Horn Dance

We live in a shady glen here, surrounded by trees, but if I press my face to the  glass in the front and back of the house, I can see the hills. If I am mindful, I remember to look at them in the morning, when they are blue and gray, or frosted, like today. In the afternoon they are naked, drastically different hills from their lush and wanton summer selves. Across October, they spent a few weeks turning yellow and orange. Then one morning I woke to find all the leaves had dropped, except the red ones. Now they display fantastic tangles of bare branches and tufts of peacock-shaped crimson, a somewhat Suessian landscape, gray lines exploding with rainbows of red. In the late afternoon the sun wraps the hills in gold and crimson, the long white trunks luminous and glowing, anyway, in the dying light. If I bend down and peer through the arch of trees, I can see the pale cornfield two houses down. Today it is tipped in frost.

 I love these autumn woods far more than I loved them in summer.

Yesterday I stood gazing at those hills, at my neighbor's tree which was, indeed, copper like a trumpet call against a bright blue sky. I was thinking about worth. I'm not feeling worth much myself these days. Moving for my husband's job has brought on a bit of role confusion I did not anticipate. I got a job of my own and then had to turn it down, because getting a brewery up and running is placing extreme demands on my husband's time, and he can't commit to being home with the girls in the evenings nor on the weekends. I'm not making any money off my writing, which I set out years ago to do. I want to feel worthy. I don't want to get a job. I want to experience all the world at the same time I want to hide away from it like a hermit in the forest, alone with stories and poems.

There are three things I don't know: I don't know how humans survive the things we do, I don't know why my blogs always sound so melancholy when the heart of me is stupidly idealistic, the third thing I forget. This morning I woke early and went down the hall to find my husband gently waking our daughters, who were nestled into bed together. Moving here has bonded them, I think. They can often be caught hugging one another, fondly cradling and stroking each other's flushed pink faces. Behind them the morning sun shone bright through the window, over the white frosted grass, and backlit them all in heavenly light. For three nights in a row, I dreamed of paths. One through a thick forest of bracken and bramble, one through sinuous brick streets of an old European city, one through canals overgrown with weeping trees and low-slung magnolia. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I am a Gemini. There will never be a singularity to my nature. I have a twin that dwells in me. When I proclaim this to my husband, he keeps a straight face.

When my dad was here I told him about my guilt over my decorative, garage-sale antlers. Guilt that an animal had to die, to sacrifice this blood and bone, so I might adorn my house. My dad told me this wasn't necessarily true. He told me that in the deep of winter, deer actually shed their antlers. They drop them in the forest like offerings, unconcerned, unburdened, and grow new ones again come spring. The people of long, long ago would walk through sleeping forests, gather these things that nature had surrendered, take them home to fires and turn battle-bone into a sacred dance.


Lay down locked horns and dance.

Here is why my blogs sound the way they do: everything is so beautiful it hurts.

Ode to the Oyster

Last night we went to something called an oyster roast at a house up in the woods, with a real bonfire, this time. Someone put a trough over the fire and was pouring oysters into it, where they steamed and hissed and grew fragrant under the wet towel layered above them. When the oysters popped open, they were dumped by the bucketfull across a plywood table with a hole cut in the middle, and everyone just crowded around and dug in, shucking them open, adding horseradish and butter and cocktail sauce, and eating the roasty, smoky shellfish by the dozen. The last time I'd had a chance to eat oysters raw I was pregnant and young enough to be fearful, so I declined. That was eight years ago on a wet and cool night in southern California, with Christmas and sea storms hushing down through the palm trees. This night, by the fire in the mountain air, I had a hankering to slurp an oyster raw but I couldn't get my hands on one. I surrendered. We were talking about truth and how to tell our stories. Then I saw Noah at the table, cracking a live one open. It's for you, he said, prying apart those stony, flaking shells and quickly slicing the muscle away. He handed me this rough and sandy stone full of quivering pearly mass. I adorned it with butter and a squirt of hot sauce--quickly--and then tipped it down, into my mouth, where the outside layers sloughed onto my lips but inside--

--my mouth was an explosion. I shut my eyes. It was cool and slippery, with a sinewy center that resisted my testing teeth. I snaked my tongue into this creature's home and sucked it up living, with its juices clean and oceany on my tongue. Ocean water, oyster, touch of butter and spice. A living thing surrendered up in offering, that was not lost on me.

I communed with the sea.

I took it inside of me, heart, mantle, mouth. All. Never in my life had I tasted something so vital, so immediate, so vivid with the pulse of its home, the Atlantic, the gray waves, churning waters, a cleaner taste than I thought this ruined earth could possibly offer, a taste like sea spray and wind on my face, like purer green seas of different, innocent times, all of it rushing over my taste buds, a taste that goes through you, down to your groin, good god it was holy, it was sensual, it was essence of life. I shut my eyes and turned my face from the fire. I almost cried. They oyster's greatest gift is not its pearl.

Thank you, oyster.

Wild Nights

Dinah Fried's Fictitious Dishes: The Catcher in the Rye. Artist's website here. Used with artist's kind permission.


Most mornings here in Carolina are misty and gray, but today the sun broke autumn light through the trees, a rosy dawn. Driving the girls to school I was groggy and dry, having last night put on my butterscotch cowboy boots and leather jacket, caramel, and gone to a cozy restaurant, where we sat at the big oak bar and I ordered a vodka martini with extra olives. I'm reading a book in which they keep drinking olive martinis, and I'm hopeless against things like this. I was in the mood to feel glamorous, so I did. As the night wore on some friends arrived, coworkers of Noah's and their companions in town for a bike race. One man from South Africa who has moved to Atlanta, one man from Atlanta who has moved to Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and of course me, missing the west and going backwards against all hopes of my ancestors. The vodka was so cold and pure, the drink of flapper-haired girls from a jazzy age, of women with black eyeliner instead of stockings, but here I am, a different self and a different age as well, so I enjoyed raising that clear, sweating glass to my glossed lips and taking neat sips of the stuff, swiveling the olives for fun. I had enough to drink that I texted my friend about British accents and knowing what to do in my next life, and then I fell into bed and rose hours later to a crisp and chilled Carolina morning, my toes cold beneath the bedsheets. At the school drop-off line, just as she stepped out of the car, Indy, in pigtails, said "Mom, guess what? Oh never mind, I'll tell you later." But she won't tell me later. She won't remember, she is six-years-old, her socks slouch unevenly and paint smears her wrist as she runs in the school doors to a life I don't know. She won't remember, she won't know that once on a night in September her mother wore a leather jacket and drank vodka martinis in a bar, when her skin was still smooth and her hair was dyed cinnamon, that she gazed adoringly at her husband, who told her she was an endearing drunk, and later a man from another universe bid her farewell with a kiss on the cheek.

The Direction I Go

I was almost too nervous to watch the game last night, because if we don't take Peyton Manning all the way to the Super Bowl, I'm going to feel personally responsible. I don't know if it's because I'm the oldest child or because I was raised to fear authority, making me nervous and formal around anyone who owns anything, has a job that requires a uniform, or was born before 1960. Needless to say, I will never be hiring entrepreneurial male fantasy strippers. Look, this is not the direction I intended this to go.

On Saturday here in Brevard there was the Mountain Song music festival. It just happens to be put on by an old friend of Dale, of Dale's Pale Ale fame. We saw Dale riding his bike on the way to the fest, and since then every time they see a cyclist, my girls shout, "Hi, Dale!" It's not my fault they're stupid, I didn't drink beer when I was pregnant. I stuck to wine coolers in the third trimester only, so we're in the clear. If the baby's gonna get brain damage from a sparkling beverage named "Peach Malibu Fuzz", it's the baby's own fault, I say. I may have just lost half my audience.

I am tired of going everywhere without my husband. I almost didn't go to Mountain Song. Then my new friend Amy called and said she was there, and she was stuck with her kids as well, so we might as well be stuck together. In the end, I got to see Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers, and then stand in the rain with a bunch of other parents, our kids recreating Woodstock in the mud while we told each other how much we'd like to JUST SIT DOWN for more than 2.5 seconds. I drank two Dale's Pales Ales, drove my kids home, bathed them and fed them cookies for dinner and then fell into an enchanted sleep. I dreamt of a strange labyrinth that I've visited before in my dreams and was out solid until twelve noon, which is how I know the Peyton Man-child visited me in my sleep to make sure that I was rested for the game, which would last until nearly midnight eastern.

 My skin in this photo is brought to you by Picasa's "Orton" effect. 

This is a full disclosure blog, after all.

Indy's eyes are brought to you by 

her mother's first-trimester offering

of salt and bone.

But here the narrative shifts. It was noon on Sunday and a gorgeous day. 65 degrees and sunny, a cool breeze coming down Cedar Mountain. Let's get some bagels and go for a drive, I told my girls. Two hours later, we were not on a drive. I was on the phone with my husband, telling him that Ayla had colored a balloon with blue Sharpie and then managed to transfer that blue Sharpie onto the couch, the coffee table, the white breakfast table, and my sweet yellow vintage chair. Maybe the Malibu Fuzz got to her after all. It's a beautiful day, I told him, and I'm too mad to savor it. I knew that day I would drink my first pumpkin ale. I wanted him there to make green chili, to cheer on Peyton, to splash with the girls in the stream and show them bugs and mushrooms and spiderwebs. Also I was covered in bug bites, scratching and scratching. This seems pertinent.

Here is one of my unfortunate traits: the desire to prove my fearful heart right by stubbornly remaining unhappy. A black pit had settled in my chest. There was much of me that wanted to stay home, keep the girls in their rooms, miss the glorious day. I don't know why. I'm learning to resist that part of me. A deeper wisdom said to go, and so we did. I read in a book recently in which the author said that happiness is a place you either arrive or you don't, by happenstance. I know this to be untrue. Happiness is a thing you choose, and I have to keep choosing it. Despite all the fearful whisperings. Despite what I have to prove.

Up in the woods, the moss covered trunks gripped the earth like witch fingers with the claws dug in. There is so much that children must do, in the forest. They must step barefoot into golden water. They must go down the beckoning paths. They must gather acorns and yellow leaves and arrange them on rock-altars, offerings for spirits in the trees. I imagined what it would be like, to live in this world of river and leaf and stone, rather than the world of car and bank and parking lot. Good god, the day was like a peach from the ice box. Cool and sweet and dripping with rosy heaven.You have to let the world break your heart, split you open. You have to let the blue sky heal it.

I don't know how we spent the morning. The day before, we'd gone to the farmer's market, which is called the tailgate market, and bought chorizo breakfast tacos and lemon chess pies. We'd seen our new neighbors and new friends, walked around looking at the tomatoes and squash and corn, which we didn't need to purchase, because our neighbors had been leaving them on our doorstep regularly. It seems that everyone here grows gardens, and grows them with great success, western North Carolina being a rain forest, a fertile crescent, where I am told one can grown nearly anything. I want to grow coffee beans. I want to wear a panama hat and cradle green coffee beans for roasting in my soil-covered hands, but look, there goes my movie self again. Not me. Never me.

I probably cleaned the house, or laid listless in bed with a book. I am easily overwhelmed. The weight of the day's tasks often crush me and I curl up in bed, happy and hating myself by turns. I don't remember, but in the afternoon we got in the car and drove a direction that might have been north to Asheville, where Noah was flying in to see us for the first time since we'd moved, four weeks before. As we drove, the valley opened up and I could see the sky. Everywhere was green. We were bouncing with excitement. We were minutes from the airport when Noah texted to say his plane had been delayed in Charlotte and he didn't know when another flight would leave.

Since moving to Brevard four weeks ago, all the vestiges of my former life had vanished, washed away by the daily torrential rain. All the places I knew were fifteen-hundred miles away. The landscape had changed like an old-time theater prop and all my routines with it. All the people I knew. The places I used to drive to and past, the place we used to go for coffee, for beers, for a quick dinner. The faces I used to see around town, the parents at school drop off, the sounds of the neighborhood, the hue of the sky. My husband was gone and for four weeks I had lived as a single mother, making friends alone, going to parties alone, arriving at strangers' houses invited but alone. Everything was changed and it is no wonder, no wonder I lost my sense of self.

So you won't blame me for what I did next. I spoke to Siri, oracle to my slouching Odysseus, and she guided me to Starbucks. The girls asked for a "Frakking-cino" and I indulged them. I ordered a chai and we parked in the shade of a maple tree and pushed all the doors open. Just an hour later, my movie self would arrive to pick up Noah in white lace and aviators and Noah's movie self would tell me how proud he was of everything I'd done, alone in the forest. In reality the sight of him would bring tears to my eyes. Tears that were happy and releasing a bit of the strain that had been keeping me up at nights and waking me at dawn.

But first, while we were waiting, Ayla climbed into the front seat. Two days before, I had walked out my front door and smelled that gorgeous soft-apple scent of fall. Now the breeze that blew our hair to our faces was teasing and cool, and the light filtered rich and golden through the trees. Everything different than the day before. Do you feel that? I said to Ayla.

She closed her eyes and scented like a lioness. "Mmmm," she sighed, so deeply content. "It makes me feel like everything good is going to happen."

Wink and A Prayer

To prove how absolutely asinine I can be, I have challenged myself to write a sonnet a day for the next thirty days.


Here is today's.

Sonnet Two: Wink Wink

Last night the falling branches struck my dreams.

I woke with noisy ocean in my bones.

I'd seen great tidals fingering my seams,

And sailed back to sleep, and heard you groan.
The children woke and donned their little boots,
I trampled out in mine and cursed the snow.
I fear I said a lot worse words than shoot,
Cold makes me mean and cranky, as you know.

Today my dumb dog thinks I'll take her walking.
I tell her look, the snow's still coming down.
She suffers to comprehend when I am talking,
I suffer from a lack of Pho in town.
The tree that once skimmed heaven lies in grass
Please bring me tea, and tell me this won't last.

Things Coming

Today, on this last morning before winter comes, I was prodded out of the house by my dog. We left behind a chicken boiling for soup on the stove, which made me feel cozy and Midwestern, like some happy housewife I never hoped to be. There is something so snug about tonight's dinner already on the stove this morning; we'll admit that even I am not immune to the allure of snugness and leave it at that.

The dog and I walked up the hill and out of the neighborhood. The air was sweet and smoky. I long for woods, but what I have are the plains and as we crested the hill they sprawled out before us, patchwork autumn until it meets October sky. We stopped and looked at the faraway trees gilded in morning sun. In the distance, someone churned farm equipment up and down the hill, kicking up a tornado of dust. The dog was patient. She waited at my side until she saw a squirrel. Then she remembered her wildness and sprinted down the path, frolicking atop the falling leaves. We stopped under a crimson tree. Behind it the clouds were burning off. The sky was turning blue. We stood there for awhile.

Gun shy, saddle shy, any kind of shy you name, I am. I said my little thank yous to the trees before mentally reciting my armor against winter's frosty invasion: Omega threes. Walks under the weakening sun. Lots of greens and blues and reds. Read my little book. Write. That's it. A paltry list against the threatening dark six months.

We had a good weekend, what more can you ask. I took Jack Sparrow and Cinderella to McDonald's, a recipe for disaster that in the end turned out just fine. Late Saturday afternoon I browsed a used bookstore and found a sweet little book of sonnets by Garrison Keillor. I love them entirely, wistful snapshots of lost humming moments. I took them home and read them in bed, illness and anticipation aching in my bones. I sang the girls to sleep by the glow of pumpkin lights. In the kitchen, in the dark, I told my husband how I hate the snow.

Doesn't it snow in Taos, he asks.

Yes, I reply. Then, I show myself bare in a nutshell:

But it's Taos.

Now and Then

One year ago this time, I was about to be hit with a monster of a depressive episode that has me feeling saddle shy about the upcoming winter.

Two years ago this time, we were preparing to move from our home in Denver to live with family in Ft. Collins. We were preparing to leave a beloved neighborhood, a steady income, a city we loved, a first preschool.

Seven years ago this time, almost this hour exactly, I was at Coopersmiths eating fish 'n chips and waiting for Ayla to be born. She was six days overdue. I had scheduled an induction for the next morning. I sat in my seat rocking back and forth with strong contractions I was afraid to hope were real. That night by one am I was in the hospital euphoric with gratitude for my epidural, all plans of a 'natural' birth (like any birth is unnatural UNLESS you are named Rosemary) tossed aside. She came on her own in the morning. I held her to my chest, heard her first cries, sang her a first song looking down on the gold and crimson leaves outside our window.

Nine years ago this time, I was days away from my wedding. I was young. I was stupid. I was thrilled.

This year, I blame her October birth for Ayla's love of the spooky and macabre. For her deep, innate drive to face her fears head on. For the fact that she eschews pink and princesses for Zombies, Darth Vader, and grasshoppers.



This year Indy turned five. She still runs to me with her arms wide open when I pick her up from school.



This year Mr. V went to the Great American Beer Fest, a place where he had once gone and wished. This year he went to win.



This year we drove up the canyon, parked by the river, got caught in the rain. The sun was brilliant, illuminating the shower against the blue sky. We headed east. Got ahead of the storm, at a place along the same river. A willow tree, a river island. The girls said it was the perfect spot.

The rain'll catch us again, I said.

But you know, it never did.

Three for Fall

Autumn is my favorite time of year to read. Well, autumn and summer. And also January. Ok, maybe every time of year is my favorite time to read, but you know there is something extra alluring about sitting down with a chai and a great book on these smoky, dusky days. Here are three books I'll always wish I could read for the first time. Again.

The Family Fang, Kevin Wilson




When I can't find a good book, it feels like I can't breathe. I'd been trying a variety of things--classics, popular fantasy, new releases--and nothing would take. Then along came The Family Fang and saved my life.

The third page (or so) had me laughing harder than the latest Chelsea Handler book--and I love Chelsea Handler. The Family Fang is so approachable, so witty and deeply entertaining. It is the story of Annie and Buster Fang, known in the art world as Child A and Child B. Their parents are performance artists who have been incorporating Annie and Buster into their oddball public stunts since they were babies. The book plays with some serious themes--as adults, Annie and Buster have trouble determining which events in their lives are real and which are for entertainment. But mostly it's just a great time when Child A and Child B each suffer a career mishap and land themselves back at home with their famous, crazy parents. I loved every page of this book. I read it slowly. Part of me wanted to stay with the family Fang forever, I was so wrapped up in their lives and having such a fantastic, hilarious, thought-provoking time there. This is one of the best books I've read in a long time.


The Rules of Civility, Amor Towles



It's kind of like if you took really good writing, the good kind of good writing, not the stuffy kind. Then you add all the romantic Manhattan sets from Gossip Girl, only if Gossip Girl was set in in the 1930's so it's even better. Ice cold dirty Martini's, extra olives, instead of fluorescent pink Cosmopolitans and your grandmother's pearls replacing Juicy Couture. Stockings drying on the radiator instead of hair dye and spray tans. Ok? And then you took a little bit of Great Gatsby--not the parts you're supposed to value as the Great American Novel, but the parts you might have actually liked if you weren't constantly having it's greatness shoved down your throat--the ambiance, the intrigue, the ingenue. Dress it up in the sleek, stylish working-girl story lines of Mad Men. Add a sharp-tongued heroine and fantastic rat-a-tat banter of a black and white starring Bette Davis--and you've got yourself a novel to fall into and fall in love with. I loved every minute I spent in this book, bashing around New York, New York with working-class Katey Kontent and her high society friends and lovers. If I developed a freak memory loss, where every day I woke up not remembering anything from the day before, it would all be ok as long as someone would hand me this book every morning, and I could read it anew. Maybe that's a weird thing to say but love makes you crazy.

Now you know, October is coming. Every October I get pretensions about myself and think I'm going to read Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker.

I never have.

But that's ok, because there is an author whom I'd much rather spend October with. Her books are deliciously spooky, overwhelmingly absorbing. They crawl under my skin and don't leave me for months. They haunt me. I was lucky enough to get to write a review of her latest one over here on Blogher.

My title over there is better this time, and you know why? Because they changed it.

Feel like buying a book? Maybe you will want to head over to your local Barnes and Noble or independent bookstore. Did you know that even used book stores often stock new releases? I mention it because I'm hoping to avoid more of this:


I loved you, Borders Longmont.

Happy reading, friends and lovers.

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.

A Cautionary Tale

Ayla used to ask me to tell her stories.

She had her special requests. "A mermaid--a purple mermaid with a sparkle tail--and a prince, and. .. .pink kitties. And a golden seashell. By the sea. With a castle. And a sea witch."

And I would bake up a fairy-tale with the required ingredients.

Sprinkle in a pinch of 'mermaid saves herself/sister/prince'. You know. For spice.

She could have listened to me tell stories all the time, but of course I couldn't tell them all the time.

I got tired. I have been engineered to resemble a human in nearly every way and, like humans, I eventually tire of any activity and need rest.

But usually when she asked, I'd weave her a Mermaid Tail. Kingdoms by the sea.

Then today arrives.

I'm brushing her hair to get her ready for karate. Ayla Beloved Tuttle is 6 years, 8 months, and 7 days old. When this moment is over, she will retire to the couch with a small tube of nail polish and bend over her toes, looking for all the world like a 13-year-old. She will write a list that says, in scrawling but improving script, "nail polish. lipstick." She will put on iCarly.

I release her hair from the ponytail it's been in all week and it explodes like a Lee Krasner. She looks like the character from Neil Gaiman's "Crazy Hair". She looks like Beatrice Fluffernutter, or Zoe Azul, or whatever her name is, the girl who goes to school and uses her long red tendrils to write on the chalkboard. To distract her from the pain, I start to spin Ayla a yarn. About how she lived with the wolves. She learned where the wolves found berries in the summer, and where they went to stay warm in the winter. She learned the precise wolf calls for 'I love you' and 'we're out of peanut butter'. Ayla was silent.

I thought she was listening.

In the story she came back to me with her hair looking like she'd been raised by wolves. Which of course, I told her, you had. I was so happy to see you, because I missed you. But one day you began to miss the wolves. So you went out the front door. You stretched your long neck and howled your wolf howl. Then you went down on all fours--

"Mo-om," Ayla said.

You know the way. You've said it, you've heard it. The two syllable lament. "Mooo-oom."

"What?"

"I don't want to hear this anymore."

I don't know when this happened.

I finished brushing her hair in silence.

On her way out the bathroom, she paused to grab a tube of lip gloss.

She never saw me cry.

Weak End

We've been trying to settle into a routine here in Longmont, but fate keeps thwarting our attempts.

It's Mr. V's job now to get Ayla Bird ready for school and most days he does a really great job. Only once so far have I gone to pick her up and found her bangs hanging in her eyes. Also once she was wearing shorts size 3T but we won't mention that here.

I get two hours a day to myself now. In related news, I blow through my Starbucks allowance for two weeks in five days. The second week I have to suck it up and drink tea and iced Via at home.

Sigh.

I found two cans of beer and pipe tobacco in the backpack Mr. V takes to work and I asked him if he'd lost his job.

"Honey, got to go to 'work' now."

I thought that was kinda funny.

Every once in a while I think about what I dramatically refer to as 'my old life'. Last year this time I was the one getting Ayla ready for school, pushing her and Indy to Bradley Elementary, pushing the girls on the swings (because we were always early), dropping Ayla at class. Then I'd push Indy to Sunflower Market where we'd buy pumpkin bread and salt water taffy and spiced chai.

Ayla is learning to read and drawing the best pictures in her class.

Seriously, though. They were told to draw 'space' without any direction. Most kids scrawled blobs of green and gray. My kid drew freaking Jupiter. With the striated colors and everything.

Indy is learning to say the boom-chicak-rocka-chicka-rocka-chika-boom song and I don't know what else.

I forgot to tell you how when we went camping and I took her to the outhouses she plugged her nose and said "I think a stinky little person lives here. From stinky town."

I do not make this stuff up.

We are looking forward to Zach and Susie's wedding here. We get to fly to Vegas without the kids and party like Buster Bluth on too many juice boxes.

I texted Zach and told him I couldn't come to his wedding because I had to do something that day that was a little vulgar. Zach said he had to wash his brain out now and if you know Zach, you know that was a triumph.

I am hoping for a few hours of laying by the pool next to Mr. V.

I am also looking forward to: wings, football, sweater weather, autumn walks, autumn leaves, pumpkin bread, caramel macchiatos, Ayla's birthday, my dad's birthday, Halloween, Halloween candy, sausages and sauer kraut, cider, apples in season, more Hatch chilies, and all that other stuff.

Have a happy weekend.



Indy sick and not milking it at all.



The girls helping daddy carry the slain beast.