Month: November 2011

Firsts and lasts

Whit lost his third tooth this weekend.  As usual, I cried as I hugged him, celebrated one of life’s passages even as I mourned it.  Is there a more tangible marker of growing up than teeth falling out?  I don’t think so.

Later that day, Grace and I were driving home from her soccer game and talking about Whit’s tooth.

“Does it make you sad, Mummy?”

“Well, yes, sort of, Grace.  I mean, you know that.”

“But it doesn’t make you sad when I lose my teeth, right?”

I glanced back at her in the backseat, tousled from her season-ending soccer game, cheeks pink.

“Well, Grace, not really.  It’s always the first time when something like that happens for you.  And so it’s exciting.”

“And you know that Whit still has those things ahead, right?  He’s your baby.”  She was looking out the window.

“Well, yes.”  Was she upset?  I couldn’t tell.  We drove in silence for a few moments.

“I get to have all the firsts.  And Whit gets to have all the lasts.”

Of course, predictably, my eyes swam with tears behind my sunglasses.  I nodded and swallowed.  She’s right.  And how immensely fortunate I am that my life contains so many of both.

Life is polarities

I’m particularly aware right now of the intensely opposed polarities that exist, both uneasily and audaciously, in every single minute of my life.  It is by turns exhausting and reassuring to hold these contradictions in my hand.

  • Those who are close to me know me intimately and yet not at all; I, too, still stumble navigating the emotional terrain of those I know and love best of all
  • The light is full, but of losses
  • I am both grateful and sorrowful
  • We are on the curve towards the end of the year, which then becomes the beginning of another year
  • In my deepest darkness I find a stubborn flicker of joy
  • I feel young – awkward, unfamiliar, bumbling – and old – wiped out, depleted, wrinkled – at the same time

What poles are you holding now?

Light on trees

I love the sky, and trees, and in particular the interplay between them.  I’ve written before about my continued – fruitless – efforts to capture the light on the trees outside my house in the morning and the evening.  This futility reminds me of how I’ve often tried to photograph falling snow and been similarly frustrated by my inability to capture the fleeting, stunning glory of it.  These are moments, I guess – nature swollen to its fullest meaning – for poets, or for photographers far more skilled than I.

And yet I keep trying.  There’s something so rich, so evocative, about the way light right now plays on the ever-barer branches of trees.  Particularly at sunrise and sunset, at the ends of each day’s arc, it seems the light comes from somewhere beyond the horizon, beyond the reach of my logical mind.  It makes me stop and wonder, almost every single day: most mornings finds me standing in the street, pointing my iPhone up at the sky while the kids sit in the car, waiting to go to school.

The light is particularly elusive this time of year.  Its hours are limited, its wings clipped by the dusk that falls earlier and earlier.  There’s also a quality of elegy in November light, which is somehow heavy with endings.  It is, paradoxically and bewitchingly, full of emptiness.  We pivot towards the solstice, towards the close of another year.  And the light glows like embers on the branches perhaps marking that another set of days burns irrevocably to an end.

And I stand there taking pictures.  Trying, always failing, to capture what I see.  Almost exactly one year ago I wrote about the light in the sky and the leaves on the ground, on the inextricability of endings and beginnings.  About rawness, sadness, and the strands of incandescent joy that weave through every single day, through every single sky.

A fluffy Friday fashion post

I’m not altogether as heavy as I may sometimes appear here.  Well, I am, but I have other sides too.  One that I don’t talk about much is my sideline interest in all things fashion-related.  I read, as I’ve mentioned, 30+ magazines a month (that list is a little out of date, but the total number remains similar).  In my Google reader, alongside the blogs by writers and thinkers and coaches and poets are several that focus on style and fashion.  I need to try to lighten up my recent dark mood.  So, some recent observations on this happy-making topic:

This is mostly what I use pinterest for, incidentally: a place to record my thoughts on style.

I’m currently obsessed with the following:

New discoveries:

  • MiH jeans
  • Red patent leather heels that are – ahem, strumpet shoes (Kathryn has observed)
  • Emerson Made
  • Gray jeans, by my old standby, J Brand (currently challenged by the new jean on the block)

Old favorites:

  • J Crew cashmere
  • Diane von Furstenberg dresses – for work, for cocktails, for everything, all the time
  • My black Juicy Couture sweatpants that I admit I live in

Things I must find:

  • A long gold tassel necklace
  • A perfect pair of not-too-high, pointy-toe black pumps
  • A white tuxedo jacket

The summer between my two years in business school I worked as a buyer at Bloomingdale’s.  If Matt hadn’t moved to Boston that second year, I would have entered a career in retail.  Turning down those offers, giving up that dream, was hard for me.  Who knows where that would have led.  Obviously I can’t know.  But the interest goes way back.  At Bloomingdale’s we used to joke about “buying clothes for a life we don’t have.”  I think of that now when I buy cocktail dresses.  I love cocktail dresses.  They are definitely the thing I buy too many of, just because I love them.

What do you buy multiples of?  Who is your favorite designer?  Any current obsessions?  Tell me, I really want to know, and I’m trying to cheer myself up!!

The heart to conquer it

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.

– Rabindranath Tagore
Originally seen on the lovely, inspiring blog Roots of She