen, and both bathrooms.

My mother is here for a visit, and seeing her come towards me from across the wide foyer of the airport, I felt a lurch of familiarity and distance all at once. Her shoulders felt small when we hugged—smaller than the shoulders I perpetually remember from my childhood. It always takes us a few days to synchronize, our interpretations of each other always slightly off at first encounter.

Sitting on stools at the kitchen island we sweet mandarins and talk about her past, my childhood, our futures. Words that keep coming up: comparison, criticism, home, happiness, choice. Hearing her describe the threads of her biography (misplaced affection, intense shyness, an affair, a baby, and then she married my father: a man she hardly knew, but whose ideals she loved) makes me feel a bit like I’m a bird trying to swim in the lake of her perception.

She’s brought good chocolate: hazelnut and currant, and I nibble on it, hardly able to fathom the gap in perceiving that spreads out between us. But we find much to laugh at together, and she makes incredible food.

The second day of her visit she stays with Bean, while DH and I hang drywall for hours. We work at first like giddy high school sweethearts, saying goofy things, laughing, so happy to be together. Then we grow steady, a rhythm evolving. Our movements become synchronized: each moving one step ahead of the other, our actions overlapping only when necessary (to hold each piece of gypsum up; to wield the drill, dimpling screws into its papered surface.)

When I come home for dinner, my mother has done the incredible: the house is clean, Bean has been fed fresh cooked squash with brown rice, and all the laundry is done. To me this is an incredible feat. Most days the house limps by, in a state of constant neglect. The laundry is the worst of it, and my best friend knows me well enough to say, “Oh god, you must be really stressed,” after checking on the status of our clean towel supply— and finding none.

DH and I are a team with housework as with other things. We clean together, cook together, and neglect housework together. But we are also lucky that neither of us have particularly high standards of clean, or else we’d drive each other mad. My mother on the other hand: the domestic superwoman. I murmur my thanks between bites of succulent herbed chicken.

She doesn’t see her strengths: afraid to trust in her own innate power, she is terrified of finding a ‘real’ job. Work. Of creating a home that no longer has, for her, its customary center (my father). After Bean is in bed we try to talk about this. Try, though the words feel like they are weighted differently: meaning one thing to her, and another to me.

And then DH calls with low blood sugar, feeling off. Exhausted maybe, or worse, possibly. He’s type 1 diabetic, and every time he calls to tell me that his blood sugar is going low it feels like I’ve swallowed Draino and it’s making it’s way down my limbs, melting them. He doesn’t feel okay by the time he makes it home. The test strips read one thing but his body another, and he’s shaking (fear? or something worse?), so we go to the emergency room.

After a few hours everything returns to normal (we think he accidentally took extra units of insulin at dinner), and we are tear-drenched and grateful when we hear the first raw cries of a newborn baby entering the world a few doors away.

It shakes us up, in a good way. Sometimes this is needed. When working on a jigsaw you can look, and look, and look and not find the piece you need until you shake the box and let the pieces fall anew, and there it is. For us, this reminder: life is precious, sweet, and fleeting. No house, no deadline worth its loss. Stress, like a tangle of barbed wire, needs to be coiled and set aside.

So today we played. A late breakfast (omlets, jammy toast, iced lattes), and then went to a home expo where Bean batted at balloons and DH oogled viking ranges and slate roofing. Tonight, just the two of us got to take a walk along the empty streets of the city under one umbrella, our feet and knees freckled with raindrops, our bodies touching.

8 hours spent writing applications.
6 application packages sent out.
400 other applicants competing for the same positions.
1,000,000,000 units of stress about obtaining one of said positions.

1 mother visiting.
5 loads of laundry done by said mother.
1 happy grandson.

6 hours of drywalling.
1 diningroom completed.
2 black-hole hours at Home Depot.

3 hours in the emergency room.
2 new babies came into the world while we were there.
1,000,000,000,000, (x infininity) units of gratitude that everything is okay.

6 hours of interrupted sleep.
3 possible teeth on their way in.
2 exhausted parents.

I swear I’ll post tonight & I heart you all for writing me emails wondering where I am.

Going over my writing from the past couple of weeks, I’m struck by how serious I’ve been. Early spring seems to do this—the last rain soaked days of quiet gray on brown silhouettes of twigs and trees before the riot of color hits. Then the blossoms arrive, heady, erotic, unreasonably beautiful, and the whole world goes a little nuts basking in all the loveliness of it.

I’m feeling inklings of that today. The maples are all flirty with little red catkin blossoms, and the magnolias (one of my favorite flowers) are blooming everywhere. And all day I felt kind of haphazard, but in a good way. Carefree, non sequitur, goofy. Things are strewn about everywhere, the house is a mess, and Bean was off schedule all day, but for some reason I haven’t minded. Instead I painted, and wrote a list of ten random things that strike my fancy.

2) I have the hankering this week to look at art by Gorgia O’Keefe. Again, this must be a spring thing. Her flowers. Surely you have seen them.

3) I just remembered how much I loved reading Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins when I was in high school. He writes in such a wild, heady, ridiculous, over-zealous, over-educated, over-the top way that I dig, sometimes. When I read it then, it was at the suggestion of my first serious boyfriend and we were all loopy for each other. Sappy, yes. But it really IS a great love story.

4) I’ve had time to mull over the changes coming up (re: going back to work,) and it seems okay to me now. Exciting even. This is what I’m like: it takes me a day or two to warm to an idea, and then I’m all game.

5) I’m over my chai tea obsession that lasted me through the many months of cold winter. Now I’m in love with iced, sweetened green tea.

6) I’m planning on buying bagfulls of wild flower seeds this weekend, and scattering on the hillside below our house. I won’t have time this year to plant a real garden, but it will be fun to see what comes up from the handfuls I toss about.

7) The Vanity Fair Green Issue is my bathroom reading this month.
I am daydreaming about my future studio. I can hardly fathom what it will be like not to be doing paintings on the dining room table. I’m looking at paint samples, picture hangers, and storage options. Pure heaven.

9) I’ve started listening to NPR’s jazz profiles. I could do this all day. Like higher math, jazz is something I find utterly mind-blowing.

10) We had a picnic tonight in the new house, in the room that will be my studio. Indian take out: chicken curry, aloo ghobi, naan with coconut, lassi, mango chutney, raita. Bean sat on the floor with us and fed me spoonful after spoonful of rice, and then ran circles around us, his face smudged yellow from the curry.

Your turn: ten random foot loose & fancy free things.

I looked at the calendar this morning and couldn’t believe that you turn fourteen months today. When did that happen? I thought we were still in the BEGINNING of April! Funny how my memory has been compromised, since you hit the scene. Starting with pregnancy, certain things become involuntarily selective in my memory. Appointments were missed (or arrived at late), and multi-tasking became a brain bending feat I was no longer capable of. Then I had you and it went even further downhill.

Now, in the shower every morning I start to think of all the things I want to accomplish in the day. I make long, detailed mental lists. Stuff that is really important, that I must remember. Yet, when I towel off and walk out of the bathroom my hair still sopping, the entire list has been usurped by one thought: COFFEE. You’re teething again, nose running fiercely, thrashing about in the middle of the night with your feet in my face, looking for solace, and this only increases the severity of my addiction.

This month in your development has been fascinating from a linguistic standpoint. Your receptive language increases exponentially everyday, and I’m watching you make connections between words and things.

You point to the ceiling light sconce, “Light,” I say. You point to the bedside table lamp, “Light,” I name it for you again.

Then you point outside, up into the sky towards the sun, “La!” you say.

You can follow simple directions now—if you want. You run to find your monkey, or your shoes, or truck and bring them to me, grinning widely—when you feel like cooperating. Other times you totally ignore me, more interested in hauling the broom around the house or pushing buttons on my printer (which you are now tall enough to reach.)

“Go find your socks,” I can say, and you’ll run off and find them and bring them proudly. Or I can say, “Go find your socks,” and you’ll shake your head, run off, and come back carrying the cookie sheet from the kitchen. You know the difference, and seeing your own volition taking shape is at once thrilling and daunting.

I love listening to your first attempts at expressive language: “Ki-gi” you say, pointing to the kitty. “Duhg!” You say, eagerly pointing at every dog we pass. You say “Buh, buh, buh” when you see gulls or pigeons in the park, and “Bath!” when it’s time for the tub. You know what I mean when I say, “Okay, you can pull out the drain now,” and every night you look with a mixture of terror and glee as the water swirls down the drain after your bath. Almost every day you try out a new set of consonants and vowels, and yet I can’t imagine what it will be like to hear you really TALK, just like a few short months ago, it seemed inconceivable that you’d be walking, and now you’re running every place.

You no longer walk with your arms akimbo, and you know now to look down at the ground to help you navigate around obstacles. Tool use suddenly makes sense to you too, and you try to figure out the purpose of everything. You use your little hammer to pound the pegs on your workbench. You use both the fork and spoon and successfully get bites into your mouth. And you love using the broom to knock things off high shelves that you can’t otherwise reach, although you can reach many things now that you figured out how to CLIMB: on the dining room chairs, up the book case (at least onto the bottom shelf), onto the ottoman, the wheelbarrow in the back yard.

There is so much that I want to remember about this time: the way you burst into tears sometimes when Daddy leaves, and how you run to the window saying, “Dada!” when his truck pulls into the driveway (you also say “Dada!” every time you see a red truck pass by as though there is only one red truck in the world and it belongs to YOUR Daddy.) I want to remember how you’ve started to lie down on the carpet or the sheepskin fleece by my desk when you’re tired, tummy down, feet tucked beneath you, and start singing yourself little songs. I want to bottle you up right now: the way your skin smells, sweet and warm; the way your hair curls at the nape of your neck; the way when I smile at you always smile back.

A hundred kisses,
Mama