blueperiod.

View From a Coffeeshop Window

I just realized that heap of pale orange fabric is really a small pumpkin graveyard. Three sun-faded, deflated, carcasses—feeding a patch of grass, overshadowed by a hill of melting snow.

back to the future (or "slow-living does not necessarily mandate dish-pan hands")

We got a dishwasher. Adam found a "good as new" portable machine that will roll up to our sink, wash our dishes, then roll back to a corner of the room and imitate a counter work-surface. We're all pretty excited around here. It's like we've traveled to the future.

After almost two years I'm pretty over some of the charm of this old row-house which once doubled as a shoe store. The glass doorknobs stick, the tiny closets are, well, tiny, and the old floorboards have gaps that capture crumbs and reveal the light from the cellar below. Still, I'm working on staying put—that's a tough one for me. The restlessness sets in right around the two-year mark. So, Adam bought a dishwasher. (Not so much to help me. The "dishwasher discussion" seemed to only arise on the nights he washed the dishes.)

Sol is helping him set it up right now. There is so much exuberant chatter about who will do what jobs—"I'll empty the silverware!" "My job will be loading the cups!"—that you'd think we got a new toy. Let's see how long that lasts.

thirty-what?

Yes, that's right, I'm thirty-five today. Hard to believe, isn't it? It seems like just yesterday that thirty-five felt really old and way off in the distance. Oh wait, that was yesterday. Today, I like thirty-five. It feels solid. It's been around the block a few times and knows what's what. It's done messing around. In fact, I'm liking thirty-five so much that I plan to hang out here for the next couple of years.

Birthday plans? First, Luna, Sol, and I are off to ice skating lessons. (That has been a serious trip.) Then, lunch out with my beautiful family, husband included. We'll walk around the city, maybe take the bikes out on the path by the river. Later, there will be cake—that I didn't bake—with more beautiful people whom I love. And to finish it off, I'll pound away at my keyboard for a while, getting those words out. (That is not a clever euphemism, by the way.) I'm totally making it to 50,000 this year.

What a good day.

national novel writing month (because a year is just too much time)

Alright. It's on. I'm officially signed up for crazy-making fun through the month of November. That's right, it's NANOWRIMO time again. This will be year four for me; possibly the year I make it to 50,000 words. I'm not certain why I think it's a good idea to try to write a 175-page novel in thirty days, but I'm doing it anyway. I turn thirty-five next week. I've decided to think less.

Scrivener or Ulysses? I've never used any word processor other than Pages or Word. Now, I have notes on paper scraps, in spiral notebooks, paragraphs cut and pasted into empty files, and can appreciate having it all organized in one place. Especially considering Luna's habit of covering every piece of paper she finds with her artwork.

I'm also hoping some changes to my writing habits will help unstick my stuck. Of course, there won't be time for writer's block in November.

costume planning

“Have you thought about your Halloween costume?” I ask Sol.

He shrugs. “Not really.”

“You should decide. Halloween’s soon,” Luna echoes my thoughts. She sits on the floor cutting triangles—destined to be Siberian Husky ears—out of black felt. “Maybe you could be what you were last year,” she says.

“No,” Sol says. “That would be boring.”

Last year he was an unnamed hero in a chainmail shirt and green tunic, with a sword strapped to his back. He claimed he was not Link from The Legend of Zelda and not Aragorn from the The Lord of the Rings, though he regularly pretended to be both of these characters.

~~~~~~~~~~

The requisite trick-or-treat banter was a bit tedious for the first few houses. The candy-givers did their best to puzzle out his costume. “Robin Hood? No. A knight? No. A Prince? No....”

The candy-taker stood there staring, letting them go on guessing with no apparent intention to clarify the issue. It wasn’t done in a “You’re an idiot, and I won’t dignify your stupidity with a response” kind of way. It was more like “I’m not exactly sure how to answer that question, so I just won’t say anything.”

At one point we took him aside and suggested he consider a backstory for his character, or even a name, just so he could politely put an end to people’s guessing. He considered this a moment, then shrugged and continued on, his younger sister, an adorable, blatantly obvious pink pig, beside him.

A few houses later we were met by an elderly couple beaming with the glow of vicarious Halloween fun. Or maybe it was the glow of one too many snack-size chocolate bars.

“And what is this? I see a cute little pig, and...let’s see...Robin Hood?”

Sol held his bag out in front of him. “I’m a soldier who’s left the Queen’s army and gone off on his own to be a ranger.”

Stunned silence all around. Confused looks exchanged.

“Well, how about that?” the man finally said. “A soldier. Here’s some candy for you.”

Sol started to correct the man but was pushed aside by a ninja, a princess, and a firefighter. “Thanks,” he said, and moved on to the next house.

~~~~~~~

Luna hands me the black triangles. “Maybe you could be a Bionicle,” she says.

“How could I?” Sol asks. “I’d have to drill holes all over my body.”

“Yeah,” she concurrs.

“Do I have to dress up?” Sol asks.

“If you want to go trick-or-treating you do.” I say. I survey an old gray t-shirt.

“Why?” he asks.

“Because it’s a give and take—an exchange,” I say, cutting away the extra fabric. “You dress-up; strangers give you candy.”

“Then I’ll go like this,” he says, smiling. “I’ll say, I’m just another kid, consuming resources and using technology, who will eventually destroy the planet for all future generations.”

I look at him, and oddly enough, in jeans and a navy blue sweatshirt, holding a plastic bio-mechanical figure newly won on e-bay, he looks as much in costume as he ever has.

things i didn't want to hear today

"Mama, what's for breakfast?"

"My armpits have kind of an odor. I'm starting to smell like Mama."

"Mama, what's for lunch?"

"Actually, Mama, I just remembered I don't like zucchini."

"Mama, why is the tube of toothpaste in the toilet?"

"Mama, what's for dinner?"

the last thing he said to me

When I was seventeen years old I killed my father without a second thought. The little girl I was babysitting asked me where my father was, and rather than go into the whole story about how my parents were separated, and in the past five years I had only seen my father a handful of times, I said, "He's dead."

At the time it was easier to just be done with him; no possibility of complicated intrusions. Now, I'd happily embrace such complexities if it were possible to resuscitate him with an off-hand comment. "Oh, my father? He lives in Florida; fishes all day, dances all night."

The truth was that he lived four hundred miles away and thought of me probably as often as I thought of him. I spent my adolescence learning how to live without him; erasing him from my life. I forgot about the way light danced in his eyes when he smiled. I forgot about how he liked to sing old songs like, “Chances Are,” and “Blue Moon.” I forgot about how when he fried onions and green peppers, the smell reached into every corner of the house and made me feel safe and loved. I forgot all of these things until one day, years later, my mother called to say, “Your father is in the hospital. He has cancer.”

I was twenty then, and in the middle of the worst summer of my life. I was working two jobs and still broke. I was stranded in the middle of nowhere without a car. I was struggling to finish coursework that was months overdue. And to top it all off, I was recovering from a mess I’d made with this guy, who, in hindsight, was so much like my father that it scares me now to think about it.

I felt like I’d already died a little bit that summer, but for some reason I dropped everything—at a time when I was desperately trying to hold on— and flew to the side of a dying man; a man I’d already killed in my memory. After all that time it was the threat of losing him for good that reminded me he was still there. If my mother had said, “Your father is frying onions and peppers. He misses you,” would I have gone?

time

One afternoon Luna tells me, "When I'm a mama, I won't ever make my children wait. I'll come right when they call me. I'll stop using my computer or washing the dishes and play as soon as they ask." She speaks plainly, without a hint of accusation in her voice.

Good luck with that, I think to myself. I say, "Your children will be very lucky," and try not to take her comment personally. It isn't really a comment as much as a statement, anyhow. And five is a little young for the nuances of passive-aggressiveness, no?

I do think about how often I put them off. How frequently the later that I promised never actually comes. Some days are so full of doing for them that there isn't time left for being with them. Time. How can something so irrelevant have such prominence in our lives?

"When will it be soon?" Luna asks me. "Is it later yet?" She counts to ten when I tell her, ten minutes. Time makes little sense to her. Time makes little sense to me and I've spent most of my life hyper-aware of it—so focused on its comings and goings; its absence, its presence. I've had too much and and still not enough of something I can't even explain; something that barely exists.

For a long time I honestly believed that time was speeding up as I grew older. I could not explain how this was possible but I knew it to be true. I thought it must be the same phenomena that made a return trip significantly shorter than the journey out. Once when I was twenty, riding in a car on my way to a babysitting job, I made an off-hand remark to my charge's father about  time accelerating. He was a psychologist for whom English was a second or third language, and I was intimidated by even casual conversation with him.

"Ah," he said, suddenly animated. "But time is not changing; only your perception of it." He then happily went into a lecture that took us all the way home. Unfortunately, I never I got clear instructions on what to do with this information. Just knowing that it's all in my head hasn't helped me much.

What I'd really like to know is how to slip back into that mind that doesn't bother differentiating between seconds and minutes. A mind that has little use for soon or later. Maybe, if I pay attention, Luna can help me remember. Maybe, if she's lucky, she won't forget.

ten years lucky

I'm not a gambling woman. In fact, I'm somewhat the opposite, and would prefer not to act until I have either complete assurance of a positive outcome, or have sufficiently prepared myself for the inevitable failure. Despite this fact, one day I got married. That was one day ten years ago; a beautiful day by the lake—perfect—even though the ceremony started an hour late because his father's car broke down on the way to get the cake, and everyone forgot all about the dancing, and we fell asleep exhausted by the end, too tired to consummate the thing. Wedding night consummation or no, we are still here.

Ten years. That's nothing to sneeze at, especially considering that neither of our parents' marriages lasted that long. We have commitment issues in our genes. However, we have somehow managed to not only stay together but build a life together. In those ten years we made babies and lost family. We moved out, moved back, moved up, and moved away. We've grown our own food and grown ourselves up. We've changed, and changed, and changed.

I look back on our wedding photos and fail to fully recognize those people. I am amazed at their audacity to promise each other they'd always stay together, always love one another that way. How could they promise to love, so specifically, people they did not yet know? How could they know enough to trust the people they were to become?

My brother-in-law said that when he reported the news of our marriage to our favorite high school teacher, she said something to the effect of, "Oh no." This was a woman who knew my husband and I fairly well, before we ever dated. I often wondered what she knew about each of us that could elicit such a response. Was it possible that we were even more screwed up than we knew? Or maybe it was the prospect of our combined dysfunction that worried her. I can see that.

Still, somehow, here we are, ten years happily married. So what's the trick? It isn't even until I stop to be impressed by the accomplishment of getting here that I think there might be some X-factor that makes it all possible. Maybe it is a predetermined, destiny type thing. Maybe we are soul-mates playing this thing out in variations across countless lifetimes. Maybe we just love each other enough.

Seriously? All you need is love? Sure... and respect, good communication, good sex, shared interests, good communication, laughter, and more that I haven't figured out yet. Maybe we recognize how good we are for one another, and our staying power has more to do with our deeply selfish nature than anything else. Would that be any better or worse than the other possibilities?

Last night, while we walked home in the dark, holding hands, Adam said, "We're lucky. We really are lucky." I hadn't thought of it that way before. I enjoyed imagining that our "successful" marriage was the result of our hard-work or a small piece to some larger plan. But maybe he's right. Maybe it all comes down to luck.

Protest Knitting

I just found out about this opportunity to take part in an act of radical knitting. CODEPINK's Mother's Day vigil for this year includes quilting a cozy for the fence in front of the White House. Little pink and green knitted/crocheted squares pieced together to spell out, "We will not raise our children to kill another mother’s child."

Wish I'd known about this yesterday, and I could have spent the afternoon at our homeschooler's parkday knitting pink squares instead of that same hat I've been working on since November. That's right, the hat that was supposed to be Adam's Christmas present, then birthday present, and finally, anniversary present. Now that I've got some activist knitting to do, looks like we're back to Christmas.