everyday life

Crystal clear and chilly

On the very last full day of summer vacation last year I took Grace and Whit to one of my very favorite beaches, about an hour north of Boston.  We swam and built castles, wrote our names in the wet sand, and generally danced with the tides.  The day was nothing short of magical and remains one of my favorite memories of last summer.

This past weekend we went back.  It was crystal clear and chilly, and a fierce wind gusted over us.  The beach was nearly deserted and the tide was out.  Grace and Whit ran ahead of us, picking up driftwood walking sticks and leaning over to examine the empty, barnacle-crusted shell of a horseshoe crab.  We all admired the ripples in the sand, noticing with wonderment how quickly – and temporarily, because the tide comes back in and erases it – the wind leaves its mark on the earth.

My parents often took Hilary and me on outings like this when we were kids; I thought of that as I watched my own children run on the packed sand, their coats flapping behind them like capes.  The years collapsed, as they so often do, and I marveled at how enormous swaths of life can sometimes compress into mere moments.

It was cold, my eyes were watering, my hair was flying in my face, but I felt a tremendous, surpassing peace for that hour on the beach.  I love the coast, drawn as I am to liminal places, to the border where one world melts into the next.  I am happiest near the ocean, that much I know for sure.  The weather and time of year doesn’t matter – in fact in many ways I prefer the beach off season, when it is more likely to be empty.  I just need to stand beside the ocean, to listen to the roar and the murmur of water and land meeting, the boundary between them mutable, redrawn every moment as the tide shifts back and forth in an echo of the waxing and waning moon.  And so, on Saturday, I did.

The poetry all around us

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem – Wallace Stevens

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem. – Mark Doty

A couple of weeks ago I had three Marks in my head – Doty, Nepo, Strand.  I went for an amble through poetry books and quotes, and for some reason these two lines jumped out at me.  I’ve written before that everyday life is a practice and a poem.  It is clear that one of my life’s central preoccupations is witnessing the poetry in the most ordinary days.

My first response on reading that line by Stevens was that I disagree entirely; I think if you look closely, watch patiently, there is poetry to be seen everywhere, and every day.  And Doty’s point about the world consenting to be made into a poem makes sense to me turned around the other way: it consents when we let it.  When we turn our attention to the world, and keep our hearts open, there is poetry everywhere.

See the poetry I found, just in the last few weeks?  All you have to do is look.  Remember, what you see is what you get.

The soundtrack of those long, dark weeks

I sit at my desk in my small third-floor office, the only sound the click of the computer keyboard as I write a few sentences in Scrivener.  I listen to You Are My Sunshine wafting through Whit’s closed bedroom door and sit back in my chair, quiet, letting the song wash over me.  The song changes to Puff the Magic Dragon and my eyes fill with tears.  I go stand in his dim, nightlight-lit room, watching him sleep.

The shadowy room is full of ghosts who whisper to me.  I can hear the faint squeak of the yellow rocker as I sit in it, pushing back and forth, back and forth.  I hold a sleeping baby Grace and my tears splash on the blanket in which she is swaddled.  I lean over and plant a kiss on her forehead, my face wet with my crying, and murmur to her I am sorry.

I listen to those long-ago years, listen to the story they tell of a mother as newborn as her baby daughter, of a woman startled by the yawning cavern that has opened up right in the middle of her life.  I hear myself rushing through bedtime, desperate for an hour when I’m nobody’s mother.  I listen to Come Away To Sea, to Blackbird, to Baby Mine, to the soundtrack of those long, dark weeks and months.  I listen and I ache, wishing I could have those nights back.  In part because I want to do them differently, with more love, more patience, less frustration, less impatience.  Because I want my first experience of motherhood with my first baby to have been different.  But also just because I want those nights back.  Every single one of them.

To listen to You Are My Sunshine, to hear myself sing it in a whisper to a sleeping baby in my arms.  One more time.

Please click over to Momalom for lots of beautiful writing on today’s 5 for 5 topic, Listening.

The afternoon of life

I am 37 years old.  I’m not going to pretend it is without angst, this early middle age of mine.  Two summer ago turning 35 made me very thoughtful and somewhat melancholy.  I got what felt like endless emails that summer protesting that 35 is not middle age.  But I disagree: I view middle age as a range: literally, the middle of life.  And there is no question in my mind that’s where I am.  The ferris wheel that I write about over and over nears its apex, and the view is breathtaking.  I can feel in my stomach, however, that we’re lurching close to the voyage down the other side.

I’m in good company, by the way: Carl Jung said that middle age begins at 35.  (he called it the beginning of the “afternoon of life,” something I read for the first time in Dani Shapiro’s gorgeous Devotion.) And life does have a different flavor these last few years.  The evidence that I am an adult continues to pile up: two children, a marriage, a graduate degree, a mortgage, a station wagon.  Oh, and the wrinkles.  I feel like a grown-up in the full sense of the word, which is both liberating and heavy.  Part of fully leaning into adulthood seems to be accepting all the things that will never be, and there is a deep sorrow in that though also a kind of sturdy settling, like an exhale.

But at the same time I feel a persistent disbelief that I’m actually an adult.  I still feel like I am 18.  I am still waiting for the real parents to come home and to take over with Grace and Whit.  It’s not a secret that one of the things I struggle most with is time’s passage; I wonder if my apparent willful ignoring of my own maturing is a way of refusing to acknowledge this reality.

I’m not sure.  It’s just one of the ways that life continues to surprise me, I guess, this oscillating between feeling very old and very young, sometimes in a single moment.   The constant letting go of what I thought, over and over again, that is never enough.  Releasing my hold on what might have been in order to embrace what is.  What is, in all of its new-wrinkled, dark-circled, surprisingly-achy middle-aged glory.  Maybe that will be primary joy of this afternoon of life: acknowledging and appreciating this life, this 37 (almost 38) years, right here.

Click over to Momalom to read many beautiful posts on today’s 5 for 5 topic, age.

Pictures

I am the official photographer.  It’s almost always me curating the memories of an event, corralling people into group shots, taking pictures of the flower arrangements, capturing candid images of laughter and conversation.  Sometimes, dancing as joy-filled as it is cringe-worthy.

I also take photographs of the non-events in my life, which is of course the majority of it, a large swath of ordinary days filled with images of the sky’s changing colors, the tree out my window, the faces of my children, the glasses on the table.  I take pictures of everything, and as I’ve noted it is often the most random images which, ultimately, carry the most salient memories.

Words are my lingua franca, there’s no question; words are my default way of capturing an experience and my instinctive way of trying to express an emotion.  But there are some things that are beyond the reach of words.  Often I grab at those things using my camera.  When I look back at pictures I’ve taken of the sky, or of Grace’s teddy bear packed in an overnight bag, or of Whit’s baby foot against my hand, I can see something that I haven’t yet been able to put into words.  This is when I feel most frustrated by my attempts at writing, when words seem clunky and imprecise, as though I use ten sentences to circle around a kernel of truth without really conveying it at all.

If I had to choose one way to record my life it would be words, certainly, but I am deeply grateful for the texture that pictures provide.  There are others who would choose another way, of that I’m sure.  People for whom the instinct pushes them to pictures, or perhaps to music; other ways to translate and share their human experience.  I think this Gilchrist quote gets at some of that:

I think colors made sense to him the way words to do to me. – Ellen Gilchrist, Winter

What’s your most basic language?  Words, pictures, music, or something else entirely?  What makes the most sense to you: color or words?

Please visit Momalom for a host of wonderful writing as part of 5 for 5.