At Home in the South

a summary

While my family back in Colorado has been hit with one major snowstorm after another, the south has blossomed like a sweet magnolia, or what I imagine a magnolia would look like in bloom, having never actually seen one. (We've got dogwood and forsythia and wisteria all blossoming, but no maggies yet). We had white flowering trees back in Colorado, but the ones here are more dramatic somehow, fluffy like clouds of whipped cream lining the streets, alternating with fat-blossomed scoops of strawberry. Brevard looks and smells like a frivolous dessert after a long, dark fast and I'm stunned to realize I haven't taken any pictures. I've felt a bit stunned lately.

With the kinder weather, I have remembered everything I loved about this place when we first arrived. The social scene is so vibrant and happening. It's like nobody told these people they live in a sleepy southern town so they party like it's Chelsea in the 60's. Well almost. Chelsea in the 60's with a lot of children running in around in noisy packs. Recently there was a potluck--the best parties here are often potlucks--and after mojito madness and heavy plates of delicious Cuban food, we stood around the fire, the kids determindely snapping off branches of the Christmas tree that was decaying in the back yard and tossing them to the fire with destructive joy. The hostess was one of the first friends I made here last summer, the Baptist from South Carolina who brings sweet tea vodka everywhere and talks as if she's writing a script as she goes along. "Care to step out for some celebrations and libations?" she asked me once. Or, "This snake swam up to lick a sniff." And how can you not love someone who already has herbs growing up in her garden yet still has the Christmas tree in the yard? (I don't think she reads this blog, but just in case, P--you are a treasure).

So already there have been several nights of patios and beers, afternoons of sunshine and iced coffee, dewy warm mornings with gentle humidity and a loud surplus of birds. The cardinals flash crimson against the blue sky, the woodpecker swoops by all black and white in his funny red fez. Bluebirds and something canary yellow and hummingbirds if I'm lucky. They sound all day but are riotous at dawn. If I only had sound to go off, I'd guess I was waking every morning in the Amazon, some thick jungle from an Allende novel where I stand barefoot atop the rich and squelching soil.

Ayla snapped that first picture of me last night. In it I'm cooking the apple-chardonnay sausages that Indy would begin to choke on a few minutes later, sending me flying out of my chair to give her the Heimlich. One moment I noticed she was struggling to breathe and the next I had her in my arms over the toilet, nothing in the whole wide world but the knowledge that I was going to force that meat from my daughter's air pipe, and I did. Something flew out and I said, "Can you breathe?", but she couldn't answer--from coughing, I think, but to be safe I did the thrust again and she puked. She drooled a bit. "You made me throw up," she said in wonder and I stood there, bent over, her back to my heart, cells from her body still swimming around in mine. I held her, quivering all over, steadying the rhythms of our simultaneous breath.

Everything was all right. Thanks to the great generosity of Margi, who writes at May I Have A Word?, I was able to enjoy a massage yesterday. It was much needed; I've been off the computer for a week due to pain shooting down my mouse arm and entire right side. The morning started out cloudy and misty, very Transylvanian indeed as I drove through rolling hills, past tired old horses and beautiful houses all given up, letting twisting vines and grasses claim them back. But by the time the massage was over, the sky broke blue and I sat at a coffee shop drinking my latte on ice and watching the school children in matching P.E. uniforms playing across the street. They were on a wide stretch of private school-green, an unbelievable hue. People were reading in the park, the children were shouting and chasing some puffy, floaty thing around in the sky. Every car that passed had a window down, the same summer-coming breeze in everyone's hair as we planned our meals, picked up coffee, sang out of tune. Everything was all right as you know it is in so much of the world, so much of the time.

*I just found out that those fat scoops of strawberry ice cream trees are, in fact, Magnolias. Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit!*

Post-It To My Soul

(a record of happiness)

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.

-Mary Oliver, Walking Home from Oakhead

*I would have liked to have written a record of happiness but my kids are home on spring break and I

Easyer

For Easter I took a lot of pictures and ate fajitas.

All the girls wanted to do for Easter was play chubby bunny, and we did.

So I'm sharing it.

Because, I don't know why.



Then we had a photo shoot. I wasn't really feeling Easter this year, but I did demand a photo shoot. We didn't buy Easter dresses so I told the girls to put on something fancy of their own choosing. The photos all have this hazy film because it had been raining and the lens kept fogging up. Noah didn't want to be in any pictures but he called out poses and the girls started laughing really hard and we all fell down on top of each other. Later, the girls went to bed and we staged our own sexy little shoot, Noah and I.

 It was a good Easyer. 

What Women Do

Yesterday I texted my sweet sister-in-law to casually ask her if she knew where I could get some meth. I thought it would be funny but she believed me and now I just feel bad for both of us.

On Sunday I had the good fortune to join three of my lady-friends for a retreat in the woods. We did a long yoga session that left me spectacularly sore and then spent the rest of the day sipping on tea and making collages. It suited my soul just fine. Late that night Noah and I took a painfully hot bath and I told him that I want to believe in every new age hippie thing, I truly do, but standing in a circle with a group of women singing about earth our bodies, water our blood just makes me feel hokey. I am willing to take any old stone and roll it around in my mouth, testing it for goodness and sometimes spitting it out. Monday was book club day. I learned it is required to drink four glasses of wine on Passover (yesterday was also the start of Passover) so we did that and sat around for hours talking about the book and then moving on to everything, everything in our lives, and it was good. It seems like a lot of lives and relationships are in sway. Are in transition. I have this blog sitting here and every day, every day I wonder if I should write it but I am in transition. I am feeling private. I don't know why.

The other day Ayla had a meltdown. She served herself the last of the ice cream and when it was her sister's turn to have some, Ayla was forced to surrender some of what was in her bowl. She fell to the ground choking on her sobs and the only thing I know is I never know what to do so I just sat there with her. I sank to the floor beneath her door frame, the transition space. She was wrapped in her white blanket and we breathed. We breathed together for some time until eventually Indy joined us and the three of us camped out right there on the floor, and they showed me some baking tutorials on youtube. Ever since then I have been filled with nothing but compassion and aching love for these little souls, living out their lives tethered to mine. I am getting good at working out these splinters in my heart. I'm not saying it doesn't hurt but then one day your daughter slams into your waist in the dark hours of the morning crying with joy "mom-o, mom-o!", and you realize you are free. Something you once were, you are not anymore. Like Melusine, you have shifted form. So if you ask me to, I will hold your hand and sing but what I'm learning now is that pain can be undone and nothing is more sacred to me than sitting with other women, declaring in our own ways, one by one, that we are letting go of everything that doesn't serve us. Sometimes stones find their way in but we will spit them out. We will sit with our daughters until the crying subsides. In all the dark houses in the town, this cycle is playing out forever. In all the bedrooms the mother is holding the child. In all the bathrooms, the women slip their robes like lies to the floor, and step with feet like moons into clearer water.

Roman de Melusine by Jean d'Arras.15th century.

Runs in the Family

 My Grandma Hartke with my dad's older brother, Eric.

"Our family moves around a lot," I told the girls when they got in the car after school, both of them thirsty and with low blood sugar as they always are at 3 o'clock.

Because I too had read the New York Times article,and because Elizabeth had mentioned something similar on her blog, I told them a story to stave off their bad moods, these tiny monsters I fight every day at three.

I told them about their grandmother, my mom, who moved with only her mother from Pennsylvania to Colorado at just three-years-old. They rolled the windows down. Outside the day was a riot of color, but they were listening. I told them about my dad's mother, raised on farm in Kansas, one of six girls, who moved to Colorado as a young woman.

They began to chirp in the pieces they knew.

Daddy moved from California, they said. And grammy. And grandpa moved from England?

I think Grandpa was born in Massachusetts, I told them. And Dede was born in Chicago but he moved to California. His parents moved here from Czechoslovakia. (That's what it was called when they left it).

Then I told them about my father's great-grandmother, who stowed away on a ship from Sweden as a teenager and found herself married to a deputy of Wild Bill Hickock on the prairie frontier, where she gave birth to thirteen children and buried eleven of them. The many-greats grandfather who came from Sweden to fight in the Civil War but found the war was over when he got here, possibly ensuring my daughter's own births all these years later.

"And then we moved," Ayla said. "From Colorado to North Carolina."

"That's right," I said. I don't know if it means anything. I just know that in this context, we, all of us, began to make more sense.

We aren't outliers. We are people of our own particular blood.

Comforted, we went about our afternoon.

Let The Record Show

When we decided to move here, I had visions of us sitting on a back porch, surrounded by these green rolling hills (dare I say, they're rather Irish), sipping drinks and listening to bluegrass music. The good kind of bluegrass, with more Celtic in it than country. It's not really bluegrass or folk but I don't know what else to call it. But I  imagined it playing in the sultry heat as we lived our slower lives in older mountains.

Well. Let the record show that today we are doing exactly that. It's over 70 degrees here. The bees are buzzing and I can smell lilac or honeysuckle. The drink is sangrita spiked with good tequila and tabasco. The band is Chatham County Line. Did you know that we heard Chatham County Line live the first night we came to Brevard? When we were starry-eyed and young? When all the roads seemed possible, the air was warm, the hopes were high? Well we did. There were fairy lights and pennywhistle. We stood beneath a southern sky as it turned from blue to periwinkle to black, he held my hand and we moved in time to the music, to the turning of the planets, to the rhymns of our hearts.

Accidental selfie taken during Chatham County Line show, Brevard, NC May 2012

Southern Living

A few weekends ago I was holed up in a hotel room in Durham with my daughters, who were jumping a wild ruckus between the two hotel beds, one recovering from a stomach bug and one doomed to get it that very night in the small hours. But they didn't have it yet and while they jumped, I read "Southern Living", to which I now subscribe. The first time it arrived in the mail, I wondered what the hell had happened to me. Everything went still for a moment and I swayed numbly in a "is this real life?" tilting of the universe. But the magazine is actually a great window into Southern culture, which I am sometimes baffled by, and events around the south, like low-country oyster roasts and music fests that I'll probably never attend, but sound lovely. Also it gave advice onto how to get into a hammock "like a lady" (ankles crossed, julep down) and how to make insults sound like compliments. I am pretty sure this advice was tongue-in-cheek. I am 89% sure. Ok, 72%. Look, I'm pretty sure.

In this issue was an article by a woman who's husband had moved with her from Manhattan to Tennessee and experienced the Three Stages of South exactly as I have. Stage One being a state of giddy wonder--everything is so charming! So quaint! Watermelon Rind Jelly, what is that, I don't know, but I love that it exists! This was me back in July, in a whirl of lake swimming and mountain music jams on back porches and old time street dances on Main Street. But eight months in, her husband was basically examining his own palms in wonder, asking how the hell he got here and telling his wife, "I'm starting to feel like I don't understand anything that is going on, ever". He was also homesick for what I believe the writer referred to as the "straightforward" interactions of places other. This is Stage Two. I'm not sure what Stage Three is because neither I nor the writer's husband have hit it yet, but I'm hoping it involves Los Angeles, or the set of my favorite tv show, or maybe the green people emerge from the forest and dance me into perpetual health and bliss, I don't know. To be continued.


Anyway, it helped me to know that this poor New Yorker and I have hit the same stages, at about the same times. There have been times when I've looked around at this life in awe and wondered how the hell I got here. I'm pretty sure this is a universal feeling. I was talking to my oldest friend A in Sacramento the other day. A took a new job, absolutely knowing it was the right thing to do and now nothing has turned out as she'd hoped and she is frustrated and drained and confused. Sometimes I think back to May, when Noah and I decided to move here. I felt absolutely certain it was the right thing to do. And now, of course, I wonder. I always imagined that as I grew older, I'd grow better and better at trusting my instincts, but in fact the opposite seems to be true. I'm starting to wonder if an instinct is something to be trusted at all, because none of mine seem to come out right. Maybe an instinct is just an impetus, urges meant to keep propelling us forward in life. If that is so, I'll look forward to the next one for that reason alone. I always was a thing that craved change.

Ledges, Tides, Sea-Change

On Friday I felt good for the first time in a long, cold winter. A rainy winter. A winter I spent missing my family and the wide prairie skies with an equally ice-pierced ache.

But on Friday I felt good even though I had no time to write, the barometer my mood generally revolves around. In the morning Noah and I went to an interminable school assembly to watch Indy get an award for "improvement in reading". I am against these nonsense flattery awards, (one girl was given a "princess award" for "liking princesses") but that's another blog. After the assembly I spent the afternoon cleaning, singing to Mamma Mia! (now you know too much about me by far) and listening to This American Life with the windows thrown wide. The sun was out and it was warm, that best kind of spring day, one of the first warm days after a long winter where you feel almost grateful for cold and snow--almost--because it makes these early spring reprieves so damn beautiful, so breath-taking and teary-making. Without the winter would the spring make me feel like my being, my chest and heart, are finding rich soil and blooming wide and fluttering, my center a trembling velvety butterfly wing? Would I feel that I personally am blooming? I don't know but here's some foreshadowing: I'm ready to find out. I am distinctly interested in what life without winter would feel like in my soul.

(But that is another blog, a story in wish stage, not yet written)

I feel so good today, I told Noah in breezy kitchen, looking at the blue sky. Indeed, I felt like the movie scene where the sick patient leaves the hospital, always in the sun, shaky at first but throwing away the cane after a few wobbly steps. I got out of bed, I got things done, my mind spun out stories to write and cracked jokes. Ayla's friend came over and went home and I made cobb salad pizza in the kitchen, flirting and teasing my husband. The weather was set to be good through the weekend and I went to bed feeling light, spirit and body light and beautiful when I stood and enjoyed it in front of the mirror.

And then Saturday.

Saturday came and I knew right away, shuffling about in the kitchen, measuring coffee into the machine, that it was back. Winter's grip on me wasn't over. Beneath it I slump. Depression settles into me physically as well as spiritually and I dragged about the house, heavy-hearted, heavy of foot and chest and brain. Every task seems insurmountable. Even little things like getting dressed, never mind bigger things like cleaning the kitchen, playing with children, pursuing a dream, living with purpose. My brain misfires about everything, asking why bother over and over again. I can't blog, can't edit my book. I can trick myself into writing, which is a salvation but short-lived. Noah took the girls to the park and I slouched in front of the computer, reasoning anything, even mindless web-surfing, was better than climbing back into bed. My shoulders curved around me, my body expressing my sense of total defeat. Eventually I gave in. I crawled back into bed. Why bother why bother why bother. Noah came home and the girls clambered over me like puppies, but I was unresponsive and Noah coaxed them from the room, took them outside to a gorgeous summer-like evening.

While he put steaks on the grill and threw the frisbee to the girls and dog, I got in the shower and couldn't coax myself out of  it. I sat on the floor with the water rushing over me. I made feeble attempts at talking myself out of this one like I've done with depressive episodes in the past. But something in me was protesting too strongly. I was tired of trying to choose happiness. I was tired of trying to fix myself, by myself. For years I have been managing the depression, being without health insurance and unable to afford help, and I've done a decent job. I have sought out spiritual teachings and educated myself about the disease. I have practiced yoga and meditation and what I am told therapists call "thought stopping", teaching myself to cut off the lies depression fires constantly in a brain, to replace them with other thoughts. I have taken my fish oil and walks in the sun, I eat my nuts and salmon and green smoothies. I have done this for more than ten years and sitting on the floor of the shower, I thought about how it feels like plugging holes in a breaking damn. It feels like fighting an unstoppable, ten-year tide. And I realized that depression is not something I have to manage on my own. I have tried, I try so hard, I do a really good job but I deserve to have more than one good day out of every six or ten or twenty. In that momennt of clarity, the clouds of depression cleared in my brain and I thought: On Monday I will make an appointment at the sliding-scale clinic and I will tell them that I need help. That I want medication because I can't do this on my own anymore. And I don't have to.

The decision alone brought some relief. I managed to get out of the shower. I went to the kitchen and told Noah my plan. He agreed, gently, that it was a good idea. I couldn't wait to get to the doctor's office, to get real help, but just making the decision caused a shift in my brain. For all these years I have treated depression like it is a part of me that I am responsible for managing, something that I need to change. I do believe I am responsible for my moods and actions, to some extent my thoughts and emotions but I'd been treating depression like it was my fault and something I was responsible for fixing. It's not. It's an unwanted visitor. It's a monster on the shoulder and it's not my job to talk the monster down off ledges, to self-help it into a prettier, presentable state. No. I want the damn thing hacked the fuck off.

And if I can't do that, I want to medicate it into a stupor so that I can go about my life, unbothered as possible.

So it's Sunday night. I had a decent day. First thing tomorrow I am calling the doctor. I am a little afraid of being denied help and brushed off, I don't know why, I just am. My contingency plan: if that happens, I will get another opinion. I am making this promise to myself, here, at the turning of the seasons. I'm going to get help. I'm going to feel better. I'm not going to go it alone, anymore.

The tide must change.
 

February 27, 2013

I was brutally ill Monday night with a stomach bug that I'd already nursed my two daughters through. Being so very sick made me think about the job I did taking care of them, and made me wish I had shown perhaps more compassion than I did, when, say, Indy asked for a bath at 4 am after we'd both been up since midnight and I told her to wait til dawn, or when Ayla was sick in the car on a four hour drive I made alone and afterwards I made her step out into the cold so I could rinse her hair with bottled water. I don't know. I could have done better. But last night when they got home from school and found me sick in bed, they brought me cups of cranberry juice and ginger ale and petted my forehead and I thought well, they must have learned this somewhere. Maybe from me.

I do hope.

I'm not one-hundred percent myself today, but I wanted something fresh up on the blog so I decided to post these pictures from our trip to Colorado that I've been meaning to share.

Indy and Ayla with their cousins, Eisley and Violet. One more baby cousin due in July.

 

My  girls treated to a shopping spree by Grammy and Auntie Lulu.

A family picture, Tuttle style. Noah and his five siblings, and my sister-in-law Susie there with the finger in her nose.  Then her husband Zach (Noah's older brother), Brett (boyfriend of Sophie), Sophie, Indy, Ayla, Lucy  (the youngest), Carlton, me, Noah, Mercy.

 Noah's second sister Sophie, who reminds us all so much of Jennifer Lawrence, both in looks and personality.

 

Whoopie pies during coffee break.

Susie, Noah's first sister Mercy, yours truly, Indy. God I love my sisters by marriage.

Mercy and I on coffee break, getting photobomed by Indy.

Indy and Noah's youngest brother, Carlton.

Had to throw in this one of Susie so you can get a glimpse of how beautiful she actually is.

Me and my sister, Heather, who will have her third in July.

My girls in this beautiful sister moment.



Now I'm going to go make dental appointments and round up Girl Scout cookie money, pick up the girls from school, feed them something, and nurse my still weak tummy on Mother's Little Savior--Grapefruit Perrier.

Speak

We turn a corner and a flock of red-wing black birds abandons a field and heads for the sky, all at once as if by divine decree. I can't see the poetry in anything, I tell my husband. All I write is clunky prose. My baby sits on my lap in the remembered sun and is cajoled into going to school, Ayla's hair thick as moss on her head as I kiss it, as they run. They have my freckles across their nose though not as many as I have, in the evenings they examine tinctures and oils along the sink and want to know why. For blemishes, I tell them, which you might get someday, though I hope you won't. Ten minutes are spent in a car with a book, gorgeous and lush. The earth is swearing it's going to do spring again this year, as it usually does, and for ten minutes I feel it coming, the gathering climax, the sun and the breeze and the book so warm and earth-rich they make me cry. Like the tiny blue birds, one-two-three, I discovered while gazing dreamily out my kitchen window, the one above the sink, where I spend so much time. In the afternoon Indy and I lay side by side on my bed, belly up like rainbowed fish my father once pulled from the water. She lets me tangle my fingers in her wild blonde hair, her wild child crown, her motherless untamed locks. She lets me gaze at her freckles and pin her across my chest, across my belly, the place where she was magicked into being. Life comes from life comes from life. I chop peppers and garlic. I toss curry powder with flour and shake raw chicken into it. I drop it sizzling into a pan. All night my house will smell like an Indian restaurant. Bathe the girls. Pour the wine. The brain won't stop, it spins as if it believes it's the universe, the whole swift planet. It feels raw and gauche. I have flubbed every social situation I've been involved in the past week, the brain misfires, I have actually blushed. Blushed red as I don't recall having done since college. The creative writing professor. Speak up, he said, Your voice is very quiet. You are speaking too softly. Speak up, he said, but I can't. Everything is locked away like an unloved wife who would rather burn than come out. It builds and builds, churning like thunderclouds while I wash a pan, drink a Perrier. I lie down to sleep and in my sheets is a pleasant, surprising smell. Is that the smell of me? Ayla stands next to me while I'm chopping in the kitchen and for a moment I have the sense I am standing next to myself. It seems I can see myself only in the peripheries, the half spaces, like I dwell in another dimension and can't quite reach me. I lie down to sleep but the mind won't rest, it churns out sensations, images that send me stumbling half-naked, fish-bellied, thighs hushing like powdery marshmallows, down the hall. In the hall, down the night. SPEAK UP, he said. In his hand, he teased a match.