everyday life

Look at the light of this hour.

I try to protect Wednesday afternoons to spend with Grace and Whit.  This past week Wednesday was sunny and warm: classic Indian summer.  I walked to school to pick them up and we walked home, stopping at the playground on the way.  After a stop at home to finish Grace’s homework, we went to one of our favorite places, the tower at the back of a cemetery in our town.  We like to climb it in all seasons, survey the world that we live in spread out all around us, admire the changing foliage and quality of the light, feel the wind on our faces.  The kids also like to race up the stairs, counting them as they go. The last time we went up there was in May, on a stormy day that became a tornado-warning evening.

As we climbed the stairs to the base of the tower, Grace stopped suddenly.  I was ahead of her, following Whit.

“Mummy!  Look!”  She pointed at something in between two of the stone steps.

“What?”  I admit I was a little impatient.  Whit was running ahead of us.

“Look.  Just look.”  I climbed down a few stairs and saw what she was pointing to.  A heart.  My little soul mate: she sees and feels things in the very ether just like I do.

As he so often does, Wordworth ran through my head:

With with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

At the top of the tower we admired the deep green of the leaves on the trees all around.  Grace and Whit found the playing fields of their school’s upper school, and watched tiny figures running up and down.  The breeze was cool but the sun was still warm.  The green was spotted in a few places with autumn’s red and orange, and Grace asked if we could come back up someday soon when all the leaves had turned.  Of course.  Of course.

After we descended the tower we visited the fairy stream.  That my children remain enchanted by the small, still place makes me happier than I can describe.  As we left it, Grace cartwheeled ahead and Whit slipped his hand into mine.  “Do you think there are really fairies, Mummy?”

“Yes,” I said firmly.  “Yes, I do.  Do you?”

“Yes, yes.  I was just wondering where they went when we arrived.  Do you think they hid under the rocks or flew away?”

Pondering this, we walked around a bit in amiable silence.  I told Grace and Whit about my very favorite headstone, though I couldn’t actually find it.  “It’s very simple,” I said.  “I just love the words.  It says: look at the light of this hour.”

The kids walked on, quiet, for a few steps.  Grace then turned to look at me.  “You mean, well, that means, to really pay attention, right?”  I nodded at her.  “So, like the way you take pictures of the sky all the time?”  I smiled and nodded again.  She turned back to her walking, thinking.  A moment later, “I was doing that when I noticed the heart, right, Mummy?”

I hugged her and said, “Yes, Grace.  Yes, you were.”

Look at the light of this hour. It is golden, and it contains the life of things.

Some September moments

Over Labor Day Matt and I attended the wedding of one of my college roommates.  Oh, my, but it was fun.  The bridesmaids surprised the bride with a flash mob dance to Dynamite.  I’ve never seen her speechless before, but she was.  I love the blur of the photo above, which captures the palpable love and sheer joy of those minutes.

And then it was back to school, and mornings were all about drop-off again.  Whit never fails to make me laugh.  Every single day, he does.  Thank God.

One morning the moon hung in the sky even when the sun had come out.  I stopped to admire, and photograph, the gorgeous, saturated blue (I think that’s my favorite color) punctuated with a hazy moon.  Breathing a benediction.  Saying a prayer for the sky.  Thank you.

On September 9th I took Whit for a special outing after school.  We went to a farm about half an hour away for a hayride and bonfire.  It was an astonishingly gorgeous afternoon and we had so much fun: admiring nascent pumpkins, making smores, learning about a barn owl, and hiking to the top of a hill at whose summit was this perfect boulder.

The ensemble Grace put together for lunch the two of us one Sunday.  She’s not afraid to mix patterns, this one.  That’s very right now, isn’t it?

One Wednesday afternoon the kids and I were walking home from school when I noticed this leaf on the ground.  “Oh, look!” I crouched down.  “A heart!”  I took out my phone to take a picture and Grace exclaimed “Wait!  The heart is here!”  She had noticed the piece of cement (below) just a few inches away, and thought that was what I planned to photograph.  I showed her the leaf, she showed me the heart.  I took pictures of them both.  Messages from the universe.  Love is all around.

What the writing life looks like for me

Now, time for more answers … another group of questions emerged, around the logistics and reality of blogging and writing.  Do I ever feel like I’m running out of ideas?  Am I a quick writer or do I linger over words?  When do I write?  Do I write lots of posts at once?  How do I find the space/time to be so connected to my thoughts and emotions?

So … Yes, yes, and yes, I often feel like I’m running out of ideas.  In those times I will write about what I see out my window, or I’ll share photographs, or an old post that I love, or a quotation or poem.  Often I find that just when I think I’ve got nothing to say I’ll be inspired or triggered by another blog post, or by something I read offline, or by something my kids or friends say or do.  Sometimes life just comes to the rescue.

I am a quick and careless writer.  This question actually made me chuckle, because almost 100% of my posts contain typos or grammatical errors and I often catch them midway through the day with horror.  I do everything quickly, and sometimes a bit haphazardly. I wish I was more methodical and cautious, to be honest.

Mostly, I write in the evenings.  It is pretty hard to get me out of my house during the week; my strong preference is to stay home, read, write, and go to bed early. I know! I’m so much fun it’s hard to stand it sometimes.  But my kids go to bed early so I often write for an hour or two after that.  Those are calm, quiet hours that I really enjoy.  At other times I can squeeze in a blog post or a page of offline writing during the day, between meetings or sometimes when I get up early.  I guess the answer to “when do you write” is both simply and totally unhelpful: when I can.  And yes, I often write several posts on the weekend and queue them up for the next week.

There’s no question these are busy years, that most days are so full of commitments and obligations and experiences that often I go to bed feeling a weird combination of overwhelmed and drained.  I wrote a piece for Talking Writing this summer about how the reality of life with small kids permeates the experience of writing for me right now, for better or for worse.  I don’t have advice, necessarily, for people wondering how to balance writing with a demanding life and career.  I guess my only advice is : don’t let that stop you.  Sit down.  Even if it’s for ten minutes.  Just put some words down.  They will probably take you somewhere you never imagined, and following that trail is hugely illuminating.

The question about space and time to be connected to my emotions and feelings flummoxed me a little.  I don’t feel like I have a choice about that.  My emotions are so insistent, I can’t imagine not dealing with them.  I’m a lousy compartmentalizer and I can’t stuff things down and ignore them.  So I just deal with things as they arise.  This is not an ideal way to be, truthfully, because the spiritual weather changes I go through have a real impact on those around me, most of all Grace and Whit.

A couple of you were interested in the book I’m writing, on whether blogging creates momentum for it or not, and generally about its topic and status.

There’s no question in my mind that I wouldn’t have written a book if I hadn’t started blogging.  So yes, absolutely yes, writing here fuels my other writing.  For sure.  It also interferes, of course, because it’s another place to spill my words that isn’t my manuscript.  But for me, that’s worth it: I am certain my “other” writing benefits enormously from the discipline of writing here daily as well as from my now-ingrained habit of recording the smallest nuances of my daily life.

It is hard for me to even put out in public that I’m writing a book.  It really is.  Pathetic, but true.  But I can hear Lianne in my ear urging me to put my dearest dream out there into the universe so, gulp, here it is.  I have a very rough draft of a memoir about the way my unexpected pregnancy with Grace and the bleak postpartum depression that followed her birth have indelibly altered the way I approach the world.  I don’t know that the book in this form will ever reach the world, but I think it’s an important and universal topic and I’m working on figuring out how to tell it meaningfully.  I also have about half of a novel written about friendship and first love, and while I had put it aside for over a year, lately I’m waking up at night with those characters in my head.  I think I’m supposed to turn back to it, so I plan to do that very soon.

Trust the tides

On September 1st I took Grace and Whit on a last summer adventure.  We drove about an hour north to the beach.  The day was magical.  It started out with Grace noticing a rainbow in the cloudy sky – not the standard arc but literally a patch of rainbow among the clouds.  I thought of the Tennessee Williams line I love about a complete overcast, then a blaze of light.  The rainbow is always there, even in a sky mottled with clouds.  You just have to look.

We got to the beach early and it was low tide and beautifully deserted.  Throughout the morning the tide came in, creating and then erasing a series of sand bars as it did so.  We spent the day dancing with the inexorability of the tides.  We stood on sandbars until the water lapped at our feet, wondering at how something that can be so seemingly solid – the sand under us – can suddenly disappear into the ocean.  Whit kept shouting about how the sandbar had been “washed out to sea” and I explained that no, the next time the tide went out it would reappear again.  He looked at me when I said this, baffled, but then he smiled, visibly reassured.


Grace and Whit played in the shallow water as the waves came in, noticed how you could feel the water pulling away at sand under your feet as it receeded.  They jumped in the waves, holding hands.  I watched, fighting tears.

Then they built a castle right at the water’s edge and worked at defending it against the incoming tide.  Grace scooped out a moat in front of the castle and Whit piled new sand on top of it.  They giggled as the waves washed over their castle, slowly wearing it down to flat sand.  No matter how hard they worked, of course, the tide won in the end.  But of course we know, with utter certainty, that the tide will turn and go out again next.  May we trust the tides.

Summer 2011

As I thought back over the summer of 2011, I revisited my reflections on the summer of 2010 and on the summer of 2009.  As usual, I was struck by the simultaneous sense that those months were decades ago and just yesterday.  This was a rich and happy summer, though marbled with the melancholy that I now know is an inextricable part of my life.

The beginning of summer, with its trip to Princeton reunions and half marathon, feels like a distant memory.  June rained and rained and rained, and then the sun finally came out for our week in Marion with Hilary and her girls.  Matt’s parents sold the house he grew up in, and officially are no longer Vermont residents.  This was bittersweet for all.

The fourth of July held its usual fireworks and small-town parade, with the extra bonus of getting to spend it with our cousins.

My mother injured herself and spent a lot of July and August recuperating, which was unexpected.  Her indomitable spirit prevailed, though, and she impressed every single person she encountered with her positive attitude.  I acquainted myself in a new way with the middle place, never more than one night when my daughter cried to me that I wasn’t spending enough time with her because I was with my own mother too much.  I anticipate this getting more tender, and more frayed, as I move forward, not less.

July included a wonderful visit to dear friends on Martha’s Vineyard, our annual overnight hike in the White Mountains, a rainbow cake, and swimming, sunsets, and star-gazing.

Grace went to my beloved former summer camp for 10 days, which began in tears (because she didn’t want me to go) and also ended in them (because she didn’t want to leave camp).

Whit went to Nature Camp and adored it.  It was without a doubt his favorite camp of the summer.  The kids wore name tags made out of rounds of wood and spent their days “ponding” and “bugging” (the latter sounds particularly charming to me).  He couldn’t get enough.  Unfortunately this camp was an hour away in each direction, so for each of the three days he went I spent four hours in the car.

Grace is an outstanding swimmer- we’re talking laps of butterfly, flip turns, etc.  She’s much better than I am.  I have no idea where this came from.  She refuses, however, to think about joining a swim team.  I suspect that my lack of interest in competition of the sporting kind has lived through another generation, for better or for worse.  Probably worse.

I read lots of stuff, but the books that moved me the most were Falling Apart in One Piece and Just Kids.  I also went through (and am still in) an enormous Stanley Kunitz phase.  Wow.  He says, “I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world” and I nod and cry at the same time.

I participated in Susannah Conway’s August Break, sharing photographs instead of words.  It was a lovely change of pace.

We went back to Legoland and it was every bit as wonderful as last year.  Different, of course, but equally special, joyful, and memorable.

One of my college roommates celebrated her wedding over Labor Day.  We did a bridesmaid flash mob dance (a youtube training video before the weekend, a rehearsal over the weekend, etc) and shocked and delighted the bride, who is an avid and excellent dancer.  It was so much fun!  The weekend was an extraordinary celebration with women who’ve meant the world to me for almost 20 years.  It was also an important reminder for me of where I came from and of who I am.

I think I finally started flossing.  For real!  I know.  How tragic that this merits inclusion here.  But it does.  I also experimented with a week-long cleanse (without dairy, sugar, gluten, refined anything, meat, soy, caffeine, alcohol) which surprised me, frankly, by being hugely informational and profoundly empowering.  I’m not going to live without some of those things, but I suspect I’d feel a lot better if I cut back on others of them.

I took Grace and Whit for a final summer adventure to the beach north of Boston last week, and we had an entirely magical day together.  It was intensely bittersweet, but I’m so glad we did it.

Another season turned to its end.  On Monday night, the night before the first day of school, Whit cried at bedtime.  He told me he doesn’t want to get older, doesn’t want to stop being 6, doesn’t want to go into 1st grade.  How to respond to this, so vivid a reminder of my own rawest and deepest wound?  I don’t know.  I just hugged him, kissed his forehead, told him I knew and I loved him, that that I believed it would keep getting better.  Then he pulled on his favorite red sweatband and went to bed.