Asheville Je T'aime

We were sitting in the Asheville Brewing Company when the doubts began to set in. A man with ear plugs and an easy friendliness had just served us a cast iron skillet balanced with samples of foamy beer and Mr. V was talking about possibilities but I couldn't hear a word he had to say. I was trying not to cry.

I had the Rockies on my mind. My people were prairie and mountain raised, pioneers moving ever westward and it's not a thing you soon forget. Your ancestral landscape gets into your blood and like it or not, in some ways you will always be the place you came from. Brevard was beautiful but it was a shock to my sensibilities and sitting in a bright, artsy city, I remembered where I was made. Craving one place and longing for the other, I never know where I might land.

We'd crossed the French Broad river, which I will never say without seeing a smoky-eyed woman pulling up her stockings, and made a right on a corner where The Thirsty Monk faced Jack In The Woods Public House. I might as well have been in Avalon or Paris. The Monk was a bright purple building, packed wall to wall on a string of similar tall facades, the streets loose brick that shifted beneath our feet and meandered around courtyards and bright alleyways, each one brimming with drinking, dining folk facing streetward, a la Parisienne. Plenty of bookstores, plenty of earthy chicks with scarves in their hair like me and legs that go a long time between shavings, also like me. (Sorry, my Californian sisters, but it's true). There were specialty stores for everything from pastries to wine to cured meats to dog biscuits, and this is exactly what I love about Edinburgh and Manhattan and all the great old cities. Asheville is known as the Paris of the south, and now I know why.

In Asheville it seems that the culture is the counter-culture, but no one's feeling smug about it like they are in Boulder. Perhaps because you get the sense that Asheville isn't a place where rich pseudo-hippies have settled because it's beautiful and has a Whole Foods, but a place where eclectic people, people normally on the fringe, have congregated and they ain't smug but so damn happy to have found each other in all this mess, and who woulda thunk but they've made a home.

Driving in to Asheville we'd spotted an old man waving a confederate flag from a bridge, but inside the city there was no such nonsense. The brewery was running over with young families. Mr. V was talking mortgages and I was craving babies, the surest sign of trouble I know. I shook myself back into the present and shifted towards sunny as we walked up Patton, past traveling musicians to Hayward and Battery Park Avenue, where I was reminded that there is history in the south, history involving names like Grant and Lee and Stonewall Jackson. After standing quietly taking in the view of the hills from the portico of St. Lawrence Basilica, my husband decided to take me out for a French dinner and we found Bouchon almost by accident. "This city should be a good place to get French," I said to Mr. V. "Asheville has a lot of French influence." Since this is my blog and we're into being honest here, I'll admit that this is one of those things I say more by instinct than by actual knowledge. But steering by instinct is what landed us here in the first place, so I went with it.

Bouchon was at the end of hill where we'd spotted a Japanese chef plucking herbs from his garden to use in whatever culinary mischief he was up to. We sat in the cobblestoned alley, filled with greenery and umbrellas and summer soiree lights. I ordered my first pate and my first Kir Royal and thought, if I can't have Paris yet, at least I have this. Mr. V ordered the canard a l'orange rubbed with cocoa nibs and I stuck to moules-frites. They tasted of the ocean and I sucked them down, happy as any sea star nestled in its proper bed.

We left Bouchon and were headed up the hill when the skies just broke right open, faster than a prairie thunderstorm. Look at that cute little cloud, I thought, and then suddenly the rain was too torrential to see in. We were standing just in front of a brewery, so having one more drink was the only thing to do. There was a deep covered patio, perfect for sipping and breathing in the scent of rain, the bright light on the art deco buildings just across the street, and smiling like we'd won the lottery. This is my favorite thing about traveling. You're just going along in your life and suddenly serendipity blesses you so certain you know there is good in all this limping, stuttering earth. I grinned wildy at Mr. V over a salty margarita and told him how I loved it when this happens. That's when it struck me that I've always said I want to live in a lively city and in the middle of nowhere, and that maybe in this part of North Carolina I could have both.

There are things I haven't told you: there is a Starbucks in Brevard, but it's inside a grocery store and while the local coffee spot makes a creamy, nutty latte, it has the ambiance of a Furr's in foreclosure. Mr. V says that when I saw his first paycheck from the brewery, I cried. I have no memory of this but I don't doubt it. What I know is that in the end, anywhere I go is going to become one more place I want to leave.

The next day it was time to head home. We traveled over four hours in the rain from Brevard back to Atlanta and when we got to the gate at 2:35, after running faster and farther than I have since college, our 2:40 departure had already left. We sat half the day in the Atlanta airport, so overstimulating I curled up on the floor with headphones in my ears and closed my eyes. I stayed that way until Mr. V brought me a frozen yogurt and it was time to board the plane and fly west, west over prarie, west toward home. We passed over a spectacular lightnight storm and watched great thunderheads light up rhythmically from the top side, clearer now than ever the way those clouds answer each other, a nebular call and response. Departure was at the tail-end of evening and a strip of electric blue sunset hung stubborn in the sky. We chased that last light of sun all the way home. We never did catch it.

Choose Your Own Adventure

image credit: here

There is a temptation to make it sound more dramatic than it was, but here is the truth: three years ago, Mr. V and I went to lunch at the Cherry Cricket. When our bellies were full of cheeseburgers and pale ale, we walked around Cherry Creek on a copper-bright autumn afternoon and I told Mr. V to quit his job and take another, thus reducing our income by half.

I know.

It was a good time in our lives, our girls yummy and adorable at 3 and 5, our neighborhood in Denver full of parks and libraries and Starbucks, our grocery budget roomy. But despite our urban splendor and abundance of farmers market vegetables, Mr. V was miserable. He was in a corporate management job that he hated, where all day he took calls from people who were so upset no one else had been able to calm them down, and look, even if Mr. V managed that task, they never told him thank you. Feeling the strain his unhappiness placed on our family, I encouraged him to follow his dreams by. . . taking a class on brewing. Naturally! He'd been home brewing with a friend for years, and this level of spousal support was easy for me to manage. He took the course at night, while I was at my beloved bookstore job or sleeping. I patted myself on the back for being such a good wife and Mr. V learned ridiculous things about mash tuns and worts and all kinds of chemistry terms that I can't even begin to guess at.

I mean, honestly. Well done, me.

But hold your applause. To my stupid surprise, after the course Mr. V got an actual job offer at a brewery in Longmont that made one of our favorite beers: Dale's Pale Ale.

I have always been dreamy. I'd spent a lot of time watching Oprah and reading Martha Beck and telling my husband and myself that it was paramount we follow our dreams. This was easy to say at the time, as I had no idea what it actually meant. I thought of the whole process as rather like a wishing well: fast results, immediate worldly success. Mr. V supported my dreams by spending almost every Saturday and Sunday morning with the girls so I could go out and write for hours. Now Mr. V had an opportunity not to be a brewer, but to work on the canning and packaging line at a brewery he really loved. It was time for me to make good on all that talk.

He'd be earning a single digit amount an hour.

To make it work, we'd have to move out of the neighborhood I loved and move in with his mother and teenage sister and brother.

Thinking about it now, I still can't believe it, but we did it. On a chilly Halloween, we packed up our house, said goodbye to life as we knew it, and fell asleep that night, after trick-or-treating, in a bedroom that shared a wall with the room my mother-in-law had decided to share with my daughters.

If you are thinking, Cozy!, know that I am thinking about all the once placid pioneers who used to go mad over cabin-bound winters and murder each other, which should give you some idea as to how our winter went.

It was one of the most difficult times Mr. V and I had ever faced. Mr. V took the car to work and I spent long days alone with the girls in a home that wasn't my own, never certain when his mom would be in and out from her job or the teenagers would show up with crowds of loud friends and decide to turn up the amp on the electric guitar. There were seven of us in a four bedroom house and it was often untidy and crowded and maddening.

During the dire cold nights of that winter, the house, I kid you not, heated by a wood-burning stove to save money on bills, our faith began to waver. We considered moves to Arizona, Oregon, Montana, New Mexico. I gave up on the dream over and over again, called uncle, told the universe I'd had too much. "We followed the dream," I clearly remember saying to Mr. V one terrible night. "Now let's follow the money."

When we couldn't bear it another minute, a shot in the dark paid off and suddenly Mr. V expected a job offer from the great Brew Dog. I started researching immigration to the UK and we were ready to move to the northern-most tip of remote Scotland. I wanted this very badly. I imagined myself in wellies, walking a misty coastal landscape to a tiny general store to buy haggis and tea.

Just before Mr. V was set to leave for a two-week interview/informal training session, Oskar Blues offered him a promotion. We took it rather than moving to Scotland to earn just above minimum wage. We moved out of his mom's house and into a tiny house in Longmont that I was ashamed of. I didn't have anybody over for a year. In some ways, life was harder then than it had been at his mother's, because I expected things to be better by now. Limited intangible dreams to an arbitrary clock and got mad when they didn't arrive on time. Then one day, just in time for Christmas, Mr. V went to a company party expecting beer and little smokies and came back with a bonus and a raise.

Now I see that those things I thought I wanted--corporate securities, Mr. V in jackets and ties, a mortgage in Denver--never would have fit us well. Right now Mr. V works for a company I love, where employees skateboard around from the brewery to the "Anti-Corporate Office"; a company that lets me take the employee's free yoga classes, that gave away a car at Christmas to the company's longest standing employee. It was worth it, it was so worth it, all that time spent wandering in the dark to land here, in the sun.

Ships come in on their own damn time is all I know for sure.

My one regret is that we didn't get to move to any of the places we'd talked about moving to. I have an adventurous heart. Colorado is gorgeous, but I've lived here thirty-one years and I've always wanted to live somewhere else. It's a dream I'll never let go of. I want to see every last thing in this world.

A few weeks ago, we learned that Oskar Blues is expanding to Brevard, North Carolina.

Mr. V and I are flying out this weekend to have a look.

Rain Dance

Friday night in May, but it smells like June, like caramel corn and cotton candy and everything good in the world.

I still don't know what the sweet scent comes from but I die a little death every time I catch it.

My husband and I have mixed drinks and taken them out to the patio. The girls are in bed, or supposed to be. I catch their silhouettes, their brambled hair, in sheets of black against a yellow light through my bedroom window. The evening is nearly over and a wind is gathering in the west. I pull my wrap tight around me, tuck it underneath my toes. I sip my drink that tastes of last summer, the sweet tequila that's been untouched since August.

He gets a phone call.

I hear tiny feet bounding up and down the hall. Inside, the children are making mischief, like survivors in a house without adults. Above me the great old tree is hushing in the wind. My husband's voice is a background murmur as I tip my head to the violet sky and watch the bats, watch the leaves, watch the wind.

Far in the southwest cracks one spectacular bolt of lighting.

Earlier that day I'd realized that the stories I tell myself about everything going right one day are as hurtful as the stories I tell myself about everything going wrong. This epiphany settles friendly in my chest, beneath the burn of tequila and the chill of the summer storm. Nothing goes my way is a thought I've learned to stop, but its companion lie is, when I achieve this, everything will be circus and peonies and now, I realize that isn't true.

I am happy now.

I will fall asleep, a little drunk, in clean sheets next to my husband and I will know, or maybe remember, that everything my happiness needs is contained right here and now.

Every last thing.

After the bolt I watch the same spot in the sky for five minutes, ten, but nothing comes. Then we see it, a flickering light in the north, its answering thunder. Through the screen I tell Ayla to sleep in my bed, where she can burrow and hear the storm and her father's voice.

My husband and I sit on the patio as the storm approaches and settles in above our heads. There are bone-clean fingers of white lightning in the west and echoing fairy lights in clouds to the north. The wind rushes and I close my eyes and with every part of me, feel it in my hair. I know it's a little dangerous but maybe that is why it feels so good, why I feel so alive, why these storms seem to enter into my body and tingle in my veins, in my marrow where lately I have come to picture combs of clean new honey.

It is a beautiful storm. The moment it becomes full dark, it begins to rain. I stand in the garage door for just another moment and close my eyes, breathe in the scent. The atmosphere is full, a charged presence like spirit or heart and it fills me up, and I am full.

Change is coming, like a quickening storm.

I am happiest in in-betweens and this is why I want to see the world.

It makes me feel more alive.

Where I'm Going: Part II

Yesterday my sister called me to say a swarm of bees had arrived in her lilac bush and two hours later, she had hived that swarm.

I spent a good portion of today defending my own hive like a toothless man on a front porch, a spray bottle of syrup in one hand and a broom in the other, slaying yellow jackets and ants while dark thunderclouds approached from the west, the wind thick with the sweet scent of early summer. I have made myself a bee vigilante, and it will drive me crazy if I let it. I could, theoretically, sit there for ten hours a day, defending the hive.

At some point, I have to trust the bees.

The post I wrote yesterday rattled around in my brain all afternoon and evening. I went in to it intending to do one thing, and by the end of it I think I'd done another. I was unsettled and bothered, (but not in a good way). The line between sharing a story in a helpful way, and sharing it in an indulgent way, is a thin one and I'm still learning to walk it. I'll mess up, sometimes. I hope you'll know my intentions are good.

I tried to banish my bothers from my brain as I sang Indy to sleep, leaving off the last word of every line of "Sweet Baby James", which we sing "Sweet Baby Indy", and allowing her to fill it in. In Indy's version, the cowgirl thinks about "horseys" and glasses of beer, and closes her eyes as the doggies "are tired". (Ayla's version involves a young zombie who likes to eat brains, and begs the listener "please just don't eat baby James"). When I was finished, she put her hands on my cheeks and smashed her lips to mine in a full, lusty kiss. Indy, I said, when she pulled away. You haven't done that in a few years. You used to do that all the time. I spent the next five minutes being kissed in such manner by Indy and then Ayla. I'll tell you here, but don't repeat it: Indy is the better kisser.

The bees are beginning to die off and being replaced by the second generation. All this work they do, not for themselves, but for future generations of bees to survive a winter and into a spring they won't live to see. If I wanted to, I could get morose about the bees. But I've decided not to. The bees do as they were born to, and so must I.

Two weeks ago I wrote in my journal: I must learn to approach writing like the bees--not go into it until absolutely necessary, then work without all this worry, or desperation, or wondering why. 

This is how I want to live my life. I want to put good energy into my children, and let that good energy come back to me. I want to make honey with the faith that someone in the future will need it. I want to let go what needs to go and embrace what needs to come. I want to sail my seasons bravely, knowing that in each moment, we are laying the groundwork for what's coming next.

So we might as well make it sweet.

Where I'm Going, Where I've Been

*Expecting Indy, Idaho, July 2006*

Here is the road block I run into over and over again:

I blog about my life because I want other people to know they're not alone. This involves the sharing of pain, but I don't want to dwell on pain, to nurture it. To feed that wolf.

This is my mission because twice in my life, my suffering has been deeply compounded by the belief that I was alone in it.

Weeks after getting married, I was struck with the worst depression of my life. I couldn't get out of bed. If I got out of bed, I couldn't get out of the shower. Mr. V went to work and instead of going to my last semester of college courses, I'd sit in the bathtub immobile, imagining myself spread out on my white bed spread, with red plumes of blood flowing from both of my wrists, staining the sheets. I don't know if I deeply intended to create this image, but I nurtured it in my heart.

I was 21. I was attending an evangelical church and angry there. Religion was a thorn in my saddle but I couldn't admit it yet, too scared of going to hell if I didn't go to church. Church contributed to my depression; everyone around me having transcendental experiences with a God they said was like a father (a punitive one), insisting Jesus could heal all wounds (like magic) and me, shriveling inside, my heart a stony pit. I wrote fragments in those days, (too disturbed for real narratives) pouring out the terrible images that filled my head. I felt myself rotting from the inside like a deer carcass in the moss. I imagined that my skin smelled of sour milk, that I was spoiled down to my very flesh.

I wanted to go on anti-depressants but we couldn't afford health insurance.

I've had people in my life determined to tell me that my pain has never been worse than their own. And now I only hold in my heart these words, from Amanda Palmer:

you can't measure human suffering with a yardstick.

those who try to do it end up vindictive, even when they're

trying to be helpful.

because the minute you start measuring suffering, you invalidate somebody's suffering.

. . . and that just never works. that's where the whole shit starts getting ugly.

anyone who says "my pain is bigger than your pain" is speaking from fear.

anyone who says "my feelings are more valid than your feelings" 

isn't speaking from empathy.

there's no pain that isn't 'real' because somebody has it worse off.

I sat in church and I prayed the only prayer I could: please help please help please help.

Eventually I felt better. Then I became pregnant by mistake. We were evicted from our apartment. The day we moved out, friends took us out to dinner and gave us two or three hundred dollars. It brought our bank account balance back to positive and remained pretty much all we had in the world. (Besides each other?)

We lived with his parents, we lived with my parents. I had a baby and brought her back to a house with a $800 rent we couldn't afford. Depression hit again. I didn't know it was common. I thought I was fundamentally broken. Marriage and motherhood were supposed to be two of the best experiences of my life, and both sent me into the darkest place I'd ever been. When Ayla was a baby I didn't imagine myself dead, but I was filled with such rage. I broke dishes, dashing them to the kitchen floor. I kicked a hole in the wall one day while my baby cried in her nursery, knowing only that I mustn't go to her. After four months of independence, we had to ask to be released from our lease again, and were back to living with parents, in an ugly room with sheets tacked over the windows, in a life I hated.

Through both these experiences I felt so terribly alone, and this is why I blog. I remember the overwhelming relief I felt, years later, watching an Oprah that said that huge percentages of women feel depressed after they get married. I wasn't fundamentally broken.

I was normal. I wasn't alone.

And eventually,  I got out.

I went to hell, and I came back.

It took years. It wasn't easy. It's not a one-time journey, a final destination. You don't arrive in paradise and stay forever. Sometimes things get difficult and I catch myself treading back toward the dark woods. I don't know why. Because it is a familiar way, a path I know, a path that seems to be ingrained on my heart. These ruts.

But my heart, like my brain, can form new connections, spark new life, learn new paths.

Sometimes it doesn't seem like I've allowed myself to choose the path. Sometimes life just smacks me there. I land hard in a scary place, all the wind knocked out of me, and I sit down and cry.

I have to remind myself to keep looking for the light.

This will be the journey of my life, learning to tread this meandering walk way that twines between the thick wood and the sunlit beach and back, learning to turn, again and again, away from depression and darkness and if I have anything to offer it is my truth. The story of my depression and the story of my spirituality are the same story.

I've been to hell, and I've been back.

I found my way back, and so can you.

Before We Turn To Stone

"A heart that is open to the world must be willing to be broken at any time." Stephen Cope

Last week I spent two days in the hospital with my grandmother as she was dying.

Not so much time, really, but when you are in a room with a dying person--their labored, halted breath, their far-away eyes--time passes differently.

My emotions were cycling.

From tears to happiness to one moment of red-faced, gasping laughter in the hallway of the oncology ward with my sister

tears streaming down our faces as we let out explosive, inappropriate laughter.

After the second night, I arrived home late and I was so exquisitely grateful. So grateful to fall bone-tired into my soft bed at the end of a long day, knowing I would rise from it in the morning.

So grateful that morning to step into a hot shower, for the gift of movement in my limbs, the gift of water on my skin, the feeling of my own fingers massaging bright minty body wash into my sunny, freckled arms. My strength, my egregious vitality, my freedom to do as I willed:

to walk to the window and gaze out at the lilacs

to brew a scalding coffee and sweeten it with cream

to sit on the patio, feel the sun on my face, smell the sweet and dusty florals in the air

all things the dying cannot do.

On Saturday morning I sat up in bed, not weary at the thought of a day alone with the girls but with such lightness in my chest, such apple happiness. I rose from bed smiling, the thought in my mind that I couldn't wait to walk down the hall and see them, sleepy in the sun. My beautiful, beautiful daughters.

We spent some time talking to the hospice nurses.

These women (they are almost exclusively women) who care for the dying in their final days say the most fascinating things.

One of them told us she believes a certain agreement must be made

that the spirit of the dying must soften, and open,

(this is how they bloom, the flowers)

and say yes

yes, now I will go on.

In those few days I felt softer

like fluttering petals in my beating heart

as if all my membranes had thinned and agreed to allow all the light and all the stunning beauty of this world to stream in

morning light through crimson glass

which means letting in all the love, and all the pain as well.

Sometimes I fight so terribly with my daughters.

Sometimes I get annoyed with people who believe differently than me.

Sometimes when another person is soft, I want to reach across and place my hand over their mouth

can I bear, to see this part of you

and ask them not to be so vulnerable

not to expose us both for bruising.

And I wonder if learning to love is like this:

teaching the heart to stay open to invasions and pain

asking it to say yes, again and again, to the spirits of others.

By doing this, do we finally learn

that no one can hurt us the way we feared they can?

I don't know if it's all right to say this but lately I think

that the dying of old ones is a gift.

By witnessing their journey

their agreement

to open in all the soft, fluttering places, and let go

they teach those of us who remain

that there is not one moment on this earth that isn't precious

I stirred rosemary and garlic into aromatics and I nearly wept.

Until we see the dying, can we know how to truly live?

I want to know how you learned to love.

I know it is too much to ask.

Full Bloom Days

Yesterday I sat at Starbucks so long the baristas offered me free sustenance. "We made a mistake, but you look like you could use this," said the young man singled out to approach me. He set a passion tea on my table and backed away slowly, like the wrong move might make me cry, off with his head. I wondered how I must look, pale skin, glazed wonder in my eyes. The laptop zombies, they drive me crazy. Mainly when when I can't find a place to sit because of them. But yesterday, I was one.

Maybe I will go back to school and be an English professor, I said to myself the other day. It was raining in L.A. but it was almost 80 here, making mockery of all my dreams. I was sitting in my backyard and reading a book about just that, about an English professor, about doctorates and discussions of love. That did it to me, that always does. I want bao and green tea ice cream, I'll say to Mr. V, and Mr. V knows I've been reading Lisa See.

So maybe I will do this instead, I said to the universe. She just smiled back. Go ahead and try, she said. I won't stop you.

But the truth we knew was this. I am not an English professor, or a magazine editor, or a 911 operator or any of the other occupations I entertain on warm spring days. I'm not a blogger either, something I realized when reading this post by you know who, my favorite blogger, who realizes she is not a writer of books, not now anyway. I am not a blogger, it is not my calling, it was a relief to recognize it.

Which does not mean I am going to quit blogging. But I had neglected my work, momentarily. Stopped editing, stopped writing, and so this week I've gone back to it, like I hope I always will. I am telling stories. I am struck by Ayla, who is seven. My mind recites the only times table it ever memorized: Seven, fourteen, twenty-one. I feel overwhelmed some days, driving from the grocery store, sitting at Starbucks and frightening the baristas, with happiness. There were times in my twenties when I was so unhappy, so restless, such a stranger in my life. 7, 14, 21, Ayla marches on and so do I, but I am so lucky, my sun-dappled life a thing of dreams, I am doing what I want, what I feel I am meant to do and some days I feel I'm getting younger. The days pass maybe not in straight lines but in circles, or moons, regressing, fulfilling, full bloom. My soul grows lighter.

The story moves on.

What We Don't Say

What I didn't say was that Monday, I woke up in a black mood.

There was no reason for the mood. I went to bed feeling fine and woke up with an absence of any feel-good hormones. I was unloading dishes in the kitchen, my entire body feeling heavy and my heart unwell, when Mr. V got home from the gym. "Why don't you go out," he said almost immediately. I nodded. My mood was so dark, I could barely speak.

This doesn't happen often, these days.

I wrote for awhile, came home, and took the girls to Chick-Fil-A. I felt marginally better, but by the time I'd returned from fast food and a very crowded grocery store, the mood had crept back in, unwelcome visitor in the tender places. Mr. V made dinner while I folded laundry in the bedroom with the door closed, the girls perfectly content to watch some early evening Totoro. It had been a good weekend. We'd all gone to see "The Secret World of Arrietty", the new one from Studio Ghibli, an outing we don't take very often. Then a fun party, followed by a good meal. A night's sleep.

Black mood.

A nervous voice in the back of my brain feared that here it was: a late arriving plummet into seasonal depression. I didn't listen to that fear. I knew from my previous experience that the only way was to wait it out. Not to nurture the darkness--not to feed the bad wolf--but not to deny or repress it either. Just to lean in. To let it be. To observe it like from a distance whenever possible. I made it through the day, quietly, avoiding unnecessary interaction. I managed to tell my husband that I wasn't mad at him, this mood wasn't his fault. I just am out of happy today, I said. I know, he replied. It's ok.

I sang Indy to sleep and put myself to bed. In the morning, it was gone.

****

Headed out the door to school drop off, I texted my husband. "Indy is in the worst mood of her entire life," I said. Indy is rarely grumpy, and the culprit is almost always lack of sleep. She resolves this by asking me to put her to bed, and I do. She wakes up refreshed, her good-natured, buoyant self. This morning, I'd told her to put on her shoes. She'd squared her shoulders at me and said "NNNNNNO." Oh Indy. Indy's fate is that she's stubborn so seldom, it becomes comical when she is. I handed her her pink jacket. She took it and threw it on the ground.

I turned away and laughed. Indy angry is like a fierce beautiful pixie. She presents no real threat, can do no real harm.

The breeze changes.

So does Indy.

****

Ayla and I walk a delicate line together every morning.

My seven-year-old in her spirit is thirteen. Being asked to do something nicely annoys her. She drags her heels, not wanting to comply until the power of being told is worn off. She is reminded again. The reminder kicks her off the balance beam and lands her fully in outrage. If she has to be told a third time, things go irretrieveably down hill. She stomps, rolls her eyes, slams doors, calls names. Says, "I knnnoooooow," in her best teenage drawl. O-M-G. Whatever. You're ruining my life.

All have crossed her lips.

Of course it is difficult. I take deep breaths. I imagine white or my preferred caramel-colored light. I try to send her calm energy, try to keep calm myself.

Often I fail.


*****



Driving the girls to school in the morning, I know that Ayla and I have the more difficult time because her moods hold up a mirror, reflect my own struggles back to me in harsh glinting blades. But in the strengthening February sunlight, I know that dealing with my black moods, the process of learning and struggling over time, is what has allowed me to become the person who can ride them out today. Ride them out without hurting others or sending hurtful thoughts at myself

I know that this angsty incarnation of Ayla has emerged early, the moods and anger and defiance rearing long before they were expected. But now, like waking up on a black day, I know there is another side. Sometimes Ayla seems a world-weary traveler, sent to show me how far I have to go. How easily my daughter can tug a thread and ravel me undone. I love this old soul that was sent to me. Who she is, and who she will become.

I know the person that emerges in the light is different from the one who first started out down that dark path, into the woods by chance or by choice. I know there are roads through the blackness and out. I know that I can tell her about them, but she'll have to find them for herself.

I trust the wisdom in this.

Ayla will become, like me, a person who knows that all things pass.

Over and over again, we will walk these roads.

Forever we will find the light.

Snow, Secrets

Last night we put two sick kids to bed early and watched Moneyball. We'd watched Drive the night before, and I'd spent the evening walking around the house listening to the song on my ipod and had even played it in the car en route to the library, driving purposefully but with my face all emotionless and blank. I like to pretend I'm in the movies whenever I'm alone. I've never been caught.

It's important you know we'd watched Drive because it's possible what happened next can be solely chalked up to SRGD (Sudden Ryan Gosling Deprivation). My husband was trying to enjoy the movie and I start tossing out comments like "Could we take baseball any more seriously?" and, "Could this movie be any more like The Social Network?" with a vaguely Chandler Bingish inflection. I don't know why I decided to become the movie's heckler, it was after all an innocent little movie, sweet and well-intentioned. I swear I didn't know until the credits rolled that Aaron Sorkin had written this, too. Like I said, it wasn't Drive, there was no Ryan Gosling or sweet-ass synthesizer music, or hot pink fonts. Billy Beane seemed determined to be unhappy and the scene--MILD SPOILER HERE--where the clouds roll in during the game and you-know-what happened really bothered me. It made me itchy. I get that we are trying to be romantic about baseball here, but come on. I just don't have it in me. You can't play "Kittens are being forced to fight each other to the death" music during baseball. Hath Jimmy Duggan taught us nothing? Also I was annoyed that I was born in 1981, I'm 30-years-old, and the vast majority of movies are still made about men. Yes, I know we had The Help and Bridesmaids this year, but Kristen Wiig and Skeeter Phelan can't single-handedly save Hollywood and can someone call Steven Spielberg and check if he's even aware that women exist? The last time I saw a female in a movie of his, Drew Barrymore was in pigtails and screaming.

We turned off Moneyball and I listened to the song again to comfort myself. Mr.V went to bed and I made a cup of tea and settled down with a Jacqueline Carey novel. It was close to ten and the house was dark. The snow had started outside. Mr. V had baked bread and I had a thick, warm slab of it drenched with butter and honey. It was a real cozy moment, where your bones just say "ah". From down the hall, I heard a small coo. I set down my tea. In her bed, Indy was crying.

Baby, I whispered. What's wrong?

She had an earache. Medicine and warm washcloths were given. Look, I said, pointing to her window. It's snowing. We snuggled up tight together. How sweet a mother I will be right now, I thought. We will just cuddle here until she is back to sleep. Indy sat up. "I'm just going to go lie down on the couch and watch Rugrats," she said. "Because I feel like I want to."

It was ten o'clock and she'd in bed for three hours. I am powerless to Indy. I settled her on the couch and turned Rugrats down low. Outside the window behind her the snow was thick like marshmallow cream. I felt my flirting illness settling deeper into my bones. Baby, I said. I'm going to go to sleep now.

Ok, she said. I'm just going to watch this for a few more minutes and go back to bed.

Yeah right, I thought, kissing her forehead and padding down the hall. In the morning I knew I'd find her there, the tv still on, my Indy dreaming away under quilts on my sofa. But I was wrong. A short while later a noise opened my eyes, and there she was in her room. My door faces hers directly, her nightlight was on, and I watched my Indy in her private world, in her owl pajamas, five-years-old and so good natured, whenever I tell her I forgot to put dessert in her lunch or the birthday party is canceled, she shrugs and smiles and says "Oh, that's ok!" I watched her climb up on her bed, on the flannel sheets, and pause to rest her elbows on the sill and peer out the window. She muttered something, soft as snow, some private world or language I could see only the fringes of, the essence like Avalon, shimmering in the mist. She blew on the glass and squeaked her finger through the fog.

Memorize this moment, my spirit said to me. So very seldom am I present enough to memorize. Brief flashes, laughter on a beach, my daughters in the spring, pink cherry blossoms falling in the breeze, landing in their hair, and they are holding hands. But now I have it, this memory, forever. Indy, five-years-old, pausing at her window to think thoughts I will never imagine, to spin dreams to be forgotten, to tread in worlds that I will never see.

Keep The Bees

I haven't blogged in a week because I've been too busy eating pizza. Potato-kale-gruyere pizza. Oyster mushroom pizza. Chorizo and roasted red pepper pizza. Clam, garlic, and pecorino pizza. My husband became a brewer and brews me lovely beers, but it's his pizza dough that has wooed me true.


Mr. V had the week off, so we fixed up around the house and spent mornings with our coffee and old movies. (The kids, they go to school, it's a major miracle.) Later, I took him on our first trip (together) to Ikea. I felt personally responsible for the fact that it was crowded. It wasn't crowded the first time I went. I didn't like the ladies in their high boots and blow-outs trailing me too closely behind. I felt like a younger version of ourselves, making up a registry and discussing drawers and brackets, and then Mr. V got impatient toward the end and started following me around too closely, watching me while I looked at prints.

But I didn't mind, because he came home and spent two hours putting together a new tv stand.

We took the girls for ice cream, and to play in the low-hanging sun the day before the snow came. Then the snow came, and we drank more coffee, and bundled under blankets, and stayed warm.

And ate cookies.

I guess It was a week of dreams, and (miracle!) there was also time to attend the bee class. Where I learn about bees, and they are so beautiful. (Two things that make me cry: the "Mama Mia!" number in the "Mama Mia!" movie, and the sight of honeycomb). I came home and Mr. V and I, together, schemed about sweet yellow clover and hive tools and honey supers.

I am drunk with love for the bees.

So, Vesuvius, how do you do? You might ask me this.

And I would tell you, here?

We're doing just fine.

I am Vesuvius and I cry when the peasant woman throws the sticks off her back and joins the dancing.

Hunted

A lot of stuff went down today.

I guess that should be expected when you get up to have a pee in the dead of night and in mid-act hear your husband's alarm going off. Because it's 2:30 a.m. and time for him to head to work.

Some days, I don't know. Life hunts you down. "Oprah says you can't solve emotional problems geographically," I tell the husband, but sometimes the urge to flee is so strong. Sometimes you want to feel safe in your world, even though you know that doesn't exist. We rushed over to Oskar Blues Homemade Liquid and Solids because that's what the male V and I do when we're feeling hunted. We eat and drink, the girls blow up Death Stars and, as I would come to find out hours later while in emergency room triage, stuff sand down their pants.

Don't judge their sandy-bottomed joy.

After that we had no strength to venture out in the cold. We headed for Barnes and Noble in Boulder. Within five minutes I realized our mistake and we left. Ayla asks for everything. Her requests the white rabbit, I leap down my black hole. I'm getting better at what my Blood Sister A calls "thought-stopping". When my brain starts to launch me into my old "universe is out to get me" or "good things don't come my way" soliloquies, I can usually tell her just to knock it off. Depression is a wolf howling at the door, who says you have to open it? But when she knocks in the form of my children having desires, I spiral downhill fast. "I want to ask Santa to bring me Legos for Christmas," says Daughter A and seconds later I'm shivering in the corner, mind whirling with every sparkly gift I can't afford to buy them. Christmas is coming. Get the hell out of the retail stores.

Fortified now with hot beverage, we drove to the park. My husband tossed my daughters around in the leaves to their everlasting delight. The dog stalked squirrels.

Somewhere in all this I canceled our cable, found a rejection letter in my email, and decided to dye my hair brown. The day grows dark. We buy produce for a vegetarian dinner, healthy. Just what we need.

Everything happens when mom goes to the bathroom. From my moment's peace, I hear a yelp. A yowl. I open the door and my Indy is crying. I rush to her and grab her little face, which is smeared in blood. She had been resting her head on the dog. The dog has nipped her. One cut on her lip is very small but deep enough that I bundle her back into boots and drive her to the emergency room. Ayla is sobbing, she stays home with dad.

In the Emergency Room a couple checks in. She's twelve weeks pregnant. I assume she's had bleeding but later I hear whispered 'throwing up'. I don't know. I count my blessings. My baby is shaken, but she's here on my lap.

In the emergency room, we discover the sand in her britches.

No stitches required. They say she won't have a scar.

I email Blood Sister A. I tell her I wish a wise person would swoop into my life and tell me what to do.

Then I figure, maybe that wisdom's just waiting here.

Within me.

















(This picture is of Indy feeling better and playing with the syringe they gave her. I love the fierce concentration on her face. She was plotting about how she was going to come home and squirt Ayla. Like that.)

Certain Slant

Central Park in October 2008


Yesterday I came both home and within two inches of smacking my husband's noggin with a cast iron skillet in the same exact moment.

Our house faces east and is full of the sun. It's two billion degrees outside, exactly. The flies keep getting in and I'd spent the night before being harassed by a nasty black rickety cricket. Then I walk in the house and what is the man doing? He's boiling potatoes. On the stove. In the house. The sun is shining, the blinds are melting, and the man is boiling potatoes. It gets worse.

He's boiling the potatoes in order to mash them.

And on the counter is a jar of gravy.

Excuse me while I run to the bathroom and puke. Why don't we just eat a really greasy quesadilla, put on a Fair Isle, and go to the county fair to ride the Spyder at one in the afternoon? I explain to him that this is how his actions make me feel. What's the point? We've had this conversation a hundred times. We'd have it again this afternoon when I got back from the movies and could smell it the second I stepped out of the car.

Beef stew.

Don't be too hard on him. It's not his fault that he's a Californian. When we were newlyweds, I told him gently at first, and then with ever-increasing consternation, that Russian Pork Chops and baked acorn squash are not things we make in July. Stuffed peppers are an autumn food and chili is only for months with an r--and even then, we're getting liberal. We don't buy blueberries in January, and we don't break out the dutch oven until well after Labor Day.

The issue we have here comes down to seasons. I go on insisting that foods are seasonal, Mr. V goes on priding himself on "not being a slave to the rules". I calmly tell him that they are not rules, just firm preferences colliding with common sense. You'd think he'd get less of a kick rebelling against those, but no.

Some things are just in our nature.

***

In May, I had a hag's toothache that summer would be a quiet season for me. A behind the scenes sort of time. I declared myself on blogging hiatus only to post almost every day that week. But then my posts tapered off. My tides receded. I needed to be inward, and so I have. I've been busy. I've gotten a lot done. For whatever reason, my spirit asked me for a bit of solitude and I gave it that.

Call me crazy, but the light felt different today. The clouds broke open in the late afternoon, the after-storm breeze was chilled. The light hit the trees at a certain slant and I heard the promise of fall.

Things come and go. My husband is out of his damn mind.

I believe in staying true to the seasons.


"hag's toothache" means a nagging feeling or a gnawing intuition, and I made it up just now.

Under the Radar

Memorial day weekend passed in a blur.

The girls were sick and missed their last days of school. Mr. V, birthday boy, was sick as well. On Saturday night I went to bed at nine pm and slept for thirteen hours.

I woke up and I knew a few things for sure.

One was that, god willing and the kids don't get pink eye, I spend most of my days doing what I love. And oh, how I love this thing I love. And that is a true happiness.

Indy bursts through the door and dumps out handfuls of flowers and rocks. That she has collected for me. Because she loves me.

Happiness.


I knew that in ten days--or eleven days--look, I don't really know how to count days--I am going to turn thirty. It's true. And I knew that I want to spend these next ten or eleven days celebrating. I am going to fete myself with little treasures.

Today we had Mexican food with guacamole, and ice cream. Holy cow! Sakes alive.

Tomorrow maybe I'll spend some of my early-arriving birthday money on a book and a song.

Bit by bit, moment by moment, is how these things are done.

What I know for sure is that my future holds Frappucinos and some really good pizza.

What I know is that I will never buy margarita mix labeled "Skinny Girl". Life is short. Life is hard.

Life is sweet.

I woke up from my ten year nap, and I knew that it was time to lay low for a little while.

Things need to kick around.

Grains of sand must be turned over and coaxed into pearls.

Soft places must be nurtured for new things to grow.

I'm going under ground. Under the radar. Incognito, if I will. (I will).

I don't know how often I'm going to come around these parts, for a time.

I just wanted you to know, in case you come looking.

When I was in college, there was a serial rapist in our college town.

I was driving in the car with a friend, who was on the phone, trying to explain to someone how uptight we all were because of it.

In her bouncy, lovely way, she raised her eyebrows and exclaimed, "We are all on hi--"--she searched for the word-- "--atus."

I wish you summer treasures. Good books, good beer, crickets in the evenings and languid afternoons.

I wish you peppers on your pizza and cinnamon in your coffee.

I wish you Mary Oliver poems.

I wish you tv shows on dvd to devour, five or six at a time.

I wish you all things coconut and good, vanilla bean and spicy. Whatever is honey-dripped, garlic roasted, and wonderful to you, I wish you those things.

Wherever it is you wish to go, I wish you a piece of it wherever you are.

I wish you many star-filled nights at the cabana of Le Happy.

We are on hiatus, here.

I am Vesuvius and here comes the Mary Oliver poem:

Don't worry, sooner or later I'll be home.
Red-cheeked from the roused wind.

I'll stand in the doorway
Stamping my boots and slapping my hands,
my shoulders
covered with stars.


(from 'Walking Home from Oak-Head. By Mary Oliver.)


My favorite poem by Mary Oliver
is called "The Journey"
and you can find it online.

Come On, Get Happy

I keep trying to blog about happiness, and I keep failing. I don't know why; all I know is I've eaten a starbucks birthday cake pop every night for the last four nights, and I know they say eating food doesn't make you happy but they are lying and listen, I have no intention of laying on my death bed and saying, "I should have eaten more birthday cake pops".

Cake pops aside, here's the deal: I have a weird neuroses when it comes to happiness. It took me a long time to pinpoint it. I knew something froze up in me at the prospect of having to show happiness but it wasn't until I envisioned myself walking in to a beautiful home that Mr. V and I had fantasy-bought--a cute little bungalow--and in the vision I walked through the front room with the exposed brick whatevers on the sides and the built-in bookcases, and I felt a brief, wild flare of happiness. And then I squashed it. And I fantasy turned to Mr. V and gave him a wan smile and effectively killed both our fantasy joy.

Which would be fine if I only did this in fantasies, but I tend to do it in real life.

Having this vision forced me to look at why I behave this way--I always freeze up, on Christmas and on birthdays, and you should know that I might not be able to stop, yet. I curb my enthusiasm. And I realized I do it because I have this almost sub-conscious fear that being happy is going to create some kind of debt. That if I show too much pleasure, someone's going to come along with their hand held out, expecting something in return. I don't know what. Mr. V might see me enjoying myself watching "Supernatural" and make a comment about the dishes. (This has never, ever happened. It's just what I fear.) Like the universe is going to say, Oh there you are Vesuvius, looking all happy. Well. It's time to make good on that.

I don't know why I have this fear and it doesn't matter. Just acknowledging this tendency has helped. Now I can remind myself that it's not true and that it's ok to show happiness sometimes, just not on Good Friday, or when it turns out you were right and your husband has been driving in the wrong direction this. Entire. Time.

So that is where the cake pops come in. If I want to be able to someday freely express joy at the big things, I have to start small. My spiritual discipline is this: Drive to the Starbucks where they don't know you. Buy a cake pop. Again. Take it home and sing to it. Caress it. Eat it slowly. Smile.

Smile with every part of you.