{my topography}

The light is coming through the window sideways, and there in my towel still dripping water onto the wood floor, is where my heart breaks with sudden surprise when he comes to tell me a friend has killed himself.

I sit on the white sheets and feel the blood rush up in my ears; denial flooding my senses like the sound of the ocean in a conch shell. “You must be wrong. There is no way.”

He was a new friend. Not close. Yet. Becoming, maybe. The tessarae of quiet conversations had begun to fit together in my mind to make the mosaic of someone full of longing. He was caught in the humdrum of a life too full, too filled with things and forward motion. He had a brother who had also killed himself. Another, died in a fire. Ache must have been like the small broken skeletons of fishes fossilized the shale in of his ribcage.

Gills of sorrow always winnowing open and closed with a frantic private panic he couldn’t say. Sometimes I though I saw this in his dark brown eyes, across the table from me in a crowded room. Still, we couldn’t have known. We sat across from him and his high school sweetheart, married for years, their daughter Bean’s age and their son not even one, and ate nachos just last week. He held his son in his arms and walked around the restaurant until he fell asleep. Smiled. Said words that went out into clattering air of the restaurant. Laughed.

“I don’t want daddy to be gone,” Bean sobs with unexpected emotion, overhearing us talk. The house is full of sunlight. We’ve just cleaned up from breakfast. We carry him to the couch together, wrapping him with kisses, feeling both grateful and greedy for the moment, our cheeks touching.

The day after he kills himself it rains heavily and big branches from the poplars at the end of the road shear off, hitting electrical wires, making the neighborhood dark. In the morning when we hear the news I call his wife, and her voice sounds like broken teacups falling to the floor. She says she’s planning to take her kids to the Halloween parade, unable to make life stop moving forward. Her daughter was so looking forward to going, dressed as the family cat, anticipating sweets.

I keep calling throughout the day even though I know everyone else is there—closer friends, family, maybe people bearing official papers and information and possibly his body. She doesn’t call back, and on their answering machine still his voice, in a few words making them a family unit, not yet erased and replaced by just hers. I think of how many times she’ll play that message, keep it on purpose, just to hear him. I think of how when my father died I wore his blue flannel shirt for weeks, pressing my face into the fabric to smell him there.

Today the sky is cloudless and the sunlight falls in sleepy autumn angles and the trees are suddenly bare; leaves are strewn in wet heaps on the ground. When I sit on the sloping lawn at the back of the house, my gaze unexpectedly falls on a garden snake eating a frog twice the size of its mouth. Bean comes to sit on my lap and we watch its body writhe, mouth unhinged, the frog body slowly being consumed.

“Why is he eating that frog, Mommy?”
“It’s the way things are little guy, snakes need to eat too.”
“But now the frog isn’t alive any more is it?”
“No.”
“Why?”

The sunlight dapples his soft cheeks. His fingernails are caked with mud. On the couch when we held him and assured him daddy would not be leaving, he told us we needed to make a chest to gather stars in, to keep us safe. “Happy stars,” he said. Out of the blue. No context, no segue from the previous conversation.

Maybe if our friend had had a box of stars he wouldn’t have…

I know so little of his life, or hers. Recent friends, before the ties were deep enough to warrant pointed questions, or concern, even though we both tasted depression in the air when we were at their house. Like smelling snow, metallic, raw. We held our breath, laughed, shared meals, left grateful for the messy love of our own lives.

And now. Now what? How do you possibly reach out and hold someone who is as utterly blindsided by tragedy as she is? How do you tell them they can survive, even when they say they can’t—and you’re not even sure if it is possible to go on breathing when you’re drowning the way she must be drowning? I keep calling. Offer to bring dinner by. Feel helpless, and selfishly grateful it isn’t me. I can’t help it.

Outside the pale sky is strewn with fishbone clouds. On my lap Bean naps, while the late afternoon sun paints the walls. The day keeps on moving towards twilight, one day towards the next.

In the morning, first thing, snow coated the ground like sugar. Then it melted, and a soft rain started to fal, rinsing the remaining orange and yellow leaves; making them fall in wet heaps to the dark ground.

Every day hinges around these simple things: dishes stacked in the cupboard, food prepared, then put away. Each day I try to succumb more gracefully to the essence of these tasks.

After work I put fresh paint in Bean’s pallett and let him go to town. I love his abstract lines and the way color and shape become things after the fact, after the paint has been smeared across the page.

Bringing fresh water for paint, I have my camera with me and snap a photo. This is life documentary: catching the bubbles swirl in the glass and the water running down the drain.

Evening, before bed. A circle of lamplight in our blue bedroom.

Morning blur. All of the pictures I took today have this blurry quality. Such an apt reflection of my Monday. Here, Bean giggles in the covers as I get dressed. He’s such a big kid now–sleeping every night, all through the night, in his OWN bed. I still am marveling at this. It’s such a big deal for him–the boy who is impervious to sleep.

A skeptical self portrait. From this angle I hardly look pregnant. Must take a side angle photo tomorrow so you can see how truly huge I am.

Work bag on the floor at the end of the day. The house is cold when I come home.

I curl up on the couch to check email and savor the quiet of ten minutes when no one needs me.

Dishes. Laundry. These small things. I try to give myself over to them, being wholly in them, letting all else but the moment slip away.

Bean lives his whole life in the moment…although he is beginning to get the concept of future. To him the future means one thing: toys he can ask for for Christmas this year. He’s taken to marking with Xs all the toys he wants from every catalog that arrives at our door.

Drying my hair. Hating maternity clothes as much as I did last time. This is not a good start to the morning.

Breakfast = best part of the day. DH made biscuits (he makes the best.)

Yummy lemon curd to go with flakey, dreamy biscuits.

Then an insurmountable list of everything to do. I dropped the couch on my foot while moving it to vacuum. I started to sob. The rest of the day pretty much felt like a bruise. Thin skinned doesn’t even describe it.

Everything feels on edge. Precarious. Fragile. Dramatic. Technicolor.

After Bean is asleep, I sit on the couch in the living room writing lesson plans and wondering where I’ll find the energy and enthusiasm to face 22 second graders tomorrow. The house is quiet & clean. I lit a candle on the windowsill. The light falls in yellow flickering circles.

Morning light.

Shower.

Unmade bed.

Drying my hair.

Breakfast = broiled grapefruits w/brown sugar; croissants, soft boiled eggs; lattes.

Empty table.

Letting the geese out.

On the walk…

Inevitably the geese join us. Bean always bikes–in his bright yellow helmet with thunderbolts.

The frost has turned to dew.

Back inside, doing laundry I notice my mismatched polka dots.

Bean draws in the kitchen while us grownups whirl about the house tidying. Then we take a trip to town: lumber at Home Depot; lunch; a stop for bread; and a stop for some new sheets.

In the blink of an eye the light is already slanting towards twilight.

Bean twirls while I sit in the leaves soaking up the last rays of golden sun.

How I love weekends.

Am thinking of doing this all week. Inspired by Ali.
All too often the fragments that make the mosaics of my days go unrecorded…

Like today. When all I feel like doing is crying for no reason. When I come home from work and feel like I can’t give anything more to anyone but I have to, because DH has guitar lessons and it’s the mama show for bedtime routine and dinner tonight.

It rained all day. Maybe that was it. Or maybe hormones. Or maybe I’m lonely or tired or hungry or some stupid combination of those three. Some days just suck. Even with the perfect orange leaves, wet from the rain, and the sun falling in angles, and the sound of Bean’s voice rising and falling in the living room where he excitedly narrates a story to himself.

It feels like I’m submerged, but unable to swim, like a rediculous dream. Does anyone else ever have days like this: where you see how irrationally moody you’re being, but cannot stop, cannot shake it off, cannot break into a grin no matter how much you know that you should?

Mellow autumn sunlight. A blanket. Orange leaves getting stuck in our hair. A pomogrante to share. Giggles. Juice on our fingers. Delight.

I want to write, but every time I sit down I feel my energy evaporate like moisture on hot pavement.

Five months pregnant, and my orbit has grown small. Small so that it only encompasses my growing family. As small as the round circle of the milky white moon climbing rung by rung into to the heavens through the branches of the tree. As small as a dinner plate.

At the end of the day I curl up on the couch with a head full of daydreams. Suddenly I’ve been having images of paintings I want to create. The slightest whisps of glimmers for stories, like the first hint of smoke in the autumn air.

I am content to wait. Content to let making minestrone soup from scratch and cornbread muffins be enough accomplishment for the day.

What would our country look like in a Depression now?

If we go into a depression, what will happen to artists–who base their incomes on the production of a commodity that doesn’t fall into the category of “survival”? Would there still be literary magazines? Galleries? Etsy?

If we go into a depression, what will happen to private schools? Will parents still send their children—or will they opt out, out of necessity? And what will happen to public schools as a result? Will they become more overcrowded, further under-funded? Will the tax base stay the same?

If we go into a depression, will we be able walk the fine line between heart’s longing and daily need; between the unquenchable desire to create and the need for an income–the hard-scrabble talk of hungry bellies overriding the thirst for beauty, for words?

Suddenly I’m realizing that my understanding of the Great Depression is based on the vague memories of a high school reading of The Grapes of Wrath. I cannot picture life without the wanton consumerism that drives our culture.

On the radio, I hear newscasters warning that “the holiday season looks gloomy” not because people no longer love each other, or have lost their faith, but because consumers are spending less in stores. It gives me the shivers.

On one hand I think, damn right. We needed this. A shake down, a shift, a change. The bare bristling greed of Wall Street needed to be ripped open, the bandaid of oblivion and status quo ripped off abruptly, the blood loss inevitable. On one hand I think, would it really be so bad if people had to step back from the brink of unrequited want for material things? If they had to scale back, live closer to home, greener by necessity. If gardens, if local produce, if organic, if simple were a way of life necessitated by an unstable economic culture.

But on the other hand, my chest aches imagining. I’m having a baby. My son’s will grow up in this time, and whatever it holds. To be prudent, I’d keep my job, I’d focus on the paycheck, not the yearning. I’d let my view narrow so that my weekends burgeon and my week’s blur, so that need trumps the calling of my heart to write full time, to create. Because is it not unspeakably selfish in such a time for a mama to want this? To want to slip out of the workforce, into a world where word matter, where art matters, even as the world as I know it may be changing, ending, reshaping.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that I have always believed unwaveringly in the Grace that holds my life, and I have no reason to stop believing in it now.

It’s a boy!

I’m thrilled. I’ve always pictured myself being the mama of boys.

Exhibit A: Bean will clearly be the world’s best brother.

Exhibit B: Indubitably boy. (His leg is tucked up under him. It’s a direct crotch shot…which I thought twice about posting on the Internet, but then I thought about the 5 months of nausea and general malease he’s caused and I felt perfectly fine with it.)

Gratuitous cute ultrasound pic: thumbs up!