Kinfolk Vol. 3

Posted on | March 26, 2012 | 3 Comments

Good morning! After a tender, quiet weekend full of work and small moments: toast and bacon and good cappuccinos, cleaning out my closets and building blanket forts with Sprout on the bed, and many hours spent in my studio writing (my thesis), it is a new week has begun. And I’m excited to share that a little piece of mine called “Morning Rituals” is in Kinfolk Volume 3.

It’s the kind of magazine you want to hold in your hands: the texture of the pages, the heft of it, the dreamy grain of the photos, and words that inspire you to be right here.

Get yours. You’ll be happy you did. Perfect for reading over breakfast with toast & bacon and small boys.

At whatever cost

Posted on | March 25, 2012 | 4 Comments

I have no way of knowing, that reading this piece would make the soft pulsing organ in the hull of my ribs ache with indescribable sadness.

A mother. A runner.

“I thought of you when I read this, you’ll see why,” was my friend’s explanation for the link to this story in my inbox, referring, no doubt, to the fact that the school mentioned is my high school alma matter. It takes me until page four to understand that this is probably what he means.

And maybe it is because of this–that I know the geography of her life–that this piece has the effect that it does.

She was pushing Julian up just to keep him above the water. She would raise him, sink under the water herself and then reappear.

I read through to the end and feel broken open sitting in my studio among sheaves of research for my thesis, the window open just a little to let some cold spring air into the stillness of the room.

Outside I hear my boys driving a remote control car across the newly greening lawn; the car’s small motor makes a whirring sound, like a hive of angry bees. The dog barks at it every so often; high pitched, uncertain, her head tilting to the side. Then she settles down with her bone under the crabapple and watches uneasily as they run pell-mell, laughing.

The sky has been gray since dawn. All morning I’ve caught myself wishing it were different. I want the sun to come back the way it was all last week: mellow and golden and so warm the lilac started to send out furling tender leaflets.

Maybe it’s this that makes me fold in against myself when I finish reading; like one of those Leatherman tools, where everything is rendered useless in its compact state; knives and saw blades and pliers all folded against each other.

I sob.

They were less than 10 feet away from her, but in the time it took Caleb to turn back around, Rhiannon had breathed her last breath and vanished into the sea.

When the finish line is moved, runners struggle to continue beyond the expected terminus.

It isn’t just the facts of the story. Because later I go back and read other reports in local newspapers, and each reporter describes incident in the typical anonymous tone such papers tend to take on purpose so that no one becomes too alarmed: “Healdsburg woman washed out to sea.

I think it is the way piece in weaves the grief into container of tenderness; the way the author gathers the facts and turns them over and over, like pebbles on the shore, looking for understanding, that moves me to tears.

It’s damn good writing.

There was a time when I might have managed to read this piece and move on. But then I had one son, and then another, and with their births I become utterly permeable. The world slips in now through my breath; my eyes; the very pores in my skin.

Now, I cannot move on. The grief lingers in my chest all afternoon like a carrier pigeon in its wicker create. I don’t know how to release it, or where to tell it to fly.

I run and errand and when I return, Sprout, who has been napping, has just woken up and he runs to greet me, his arms held open. I press him to me and his smell his scent like it is a thing that can sustain me.

It is.

T looks up from rewiring the brake cables on his bike. “What’s the matter?” he asks, seeing my face.

I tell him, in as few words as possible, trying to be obscure so that Bean, who is puttering about at the opposite corner of the room wont hear, but he stops to listen. I tell the part about the way she held her son above water until he could be rescued and then slipped under, and Bean takes one look at me and says, “That makes me sad” and in an instant he is beside me, folding his small wiry body against my birdcage chest.

I hold him there and cry silently, with gratitude and for my tender boys; for the fact that I am their mother, at whatever cost.

Where ideas happen: a documentary of small moments

Posted on | March 19, 2012 | 4 Comments

In the slight slender seconds of pause
when the tea is hot and the quiet is steady,
or at the stoplight, waiting to cross the street
beside a billboard, and then the galaxy of staples
are all invitation I need
to linger, to take a picture, to look and then look again.

It happens in the washroom at the little vegetarian cafe,
where the picture of Bukowski, likely piss drunk,
is a lurching reminder as I dry my hands
to be irreverent and bold with what I know;
in the same way that the ink-spattered sink
promises that being in the midst of the mess
is the best if not only way to find the truth.

And it happens always, in the cafe,
a frothy cappuccino its own evidence
of creative collisions and circumstances
that invite recollection or collection;
And also always staring out my office window at the sky,
where the moon, white and round,
offers endless chances to describe its pale face anew,
and so I do.

//
An invitation: Tell me your way of talking about the moon without talking about the moon at all. (I love the way you think.)

On loving someone for a while:

Posted on | March 19, 2012 | 7 Comments

There is a slow magic to knowing someone for a while; to loving them for longer than a decade; to waking up beside them morning after morning. It isn’t an effortless thing, or something you just stumble into. Rather, it’s a thing of shared dreaming: Of taking each other’s hands, of walking side by side, of saying yes, and imaging what our future holds together.

I don’t take a single day for granted. Each day I wake up committed and eager to try again, to grow, to live this life side by side, and so does he. I think this makes us among the lucky ones.

Yes.

The truth is, after a dozen years, he’s still my favorite.

I love him more than I ever did when we first were dating, that’s for certain. He has better biceps now; more smile lines; less hair; more scars; deeper laughter; wider love.

Have I ever told you about how we met? He asked me to go downhill mountain biking the day after we’d met, and I said yes, even though I’d never done such a ridiculous thing before. We road the chair lift up the mountain together, and somehow while taking pictures with a disposable camera we dropped it, and even though we rode down and looked for it, we never found the camera that had the first evidence of us together on it, his arm around my shoulder.

He let me ride his bike because mine was not really cut out for hurtling down such steep terrain, but somehow he broke my front wheel in the process, which was a great guarantee, really, that we’d have to see each other again.

And when we did, I remember thinking: How could anyone be this good, this solid, this open hearted? And then he kissed me.

We were in college still.

Now we’re at a stoplight driving into town with the boys in the back seat and the dog in the trunk and we both stare in wonderment at the group tour of the UVM campus that’s crossing the road in front of us. The kids are so young; so fresh faced and slouchy and hesitant in their posture. Their parents stand upright, arms folded, or hands clutching catalogs and brochures or handbags; and they look anxious and skeptical and worried and old.

How is it possible we’ll be them in ten years? Instead of the younger ones, looking careless, their arms and legs like question marks, their clothes too baggy or too tight. How is it possible that Bean will be one of those boys, his sandy hair all shaggy, stubble on his cheeks?

We shake our heads. He reaches out and rests his warm palm against my thigh. Then the light turns green.

A reminder:

Posted on | March 17, 2012 | 2 Comments