View From Above

Four years ago, on Election Eve, I was in New York City with my dad. We were calling it Obama Eve and joking that if we left our shoes by our door, in the night the Obama Child would come and fill them with hope and health care. I was giddy, my whole generation was. In Union Square Park someone was hawking shirts--Orcas for Obama, Polar Bears for Obama, Eagles for Obama. I bought the one that said Wolves for Obama, thinking its message would be clear. This was when Sarah Palin was hanging out of helicopters shooting rifles at wolves. Wolves in Support of Obama. Of course, there is a second interpretation, one I did not intend. On Election Night we left the city, we got on a plane. The stewardess treated us to free tv so we could watch the election results. Obama was winning. Everyone was happy. Hope and change were on all the lips and in the air. We knew, for awhile, that we can make our world new. We hadn't forgotten, yet.

I had just seen Manhattan for the first time and it was too soon to leave. I don't know what will happen in this election or the next. I know how expectations lead to despair. But I also know that late one autumn I spent three days in New York with my dad. I looked at art until my eyes bled. We drank Smithwicks and ate cheeseburgers at a bar in Hell's Kitchen before walking to the theatre district and watching Daniel Radcliffe strut naked about the stage. I know everything is wrong with the world. But listen: the leaves turned late that year in Central Park and were waiting for us, comforting crimson and gold. A Chinese immigrant stopped to give us directions in the metro station, rocking his pig-tailed toddler in her stroller. The city was full of marvels and I could have stayed forever and tasted them all. Obama was winning. Manhattan was life, the universe, the whole raw oyster with the pearl. We boarded a plane.The next morning I woke up in Denver: jet-lagged, a mother, the world the color of straw. I sat stunned with my coffee while my daughters made their noise and mess. I woke up, Obama was elected president, everyone was talking about moving forward but all I wanted was to go back. Not back in progress but back geographically and back in my spirit. No matter what happens, I want to stay in the place of hope and possibility. Forever.

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.

Legends of the Fall: Part II

Is it every really too early to introduce your children to the works of Quentin Tarantino? was the question I put to my husband. He answered in the affirmative. Of course I suspected he would, but I am unsettled lately by all the things we never know. Is it possible to be sure-footed about anything? This week I took a walk through the woods and fell down four times, placing my feet wrong in the leaves obscuring the narrow path. I will leave you to draw out the metaphor.

I am feeling less superstitious, or less worshipful, about the turn of the seasons than I usually do. I have no urge to write about shedding with the leaves, to construct little idols out of stone. I am confused about many things. Why does our society sometimes view forgiveness as a weakness? Why do I move across the country in July and then not feel homesick until 9:30 pm on Halloween night, when my daughters are snuggled up safely with their father watching The Mummy, albeit with far less candy than I'd hoped?

My parents came to visit for a week, and when my mom went through the gate in the fence and climbed the green hill to our neighbor's house, she said something like, "You said bonfire. That's just a plain old firepit." And she's right. But what if the truth of the emotional resonance of a moment is better expressed by "bonfire" than by "firepit"? Our lives are less about what happens to us than the stories we tell ourselves about what happened, and a blog is a chance to create a reality. Moving to Carolina was a magic time, a time of alchemy and sometimes, I have to omit the gritty details in order to give you a feel for the holy transformation of the experience. If I tell you only that the forest is green and buggy, I rob you of the magic. If I say it is tropical, like paradise, you begin to feel the spirit of the place.

 I will trust you to infer the bugs.

What I have is the legend of what happened in October: my family reunited, my surprise baby turned eight, we celebrated, we ate and drank, (we worried about money) we wore sweaters and passed through scarlet archways. My parents came to visit, I was so glad to see them, (they drove me crazy), I dropped them off at the airport and cried all the way home. I started walking in to doorways, I wrote stories about characters (I wrote stories about my life). Say October was dreamy and sun-spun, like golden fingers of light playing with fields of wheat and straw. Say it was a month of the dark and the wolves creeping in. Light your fires and cradle them. Believe what you will.

The bugs are real but so are the apples we lifted cold to our noses and snapped, sweet-smelling and firm-fleshed, in our teeth.

Last night I lay in bed thinking about Elizabeth Aquino's blog post. (It is from Elizabeth I borrow the term unbloggable.) I was sick for home, strangely displaced and aching for, of all things, Estes Park. I thought how a small part of me was homesick for my childhood home, for childhood. I thought about how one day in the future I'll be homesick for the days I'm living now, days of small children snuggled up under flannel sheets in the dark at 6:49 am on a Thursday morning. The answer, of course, is to cherish life now, but who knows how?

I mean, really.

(While you are cherishing the thing you think you have, it is spinning into something else.)

October Interlude

Abiqui, New Mexico. 2011

I am taking the month of October off to work on other projects and hold on to fall. October is my favorite month. My dad turns 39 again, my Ayla turns eight, and Noah and I have our ten year anniversary. I'm hoping for a beautiful autumn, but right now the rain has left all the colors muted and dull. Still, the forecast holds promise. We will buy our marshmallows and stoke our fires. Every day in the morning light I watch blue and red birds dart like hope and passion grown from trees. Something you could either harvest, or pass and let it lie. I miss the high desert, the audacity of the colors and the land. I read Rumi and make plans for other lives. Characters on the page. "Blades will sprout / where you do your work". I wish I could send you the scent of my beehive, which more than once has made me nearly cry. All summer long they've labored. They've created nothing short of heaven. If sacred love had a scent, it would be this. The scent is golden, it is dripping, like a memory of childhood and grass. It is the fragrance of the feel of sunlight on your eyelids. The only thing to do is survive the winter. I want to be like the bees and never fret or ask why. They cut back their brood-rearing and seal off their doors. Already their tired wings seek succor. Already their bee-minds think of spring.

Kenosha Pass, Colorado. 2010

Homeward, Angels

Woke up in the wee hours this morning to drive Noah to the Greenville airport, where he caught a flight back to Colorado. I have spent my life living in the shadows of Longs Peak and Mt. Evans, in a state shaped like a square and divided by one sharp line. To your left are the mountains, to your right, the plains. I would call the Rockies majestic, though I've heard people here call them imposing and intimidating. Say what you will, they were always there to guide you home. You have to be very silly to be very lost along Colorado's front range, the mountains a long backbone along the curve of the earth, due north to due south. Facing forward like good soldiers. I had to move away from them to realize what a compass they had been to me. Now I live in a place where nobody knows where west is, not really. You can't even trust the setting sun, because of the lay of the hills. At five in the morning, in the very dark, we drove an arduous road through the thick woods over Cedar mountain. I dropped my husband at the airport, held him close, kissed him goodbye. Then, girls in the back, I turned and headed west, or north, or sometimes south, to home. The sun was coming up and from the flat earth of Greenville I spotted the soft rise of the Blue Ridge mountains, peaking up like the bounty of mother earth, who was never told she should be ashamed. Home, I thought, and began to cry. All those years at the feet of towering giants and then, another range starts calling me home. I skipped the taxing curves of Cedar mountain for another road, a different route. There are simply more directions here than there are in Colorado. We passed the Look Homeward, Angel cemetery, but of course you see the inherent issue. I thought how I was the opposite of Bob Dylan, the antipole to a rolling stone. I do not lack direction home. Rather, my paths are many.

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.

What is Left The Daughter

Last night I saw this picture of my daughter, Ayla, almost eight years old, and I thought, for all the worrying our society does about raising strong girls, the truth is that girls are born strong and all we have to do is not mess it up.  Then this morning Ayla woke with black charged thunderclouds around her shoulders, probably because I put her to bed last night with them, having reached some sort of a breaking point, my nerves all red and raw and glowing and after she lingered far too long in the bath, in the brushing of the teeth and the homework and the picking up her toys, I finally snapped "forget it, forget it, just go to bed". I told her I loved her and tucked her in, but today she rose from her bed stomping and shouting and near tears. So last night I'd planned to write a post full of optimism, soothed by the knowledge that this is my daughter: coltish and charismatic and born with an intrinsic understanding of how to balance her beauty with her strength, her supermodel pose in soccer cleats, a tiny Tavi who bosses around the boys. She knows how to balance them because they are both hers, she was born with them, she has claim to them each and she knows how to wield both and all I have to do is not mess it up. Then this morning happened, these storm clouds that might be my daughter's dominant trait and I worry about where they came from. Were they bestowed to her by fairies, did she inherit them through my blood, did I give them to her in her early years, a bushel of rotten apples, milk laced through with arsenic? Was it something I did? Is their any horror like realizing you have somehow passed the worst of yourself to your own tiny child? I don't know what to do about them, I only know they are the single most troubling element in my life and I would give anything to take them away from her, except it seems like the one thing that might ease my daughter's troubled spirit is the one thing I can't give. I am not a fairy godmother, I cannot give, nor be, perfection. But having inherited genetic tendencies toward depression myself, I know that if you let it, your pain will teach you to follow the sun. May she never forget how to wield, may she never lose her sovereignty over herself, may she learn, like the wanderers, the orphans turned heros, may she remember the myths, when her spirits feel gnarled and broken like tree limbs, may she turn them back skyward and follow the sun.

The Mermaid and The Lion

I've had the luck over the last few months to meet some incredible people through blogging. Two of those people I want to talk about today are Elizabeth at a moon, worn as if it had been a shell,  and Eric at Pressure Support. Elizabeth and Eric both keep wonderful blogs and both happen to be parenting children with special needs. Elizabeth is mother to the ethereal and dreamy Sophie. She chronicles her life in Los Angeles with Sophie, her husband, and her two dreamy-in-the-other-sense sons, writing about the everyday with wry wit and insight, and the hard stuff with breath-taking poetry. She also posts lovely pictures of Los Angeles which make me sigh and think some day, city by the sea.

Eric is father to the sweet and stalwart Liam. I'm newer to Eric's blog, but he writes about his family's life in Rhode Island with passion, clarity and honesty that is approachable and refreshing. He and his wife are warriors for their son. Reading their stories of confronting the challenges their children face has humbled me many times over.

Elizabeth recently created this video using the input of many other people doing "extreme parenting", as she appropriately calls it. Watch the video, which is stunning and gorgeous, and then please check out their blogs. Not just because they give voice to a group of people we don't hear enough from, and not just because they are parents to children with special needs, but because they are writing about the challenges of their lives with incredible beauty and grace.

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."