{my topography}

It seems like it was just a couple of weeks ago that I was clipping Bean into his ski boot bindings for the first time and sending him down the driveway. Now the first leaves are already golden and orange. Where has the summer gone?

The crickets know that snow is on its way. In the garden, fat pumpkins with girths rounder than Bean’s hugs. My Bean, who has started a mixed-aged (Waldorf) kindergarten program, and comes home singing. My Bean who tells us about the enormous imaginary kangaroo that lives upstairs. My Bean, suddenly a big-little kid. Four and a half. Mischief around every turn. He is my favorite forever.

And then my baby boy, my little Sprout, coming up on 7 months old, impossibly. He is a chunk. Pure love. Grins always. He’s been surfing the floor the past week or so, trying to crawl. In between attempts he’s pleased as peas to sit in the center of a circle of pots and spoons, banging things and grinning. He’s always cracking himself up. There are so many times throughout the day where I’ll look over at him and feel my heart catch and then expand. He’ll be smiling at me, watching me from across the room as I do things in the kitchen or fold laundry or type. He is my little Buddha. My reminder to be right here, now, in this precious, precious moment. He is my favorite always.

Also, some weekly blog crushes to share:

2 or 3 Things, Bliss, Le Love (can’t help going here and smiling), listing quirks over at Cupcakes & Cashmere…(a quirk DH pointed out tonight while we rocked it in the basement gym—3 miles in 24:15 minutes—is that I love to watch bull riding. Really.)

Also, these houses (still brooding over treehouse plans, as you can tell.) This gorgeous little party. This amazing installation. It’s how my heart feels, sometimes, lately. Overflowing, made of feathers, of air, of fragile things.

What are some of your crushes right now? Share please.
Also~ what are you looking forward to this week?

I am running hard. It’s my first run alone without boys, and I feel like I am flying. Then almost as a reflex, my muscles contract, gravity pulling at my shinbones.

I’ve seen it, just, out of the corner of my eye. I stop, loop back.

On the side of the road, a hermit thrush among the pebbles, the tall roadside grass bending down around it, shade dappling its feathers. Its eyes are closed, two dark curved marks among the white down of it head, its life a parenthesis between them.

I squat. My hips are flexible and loose from running hard in the heat. My knees are by my cheeks. My muscles tingling with sudden stillness.

I reach out with a single finger to touch bird’s flecked chest. I can feel my pulse beating in my fingertip as I press it against the bird’s soft down. It is already stiff, its claws drawn up, wings folded close. Only its neck, slightly askew, reveals how it might have died: a sudden thud of softly feathered bones and flesh against a windshield glass. A pickup truck maybe, the farmer’s son driving fast, gravel spitting up behind his tires.

I am breathing hard and the backs of my knees are slippery with sweat, but for a hundred minutes, or maybe it is only one, I cannot take my eyes of the bird.

I’ve heard the hermit thrushes calling in the woods. Theirs is a song that makes my heart tremble, though I can’t say why. Now here on the road its slender throat rests among the bits of gravel that are also beautiful when I look: sharp shards of quartz and other stones I do not know the names of.

I swallow hard and taste salt. All the way home I notice how things die.

Clover cut by the a mower’s blade, each tiny cluster of three leaves wilted now in the heat, bunched, scraggly, drying to a paler green.

The sleek shimmery S of a snake, pressed flat into the drying mud, its scales like scalloped plates, the road stained darkly with its sticky blood.

A cluster of dead leaves on the sassafras tree where a twig has ripped partway off from the branch The leaves are brittle and brown. They curl inward like a frail fist.

They hold secrets, these dying things.

Still panting hard I walk the steep incline of our drive and duck into the coop where the air is alive with the frantic fluttering of a small housefinch caught between the window and the wire mesh screen. I thought I’d seen something dart in before me, a small figment of air and shadow. I know they come all day for the cracked corn we feed the hens, swooping in through the door, then out, but my arrival sent it fluttering panicked to the window.

I wait a moment. Wait for its fluttering to become still. The air is pungent and intense with scent of ammonia and feces. Dust motes fall in golden angles towards the floor. The bird stops thrashing and crouches in the corner between the glass and the wire mesh.

I reach for it with a quivery hand. It tries to fly. Its wings spread, its feathers brown and utterly perfect, each one layered upon the next to make a thing of flight. Its wings become tangled in the mesh, the wire holes almost big enough for it to slip through. For a few brief seconds we struggle. Then I clutch it in my palm, carry it to the door and let it go.

(My father died seven years ago today.)

UPDATED to add: It wasn’t until after I’d written this post that I realized it was the day my father died. It’s not about loss, so much as it about wonder. In this culture we always think of death as sad, but that strikes me as so one dimensional. It’s so much bigger, and sometimes sad doesn’t describe it at all. Sometimes it’s about shape shifting. About things beginning, changing. After exhaling we inhale after all. There is more to us than this, I think. More to the thrush’s song, suddenly silent. Along the road I also found the empty blue shells of robin eggs, long empty. Those birds have already begun to fly.

What do you think about death? What does it mean to you?

These are days of thunder, of quivering rain-soaked leaves, of things starting out one way and ending another. Expectations are for fools: the bright shiny bits of tinfoil that trick the crows with their dark feathers and bright eyes to plummet towards the ground.

We see ten crows, a murder, when we go for a run. They keep swooping back and forth across the road; wings wide and black like sudden shadows lifting free from the foliage, everything so green it almost aches.

The damp air is sweet with the fragrance of bloom and fruit. Raspberries are ripe now, and blackcaps along the fences. When we’re through with running we stop to eat them, the juice making our fingers purple and stained.

The air is so humid it feels like we are drinking water as we breathe, our skin slick and salty, feet skimming the gravel. Since we started running at the beginning of the summer we’ve made progress, minutes off from our first time, and every day, nearly, we’re there together running the uneven terrain of hills and dirt road, breathing hard, sometimes quiet, sometimes telling each other little things.

Running has been the one thing that has held this summer. Even when everything else is at a loss: words, money, time, we’ve had running. Even when things have been endless: rain, worry, self doubt, there has been blood thrumming through the capillaries in our lungs, our rib bones rising and falling hard like the hulls of little boats pitching on a storm tossed sea.

It is something to run everyday without expectation. To just go, run, and gradually mark a difference. I am trying to learn this: to expect nothing and persist.

To wipe sticky cheeks, to weep, to tell stories, kiss scraped knees, make plum tarts, shuck peas, gather words, gather four leaf clovers, gather hope, drink lemonade, drink coffee, put words on the page, hit the delete key, hit the wall, dig in the dirt, remember, recycle, rinse the plates, stay up late, write, write, write.

Some days it takes everything just to show up for the day. To get out of bed after a night that turned into a wind-whipped laundry line of hours.

I’ll be honest. Some mornings I wake up wanting to put my fist through a wall. There are mornings when I hate the sound of my children and the crows in the trees. Mornings where my thoughts are black and jagged and coffee seems like a weak substitute for all the hours unslept and torn into fragments by the urgent primal demands of my baby and my boy.

And its on those days that running matters most. That time on the road has become the footing that makes it possible to go forwards in my life. And look! I can run faster than I ever have.

Some days it is only the only thing saves me: if I can run, I can write. If I can write, I can live. If I can live, I can mother.

It is the hardest thing, this: to turn towards a new day with empty palms, ready to let it be whatever it is, and still to persist stubbornly.

Yesterday, this: four miles.

We ran with the sun on our faces, the air heavy and sweet with cut grass and the last of the lilacs, ferns everywhere like green paper cutouts along the roadside. The ground was damp, the gravel singing underfoot. Four miles and I could feel my quads loosen, my legs reaching that pace where they were moving on their own, one foot in front of the other, lungs gratefully winnowing each inhalation of sweet air.

Then we were back, passing the final mile marker tree with the shaggy bark, tall by the by the mail boxes, where the road is cool in the shade. We walked up the hill swatting away buzzing insects, laughing, sweat running into our eyes.

And then there was this: inside stretching, I picked up Mary Oliver’s newest volume of poems, flipped to this one, and felt as though I was breaking off chunks of bread to feed my hungry soul, sunlight on the floor, my muscles limber in repose. I looked up to see the lush pink of the cyclamens on the windowsill blooming, and things stopped for an instant. I was just there, air in my lungs, the fuchsia petals on the sill glowing with afternoon light.

And suddenly I was full. That single slender moment, utterly perfect. Whole.

And in the end, this is what I live for: to find myself again and again in these moments, to locate myself here. While today rain pelts down, and the green leaves of the sassafras trees whip about, and the stock market dips and does unpredictable things and nothing is ever secure, yesterday there was that.

Yesterday there were those few breaths on the floor, words humming in my heart, my spine bending towards my knees, my slender wrists resting on the bones of my ankles, reaching, stretching. Those few moments before everything picked up and carried on: shrimp scampi for dinner, collecting eggs, reading stories, wiping dirty faces.

What is this life for, if not to live in it moment by moment? What is success, if not to experience sometimes and again irrefutable joy in this right now? And to hold that joy with the same hands that rinse the dirty dishes the sink; the same hands that reached for my baby, new, slick with amniotic fluid and blood; the same ones that carried the chipmunk with puncture wounds in his belly to the rocky wall where it might escape the cat; the hands that cupped my own face streaming with tears, tiredness eating the marrow of my bones.

What is success, if not this, this hunger to be alive right now? To be here, loving, dreaming, running hard down the road?

The roads have turned to mud now: layers of ice-hard earth thawing to slush, sticky and trampled. The yellow evening light is speckled with the flutterng wings of bugs, newly hatched, air eddying around their tiny exoskeletons.

We go for a run, just the two of us, conversation filling in the spaces between hard breathing uphill. A chainsaw whines and the scent of fresh cut wood makes my nostrils flare. Our feet sink a little with each step; muscles suddenly thrumming with heat and momentum. The air is soft, and while the snow still lingers at the edges of the fields, the brown grass lies exposed to the sun most places.

“Every step I take my feet sink,” DH says. The setting sun is at our backs. The sky is like the water I dip my brushes into: a bowl of pale ultramarine and pale saffron spilled at the horizon.

We’re holding hands. It’s the end of our run, and we’re walking back along the muddiest part of the road. In our heads both of us sing, every step you take…

Neither of us sings it aloud, but I know we’re both tuned in to this same static. “Did you just sing that song?” I ask, to be sure.

He nods, laughs. Even more than me, he’s the one doing this: filling in the spaces between thoughts with the flack of a thousand sitcoms, commercials, songs, clichés.

We do this all the time. Pop culture interference broadcasting stuff into the spaces between our thoughts. A word triggering the memory of another. Phrases tumbling unbidden into the twilight in spite of us. Turbulence in the spaces between. It’s a lovely day.

In my palm I feel the heat of him there next to me; so much between us unsaid.

What were like, before it was like this? Before thoughts were so commonly shared: before mass media and marketing, email, texting, technology instantaneously and exponentially making each thought at once more available and more clichés. In the spaces between, there was once an arc of silence. A breath beat without stimulus.

Now our minds hum constantly with unbidden music. Random access memory. Filler.

Without it, what would we be like?