{my topography}

Big skies. Scarlet Gilia and Indian Paintbrush. Writing. It’s where I’ll be all week.

Went to sleep last night with the dizzy images of the Olympic opening ceremony.The awe-inspiring precision, the vastness, the almost eery unison of the performers left me feeling both wonder-filled and anxious. The little children, handing the Chinese flag over to the soldirers… shivers.

Woke up to sun. The twelfth day of sun all summer. For real.

French toast and a iced latte. I may be turning a corner (though I feel queasy right now.) Then I finished painting my new studio space upstairs, before dinner with freinds downtown. Play in the fountain. Street artists. Good times.

* An iced decaf latte tasted good today. This is miraculous.

* Bought orchids for my new studio space (we’re shuffeling rooms, repainting, etc.)

* My pants no longer fit, but I’m not really showing. In other words, I look chubby around my middle. So attractive. It’s all about the bella band now.

* Am excited to watch the Olympics tonight. They always get me motivated to do sports and to take better care of myself. Ironically–last time I was watching the summer Olympics, Bean was in my tummy.

* Bean used the words “actually” and “absolutely” in the same sentence today. It made me giggle. Now he’s digging gravel on the driveway with the geese looking on.

* I’ve decided all the little things matter. In a year from now I’ll forget what being pregnant was like. For the next little while, I’ll be focusing on minutia and perhaps starting to draw every day objects again. It’s somehow very grounding to bring my attention back to the little things. To take notice of food, small moments, errands, conversations.

More thunder. The kind that rips things. That takes your breath away. That follows the same jagged streak through the sky that the lightneing took.

Feeling slightly better today, but terrified that if I say so the horrible morning sickness gods will smite me down.

Watched the end of So You Think You Can Dance tonight, and every bone in my non-dancer body wishes I were a dancer. People tease me for loving the show–but they can only be people who haven’t watched. Because it’s not just entertainment, it’s art. Some of the dance pieces tonight made my breath catch. Its one of the few things I’d do differently if I could do my life over again. I’d dance. Instead I grew up in a very quiet home without any music that even remotely had a beat (read: my parents only played Vivaldi) and hence I have zero rhythm. Yet watching dance makes my heart sing.

If you could do something differently–if you could do your life over again–what would you do?

I felt reasonable today, and as a result accomplished seven times what I have been typically accomplishing every day. As in: completed & turned in 2 manuscripts, finished an article, and completely set my classroom up. That last part took me almost the whole day. My back is rediculously sore from pushing metal desks and bookshelves around. I snagged to boys on custodial duty to move the really heavy stuff, but the rest I did myself. It’s too hard to try and visualize classroom feng shui with two teenage boys gawking about.

While I was sorting books rainclouds gathered. Suddenly it was ominously black out my window. Then the rain came pelting down in sheets. The smell of ozone came through the open windows, and then a crack of thunder so close I jumped. On the way home I passed the tree the lightening had hit. A huge branch had cleaved off an old maple–and had wrapped itself entirely around an electrical line. One thing New England weather isn’t is boring.

Also: Bean just went and got his shoes and then left the house with his guitar (an old beaten up acoustic guitar we’ve had around forever) saying “I’m leaving to go to a concert so I won’t be able to go to bed tonight. The concert will be really really long and I’ll be out really late.”

I have absolutely no idea where he got that idea.

So I’ve been both rediculously busy and rediculously sick. Still. Isn’t that sad? But in my state of near dispair I came up with a good idea: micro blogging. Of course twitter already came up with the idea, and I’m just a lame copy cat, but I decided that I’m going to try this month to blog as much as possible, about all the little things that I keep saying “I should write this down or I’ll forget,” and then I promptly forget.

Like this: Bean, in a conversation about how you can tell the difference between boys and girls said: “Girls have hair that goes flowing down. Boy’s hair mostly flows up. Occasionally boy’s hair goes flowing down too though.” Direct quote. Yes, he used the word occasionally. Can YOU think of a better three year old definition?

Or this: It is thundering every single minute right now. Not big huge cracks of thunder, but little bursts. The sky is pale and overcast, and of course, it has been raining. It has so far rained every single day in August.

And also this: for two days I felt better. I had an iced latte (tall) made by DH with maple syrup. It was divine. He also made biscuits (from scratch) and eggs. Everything tasted rediculously good. I was heady with the possibility of feeling like myself again. I accomplished eighty-nine things including starting to paint my new studio/office space (deep blue.) And then crash. Yesterday I was a miserable ball of ick. Beyond depressing.

Alright. That’s it. I’ll be back today. See, micro blogging means I am basically going to write everything down in little bursts like the thunder. We’ll see how long it lasts. A month? Maybe? (If I have internet in Colorado.) Anyone want to join me?

What do you do when your kid is over tired. You know this as surely as you know it’s raining. He skipped his nap. Falls apart before dinner over a cracker, over putting his sweatshirt on, over cleaning up his blocks. What do you do when you make every attempt to put him to bed early on time, and you give him an extra long bath because it should calm him down…but by bedtime he is tightly wound. Over tired. Stubborn. He doesn’t like the songs you sing. He kicks his legs in your general direction. He wails when you leave after your promised one song and a snuggle. He gets up and follows you to the door, screaming, sobbing. Do you give in? Do you go back and calm him because you know he’s tired? Or do you insist, and not give in–this tantrum likely to lead to others. Bedtime already prolonged enough. What do you do? Because I don’t honestly know lately. He’s at this new stage, and its requiring all the patience I’ve got.

Two years ago today I was watching gold finches and feeling rain. I was moving from rumpled sheets to shower, feeling my body linger on the cusp of sleep deprivation in the midst of Bean’s early toddlerhood. One year ago I was eating peaches and watching finches and feeling ready for anything. It’s funny, having a blog. It makes you return to your former selves, finding where you were at on this day or that, a year ago or two. It snares small moments in the weft of life; keeps them there even after memory grows fickle and occupied with greater things than the small fragments of a day.

I’m in such a different place this year, my body doing this crazy and miraculous thing. I’m sensitive and distracted and sporadic. Everyday is like the twirling flight of the bats I watch every evening. They come from within the eaves, darting about in the melon colored light of after sunset.

I’m unsettled, even as I’m content. I have this ridiculous urge to nest, to dig in, to just be in this small corner of land, and it feels so out of character to just want to be here. But the thought of traveling makes me want to tuck my knees to my chest and move closer to the softest pillows on the couch.

Here is all I want, with my cat curled next to me, her gentle purr making the air vibrate along my thigh. Yet I am hungry—for more than just this: curling towards myself, protective and quiet.

Hungry for art. I’ve spent so long without it, I feel an unfamiliar resistance at the thought of gathering up glue and scissors and paint. Hungry for running, and while I’ve gone for several runs recently, the days are too unpredictable and filled with nausea to make any of it a routine. Hungry for good food.

Inexplicably, I feel like I’m in a state of limbo now, a nine month limbo waiting for this little one.

Will it always feel this way? Like I’m holding my breath, like the two small lines of the pause icon have been stamped across my days? I am holding my breath, waiting, at the very least for this nausea to stop. It makes me a husk of myself. I linger in bed mornings without the gusto to rise.

It has also been a summer of rain which has left us always on tiptoe expecting summer to start. The grass is verdant and waist high in the meadows, but the air is always damp. Every day thunder. Every day out the window I watch the rain come up the valley towards us: a steel gray cloud against the paler blue of the summer sky. It arrives quickly, thrashing the leaves and pelting the windows.

And the garden, well, it’s rampant and wild. Tomato plants as high has my shoulders; little orange cherry tomatoes as sweet as sugar; beef steaks still green, and five other kinds, all in various stages of ripening. Beans by the colander full (should I blanch and freeze them?) Basil to be made into pesto; empty beds waiting where the peas and broccoli were—waiting for late summer seeds and early autumn crops, while I stay indoors writing, a deadline and a trip to Colorado for more writing with Pam before the month is out.

In late June the sky was light at nine. Now at quarter-to the sky is already indigo and the insects rattle their warning: summer is ending. Already, passing over the bridge at the end of the road, I saw the first red leaves on a maple. My heart flutters at this so soon turning. The ache of last season’s winter still clings close.

What were you doing last year, or the year before? How have you changed?