{my topography}

We are wrapped in summer now; heat pressing in at 9 a.m., the mountains obscured by a soft haze, and the woods verdant with foliage. Along the mown paths that we’ve cut through the meadows, black-eyed-Susans and daises flutter like prayer flags. Tiny wild strawberries hide under delicate serrated trios of leaves, and we squat to gather them at the edges of the path, the juice staining our fingers red.

We watch the clouds gathering on horizon listlessly from the shade, wearing hardly anything at all, waiting for it to pour. Then we stand our faces upturned, fat raindrops speckling our cheeks.

Bean seeks out the hose, splashing cold water across my knees as I lounge in a lawn chair reading a novel. Heat stupored and languorous, I am trying to adjust to the pace of summer, recalling what life is like without urgency.

We make frosty smoothies from fresh peaches and frozen raspberries, eating them with long handled spoons from tall glasses in the shade. Mostly, we loll, Bean running naked in bright yellow Crocs and a sunhat; me in a chocolate colored bikini, wondering what sun will do the silver rivulets of stretch marks that have shimmered on my belly since his birth.

I catch myself staring. He’s so lithe and muscled, with the perfect little gibbous of a frog belly floating out in front of him. He moves with the ease of a yogi, squatting to inspect an iridescent June bug, spontaneously somersaulting down the easy slope of lawn, or racing pell-mell, with arms akimbo towards the garden where dirt and worms keep him occupied for over an hour. When he lies back on the grass, eyelids closed, I know he’s feeling the earth spin. His skin is still translucent, and I can see his veins running in intricate patterns across his ribs.

He’s my kid, and sometimes still I’m struck with disbelief. It was strange to be away for a week and then back—to watch how the warp and weft of my life separate and then entwined again. Strange to feel the familiarity of just myself: moments long on thought, late nights sipping wine and eating oysters, my pulse quickening to the tempo of the tenor sax. And then to feel the sticky sweet headlong passion of two-year old ardor, my heart thudding like a jungle drum.

Lately DH and I have been stopping each other in the midst of things to point out moments we could never have expected when we first found out we’d be parents. Like last night, the three of us in the back yard after dinner, the long rays of the evening sun falling just-so to make everything tinted with gold, DH playing guitar and Bean twirling around him in lopsided arcs. Or when all three of us were sitting on the grass, each one with a gawky chick in our lap, our uncontested favorite named “Mrs. T” for the way her orange feathers make a mohawk at the nape of her neck. Or lying naked on the bed our bodies slick in the evening heat, the fan oscillating and the moment ripe with longing, and then Bean clambering up to toss pillows on our heads, declaring, “I’m making a fort!”

It can’t really be reconciled, the way these moments merge together to make my life. Sometimes I think what would have been, might have, had June not brought the two blue lines in 2004. I wonder if I would have arrived at this point, with my writing, with my love, with all the corrosive stress that has worn thin the membrane of my heart, or if I would have veered off: painted big canvasses perhaps, or gotten a PhD in marriage and family therapy, as I once thought I wanted to do.

Listening to the stories of the people I spent a week writing with, I realized how absolutely not alone I am in the experience of my life. The odds tumble against everyone, and then turn. Life has a way of bringing us what we need, though not always when we imagine we need it. I was struck by how everyone held longing close to their hearts; how each had made major life decisions that painted the canvass of their life with bold strokes, yet every picture was as flawed as the next. No situation has it all—life with kids, or without them; partnered or flying solo; degree program or grass roots experience. Each of us had trepidation that first day; each harbored the same isolated terror before reading his or her work aloud in front of an audience (which we confided to each other later over Malbec and warm buttered bred.) Life simply is.

So here I am, somebody’s mother. Thigh deep in the decadence of summer: strawberries by the pint full; vanilla ice cream staining our lips with milky mustaches at midday. I took Bean to the lake for his first swim of the season yesterday, and like a little waterbug, he plunged right in, head high, legs churning out a steady stream of bubbles. At night I dream of four leaf clovers, which I then find when I wake up, and stories keep raining down now, like marbles spilling from a jar.

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

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

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

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

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

Evening

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

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

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

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

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

“Come on,” I say.

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

This place is big with words, with ideas, with art. The walls remember e.e. cummings and Stanley Kunitz; Grace Paley’s voice and Mary Oliver’s eye for noticing the profound in minute details. A fish weathervane tilts out my window. A long catwalk connects the studios; roses tumble wildly below. I stand in the mirror taking pictures to remember this, so that when everything else pushes in, I’ll have snapshots with light flooding through big windows and the fan whirring. I’ll have Pam Houston’s voice and the laughter of other students sharing work. I’ll have the images of Robert Yarboroughs paintings dancing like sunspots on the inside of my eyelids, and Wired Puppy coffee, and houses painted lavender and lemon and ocean blue. I’ll have the memory of hours writing, quiet pooling up like water around me; and I’ll have the seal’s slick wet heads bobbing up out of the water to eye me sitting, sand flecking my calves, alone on the shore.

Have I mentioned that I’m having a divine time? I sat for three hours and wrote this afternoon after receiving brilliant criticism on the piece I am working on. I went to the beach yesterday, with a picnic: spicy fried chicken, pot stickers, salad, grapefruit soda, and a coconut & chocolate chip cookie. Then I watched the sun set over the water.

I heard Maxine Kumin read from her work, and oh, how my breath was lost somewhere as she read, like the flight of birds.

And I went to dinner with Pam and the class tonight. She is charismatic and analytical and forthright. She’s been in the Bronco’s locker room and interviewed Toni Morrison, and she can make a room of people laugh belly laughs repeatedly.

Here are a few things she’s said so far this week that I really want to remember:

On why she writes: “Writing is the way I honor the physical world. I think of it as a kind of prayer.”

On craft: “Sink the story into the metaphor. The challenge is how to sidle up next to the big things without becoming lecturers and making total fools out of ourselves.”

“There is nothing worse than trying to say something. You’ll always fuck it up. Keep it concrete.”

“You don’t have to tell everything. Let the concrete specifics stand in for the general.”

You cannot communicate depth using emotion word. ”Just read your seventh grade journal to see that!”

On Revising: by the fourth draft, “take out the things you needed to say to know, but now they can be removed.”

On fiction versus nonfiction: “Everything I write comes out of my experience. I hardly imagine anything.”

Do you know how freeing that was for me to hear? Do you understand how those few sentences made lots of things possible for me with writing, that I hadn’t imagined possible?

On audience; “You must believe your reader is as smart as you are.”

The big rigs were matchboxes and the cars marbles and then it was over. On the way down, the salt flats were pale green and iridescent blue, and the mountains heaved up like bread rising in the oven. I chewed gum on the descent, for the first time I’d ever been allowed, and felt my seven-year-old body slam into the back of my seat as the wheels hit the tarmac and the wind flaps roared with engagement. I tried hard not to swallow my gum.

The second time, two years taller, on a ranch outside Gunnison I was in the back seat next to my sister. She was always talking about being a pilot when she grew up. I decided I wanted to be one too, but the way she talked made me keep my dream to myself.

My dad sat in the front seat with a thermos of coffee and bread and butter sandwiches wrapped in cellophane next to Art Gilmond, who was sixty, and smelled of engine oil and sweat. He was balled and sunburned and he kept a ranch with mustang horses and fruit trees. We were staying the week.

I’d surprised him heading for the bathroom the night before, coming up the stairs just as he was passing in the hall.

“Boo!” I yelled.

His fist stopping just inches before my startled face.

“Damn it. Never do that again,” he said his face suddenly ashy. “Never surprise a Vet.”

I kept my distance.

The yellow and white propeller of the little four-seater wound up like a drunken bumble bee. This time the plane bucked down the runway and then lifted off, air slipping under and over its fat white wings like someone had tossed it aloft. We circled the canyons low enough to startle horses. The engine vibrated in every cell of my body. The sky seemed to be a brighter blue than on the ground, and everything looked miniature like in a painting or like a toy store village. We at bread and butter as we circled; flying to the edge of a canyon and then flying on, the land suddenly falling away below us. My ears popped, and I gulped air.

The third time I was seventeen, and alone in the front seat with the instructor. The long cable that connected the glider to the belly of the plane up ahead of us would pull us aloft, he told me. I was ready. By the fence my dad stood with his foot on the bottom rail, a thermos of coffee in his hand. I’d been reading. I knew about aerodynamics and the Wright Brothers. I also knew about Icarus.

I was ready for anything except for the way when the instructor retracted the metal cable after we’d climbed up, and up, circling with the tow plane until we were at gliding altitude, it was suddenly silent. No motor, just rushing wind. I could see gulls circling just below us, and the tiny speck of my dad.

Walking knee-deep in the ocean. Picking up scallop shells for Bean. Uniterrupted reading time. Trying to kick fear in the ass, and the prospect of an entire night of uniterrupted sleep.

I left at half past nine, and followed the sunshine south. Listened to Radio Lab. Did you know dolphins and ducks sleep with one half of their brain at a time? I was fascinated. Listened to a fiesty Niko Case play for a live audiance, and watched as the landscape flattened and the trees became stubby and gnarled. Now I’m here, feeling light headed and wonderous. Ready to take a walk to the beach, and maybe to scope out the local coffee shop before orientation starts in an hour.

I have work to share, but I’m terrified, still. DH read it dutifully and gave the best of advice: you have to start somewhere, and anywhere is good. Especially if you love words as much as I do. And besides, they’re not going to eat me alive just because I signed up for advanced fiction when I’ve only written a handful of fiction pieces in my life. Right? We’ll see. I’ll be posting a lot this week (no two year old!) I’m interested to keep a record of my emotions as I jump into this. Something I’m drawn to and totally scared of in the same breath. Must be a little how moths feel, fluttering by the porch light.

I woke up this morning with a sore throat. I always seem to do this: get sick right after I’ve made it through to the end of something stressful. I also always manage to leave everything for last minute: laundry, the rest of my fiction piece, packing. I hate leaving in a rush of packing and hapazardness, but I always seem to manage to find myself there.

An inefficient overachiever, and a sick one at that.

I’ll leave in the morning tomorrow, and drive for six hours. Signing along with the radio, trying to get the directions right, and feeling like my stomach might fall out my mouth, but I’ll try not to focus on that. (Have I mentioned how anxious I get right at the beginning of things–at that cusp of unknown? I have. I know. But I really hate it.) But with all my heart I’m excited to be going, and I have questions that I’m determined to ask of the lady whose prose makes me grin, or catch my breath. But I also want to know answers from you. If you write, or read, or dream of writing, I’d love to hear your thoughs.

* Where are the lines between life and fiction. How can pieces of life, stories, characters, annecdotes become the tapestry of fiction?

* How much is enough? I’m forever writing the long piece. The piece with backstory on the backstory. I want to learn to craft a shorter narritive. Something with just enough to let the reader do the rest. How do you know when to leave off, without saying everything?

* And audiance. I don’t feel like I have a sophisticated enough sense of audiance yet. Kurt Vonnegut says “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” If you write, who is your one person? Who is yoru audiance. Maybe that’s my problem, I can never think of just one person.

On the front lawn, with the half-doze little araucana chicks, soaking up sun. School’s out. Summer’s finally here.

More environment self portraits here.