{my topography}

The ache feels like frostbite, slowly traveling from the peripheries towards the very center of my chest. It’s the kind of ache that you can’t put a finger on and say “here, take this, do this, it will feel better.” Instead it’s pervasive, a wash of heartache, the color a cloud-torn sky after sunset, muted, when indigo starts to unfurl across the heavens and shadows are black.

I’ve never felt this way before: followed by this unnamed dread, this sorrow, and I keep turning to look behind for the hungry dog of my distresses that hides in the bushes, waiting. I never do. I don’t know where she lurks like a bitch in heat, howling in the middle of the night, scratching at the door of my contentment. In the morning there are splinter’s everywhere and my head’s a mess of fragments. It’s still winter. I keep saying this is the problem. I keep blaming the shivery sliver of mercury hovering below freezing. Ice makes the puddles filmy, and bubbles rise when I poke my booted toe in.

But maybe it’s more. Maybe even with longer days and supple heat and petals this thing will gnaw at me. Some days it feels like I’ve swallowed the missing shard from a pot glued back together, the porcelain pieces pressed so close the adhesive running between them looks like transparent veins.

Maybe it’s this: I dream about breaking clocks. About scattering the numbers and the minute and hour hands across the snow; about leaping from the clock tower and having my fall take forever, weightless, because finally there is enough time.

I wake up and throw myself at the day. I know this isn’t graceful, but animals aren’t when there is a terror or a wound to lick. It’s like I’m always at the edge of the forest with the scent of smoke curling at my nostrils. The days are too short, and at the end of each I am still thirsty.

The boys are checking out tractors. Three generations of men with long eyelashes scoping out farm machinery, their fingers nestled into warm jacket pockets, the air still stupefying cold. It’s nearly April, and the mercury can’t make it up above forty for more than an hour in late afternoon. Just long enough to get the sap to start running, before it freezes back up.

I’m in the dining room where the sun makes a pattern of rhombuses: bright and shadow across the table, and the woodstove fills the room with snug heat. The cat sleeps sprawled in the sun, while around the house wind moves incessantly, like restless spirits.

If I look hard, I can see the small buds on the trees growing rounder—as though the woods have been stained with a faint and hazy hue of red. And though it snowed yesterday, the ground is scabbed with mud and melt. Still, it’s cold out. Bitter in the wind the way it was in January, and my body has grown sluggish and soft from all the weeks indoors.

Today we ate toad-in-the-hole’s, ripe mangoes, yogurt and honey, hot coffee. Then packed snacks for a road trip to anywhere, but here. Spring fever has made us stir crazy, and we went looking for sugar makers and for barnyards with animals; for wind-whipped ridges and different sky lines; different windows to look out of, at the very least.

In a neighboring town we licked freshly poured maple candy off our fingers after pulling it from the snow in long golden ribbons, our cheeks chapped in the wind. People serve bread and butter pickles here, during sugaring, and home made doughnuts. Then we ducked indoors at a café where the floors were old pine in wide planks and the lattes were thick with microfoam and the coffee and foam was poured into a perfect bloom at the brim of every cup.

On the way back the sun made us squint. This American Life on the radio, Bean napping. We stopped at the carwash, and DH pointed the spray gun at the wheels, trying to dislodge a winter’s worth of frozen mud hugging up against the rotors. Small things, really, but a change of scenery; a couple hours to elope from our everyday where spring still hasn’t come and the laundry has yet to be done.

I picked up the local free paper this morning, after twirling around the house putting what appears to be an endless collection of toys and cups and socks back into their places, and found this (by Bob Brezsny):

AQUARIUS: The composer Stravinsky had written a new piece with a difficult violin passage,” writes Thomas powers, quoted in the book Sunbeams. “Afyter it had been in rehearsal for several weeks, the solo violinis came to Stravinsky and said he was sorry, he had tried his best, the passach was too difficult, no violinist could play it. Stravinsky said, ‘I understand that. What I am after is the sound of someone trying to play it.” Keep this story close to your heart in the coming week, Aquarius. It will give you the proper perspective as you, too, go about the work of doing the best you can at a task that is virtually impossible to perfect.

See? The universe has my back. Apparently all I need to do is listen.

***

It has been sunny all weekend (Happy Easter!) and being out in the sun almost feels like being drunk. The intoxication of brightness. The way the angles of light outline new buds: the silent beginnings of another growing season. I’m still lurching about, trying to find a blanance: trying to be outdoors every single second of the day, and still trying to get everything else done (writing, laundry, vacuuming, minutia.) So far I don’t seem to be succeeding all that well. But then I read the above and try hard to just be.

The beginning of spring looks like circles in the road, and ours is a mess of them. I’ve always wondered about this: how potholes form, always round like bowls, instead of square or jagged. The car groans going over the bumps. The tires gather mud, and getting in and out every day my jeans are graffitied across the calves with the tell-tale marks of rural living: mud.

I walk out to the upper meadow. The snow is hard beneath my boots, and I barely break through the surface crust of ice crystals. Below I imagine nematodes and newts and other small crawly things hibernating in quiet coils waiting for the sun to make their blood stir.

I always feel like I blink, and spring has blossomed. It’s the shortest of season’s here; with everything bursting into bloom urgently, the growing season so short, autumn already nipping at summer’s heels by mid September. So I walk out to the edge of the woods along the meadow where the limbs have falling during the recent ice storms and the ground is a patchwork of melted places and white, and I sit and listen for spring.

Even before the snow melts, or any blade of green pokes up anywhere, the birds come back, and hearing them I feel like helium is being pumped into my lungs. Like my feet might just lift off the ground with the promise of someday wild strawberries and late warm evenings and supple grass.

Sometimes in the car I tune the radio to a station from Montreal, just to hear the lilt of French and listening to the birds feels like this to my untrained ear. Ornithology would give me the proper nouns and verbs for all the twittering: the ruckus chatter of a flock of dark winged birds sitting high in the branches of a tree at the opposite edge of the meadow; the repeated trilling of others. I know enough to know these birds aren’t here in winter. Not chickadees or the red sparks of cardinals that dart through the snow to the bird feeder, but birds with songs that come from the south, where the sun has already warmed the ground and the daffodils are up.

It’s a long month, March. It tries my patience, and I feel myself picking fights simply because I’m restless. In bed I can’t sleep and I can’t shake the off-kilter feeling of whatever we’ve left unsaid. I sigh in the darkness, “I’m sad,” I murmur.

He’s asleep, barely, almost, and is annoyed. He was annoyed before bed too—at the cat for dogging him around the house, meowing, wanting something, catnip maybe or fresh water… spring.

“Shut the hell up,” he growled, turning on her abruptly. Her tail twitched like rope. She backed up to a safe distance. I backed up too, still as permeable as I’ve always been. I can’t seem to stop him from soaking into my pores. Even when it’s not a big deal like tonight, when he wasn’t even talking to me, just somewhere near me, blowing off steam.

In bed I’m still percolating and I can feel him sigh, the covers shifting slightly. “What?” he says. “What’s wrong?”

But what I want aren’t words now, this late. Really, I’m not sure what I want, more than spring, more than warmth, more than maybe his arms around me unbidden, reassuring.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

The room is dark. So dark I cannot see the opposite wall. The wooden shades are turned so the moonlight is blocked, and under the flannel I feel my heart beating. My mouth is hot. “No.”

I really want to be tucked up against him and I know I’m the one who started this. I’m like those damn dime store carnations that soak up dye, turning unnaturally bright blue or fuchsia at the slightest suggestion. I can’t shake the feeling something’s off. It could be anything. A hundred things. Likely nothing. I do this, waiting for spring; waiting to be able to inhale air that doesn’t cling in my lungs, thermal and dry.

“I felt like you were mad at me before we came to bed. We didn’t spend any time together today. I feel like we never got a chance to talk, and now you just turned away from me, pulled the covers and went to sleep.”

In the hall the cat moves towards our room on silent paws, her purring announcing her approach. She chirps, an eccentric little meow of greeting, then circles the bed, purring, wide eyed in the dark, tail jerking back and forth.

I lunge for her just as she’s slinking under my side of the bed. My fingers graze her fur. She’s doing this on purpose. The cat should have been named Loki. I bite my lip. I want her out, to fix whatever angst is zinging back and forth between us like static, making the hairs on my arms stand up.

It takes both of us hurling things under the bed for her to give up her antagonizing perch just out of reach and make a run for the door.

He’s impatient with me and it’s past midnight. I follow the cat out the door and slip into my small boy’s double bed, but cannot sleep. Before I left he said, “Why do you always have to drag things out?” Like I am doing it all on purpose, this restlessness, this sabotage of sleep and tenderness.

I had no answer and so I went, but craved his arms even while smelling the sleep-sweet scent of my three year old, arms flung wide across the bed.

His room is filled with light when I come in, bare feet crossing the wood floor, avoiding the places that creak. I switch off the starshaped light above him, then lie in the semi dark, the moon flooding his un-curtained windows, and wait for sleep.

But it doesn’t come. Illusive, like the first weeks of spring, sleep hovers at the periphery of my senses. I feel myself slipping towards it, but am yanked back, again and again until I get up once more and trundle back to his warmth. He’s moved to my side, and is asleep, holding the covers where my body would be. I nose my way in, pressing my lips against the heat of his chest, and he wraps his arms around me fiercely until I can feel the outline of every muscle in his back. And as we’re lying this way, the heat between us making the windows fog so that in the morning we’ll find condensation in upturned moons at the bottom of each pane of window glass, we hear the coyotes.

First one, a long low howl that makes my spine prickle and my eyes widen in the dark. Then many. They are running up the ravine along the edge of the lower meadow and the woods. I picture their tracks on the snow, a pack chasing the moon, chasing a buck, hungry like we both are for a riper season.

The inability to sleep (wtf? When did that start being one of my problems?) combined with perpetual snow has me rather glum. The only good thing? Tomorrow is Friday.

We sip pink homemade smoothies with striped bendy straws. Bean grins up at me. We clink our glasses together. “Cheers,” he says.

Against the window, white snow falling sideways. A jar of golden honey on the counter. I’ve been curled into the corner nook on the couch all day with my laptop. Achy: pms and the flu, what a whopper. I’ve burst into tears at least a half dozen times. DH looks at me like I’m from the moon, then offers to make tea.

The cyclamens on the windowsill are a riot of pink, and in a circle around my small boy: fluorescent green Post-it notes, crayons and stickers. There are logs on the fire and the room is filled with a steady heat and the smell of smoke, faint, the signature of winter, still here, though today sunlight until 7 and at dawn, mourning doves on the ground below the feeder.

It is time to force branches of forsythia, and to visit our neighbors to inhale the sweet heady scent of maple sap and steam by the evaporator. Time to buy Bean a new rain slicker, boots. Mud from here until April.

What are three blogs you’re enjoying this month? I’m craving new inspiration, beauty, curiosity, and delightfully precarious sentences.

Took my camera with me to the waterfront with the boys for a walk.

Got the skunk scent out of my cat with a natural enzyme spray: no tomato baths necessary!

Woke up today with a splitting headache. Now I have a fever. I can thank the kiddos at work for this one. I am so ready for warmer weather. For being able to throw open the windows. For anything other than ice storms. I so hoped to post something longer today–I was facinated by your comments about the idea of living ‘perfectly’ and wanted to write more about what I meant. About trying to live the way one always hopes one will—someday, although the doing of that in the moment seems to get put off for lesser (and greater) things.

But now that I’m sick all I really want to know is: what movie should I rent tonight?

Help.

She smells awful and is currently spending the night in the garage with a bunch of old towels (sprinkled with catnip to sweeten the deal) until I have the time to figure out what the hell to do with her. How do you wash a cat in tomato juice?? Any and all suggestions welcome.

I woke up in the middle of the night to a nosebleed. In the dark I could imagine the color, my cupped hand already filling, reaching for tissues.

In the morning an ice storm, a two hour delay, lingering over coffee.

At school, everything out of routine, topsy turvy, but we’re talking about poems and poems make anything better.

In the evening the sky was navy and threatening, but then suddenly each twig and branch was gilded with light.

Project runway ended. It made me happy.

What is your midweek like?

I make lunch the night before; do yoga first thing; then come home from work and play with my boys. The three of us take a long walk down the melting muddied road. It is pock marked with potholes: perfect circles of mud and splashy water, just right for jumping, which Bean does in his black and yellow rain boots. I love the way he pauses before each jump, placing his feet together, crouching down, getting the most out of his small muscled legs. The water goes everywhere in satisfying droplets. I love too the way he pauses to fish around in the muddy, icy cold water, then stands up triumphant: “I found a beautiful rock!” he yells.

I make lunch the night before, circling the counter unaccustomed to thinking about food at 9:38p.m. Especially not a chicken & arugula wrap, fresh berries and yogurt, walnuts and raisins. In the morning I slip from my bed and turn the shower on before thinking. I stand bleary, rubbing my eyes, my feet on the looped lavender bath mat. Then I turn the water off, circle the house, find my yoga mat and breathe. After the fourth or fifth sun salute I realize that the entire right side of my body aches: my ear, throat, hamstrings, ankle bones. I apologize to my body for just living in it so often, without thinking. I take my vitamins. I turn the shower on again. I exfoliate. I let hot water pound on my back until I know it’s made my skin lobster red. I linger. Then I plunge towards the day.

I am trying to live this month as intentionally as I can. Taking care of myself. Making the whirling chaos of my day to day life less chaotic. It’s all about the small things, that I’ve given too little thought to. The things that ultimately bear the Morse code of self discipline. Food. Exercise. Laundry. Dishes. Creativity.

I loved reading your lists about the things you’d do if living “perfectly” for a month. Now I’m wondering: what stops you from doing them? What stops us all, really?