August 14:: Country Fair

Posted on | August 15, 2010 | 8 Comments

Still on the August Break and posting every day over at flickr.

Yesterday we went to a country fair. Fun. Sun + sun, livestock, lemonade, maple cotton candy, ribs, tractor + truck pulls, pig races and rides. Sprout’s first carousel ride = total glee. An awesome day, except: my gimpy ankle and the long drive home.

Today I feel nostalgic for summer, even though it’s here still. I hate that it’s ending. I’m not ready for the yellow leaves that are already on the ground; the cricket songs; the shooting stars. I want the live long light and languor of July a little longer. Although the peaches now are making me smile, and the promise of apples soon. Today the sky is pale, pale. The color of sun on cement; the color of white with shadow. The color of a day slipping by with wind in the trees. I want to nap. There are things I must do: two chapters, an InDesign project, always a to-do list. Two weeks more of summer and then who knows. Everything upended, likely. Everything different. I don’t remember how to be in class. Don’t know, yet, still, if I will be. So it goes.

How are the last weeks of your summer being spent?

One more lesson on the things I cannot control

Posted on | August 12, 2010 | 2 Comments

Here is the truth: I was a certified swim instructor for years. I have taught every kind of person to swim: a 2 year old; an elderly woman; a teenage boy who only spoke Chinese; an autistic 4 year old who would sink blithely, fearlessly to the bottom of the pool if I so much as blinked. I was a lifeguard for years. In California. At a water park and at hectic health club pools where kids would do the deadman’s float just to addle my brains.

Simply: I love the water, and I’m good in it. I can tread water for minutes; swim a mile at a reasonable pace; do the butterfly; snap a flip turn; float forever.

But teach my kid to swim: this, somehow I cannot do. More…

Interlude

Posted on | August 12, 2010 | 2 Comments

Running last night, after a day that felt so very long, I tripped and sprained my ankle. Damn. It was shockingly swollen immediately, but our awesome neighbor who is a doctor said it wasn’t a particularly terrible sprain (thank god) and that it will take about 3 weeks to heal.

Hi universe. How are you? Oh, what? You haven’t noticed that I have a lot on my plate this month huh? Well I DO. So can you please ease up a wee bit? Thank you very much.

August 10::Tuesday

Posted on | August 10, 2010 | 6 Comments

I am permeable and split wide open like a summer melon overripe with the sweetness and sun and with all the things that are still unresolved.

I am like a diver, on a cliff with a blindfold leaping on promise, daring to dare.

I am girl caught in the morning light, caught by the beauty until I can hardly exhale, wet hair dripping, light slipping golden and honeyed across the floor.

I have just exactly these superpowers: I am a questioner, a seeker, a storyteller, a finder four leaf clovers everywhere; I am brave; I love the ones I love to a fault; and I find my salvation day after day among the pebbles on the path, the spider’s weaving webs, the sun rising and then setting in a sky filled with rain and contrails and wonder.

What are your superpowers?

August 9::Monday

Posted on | August 9, 2010 | 7 Comments

Us, through the eyes of my friend Willow. It is somehow enthralling to see ourselves from the back–a view we will never have of ourselves; a glimpse of us more vulnerable maybe, always leaving wherever we are, turning, going, doing. I love this entire set. Loved the day filled with thunderstorms and an accidental perfect meeting with T right after he finished work.

August 8:: The urgency of now

Posted on | August 8, 2010 | 10 Comments

I find my way in the dark, fingers slipping across the smooth surface of the wall, across the lip of the door frame, the lights needed now at 8pm. The rain is falling outside. Along the road today the first red leaf with a hole in it’s heart; chicory and queen anne’s lace at the roadside ruffling like a party dress. The monarchs have arrived; gold finches flit high into a golden sky before the twilight. Bats come just before dark, then rain.

My friends ask: why do you feel such urgency? Why more now than any other time?

I fumble with my reply.

We are sitting on a blanket in a field of grass and black eyed susans. Above us the clouds twirl, gather, disperse, and play hide-and-seek with the sun. I want to say: don’t you feel it too?

I see myself differently through their eyes; these friends I have known longest, who kiss my kids and spend the morning with me in the garden picking beans, and later in the kitchen blanching and freezing them for winter. I see how I am more permeable perhaps. Thin skinned. The spinning world is always close. I hear it’s whispered pulse.
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

Look at the headlines, I say. Listen, listen. This is your only now, your only life here among these clover and fat green grasses. This is what I know.

Maybe you are thinking: we’re here aren’t we? Doing the day, living, waking, working, eating. And it’s easy to shrug in the isle at the grocery store and buy the mangoes from Guatemala (feeling incapable after all of doing much at all to save the world) or to bask in the hundred different freedoms that we have that others elsewhere cannot know (imagine, if there were no roof. What then of the rain? Of Internet. Of this.)

You might think: we’re doing fine.

And it’s likely true, we’ve mostly turned out fine, but think what you could be. What can you be?

In the coop the hens lay perfect oval eggs, each one a gift. When they see me coming they come running, follow as I walk, a fluttering eager flock. They want handouts, of course. Bread broken, peels of things I do not want. And in the garden there are miracles I cannot understand: new potatoes, thyme as high as my knees, purple peppers waiting on the bush for more sun to sweeten their crisp flesh, slugs, beetles with sharp masticating pincers making holes in all the kale. I pull plump beets and sprinkled lettuce seed in the soft earth, then and bury it with a prayer.

And this, this is what I do every day: spread wonder with my fingers; bow again and again to this day that is mine.

This is a joyful wondrous spark: if this is your only day, what then? What then?

August 7::Saturday

Posted on | August 7, 2010 | 5 Comments

All about friends. The best of friends. (Miss you Jess.) Long walks to fields dappled with light; clouds above, laughter, the kind of honesty that comes from knowing someone for more than a decade; good wine and pasta with fresh corn, and chard, basil and tomatoes from the garden; the promise of Sunday bacon and a few more hours to watch my kids play with some of my favorite people in the whole world. (Also love that seeing my family through someone elses lens…)

August 6::Friday

Posted on | August 6, 2010 | 5 Comments

A couple of snapshots from the festival of fools today. Tired, enthralled boys. (The first shot was a happy accident.)

What are the things you juggle? What are the balls that can drop, or the ones that are made of glass? (This man also juggled machetes twelve feet up in the air on a pole.)