Thunder Road

Today I posted on twitter that my life is very full and very fast right now, but I wanted to come here and say it because all of you, my blogging community, mean so much to me and I'm sorry I have not been around to your internet homes as much as I'd like. I never feel it's necessary for other bloggers to say this, but now I feel driven to say it myself. I am all swept up in the strong current and, for once, am going with the flow.

So.

Today is my birthday. It has fallen into the middle of a dizzyingly busy but very good week. I am excited to tell you about it, but for now I am just going to post a video of Springsteen singing Thunder Road. Because this year was the year I fell in love with Springsteen, and because life at this moment is a rush, an exhilarating ride down a country road with the top down, windblown and sweet-scented, headed towards the sun.




Now I'm gonna go curl my hair and head out for margaritas with some real cute honeys.

Love love.

Happy Anniversary Dear Birthday Memorial Squirrel

It's a big weekend here in Brevard. The weekend of the annual White Squirrel Fest, and the one year to-the-day anniversary of when we first visited North Carolina to see if we wanted to live here. On top of that, today was also Noah's birthday and tomorrow is the last day of school. Noah's family gave him a super new smoker for his birthday and we've spent the last two days smoking meat and drinking beer and sitting in the backyard. We managed to walk downtown to the music festival, where we ate shaved ice and the kids jumped in a castle and the musicians did their bluegrass thing on stage while the sun gave up its ghost to the mountains behind them. Noah did spend most of the day Saturday in the emergency room getting 23 stitches plus 3 or 6 inside (he can't remember) for a laceration on the bottom of his chin suffered when his face met the pavement Friday night. The girls are off the walls, the teachers are surrendered, we parents are wary of the wide stretches of time ahead. My job has gone down to part-time and I found myself again, and can consider myself something besides a worker bee once more. Today while the girls were in school, we sat on couches in the cold hush of a movie theater and watched the new Star Trek movie, sipping beers in celebration of my husband's birthday and my sexism meter only went off a little bit. The lady at the ticket and concessions counter handed me back the two twenties that I'd used to pay her plus the ten dollars change and I did the honest thing and sorted it out. What it says about me that I sort of wish I hadn't, I don't know. This week I will work two days, rest two days, and spend one day in the woods with some friends and their children. If I know my friends, someone will backpack a thermos of sweet tea vodka into our beach beneath the trees, the sandy southern shoals, and we will watch our children splash in the amber river, their hands grabbing for fairies and fish. Balance is restored. If I could ever bother to remember anything, I'd know it will always go this way. Forever and ever, amen.
\

 (One year ago)

This weekend:

I Will Trade My Bears For Gold

It is the evening after my second day at my new job, my 9 to 5 gig at the library, and I am exhausted in a way I did not know it was possible to be. It has jarred me roughly, this switch of life, and I am in tatters after the full eight hours on my feet, wearing my social face. When I drive home from work I cry because I'm too tired to take care of my daughters and I want to take care of them. After three hours of socialization my eyes glaze over and I can't understand anything anyone says and find it difficult even to make eye contact. Eight hours leaves me collapsed in my bed in the darkness. Twice last week I dreamed of bears.

It is humid here tonight and the air smells like vacation. My feet and legs and brain feel the farthest from vacation I have ever felt, but as I drive home from Target where I had to go to buy the dreaded khaki pants and trainers, work attire, it feels and smells just like the time I went to Florida. My best friend and I flew to the gulf coast for a concert, and after spending the day camping out at the gates to get front row seats, and a few hours screaming our hearts out, we ended up in some joint that memory has left hazy around all the edges. The only clear detail is that I was served the very best cheeseburger I'd ever had, and that we were young women and two young men approached us and we joined them for a night of revelry. We needed a ride back to our motel room and they drove us in their truck, three of us in the back of the flat bed with the aqua-scented, the maybe coconut scented breeze in our hair and that song by Nelly that was big that year playing on the radio. A song that was wistful, that knew it was young. We drove to the liquor store and back to our motel and as the night wore on, a strange thing happened. My best friend was beautiful in an exotic way, a way I could never be, with Mexican chocolate eyes and silky sheets of black hair and cinnamon skin. She was also model-thin, and for years I'd played the shadow to her allure, I had never been the one that was beautiful. But as this night wore on, this night in Florida by the sea, it became clear to us that for the first time in our young lives the men were more attracted to me. It baffled us both. When the time came for such things--not for making love, I did not go so far as that, but the time for making pairs--I was paired off with the  better catch of the two, and I remember catching my friend's eye across the room, both of us in wonder. The world was upside down. I have a picture of me taken that night, somewhere. I'm wearing a white halter top and I am smiling with a confidence I rarely catch on myself in pictures. We were young and in Florida and these boys were kind and I was beautiful and when someone said skinny dip--maybe it was me--and we ran out to the motel pool and climbed the gate that was locked around it, my friend hugged her hands to her chest but I left my bikini top and bottom on the concrete and I jumped full in. We were not yet 21.


I remembered all this as I drove home from buying the damn khaki pants, too tired to even be moved by "Thunder Road". But a woman at my new job has had a dream of me. I waited for her to say bears, but no. She said, you were swathed in gold. A gold, diaphanous dress that was luminous, drenched in light, that flared like a mermaid's tale and on your head was a crown of gold filaments, sparkling in the sun. I will take this for a good omen and anyway, it's a blessing for an exhausted mother of two to drive home in the evening and remember that time in Florida when the air smelled like coconut and her body sliced the water like an innocent and torsional mermaid, a Melusine, a thing that changes shape and is free of shame in her unswathed skin, as if the story of Eve had never been told.

In Which My Husband Is Sweet Unto Me

(with clarification*)


A legend of us is that on one of our first dates, Noah and I were playing cards with some friends at a hipster coffee house in Lodo and at one point Noah looked at me and said "I like my coffee like I like my women: bitter and strong".  Now, folks were so afraid of me in those days that chairs pushed back from the table and the music screeched off and somebody may have broken a bottle over a bar for an impromptu shank, I don't know.

I am happy to have been upgraded to "sexy and strong".

This is some marketing material for Asheville Beer Week and Oskar Blues Tap Takeover at Walk with New Belgium. Anything look familiar?

Vesuvius Golden Ale has been aging in that chardonnay barrel for over a year. Without my knowledge. It's a specialty offering, so it won't be canned, just on tap in Asheville.When I texted Noah that I was surprised they let him name it that, he texted back "Bitch please. I do what I want."

I am pretty excited about this.

Now I have to go clean my house because my book club is coming over tonight to discuss my very own book. The one by me that I'm going to self-publish (but haven't yet)*. It's a big day here. Here's a hint about this book of mine: someone compared it to Tarantino (sorry, Elizabeth) and for themed snacks, I'm serving angel food cake. Angel food cake and Tarantino, what? Could there be a more perfect marriage?

Happy Monday.

School Dress Codes and Dirty Feminine Flesh

One of the most feminist things I've ever done may have been allowing my daughters to walk shirtless through a nature park. It was about two years ago, to the best of my memory, which will have made them 4 and 6, or 5 and 7. We were walking around a giant man-made lake in the hot summer sun. This is Colorado sun we're talking about here. In Colorado, you are very close to the sun. We were overdressed in jeans and when Noah took off his shirt, the girls both heaved sighs of relief and copied him, whisking off their tops and baring the flesh of their torsos to whatever cooling breeze might come.

I didn't think much about it until we encountered a few other scattered walkers. Then I looked at my six or seven-year-old, a first or second grader, shirtless, and wondered. If we would get stares or even comments. But we didn't. People either smiled or ignored us, passing by. Renewed by the sun and wind on their skin, the girls stopped dragging their heels. They hurried along, kicking at rocks and amassing pocketfulls of acorns and leaves, and eventually we returned to the car, hot and sweaty, and drove them, shirtless, home.

Twice this week I have been told through institutions--the school and the summer care program--that days are approaching when swim suits will be needed. These situations call for distincly different limits for boys and girls. Boys are told to wear swim trunks. Girls are told to wear one piece bathing suits or tank-inis. However, if a girl wishes to wear a bikini--a five or six or seven or eight or nine-year-old girl--she must wear a t-shirt. To cover her body.

So boys are allowed to show their flesh. The entirety of their torsos: shoulders, pecs, nipples, bellies, belly buttons, upper backs, lower backs, all of it. Girls, customarily, don't even need to be told to cover their nipples--of course they will. (Whether I believe they should have to or not). But a girl is not allowed to show this arbitrary strip of flesh from the top of the rib cage to the bottom. This is the area bared by a bikini, this is what they require my daughters to cover.

They must cover it because it isn't considered "modest". It isn't considered to be "modest" because male students and teachers might find it "distracting".

I'm not going to get radical on you and suggest women and girls start going topless. Even though my mom has told me that, as a child, she frequently ran shirtless in the summer. Even though in Asheville, 45 miles away, men are free to bare nipples but a woman who does so faces jail time. And I'm not going to entertain the idea that these rules are for girls own protection. They are not. They are for protection of the male sex-drive, an excuse for boys and men to never have to learn to respect the female body and not, as the above poster says, to over-sexualize it. 

I could write this essay about how troublesome it is that men have been taught so little respect for the female body that even a child's female body is considered somehow sexual, when the truth is a girl's chest is no more inherently sexual than a boy's, and a woman's chest is only sexual because western men have decided it so. I could write about how, with this rule and rules like it, we once again make girls and women responsible for male sexuality. Our culture tends to look down on the burqas of Arabic cultures and consider our school dress codes a different matter entirely. But rules like these are no different from burqas by their intention, only by degree. In Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis", her memoir about growing up in Iran, there is a scene in which she stands up and demands a male teacher explain to her why women must cover their bodies simply because men have decided they are arousing. I could make that same argument at my PTO meeting today, it would make every bit as much sense. It would be just as applicable, and just as relevant, as an argument made by a woman in the 1980's, in Iran.

Imagine if I asked your sons, your brothers and husbands, to cover their legs because I found them sexually arousing and distracting.

My daughters have been aware from a very young age that our society has severe limits on what is acceptable from a female body. (I realized this when my three-year-old Ayla asked me if her legs were "skinny like a pretty girl's") They have told me about a girl at their school who is casually referred to as "Fat Kylie". (There are no boys burdened with a "Fat" before their names, though there are certainly overweight boys) They are growing up in a world that assaults their bodies and their feelings about their bodies with persistent, overwhelming regularity. Here, from their school administrators, they recieve yet another lesson. The lesson that male flesh is free in a way theirs is not. Their body, like their voices, is dangerous and must be stifled. The lesson that there is something inherently wrong with and shameful about their feminine flesh--if there wasn't, why the need to cover it up? It is a subtle message, but clear. Your bodies must be covered because they make men lustful.

Lust is bad.

Your bodies make men be bad.

Your bodies are bad.

Mile 140,021

Last night Ayla came to me with tears in her eyes to ask about time and space and the origins of the universe and also, is Santa Claus real? I was sipping a cocktail in the dark and waiting for something to start. I was waiting for a tv show to start in the dark when Ayla came brimming with questions and tears in her eyes that she was trying to hide from me.

I know this is made in a factory, she said, picking up a throw pillow. But see how it's stitched together here and like, someone must have done that. I know these books are made from trees but I don't know where did the first tree came from and all the ones after that and everything is like, made by someone but I don't know where they came from. Some people said that apes turned into humans but I don't know how that's true. And is Santa Claus real, or is he like, real like the Easter bunny? I'm not crying, my eyes just water when I yawn.

(She was trying so hard not to cry, she was smiling through these tears).

Weeks ago, Indy came home from school in one of her moods where she stomps around the house and says things very loudly and with unpredictable emphasis. Usually nonsense things like "WHY are the TORTILLAS in this CUPBOARD?" or "WHERE did my DOLLY put her SHOES?" But this time she came home in a mood and said to me, in a steely way like someone out of True Grit: "Ayla and I found Easter candy wrappers in your closet and we now we KNOW the Easter bunny is you and I DON'T believe in Santa anymore." Her air was of accusation and hard truths, and I stood in the kitchen at three in the afternoon nursing cold coffee and a broken heart. If I could do it again, I would never tell my children these fanciful lies in the first place, but I have, and so here we are. Sunday night after bedtime and Ayla is asking about God and Santa with tears in her eyes and I can't tell if she's crying because Santa might not be real, or beacuse she knows I have lied an am lying to her right now. I raised my cocktail to my lips to buy myself time, to try to find a way to save both our lives.

140,021. Those are the miles on my car today as I drive out of the leafy birth canal of Pisgah forest, the trees a thick canopy, a semi-dark passage bearing me into the mysteries of life and light. The sun has returned after ten days of rain and the trees are green like Crayola. My husband has just asked why I want to move to Los Angeles/Paris/Taos and I have heard stupid reasons fall from my mouth like betraying stones and I have understood them, at last, for a fanciful dream; the kind of fancy I have entertained long past the time when it's seemly. Nevermind, I think. Nevermind. I have driven this red van across Monarch Pass in the snow hoping not to slip and plummet to our icy deaths, along Trail Ridge Road, backbone of the earth, where I saw cars crawling a thin blue line between mountain and sky and knew I was headed to that narrow road at the very crest of the world and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I have sped through the red deserts of Utah and the silver deserts of Nevada, seen Joshua tree at dawn and finally stood in the pacific ocean on a gray morning after Christmas, when the mimosas have been drunk and the champagne is gone. And then one day I got in this van and drove it east, through farmland and plains, crossing rivers wider than mountain valleys to the land where I am now, this earth that is wet and spongy and misty like any unknown feminine place we pass through on our way toward our life.

I don't believe in signs and portents. I might gamble with my life on prayer and instinct, but I wouldn't bet a dime. I don't know what to tell a child about the origins of the universe other than that I just don't know myself, and nobody does, even those who will tell you they do. Imagine yourself by the ocean, under gunmetal light and restless palms. You have experienced the isolation and vast majestic landscapes of the west. You have been wrapped in leaf-shook arms and cradled by the gentle curving comforts of the south. Tell yourself you have been guided, if it helps you sleep. You have tasted these pleasures, each distinct and in their time. Tell yourself that they have touched you in some deep place and that surely they must have worked magic on the rushing river of your soul, magic that is beneficial and will aid you on your way. Even if you lacked the wisdom to see it at the time.

(I took Ayla by the hand. I put her back to sleep)

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.