everyday life

Looking out the window

One day last week I was puttering in the kitchen and it occurred to me I hadn’t seen Whit in a while.  “Whit?” I hollered up the staircase.  Our house is very up-and-down and we have a terrible habit, all of us, of shouting up and down the stairs.

“Yes?” I heard him answer from upstairs.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m just looking out the window.”

Oh.  I stood in the kitchen, a potholder in my hand, stunned, still, thinking about that.

Later that afternoon I was folding laundry on our bed while Whit sat in the upholstered chair in our bay window talking to me.  The late-afternoon sun streamed in, viscous, gold, like maple syrup.  I shook out pajama bottoms and folded them, smoothed little boy underpants printed with robots and sailboats with my hand, piling them neatly.

“Mummy?” Whit said from his perch, and I turned to see that he was gazing out the window.

“Yes?”

“Admire the light of this hour.”

I gaped and looked at him, at the back of his head which glowed, burnished blond, in the late-afternoon autumn light.  I had just recently reminded my children about looking at the light of every hour, about the power of really noticing things.  Still, I hadn’t realized how fully he had internalized this.  I dwell so often on the myriad ways Grace is, often uncomfortably, like me but for some reason reminders that Whit too has a seam of sensitivity and awareness running through him tend to take me aback.  I find it particularly moving that my Lego-worshiping, lightsaber-wielding six year old son can also spend long minutes looking out the window.  I’m not sure why this surprises me: I guess that Whit, like his mother and many people I love, contains multitudes.

Little Things

Listening to the new Indigo Girls album.

Reading After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, by Jack Kornfield, and a manuscript by someone in my writing class.  Both, wonderful.

Noticing how entirely Grace and Whit have internalized our Notice Things Walks.  They notice things everywhere now, with new patience and quiet alacrity.  The blue jay out the kitchen window, the few red roses around the corner that survived the frost, a new smell (“it’s crispy!” exclaimed Whit) in the air in the morning.

Buying Christmas presents for my godchildren and nieces and nephews.  We have very simple, gift-light Christmases in my family, but I like to put a lot of thought into the gifts we give to the very special children in our lives.

Struggling to trust that the pain in my body will ebb.  In the very struggle, I fear, are the seeds of my failure.  Increasingly I suspect that trying hard is not only not the way to trust, but something that may actually keep it at bay.

Playing games before bed with the children instead of their watching TV.  Boggle, Guess Who, Connect Four, Uno.

Photographing morning sunlight on ever barer tree branches, trying to capture its golden, animate quality, and failing every time.  This light, like rain falling, seems to be one of those essential metaphors of nature that resists capture in literal ways.  Only the poet can really describe it.

Eating a lot of sweet potatoes, spinach, miso soup, kale chips, peanut butter, and homemade applesauce.

Waking up early and running in the night-dark morning, watching the sky crack open and begin to bleed eggshell colored light just as I return home.

Wearing a new pair of brown pajamas from eberjey that are so soft I never want to take them off.

Leaning towards home, towards quiet, towards softness, towards my children and a handful of the dearest and gentlest people I know.  And away from everything and everyone else.

Asking the universe, or my personal image of God, to reassure me that everything is going to be okay.

What little things are you doing these days?

Inspired by Ali Edwards’ lovely post

These are the years they will remember

Most mornings, I walk Grace and Whit into their respective school buildings.  Occasionally, if I have to make it to an early meeting or something, I do “live drop off” instead, letting them hop out of the car while I idle at the curb.  For some reason this always brings tears to my eyes.  There’s something about their backpacks bobbing away from me, their independence, their resolve, their enthusiasm for school – all of it mixes up into a cocktail that brings tears to my eyes as surely as onions on the chopping board or Circle Game on the radio.

The other morning was no different.  I drove away, blinking back my tears, and suddenly I thought: these are the years they will remember as their childhood.  We had driven to school all belting out Edge of Glory together, and then we had sat in the car near school singing along until the song ended.  I looked in the rear view mirror to catch them grinning at each other, overwhelmed again with the realization that tiny things can bring sheer joy for them.

I remember when Grace turned four thinking: okay, this really matters now.  That is because my own memories of childhood begin when I am about four.  I actually don’t have that many memories of my childhood, and those I do exist in a slippery kind of way: am I remembering the actual event, or the picture I’ve seen so many times of the event?  I wonder if part of why I write things down so insistently now is to address this very fact, this inability to remember when I so desperately wish I could.

My flashes of memory, as limited as they are, begin in the second apartment we lived in in Paris.  I was four-ish.  So, my assumption was that Grace and Whit would start remembering things from the same general time period.  Certainly, they will remember these days.  The power of the most mundane moments and experiences – something I’ve long believed fiercely in – was probably particularly on my mind after reading The Long Goodbye last week.  For sure, O’Rourke’s memoir had me thinking particularly of the memories of our mothers that endure.

And so I drove into Boston, my eyes still blurry with tears, watching the outrageously beautiful trees that line the Charles, the river that throbs through the heart of my home, wondering what it is that Grace and Whit will remember of these days.  We are “deep in the happy hours,” as Glenda Burgess put it in her stunning memoir The Geography of Love, and one thing I’m certain of is that it will be the small moments that most sturdily abide.  Will they remember the notice things walks, the trips to the tower at Mount Auburn, trapeze school, and chocolate cake for breakfast?  Will they remember the hundreds of nights that I read to them, tucked them in, administered the sweet dreams head rub, did the ghostie dance, turned on their familiar lullabies?  Will they remember Christmas, and Easter, and Thanksgiving, and their birthdays?

I have no idea what specific events and experiences will be the ones that rise up for my children, out of the dust of the years, some surprising, some familiar.  I could easily drive myself insane trying to make sure every single day is stuffed with memories.  But I choose not to do that, because, as I’ve written before, the memories that I come back to, rubbing them over in my mind like a hand worrying a smooth stone in my pocket, are almost all from days and moments that were utterly unremarkable, unmemorable, as I lived them.  I assume this will also be true for Grace and Whit.  So I suppose all I can do is try to be here, paying attention, to the vast expanse of ordinary days we swim in.  And to remember, every single day, what an immense privilege each one is.

Lately

Last week I mentioned how tired I am lately, how quiet and reserved I’m feeling.  That is manifesting in a lot of ways, and one of them is a real lack of inspiration to write.  But I am determined to honor my commitment, here and elsewhere.  So, a few things that I’m thinking about and doing these days.

  • I am trying to run a few days a week, shorter distances and slower than before, because of the aforementioned exhaustion.  Still, for my mental health, I need to get out there.  I hate treadmills and run outside all year long, including in the rain or snow.  Mostly, I run at 530 in the morning because that is the only time I can reliably go.  In these weeks, before the clocks turn back, it is pitch black at that hour.  I ran last week in the pouring rain, in the dark, and felt like the only person in the world.  It was strangely soothing.  I need to be extra careful not to trip though, something that’s a hazard for me even in full sunshine.
  • I am reading The Long Goodbye and finding it incredibly beautiful, though also deeply sad.  Next up is The Bread of Angels, the author of which my sister has met in Jerusalem.  I figure it will resonate on many levels, and will start getting me in the mindset for our trip to Israel in December.
  • I am writing fiction.  Well, I’m trying.  My friend Kathryn has been urging me on in this direction for a while.  We’ll see what happens.  One observation so far: I am sure there is some meaning, some subconscious message, in the tense we instinctively choose.  My automatic voice is in the present tense.  I often have to go back and correct, like a first grader in grammar class, basic verb tenses, because my voice is always tugging towards the present.  I wonder what this means.
  • Hilary is homesick.  A little.  And so are her girls.  And she told them the perfect truth: “you know, you can feel two things at the same time.”  Yes, yes, you can.
  • I am listening to Something Beautiful, by Alexi Murdoch, on repeat.  Enormous thanks to the vivid, gorgeous, and wise Jen Lemen for pointing me to it.

May the grace of God be with you always, in your heart
May you know the truth inside you from the start
May you find the strength to know that you are part of something beautiful …

What are you listening to, reading, doing, thinking about, and feeling lately?