Been this kind of couple of days – bright sun, floating clouds, vague gloominess. Can’t quite shake my offness, but am not sure where it’s from. The undertow has felt strong, lately, and I’m relating to that sense of being an open wound walking around that Michelle Williams described.

Photo taken this morning in Marion. I was driving home from an emergency Diet Coke trip to Cumberland Farms (I am a true addict) and pulled over to photograph the empty harbor. The sun was sparkling on the water and the day was crisp and clear and beautiful. I simply adore this harbor. On the subject of the ocean, I read a line today in the NYT magazine that really sounded familiar to me. It was a review of Marion Cotillard’s (I am counter-cultural in that I LOVED her Gaultier Oscar dress – someone should be rewarded for taking a risk!) performance of Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose. The reviewer described the performance as having “a deep undertow of sadness” and this is a good way, I think, of describing my own psyche, much of the time. Sea metaphors have always spoken to me, and I know the sense of something pulling me, towards melancholy.

Of course the Elle magazine profile of Michelle Williams is all heavy-duty with Heath Ledger references and inferences now, but if you get past that you get a fascinating, beautifully-written profile of a woman who sounds awfully interesting to me, and frankly familiar in many ways (the beauty, the celebrity, not so much). A few lines that resonate:

Her smiles come easily but are complicated, never carefree. “I’m always aware of the whole,” Williams says. “I have that feeling inside, when something really tickles or delights me – it’s not singular. I recognize all the awful things in the world, and in spite of them, I can still laugh.” This hyperawareness has come at a price. “For so long, I felt like a walking open wound everywhere I went,” she says. “There’s this Joan Didion quote about being afflicted form an early age with a presentiment of loss. Did I come into the world like that?” (see Didion quote below)

Like extrasensory perception, you either have it or you don’t. It’s a poignant, painful, and appealing quality that cannot be acted.

“The distraction of work is utterly invaluable. When I have too much free time, that’s when things start to get a little messy.” Tears pool in her eyes. She smiles one of those smiles.

“I was in and out of the bathtub my entire labor – 24 hours. I don’t remember the pain, or the sensation. But I do remember quietly talking to myself and saying, ‘Okay, you don’t have to tell anybody what you’re thinking right now. You don’t have to tell Heath, you don’t have to tell the nurse, you don’t have to tell the doctor: you are never, ever doing this again. It can be a secret just for us.” She laughs. “I was trying to tell myself, ‘Remember what I’m saying now: this pain is too great to bear. You won’t do this again.’ And here I am today and the next one I’ll do at home! You totally forget. It’s nature’s trick.”

Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”

“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. “

I love this passage from an article about raising boys in Wondertime by Jacquelyn Mitchard (I also love Wondertime, and recommend it heartily):

My friends and I came up with an essential test regarding the difference between boys and girls: it’s called the Wet Paint Paradigm. Girls, it seems, can learn from their own experiences and even, occasionally, from others’. However, if a boy sees a sign that says Wet Paint, he’ll touch the wall to determine it’s not a joke, and then his friend – standing right behind him – will have to perform the same test with his own finger. Boys are not dumber than girls. They simply have a rugged and individualistic sense of discovery and wonder, untrammeled by prior evidence.

Grace appears to be having the time of her life in Florida. See the flying noodle above. The more I look at this picture the more I see a little witch flying on her broomstick, but I’m trying not to focus on that image.
While Grace plays hard, I had one of those empty days that suddenly gets filled by life details. I had NOTHING on the calendar other than lunch with Natalie. That is just the more fabulous thing in my book: an empty day. I lingered at nursery school dropping off my little man, then came home to a quiet, empty house. I filled two trash bags of stuff in Grace’s room and threw them out. I also swapped out some fall and spring clothes in my own closet, and put some old children’s toys on the sidewalk (my easier-to-execute version of freecycle.org). All gone by lunch! Then I went to Cambridgeside to return a couple of things and to do a couple of quick errands. Lunch was delightful, then afternoon was gobbled up by getting one car cleaned, the other inspected, by framing two pieces of Grace’s art for grandparents, by paying bills and writing thank you notes, by printing photos and putting them into my photo album, and by cleaning out Grace’s closet and baking a batch of cookies. Phew. Now wrapping presents for upcoming childrens’ birthday parties and scheduling the next few weeks of work. An empty day is such a gift. As mundane as this minutiae is, I get a tremendous charge out of completing things that have hovered over my head for weeks.