everyday life

Random thoughts on a gray Sunday

It has been a gray and raw weekend, and I’ve been hibernating a little bit.  The high drama of last week’s Lice In the Classroom development is abating.  I know.  It’s exciting around here.  It is indeed very glamorous to be me.  All I have today are a few random thoughts.

I recently bought this adorable journal, Just Between Us, to share with Grace.  We pass it back and forth, taking turns writing answers to the questions contained in the book.  I put it on her desk when I’m finished, and she puts it on my bedside table.  I already love the tradition and, maybe more importantly, she does too.  It’s a great way to communicate with a child of her age, and my thoughts are already turning to the years where keeping her talking to me will be my highest priority of all.

I enjoyed a quiet morning as Matt took the kids to the Science Museum.  I made Ina Garten’s peanut butter and jelly bars (delish) and edited another chapter of my manuscript.  This is cooking weather, as far as I’m concerned.  Tonight, butternut squash risotto with homemade chicken stock (an obsession of mine).  I’ve advertised it to Whit as “cheesy rice” – we’ll see if that sales pitch works.  I kind of doubt it.

The tree outside my office window is totally bare now.  Just a week ago it was ablaze in yellow leaves, the last gasp of nature as she flamed to her death.  I’m remembering, as I did almost exactly a year ago, other windows that have framed my experience.

This site, Damn you Auto Correct!, has made me guffaw more times than I can count this week.  Hilarious. Truly.  I highly recommend that you add it to your reader.

Christine’s blog post today got me thinking about the holidays.  Well, the shockingly early arrival of the Starbucks red cups and the sudden tidal wave of “gift guides” in the magazines I read helped too.

I’ve done most of my Christmas shopping already, with a hearty assist from Gift Lit.  Check it out!  You can buy 3, 6, or 12 month subscriptions to books for children of various ages and interests.  I may have just revealed what my godchildren and other precious children are receiving for Christmas, but I think it’s such a great idea I wanted to share it.

Also, if you are looking for personalized holiday gifts, look no further than Fontaine Maury – I’ve been a devout fan of the line for years, and at this point love looking at the drawing options and recognizing ones that I had commissioned for X or Y party or event.  The robot?  I adore.  The placemats, plates, water bottles, bookplates … all fantastic.

Finally, here is the drawing Grace made for me on Friday night when she, Whit and I met a friend of mine and her son for pizza.  What she wrote, totally unprompted, made me weep.

Thoughts like sparrows

Wednesday morning, early.  The sky was full of promise.  The clouds, the ever-lighter blue sky, all radiant as the sun bled over the horizon.  A sky of beginnings, of life, the kind of sky that, as I’ve said before, makes me believe in God.

Wednesday, mid-morning.  The ground a riot of yellow leaves, a blanket spread around the tree that they fell from.  A ground resplendent with endings, with the beauty of life flaming out, of a year drawing to a close.

Up and down, beginning and end, sky and ground.  These polarities exist in every single hour of every day for me.

This is not my favorite time of the year.  Darkness encroaches.  We are a day away from the turning back of the clocks, which for me marks the beginning of the cold stretch of the year when there is far more dark than light.  I’m filled with dread about the darkness, and I’m also walking with memories of the difficult weeks and months after Grace’s birth heavy on my shoulders.  As much as her birthday reminds me of the as-yet darkest season of my life, it also reminds me of the swift flight of the years.  I think, on balance, the latter is worse for me than the former.

I try to hang onto the inspiration and peace that so fill the morning sky, but it’s hard, when the days shift so quickly towards dusk and the sidewalks are muddy with wet, decaying leaves.  The black branches of bare trees form their nets against the gray sky, and there is poetry in their barrenness, but so, so many endings. 

I do have calm and peaceful thoughts, but they scatter like a flock of sparrows taking flight from those dark branches into the faded gray air.  In their wake, a faint current of air disturbed by the beating of their wings, a sense of sadness, of rawness.  Another season – fall, this year, my daughter’s eight year on earth, my eighth year as a mother – draws to a close. 

I’m moved enough by the morning sky, though, that it’s not all bleak.  There are strands of incandescent joy and beauty woven through this damp, dark time.  All over again, I am reminded of the inextricability of endings and beginnings, of death and life, and of the beauty that can exist in each.  Today it is Jack Kornfield’s words that are ringing in my head, over and over:

“To live is to die to how we wanted it to be.“

Good Night Moon, Spanish moss frost, and heart break

Last night Whit picked a book for me to read to him before bed, as he does every night.  Uncharacteristically, he brought me Goodnight Moon.  “A good night book,” he said, plopping into my lap.  He is tall and angular now, in a way that only Gracie used to be.  He curled up against me and I read Goodnight Moon to him, saying the words by heart.  He was quiet, unusually still, and when I was finished he whispered to me, “Can you read it again?”

Of course I did.  Rocking in the yellow chair that held me as I nursed two babies.  In the nursery that held Grace, exactly eight years ago.  The nights are long, as they were then, the the light feels limited, though full of feeling, emotion and elegy, when it is here.  I read Goodnight Moon again, voice cracking at parts, and I could tell Whit was exhausted because he lay limply against my chest, not looking up to wonder at my tearful voice.

I wondered if this was the last time I’d rock a child reading Goodnight Moon. I thought about how often we do something for the last time without knowing it; the importance of a moment, its heavy significance, is so often clear only in retrospect. I wonder if part of this is self-protection: if I knew every time something was a last, I don’t think I could bear it.  As it is, the possibility of that, the unavoidable truth of loss, hangs around every moment of my life, Spanish moss twining around the branches of my consciousness, falling in elegant loops that sometimes occlude the sun.  That is hard enough.

This morning the fields were covered in silver frost (the color of Spanish moss, in fact, which is what made me think of it).  It was really quite spectacular, and take-your-breath-away cold too.  Grace and Whit wanted to run across the field at school (see photo), marveling at their own footprints in the rime.  Leaving their marks.  I stood and watched them, wistful.  As we do every morning, Whit and I walked Grace to the 2nd grade playground.  We say goodbye to her always at the same point, at a remove far enough from her friends that Grace feels comfortable throwing herself into a real hug in my arms.

After watching her run towards her friends, her brand-new birthday backpack bright on her parka-ed back, Whit and I turned to walk back to his building.  He reached up and held my hand, his nubby woolen mitten curling around my fingers.

“Whit?” I said to him, leaning down.

“What?”

“I like that you still like to hold my hand.”

“I like it too,” he said, squeezing my hand.  “It makes me feel like my heart will never break.”

Oh, my sweet boy.  If only.

Pictures from a birthday and ordinary life

A few images from Grace’s birthday and life around here …
Birthday morning: Grace’s favorite breakfast, cinnamon rolls
After an all-day field trip at Plymouth Plantation (which I chaperoned) we had birthday cupcakes at school.  I drove to the field trip with two other mothers from Grace’s class, and I think I may have scared them off permanently when I mentioned that I sometimes walk and sit in the local cemetery and then also referred to my dislike of music, strong tastes, smells, etc.  I think it is possible they think I’m a tiny bit weird.
After school Grace and I took our second-annual birthday pilgrimage to Barnes & Noble.  She had a couple of gift cards (fabulous birthday gifts!) and I’m eager to help her develop the passion I feel for bookstores, so off we went.  She now thinks of this as what we do to celebrate her birthday, and as far as I’m concerned that’s great.
I bought these lilies over the weekend because they were from a local farm.  I’ve never really had lilies before, and their flashy beauty struck me as they unfolded just in time for the birthday.  One small thing I’m proud of: from Memorial Day until late September I didn’t buy fruits or vegetables from anywhere other than local farmer’s markets.  It is kind of killing me to go back to Whole Foods, so I’m trying to stretch the local focus as long as I can.  Hence the new flowers.
After dinner of take-out sushi (Grace’s choice, but cucumber rolls are as far as she will go) we had her now-traditional birthday cake, which is half chocolate and half vanilla (both cake and frosting).  Yes, I’ve been baking up a storm.  Yes, I’m ready for my kitchen not to be awash in leftover sugar, sugar, sugar, but ooops, now it’s Halloween.

And also, a couple of photographs of our resident comedian, Whit.
Even Captain Rex gets tired out after a long day of lightsaber fighting.
Real men aren’t afraid to waltz with their buddies (note that Whit’s friend, the same age as him, is a full head taller … oh my poor wee little guy).
It’s good to fly before bed.