{my topography}

Challenge # 1: Your face, partly hidden maybe; partly out of the frame, out of the picture, in the shadows or turning away.

Add your photos to the Flickr pool or leave the url to your photo here.

I’ll be posting a bunch of your photos here throughout the week. Go take a peek.

I can’t wait to see what you share this week. Happy Spring!

1. January
I quit my job. At the time I took a leave of absence, but already I knew I wouldn’t return. I was enormously pregnant, nesting, wistful, restless.

2. February
Sprout was born, after seven hours of labor, four days after his brother’s fourth birthday. I yelled a lot of expletives while in the shower, in labor, while in my head I kept seeing the image of a mountain–steep, serene and calm. And then. Then. This perfect boy that has filled my year with utter entire joy. We stared at each other. He lay on my belly and we just breathed. I counted his toes, kissed him, smelled him, nuzzled his soft head. He nursed, and looked at me, and was quiet. And so began our love affair.

3. March
Spring fever. Longing for green. And beginning to realize what the year would be. A roller coaster. In the dark looking through windows, everything blurry and unexpected and off-kilter, especially financially, but also emotionally.

4. April
Finally blossoms. Planting seed starts. Feeling the impermanence and indelible insistence of what it means to be a mother of two small boys. Realizing that nothing lasts, even when things were tenuous between us.

5. May
Spring for real. Collecting tadpoles. Taking walks with Bean. Running. Weight lifting. Systematically breaking personal records. Faster, harder, farther. Rhubarb in the garden and snap peas. And also, we slept and dreamed and become something greater than the sum of ourselves this year.

6. June
It was a summer of give-and-take, of us coming face-to-face with the consequences of a life lived pell-mell, with gusto and ambition and also arduous domesticity. We were in the thick of sleep deprivation and summer’s heat and rain. Endless rain. Also rainbows. And lettuce in the garden.

7. July
Evidence of the intangible. Feeling on the cusp of things. Starting my novel. Running hard. Breaking my own records. The first tomatoes. Too much rain.

8. August
Sprout was 6 months old. I started doing freelance copy editing. We went on a horrifically funny camping trip. I received several rejection letters in the mail. Berry picking. Baking. The tomato blight killed most of the tomatoes in the garden. More rain.

9. September
The beginning of all sorts of things…Bean started in a new school… our ten-year anniversary, and laundry. A 10 hour car trip with both boys to Maine. A week with my best friend. Apples ripening. Glorious late summer sun (finally, no rain.) Also: two weddings, the last two of my dearest girlfriends were married.

10. October
A post at wishstudio, getting a new job, noticing the light, having things speed up. Exquisite foliage. Also morning poems. Pumpkin picking. Digging up potatoes.

11. November
All about noticing what we have. Navigating a part time job, NaNoWriMo two boys. 50K words. Sort of. New friends. Dinner parties. Moodiness. Teething. Sprout started standing.

12. December
Now. It has been a year of noticing moments. Making cookies for Santa with friends + sledding. The most glorious snow.

When I first started looking back at the year, I could hardly remember it. Blink. The entire year happened. And then I took a breath.

It was a year of intensely lived moments, pervasive financial stress, and newborn sleep-induced forgetfulness. On one hand, I accomplished nothing. On the other: I’m here. We are. We’re in love, big time. I have a novel that I hoard, obsess over, gloat over, feel terror about. I have two boys. I can make bread without a recipe. I can run a six minute mile. I can do a pull up. I’ve begun to paint again.

What about you? I’d love to hear what you are proud of from this year… what you learned or accomplished.

A week of friends, and bonfires and playing in the leaves. A week of making choices and getting on top of the laundry situation and soaking up back to back days of slanting shadows and mellow sunlight.

Now: Penguin Café on my headphones. Writing a novel makes everything twirl in my head.

Life is full, and there is a feeling of tenderness just below the surface. It’s hunting season. We put the light on in the coop to trick the sleepy hens to lay some eggs. In the dark we fold into each other and whisper, reconciling the smallness of today with the possibility that tomorrow will be great.

We’re all hugging ourselves in the dark; hugging each other; hungry for something. Or at least I am, he is. Lots happening in the present tense right now, but I miss being here.

What matters to you today?

anatomy of my heart today:


PS–Your comments on my post earlier meant the world to me today. Really. xoxox! C.

And I can’t find the words to write about it. Dislocated. Nostalgic. Missing the way I used to be, as irrational as that seems. Feeling anxious about the future. What if I’ll never be the things I dream of? Shit. Even I know that sounds ridiculous, and yet that voice is there in my head. A rejection letter in the mail. Not enough sleep. Whatever.

I am missing the connections I’ve made here, Internets. I know it’s my fault that they’ve dwindled as I’ve been caught in this weird place of cat-got-your-tongue moodiness that is my present. Damn. I want to share my life with you more, again. I just don’t know how to put words around it. What if this lasts? What if nothing turns out? This is the voice in my head today. Even with sun, even with coffee, even with sitting alone upstairs in a cafe.

Do you ever feel like this? Like there are no words?

What are you afraid of? What will you regret, if you never do it or become it?

I have been writing posts in my head all week. I’ve been swamped, and I love it. I’m doing copy editing. Being paid to write. Life is good.

Except. I haven’t had a scrap of time to write–on my novel, or here. Still trying to find balance. Always this. Is there such a thing? I am determined to sink deep into these last summer days with gratitude.

I found these lines at the end of a poem today–in the Sun, from A Warning by Eric Anderson

Nothing ever goes away enough or arrives enough,
and I want to cry when I think of my heart,
muscle pounding in muscle, greedy always for joy.

This is exactly how I feel.

***

What do you want to remember about August?

I was 16, obsessed with Kate Moss, had a novice eating disorder, was fixated on boys, and still a kid in a small secret pocket compartment of my heart. I read Dostoyevsky and Dante for pleasure, climbed trees, and was very concerned with the fate of the world.

I listened to Nirvana, tried not to eat, wore baggy jeans and black bodysuits, and I hated my mother because she deferred to my father on everything that ever had anything to do with me. I wanted secretly to be a runway model. I kept a sketch book. I thought the 1992 Calvin Klein ad campaign was the epitome of romance.

My father was the smartest man I had ever known and I adored discussing philosophy and religion with him, which often occurred after I’d get back from a date. I’d perch on the couch in a circle of yellow lamplight, and we’d talk, sometimes for hours, about reincarnation and karma and the fate of the gods.

He was also one of the most socially clueless men I have ever known, and had no idea how to parent a teenage girl. Aside from the good conversations, he responded to almost every one of my requests to do normal social teenage things with a “no.” I had a 10:30 curfew, and had to spend hours doing yard work in order to earn social time with my friends. He was the first person I ever said “fuck you” too.

I paid for nearly all of my clothes and anything deemed frivolous myself. I learned how to lie. I rode with boys who drove too fast and when I said I was one place, I was often somewhere else entirely.

My best friend (who took those pictures of my boyfriend and me with the rose) and I spent a lot of time together and it is because of her, and because of her mom I survived my life then. We plastered our walls with pictures from Vogue, isten to Metalica, Depeche Mode, Pearl Jam, and strangely, Enya. We drove around fast with the windows down, went to the beach, and talked every night on the phone.

I loved being the center of attention, but was too awkward and earnest to really pull it off. I was fascinated with the attention that I got from boys, but I often toyed with them. I liked boys who were dangerous or daring, or at the very least, interesting. I broke up with the ones who stayed the same for too long.

I was a lifeguard, and a swim instructor. I had a red bathing suit and a dark tan. I played chess for hours in smoky coffeehouses, and went skinny-dipping in one of my boyfriend’s parents hot tub. I wore black ripped fishnets under cutoff shorts when my parents weren’t watching, tried cloves, tried tequila.

I imagined running away. I imagined being famous. I imagined I was important enough to change the world. I made a sculpture of my head out of clay. I loved to draw. I learned to grill steak for my most serious boyfriend that year (he always wore a baseball hat and loved watching sports on TV.) I went to the Renaissance fair. I briefly flirted with the very Goth boyfriend of one of my good friends, a flirtation that lasted until he bit me, hard, on the neck at a party. I had a 4.0. I was as much a contradiction as possible. I was 16.

I changed a lot from 16 to 18. When I was 18 I fell in love, in Germany at a youth conference. It was really love, as wild and heart stopping and carefree as only young love can be. I was sure we would be together forever. We are still friends. He just got married last month.

I absolutely adored reading about you as teenagers. And now I’m curious: what was it like for you when you fell in love for the very first time? I’ll post more on this too.

In January for my birthday, inspired as always by Andrea’s awesome lists, I wrote my own: 32 things to do before I turn 32. But then I forgot to post it, until now, when I was cleaning up the post-its on my desktop (how I love the post-it widget!) and found the list again. I was surprised by how many things I’ve already done, or started to do. Something about putting stuff on the page makes it happen. And I love that.

I’m thinking that maybe as I accomplish things on my list I’ll post about it & link to the list in my sidebar. Aside from the sheer glee of writing them, nothing beats crossing stuff off lists. You too should make your very own list. I would LOVE it if you shared. Here in the comments. Or share the link to your list on your blog.

The thing about making a relatively long list of things to be completed in a relatively short time (a year) is that you have to really think about your life realistically. What do you really want to do this year? What do you want to accomplish? What are some of the small things that you have been meaning to do, that will likely get pushed to the side by bigger more consuming (and not necessarily on the list!) things unless you write them down?

I’ve blinked and it’s winter; the lush carpet of crumpled brown and yellow leaves is obscured by downy blanket of white. I sit at the kitchen counter, my back to the wood stove, watching snowflakes drift to the ground. My mind slips into a reverie, tracing the twirling track of individual snowflakes as they fall; the view straight from a Courier & Ives postcard. I take a deep breath. Hello winter.

It would be a lie to say that I’ve been looking forward to winter. I love the snow, and the first flakes falling every year make me giddy, and certainly I am eager to haul out the sleds and the snow shovels. It also helps that this winter I have toasty warm Sorrels to keep my feet snug, and a new powder blue down jacket. But winter brought out the sharpest edges last year, and it’s a bit like getting back on the horse after being bucked off to return to these cold months where the sun barely slips between the cloud cover for a few short hours, and in the night the mercury slips below zero. It was this time last year that my relationship with DH felt like it was imploding, as it underwent the fierce growth of a relationship moving past the seven year mark.

In my writing I’ve begun to explore how dialogue always overlaps. How really, there are only a small handful of moments (if any) when two people talk and both of them are actually talking about the same thing. Last winter, we were a caricature of this, aching to be close to each other yet sparring endlessly, our words the serrated objects of separate agendas. I still can’t put a finger on the pulse of the pain we caused each other: what it was for, or why. Most of it was reactionary; the product of external stresses from work and life that became distilled into the small orbit of our love, but it was also the product of a hundred small things: a cold house, anxiety over dreams unrealized, a toddler with insistent needs and disrupted sleep, and an accumulated lack of time to ourselves.

So the trepidation is there, if only faintly perceptible when I stop to take my own pulse. A slight blip. A snag in the fabric of these early winter days with snow falling and warm firelight and laughter. Every small argument bears undue weight, even though I know we’re so far from there, our love like maple sap grown dark and sweet in the heat metal evaporator pan.

It’s strange how the seasons bring things up. How certain days recall others; and for the longest time I’ve hated November. In college, and for years after, I’d get stir crazy. I’d try to break up with my boyfriend, or move to a new state, or write reams of dismal poems. It makes sense in that context, that last November marked the beginning of a season of angst, and it thrills me to no end to realize that I’ve actually this year I’ve bucked the trend. November was full of yellow leaves, a filigree of frost, and page after page of prose written with more confidence than I’ve ever had with a purpose and a deadline driving each paragraph towards completion. It’s all about climbing back on the horse, and then asking it to be Pegasus, and expecting to fly.

In the Pacific ocean, 1996.

This afternoon I sat among boxes in my studio and dug through relics (an attempt at organizing, gone very far tangent.) I found pictures of high school boyfriends; letters; collages. All small fragments of who I was then, different, yet still me, in ridiculous cut-off shorts and too-large plaid shirts (thank you Nirvana.)

It felt so funny looking back—feeling the way time arcs like electricity, fast and slow between now and then. It seems so impossible to me sometimes, that we can only go forwards. That we can only live today and maybe tomorrow, but never yesterday again. Those romances, back then when I wore converse high tops and baggy jeans were so sweet and achingly awkward. They were all good guys, and I still know most of them. Some, I’m still close friends with, which says a lot about the both of us, I think. But even though we’re friends, and we talk and share pancakes when they come to visit my little family here up on our hill, we can still only go one-way: always towards the future. We’ll never be able to slip back into the skin of our past selves—there on the rocky coast, posing for the camera on self-timer in wind-rumpled blue parkas; or there on the cobbled streets of Florence, in hiking boots and backpacks.

Riffling through the box of artifacts I felt myself slip up above like a helium balloon on a string. Suddenly with a birds-eye-view: there I am, in the middle of my life. That is how it has all turned out. That man. That small boy. That house. And not those other men, despite their earnest efforts, and big hearts. It felt like time travel, seeing my name, printed out on numerous envelopes. My maiden name. Those consonants now grown unfamiliar on my tongue.

Has anyone else ever felt like this? Startled, for a brief moment, or surprised, to find yourself right where you are? Not that it could be any different, or that I would want it to. Simply that time moves on, and that on a rare instant I see how I am enmeshed in its shimmering net, the tide pulling steadily forwards, and regardless of my loves and my discrepancies, and I arrive each day, a little further on.