wednesday stew—a random collection of unrelated miscellany

It is not nice to foist an old, out-of-tune, mostly-broken upright piano on anyone. I know because it happened to me and now we have to deconstruct it, which is neither easy nor fun. The last family who owned our house left behind an old, out-of-tune, mostly-broken upright piano which we have sort of just lived around but now must dismantle because no one—I mean, NO ONE—wants it and we can’t just have it here being all ugly, old, out-of-tune and mostly-broken when we want to have a nice open house so we can move. I admit, the deconstruction process has been a little fun and actually pretty interesting. (But I must still urge you not to foist an old, out-of-tune, mostly-broken upright piano on anyone because in spite of the up-sides, it’s still not very nice. Unless you don’t care about being nice in which case carry on with the assurance that it is indeed not a very nice thing to do.) But look how cool its innards are?

This is the built-in cabinet in my dining room. Until a few days ago, it had very ugly glowing gold knobs that I totally despised. Also, right through the glass all the mess I attempt to contain inside the cabinet was visible. (That’s exactly how glass works, in case science eludes you as it does me.) Why didn’t I make it pretty like this 5 years ago when we moved in? I have no idea. The next person will probably think this is ugly and despise it for years until she is ready to move and then changes it to exactly the way she likes.

This is what another 20 inches of snow looks like on top of about 20 other inches of snow that was already there.

Seriously? Enough already.

That’s all.

We went on a getaway this past weekend to a hotel with a (ridiculously over-chlorinated) pool. The kids went to bed too late, got overstimulated in general, slept too little which meant I also slept too little. It was a ton of work planning, packing, unpacking, repacking, unpacking. And I hardly relaxed at all. Now that we’re home, this is what I have to contend with. Yeah—that is all dirty.

(Do I have a bad attitude or what?)

Pocket.com is cool. Most likely someone told you this ages ago, but I am also telling you now! You can save web pages you want to read for when you actually have time to read them. You can organize and archive them, choose your favorites or simply delete the ones that are ehhh. What will probably happen is that you will stockpile a ton of stuff you will never have time to read, but at least you’ll know where it all is. (That’s my plan.)

And, lastly—THIS! Yes it is a laundry basket hung with those removable adhesive strips and hooks. It is where the dirty dish cloths and towels, rags, cloth napkins and burned potholders gather together for washing. I used to have a square container that sat itself on the top stair and often got accidentally kicked down into the basement which always totally pissed me off. Also it was very small and then a giant pile would grow which then got accidentally kicked down into the basement. Which totally pissed me off. This green basket once held all the girls’ stuffed animals until I repurposed a nice old chest which is now a nice toy chest. Anyhow, this is awesome, if I do say so myself. When full, I simply remove it from the wall and carry it down to the washer. Steve doesn’t like it because he says he keeps bumping into it. I told him to stop doing that and then he would be able to appreciate its greatness. I like to solve problems.

Happy Wednesday!

"A Cool Dry Place"—part 3

read part 1read part 2

All week she thinks about the necklace.

When she lies in bed before falling asleep, she imagines wearing it to the game and what the girls would say and how surprised they’d be. And jealous. She crafts spectacular scenarios in which she wears the necklace. In class, at basketball games and the ice cream parlor after, on field trips to places the school would never actually go. Places that have no educational or Catholic value, but lend themselves perfectly to daydreams.

The days pass. She thinks of the necklace day after day. She is afraid to ask her mother if she can wear it. Not because she is afraid of her mother—because she is afraid of the answer, has an idea what it will be, and as long as she doesn’t ask, she can maintain the hope for it. When she finally musters the courage, of course the answer is no.

“But, Mom!”

“To a basketball game? Mandy.” Mom shakes her head. She is ironing her dress for work tomorrow.

“But I need to look extra nice.”

“You always look nice.” Why do parents say things like this? It is not even true. Mandy vows to never say things like this to her own kids someday.

“Mom, please!” There is a frantic quality to her voice.

Her mother places the iron down and looks at Mandy. “Mandy, I don’t know when I’d ever let you, or anyone else for that matter, borrow it. But certainly not for a CYO basketball game.” She returns to her ironing. “It’s special to me. And it was expensive.”

This is Thursday.

Mandy goes to her room, flops down onto her belly on her bed.

After a minute, Lara flops down beside her.

“She said no?” Lara asks.

“Yeah.” Mandy’s hands are under her chin. Lara lies there with her in silence until their Mom calls down the hall, “Girls, supper!”

At the game, neck bare—glaring—feeling as if she sits in a spotlight highlighting her embarrassment and the stupidity for her lie, which she will now have to lie over thickly with more lies, she prays the evening will go by quickly.

All of the girls to whom she does not want to talk are part of the cheering squad. They line up facing the court, white and navy kick-pleat skirts, black and white saddle shoes, snowy white sweaters, large SMS embroidered in navy blue over their budding breasts. They jump around in synch, they bark out matching words goading the boys to victory. Mandy thinks cheering itself is stupid, but still feels she is missing something sitting way up in the chipped bleachers with the other girls who are not on the squad and the boys who are not athletic.

The game is over and they all board the bus to go to Dot's, the ice cream place. There she will eat ice cream from a paper cup which will stick thickly inside her mouth and throat and she will wait endlessly for nine-thirty when her Mom will pick her up.

She needs only to get through his.

The lights in Dot's are bright white. Mandy stands in line and talks with the kids near her. The cheerleaders burst through the door, cheering for the basketball players who follow. They won the game. The girls break into one of their cheers. They laugh uproariously as if no one else in the place matters more than they do. (Which Mandy knows is exactly what they think.) The cheerleaders are loud, they smile largely, they seem to Mandy carefree and they fit in their bodies easily. The basketball players amble in behind them, some sheepish, some with arms upraised. The girls chant each boy's name. It is easy to tell who relishes it and who is embarrassed.

Mandy gets her ice cream and sits with some of the less popular girls. The nice girls. She avoids the popular girls, but they sit at a table close-by. She shrinks and thinks herself very small, but she is still there, still solid. They can see her. Of course. They sit with their big dishes of ice cream or paper cups of frappes. One or two drink diet soda. They don't make a big deal of it—they pretend it's normal, an everyday thing, for them to drink diet soda instead of eat ice cream. "I have to watch my figure. I'll get so fat." As if they're not making a big deal, Mandy thinks. As if no one knows they're making a big deal of something like that. Mandy sees right through it. Everyone plays along and some of the girls really buy it. Mandy plays along, too. What else can she do? But inside she thinks, you don’t fool me. None of them do. Nothing they do. But all she can do is think these things. At least she has that. This private knowledge—this safe space of her own thought.

But then one of them swoops in.

"Mandy." It is Nicole. She is the worst one of all. She eyes the other girls, a brief darting motion. Dart dart one girl two three girls four girls five back to Mandy.

Nicole eyes Mandy's collarbone showily. "Thought you were going to wear your new necklace."

Nicole sits at the corner of the overcrowded table. The table full all around with the right girls. Nicole sits, one leg crossed over the other, and wags her saddle shoe up and down—her folded-down white socks, her kick pleats fanned over her thigh almost touch her knee. She sips her diet soda and watches Mandy's face. The other girls watch, too.

"Um. My mom said it's too nice to wear out to just a basketball game."

"Oh," says Nicole. She turns to the other girls, ghost of a smirk on her mouth. Heads come together. One of them laughs loudly.

"Shhh," Nicole says, glances at Mandy quickly.

Mandy can't finish her ice cream.

Then it's nine-thirty and Mom is waiting outside.

Mandy pulls her coat close around her. It's absolutely freezing out. She gets into the warm car.

Her mother kisses her. "Did you have fun, honey?"

Mandy nods. "Uh-huh," she says.

***

it’s not an 80’s metal video, people—it’s a baptism

My new red sparkly shoes. They glitter like Dorothy's!

When did it happen that women’s dress shoes started being produced only with heels that topple out at 6 inches?

Seriously.

I attended a baptism this weekend, with the honor of being made godmother to my friend’s son. And I needed some freakin’ shoes to go with the pretty dress Steve gave me for Christmas. The dress is navy with white polka dots and totally adorable.

I simply wanted a basic black pump with a normal sized heel. 6” heels are not so much in order when you are in the moment of becoming a godmother. I’m neither a prude nor a particularly good Catholic, but when you’re in church, you gotta at least look like a godmother and not Tawny Kitaen in a Whitesnake video. (Yes, I did just watch every Whitesnake video available on youtube. Once you start, it’s hard to stop.) Also, I seriously doubt I could walk in those things without looking like a badly produced CGI character. Jar Jar Binks comes to mind.

I did find some cute red pumps and they looked even cuter than black would have. But they were the one pair of shoes I found that did not render me the tallest person in the room. Apparently I am grossly out of the loop on current fashion trends. If you could see what I normally wear—plain long-sleeve shirts, yoga pants and cardigan sweaters—you would most likely not be surprised.

Don’t my sparkly red shoes look pretty with the the socks I happen to have on today? You can’t tell, but I’m wearing a plain long-sleeve shirt, yoga pants and a cardigan sweater. But these shoes do dress things up. Think I’ll go roll around on the hood of the car.

Anyway, my kids had a stomach bug about a 6 weeks ago and then sort of a weird mini-nausea experience the week before last. Didn’t result in barf, just a barfish-feeling. Enough to entirely freak out one of my little girls. It’s been 10 days and she is still carrying around the barf bucket, to which she refers as “the frow-up bucket.” She keeps it close and insists on a towel in her bed at night. She is eating as much as ever—where this little 40 pound kid puts it, I do not know—and is clearly a-okay, yet the bucket persists. She is also suddenly preoccupied with the idea of death. The other night after all the bedtime stories and songs and hijinks and ensuing parental threats of what might befall if they didn’t just GO TO SLEEP, she called me up to inquire, “When am I gonna die?”

Seriously?

The ever-present bucket.

I recently read Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm by Thich Nhat Hanh. I am well-acquainted with fear myself, most often referred to as “worry” by us grown-ups. The book talked a lot about not fighting fear, but rather embracing it tenderly. When you rail against it, it only gains power. Thich Nhat Hanh—a Buddhist monk—also reminds us to be mindful and present. This is hard work—harder than almost anything, really. At least for me.

Right now, there is a black void of time sort of stretching out in front of me. A long stretch of the unknown. I can picture my life in July—by then we most likely will have moved and I can see us at the beach. Often. (We really like the beach.) But it’s only early March and we have this house to sell and my husband’s employment situation is in flux and therefore our income and I’m not exactly sure when we’ll move or even how I will get everything done that needs to get done in order to place the house on the market and so many things—big and little—are just entirely uncertain right now. It’s all very dark and I can’t even wedge a narrow beam of light in there to get a glimpse of what I might expect. Being present is difficult.

I heard about this thing called “Schrödinger's cat.” I am no physicist—but I watch reruns of The Big Bang Theory from time to time and they talked about Schrödinger's cat on an episode I watched the other day. In a nutshell—with my very shaky understanding of physics—Schrödinger's cat refers to a thought experiment in which you imagine a live cat in a closed box. Now, there is a vial of poison (or something like that) in the box with the cat and at some unknown point in time the poison will have been released, or not. So, until you open the box, you can presume that the cat is both alive and dead since you have no knowledge of whether or not the poison vial is intact or broken. (At least this is what I gleaned from Sheldon’s explanation.)

So, here’s what I think. Life is like Schrödinger's cat. Could be one thing, could be another. Sometimes there is darkness and sometimes there is light and you simply put one foot in front of the other, you breathe in the moment (thank you for the wisdom, Thich Nhat Hanh), you dream your dreams and you smile at your fear.

My little girl and I are going to make it—we’ll navigate our own black corridors. I’ll help her out, since that’s what mamas do, and we’ll travel with the bucket for as long as we must. We all need our talismans, our lucky charms, that which brings magic to our lives. Maybe I’ll wear my red sparkly shoes, dare to dream, and hope those dreams really do come true. (Click, click.)

Hey, so if you haven’t yet had a chance to read any of the short story I have been serializing, I would love it if you did and appreciate your opinion. Here’s what has published so far:

“A Cool Dry Place”—part 1 “A Cool Dry Place”—part 2

Many thanks to you for coming here!

"A Cool Dry Place"—part 2

read part 1 It is not winter Mandy dislikes. She doesn’t mind the cold. She actually prefers it to the feverish humidity of July and August. She likes the feel of the cold on her skin, the red nose, icy toes and fingers. Likes the scarves and hats and boots and snow. Likes to warm the backs of her legs at the wood stove her father keeps cranking hot.

It is winter. Mandy is twelve. Seventh grade.

“What’re you gonna ask for for Christmas?” Lara asks her.

The house is decked-out. They have boxes and boxes of Christmas stuff to decorate the tree, the walls, every surface, every room. Mom has the touch to pull it all together and it is so nice and homey.

They listen to Mom’s vinyl LPs—Perry Como and Andy Williams. The Carpenters. Every year, unpacking the decorations, they forget about much of it, so the things in the boxes feel like Christmas presents themselves.

“Oh! The crescent moon Santa!”

“I love that one.”

“Where did we get this one?” Mom says every year about one or another.

Now the lights twinkle on the tree as Mandy and Lara discuss their Christmas wishes. It is dark by four-thirty in the afternoon and they turn on the tree lights as soon as the sun drops below the horizon. Every day one of them says, “Can we turn on the tree, Mom?”

“When it’s dark,” she calls from wherever she is in the house.

“Is it dark now?”

A pause. “I guess it’s close enough.”

The girls have discussed many times what they each want for Christmas, but never tire of the conversation. So when Lara asks Mandy what she wants for Christmas, Mandy doesn’t acknowledge she has told Lara many times already, she simply answers.

“Well,” she says, “the new Barbie is nice, but maybe one of the dolls.” She means Cabbage Patch. They are the craze of this Christmas season.

“Yeah,” Lara breathes. “Me, too.”

Lara is in fifth grade. Most of the girls in her class are asking for the doll. Mandy knows what the girls in her class will be getting. Or at least she has an idea. (And it’s not a doll.) Things like sweaters, curling irons, records, the right jacket. She knows the girls would laugh about the doll. She even knows a doll is babyish. But she still wants to play with Barbies and baby dolls. She and Lara play every day after school, after homework. This is nothing she would ever tell the girls at school. She has learned the hard way to go along with them and keep her own secrets.

But she can’t help but want one of the dolls.

“Renee and Sherry know exactly which ones they want,” Lara says. The thing about the dolls is they are all different with their own unique names.

“They showed their mothers and everything. I bet their parents went back to the store and got them,” Lara says. “I don’t even care which one I get. I’d be happy with any one of them. They’re all so cute.”

“I know,” says Mandy. She wishes she could want this doll with the same abandon Lara does. The want sticks inside her—coats the inside of her chest and throat thickly. She wants to be excited and careless. But the want weighs on her.

Still, she requests the doll when their mother asks them what they want for Christmas.

They are in the car. It hasn’t been running long enough yet and coolish air pours from the vents. Yet it feels warmer than the frigid air outside. Christmas songs play on the radio. They’re on their way to the Mall to do some shopping. Mandy feels happy. She loves Christmastime.

“What do you want for Christmas?” says their mother.

“Cabbage Patch!” Lara says. “Cabbage Patch, Cabbage Patch, Cabbage Patch!” She tosses her head back. Mom watches her in the rearview mirror and laughs.

“Are you sure?” Mom asks.

Lara squeezes her eyes shut and turns her head back up at the ceiling. “Yes, yes, yes!” She smiles broadly. They all laugh.

When Mom turns to Mandy and asks, “What about you, honey?” Mandy hesitates. “Do you like the dolls, too?”

Mandy nods. “Yeah.” Some knotted thing sits in her stomach. “I do like them.” In the end, her desire for the doll eclipses the worry.

Too soon it is the first day back at school after Christmas vacation. The girls in Mandy’s class show off their presents in the schoolyard. The air is raw and stinging. Their breath puffs out in fluffy plumes around them. Nicole got a pink and navy jacket, the most popular kind. The one with the hood. The pink is a deep raspberry. It’s not warm enough to wear it, but she begged her mom. (This is something to which Mandy knows her own mother would never give in.)

“She said I’d have to wait ‘til Spring to wear it again. But isn’t it so cool?” Nicole says. Everyone agrees.

Tara got a real angora sweater, powder blue. “Shows off my you-know-whats. I’m totally wearing it to boys basketball on Friday night. Plus, I got some awesome jeans—designer. I think they were really expensive.” Her eyes widen, her voice drops.

Mandy listens, keeps her eyes slightly averted, her exclamations subdued—enough so they won’t notice, enough so they will. She blends. It is one of her cultivated skills. A necessity in her arsenal. Sometimes it works. Other times she forgets to use it. And sometimes it’s not enough.

Then it is her turn.

“So,” Nicole says, turning on Mandy. “Mandy, what did you get?”

A look passes between some of the girls, their smiles suppress giggles.

She is not prepared. This is shocking because she has been unprepared so many times before she’d think it impossible to find herself in this very position again.

“Um, some good stuff. Some clothes. A new sweater. It’s pretty.” Comes out in a great rush.

The eyes.

“But what was your big gift?” Tara says.

“I don’t know. I got lots of things.” She stops, her minding whirling. Then! “But I guess the necklace.” She feels triumphant. And relieved. And large yet light.

Nicole’s eyes narrow. Through Mandy’s coat, she eyes the top of Mandy's chest where a necklace would be. “What necklace? Show us.”

“Oh,” Mandy touches her collarbone with her mitten-covered hand. She is protected by her coat and scarf now, but knows she’ll have to take her winter stuff off as soon as the bell rings and they all line up, file inside, stand in the coat closet and hang their things on the designated hooks. The coat closet will smell of wet heated wool, hot air from the registers, bananas and lunch boxes from now and all the years past, the gloom and heaviness of a long new day. Mandy can smell it now, here. She can call the scent to mind at any time. Home in her own safe bed. She doesn’t like to recall it. Sometimes it comes on its own.

But right now she is still outside with her hand at her throat.

“It’s too nice to wear to school,” she says quickly.

“Can you wear it to the basketball game?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my mom. It’s really nice,” she says. “And really expensive,” she adds.

“I can’t wait to see it on Friday,” says Tara. She sneaks a look at Nicole. Not sneaky enough that Mandy misses it. (Of course not.) They walk away together, arms locked, heads close. They giggle. Mandy thinks it could be anything at which they laugh.

“What kind of necklace is it, Mandy?” Sara asks. She is one of the nice girls. But she’s fringe, like Mandy. Even more so than Mandy.

Mandy thinks. She remembers the one Dad gave Mom for their anniversary. It is a solid gold heart, the size of a quarter. Fat and gleaming.

“It’s a heart,” she says. “Solid gold.”

“It sounds pretty.”

“Thanks.” She feels a little badly lying to Sara who is always nice to her. “What did you get?”

She shrugs. “A few things. Nothing like the other girls got. Or you,” she says.

“Yeah, well, it’s nice and everything, but I’ll bet your stuff is nice, too,” says Mandy.

The bell rings.

It is Monday.

All week she thinks about the necklace.

who needs a proper day planner when there are perfectly good scraps of paper on the living room floor?

If I had a nickel for every organization system and notebook/folder planner I have pulled together in the last couple of years, I would be at least .60 cents richer. And while that is not an impressive amount of cash, and therefore fails to drive my point as effectively as I’d intended, it nevertheless represents quite a few attempts at creating an adequate organization system. Let’s say if I had a hundred thousand dollars for every organization system and notebook/folder planner I have pulled together in the last couple of years, I would be at least twelve hundred thousand dollars richer. (That could be wrong—I don’t do math. But, whatever it is, I think it comes out to a lot.) Now do you see what I mean? That sum makes things a lot more serious, doesn’t it?

But somehow, none of these organization systems ever stuck. I’ve tried day-runners (remember those?), small binders, big binders, We’Moon which is super-cool and divinely crunchy and I got it one year and looked at it twice, TeuxDeux which is a brilliant idea but I simply stopped using it for no decipherable reason, spiral notebooks, notebooks with perforated pages, little purse-sized calendars.

My most recent foray into the organized life was in the form of a pretty binder, some free life-organizing printables I found online and a weekly calendar I designed with the help of a Google docs template. Yeah. Didn’t stick. But it looked impressively nice.

But the thing is, I am not actually disorganized at all, because as it turns out I already have an effective organization system. It’s called mining the living room floor for useable scraps of paper.

Lists! As it turns out, I am all about lists. They work for me. Steve once asked me if my lists freaked me out—that seeing everything to do and think about in writing caused me stress. It does not. I am actually semi-psychotic without them. A legal pad (12 for $5 from Ocean State Job Lot), sticky notes and scraps of paper—detritus from the living room floor—upon which I write the pressing stuff to leave right on top of the pad. So I won’t forget. Backs of rejected kid artwork, torn construction paper—either works beautifully. I have daily lists and house to-do lists and books to read lists. I have lists of lists I need to list.

To complete my system, I printed out a simple 2013 doodle calendar from Creative Mamma (love her stuff) for keeping track of events and birthdays and plans. I stapled half a sheet of cardstock to the back of the legal pad creating a pocket to hold other all the other lists.

I think the trick is not any one thing—any perfect thing. You simply keep trying until you find that thing that works for you. It might be a cheap-o legal pad and some free printables. It might be right under your nose. Or your feet. Look down—you just never know.

Here’s the beautiful thing about a legal pad: rip off the top page and you have a fresh start every time. You gotta love the metaphors.

"A Cool Dry Place"—part 1

It is winter.

She wakes too late to shower. Someone forgot to set the alarm and the entire family oversleeps.

“Please!” she begs.

“We just don’t have time, honey,” Dad says. He holds his hands out to her—a kind of offering. His smooth smooth hands, skin softened by raw fat. The suet that rubs against his hands as he slices through flesh—carves steaks, fillets, grinds the tougher cuts into hamburger.

He tells her that he and Mom must get to work and Mandy and her sister, Lara, must be dropped off at school. Mandy requires neither his explanations—the details of which is she aware—nor his sympathy. She only wants a shower. Her mother doesn’t allow her to wash her hair every day. She insists daily shampoos will damage it. But Mandy’s hair is oily. Sleek and shiny. Almost pretty, on the days she shampoos. Flat from bed and greasy on the days she doesn’t. (The girls have made note of it, obliquely. But it is only a matter of time.)

This day, the day the alarm clock does not go off, is a shampoo day. But there is not enough time. It has been two days now since her hair was washed. She is panicked.

“But my hair is dirty, Mom!”

It is winter.

She is twelve. Seventh grade.

“Mandy, you look fine. It’ll be okay.” Her mother touches her shoulder gently.

She does not look fine, though. Mom is just saying that.

“You can wash it tonight,” her mother adds.

Tonight is another lifetime altogether.

Mandy dresses quickly. She jams a knit hat over her hair and dreads the unavoidable moment when she will have to remove it. She pictures her hair vividly dirty and matted. Some of the boys might laugh and say some stupid things she will almost be able to ignore, or at the least successfully pretend to brush off. But the girls, who might say nothing at all, will look at her sharply and shrewdly and efficiently, with cool nonchalance and cooler blue eyes or brown or some other color. And with no words at all, they will say more.

The entire school day she lightly runs her hand over her hair. She imagines it slippery and wet-looking. Dripping onto the collar of her white oxford shirt. Trips to the girls’ room prove it not quite as bad as her imagination conjures, but her thoughts continually slide back to the greasy image of herself. She thinks it and thinks it until it becomes her. Not the hair, not the oiliness but some bigger, more horrible thing. It overtakes her to the point that she forgets the day is about come to an end. She almost forgets that she is not the unnameable thing, heavy and slow and slunk down in the wooden chair with the desk part attached like a big flat arm. She almost forgets there will be other days, other moments.

Then the bell rings. Relief more like joy floods her.

She gathers her things. Shoves her hat on her head before she puts on her coat.

She moves quietly away out of the classroom, meets up with her sister in the schoolyard.

It is bitterly cold, like ice on teeth.

It is winter and Mandy is in seventh grade.

As she walks away from the school on her way home, she and Lara talk; they giggle; they belly laugh. Distance between her and the school lengthens. The space starts out thick and heavy, wide and dark, growing thin and transparent until enough has uncoiled and the space, now thin as spaghetti and light as organdy ribbon, turns to white smoke and is gone, absorbed into the blue of the sky.

There are times when she is heavy and times when she is light.

The day is cold and brittle. It hurts to smile. Yet they do. Bring forth the hot insides of mouth and tongue and exhale warmth where it needs to be.

***

Summer is light.

She wakes to the sound of the shade snapping against the frame of the window—pulled in and blown out by the cool morning breeze. The shade snaps this way only during summer. Mandy doesn’t open her eyes. The sheets and pillows smell of fresh air. During summer, they dry their clothes outside in the sun. The clothesline pulley is stuck into the house outside Mandy’s bedroom window—the line runs in a white loop to a tall wooden pole where the other pulley is secured. Both pulleys squeak crazily as the line is run towards or away from the window.

“I’ve got to get Daddy to spray those with WD-40,” Mom says. Mandy’s dad always gets those little jobs. Mom has plenty of her own—she teaches all year and is almost never still when she is home.

They drop clothespins to the ground sometimes as they hang clothes on the line. When enough have gathered beneath the window, sunk in the soft moss and the tender green of the grass, Mom calls to Mandy and Lara as they play outside.

From the window she calls out, “Girls! Can you get the clothespins, please?” They run to the window, stoop to pick up the clothespins and stand on tippy-toes to hand them up to her as she reaches down from the window. The girls gather them up in little bunches. The ones that fell first, weeks ago, are damp and weathered. They laugh as some fall again from Mom’s hands.

Summer is light.

Mandy nestles under the sweet grass-smelling sheets and with her eyes closed, listens to the shade snapping. Maybe right now she needs only to slide the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands slowly across the smooth sheets—the green and yellow flowers, sun-faded, washed many times, rubbed to thin softness.

It is summer after seventh grade. She is twelve but not for long. She turns thirteen at the end of the summer. Not that she’s in a hurry to be thirteen as the other girls are, whose favorite topics include: boys, teen magazines, periods, boobs, high school boys. To all of their talk she smiles enough to show interest, not enough to be called out.

But all of that is far away and now she can press her face into the softness and scent of the sheets.

The summer morning is a cool sweet-smelling hushed thing with its own weight pressing into the new day. She opens her eyes. As air pushes the shade away from the window, bright white sunlight erupts into the room, then, as quickly, rushes away like the ocean, as the shade is sucked back into the window frame.

Mandy listens and hears her sister talking with their Mom in the kitchen. She throws off the covers, tosses her thin tan legs over the side of the bed. Her feet touch the wood floor and slap lightly to her bedroom door, are silenced on the pile-carpet of the hallway.

It will be a sunny hot day—they will go to the beach.

And she steeps herself in the comfort of slipping on a day like a best-loved sweater. Soft, cottony, fat loopy weave, loved, unraveling. Some pretty, faded color.

This morning Mom has sliced some strawberries for the corn flakes. Sprinkled with sugar, floating in the creamy white.

***

For the following several Thursdays the story will be continued through the ending. Hope to see you back here for more!

how much is enough?

Steve and I spent the last 3 days stripping and refinishing floors, painting walls, cleaning out the garage, prepping molding for fresh paint. The kids were at my parents’ (thanks, Mom and Dad!) or we would have achieved exactly 2% of that stuff.

As I de-clutter my house in preparation for selling it, this pile of boxed stuff keeps growing higher and spreading wider along one wall of my basement. It is all the stuff that is too “personal” (framed photos and kids’ art) and clutter-some (most decorations) to keep out. And boxes and boxes of books. Oh, and random weirdness like binoculars and tiny camera tripods. It makes me wonder how much we need some of this stuff if we’re living happily without it. I do not mean the books and photos of my kids. I mean the tiny tripod. (Why do we have that?) It leaves me wondering what do we really need? Not want, like or possess “just in case”—need. I am thinking about sufficiency versus excess.

How much is enough?

I am a contributing blogger at Lifeables.com—I write on a variety of parenting topics from reclaiming the Green Hour to battling cabin fever, spending quality time with your kids to creating meaningful Thanksgivings and Christmases to taming the plethora of toys in your house. (I am much better behaved over there than I am here.) I write about all the things you can do with your kids to make their lives richer. However, I do not explicitly claim to accomplish all those things about which I write. I do my best.

Do you ever wonder if you’re really doing your best? I do.

I guess it might be more accurate to say that I wonder if I am doing enough. Because how much is enough?

I jokingly referred to myself as the “boring mom” to a friend today. We are kind of a homebody family—we stick close to the hacienda. We keep our activities simple and our schedule loose. I love the freedom we enjoy and that we sometimes stay in our jammies until bedtime. (Then we change into clean ones.) I love that we sometimes cuddle together on the couch for half the morning reading or creating together. That a big afternoon out is the woods or the playground or our own neighborhood. I believe in simplicity. My kids are happy. They are almost always busy with activities they choose themselves. I rarely hear the word “bored” from their mouths. But here is the plague of this homeschooling mom—while I firmly believe that there is no curriculum or list of activities that can possibly encompass all that there is to know, and there is no set amount of time or specific age by which to learn a particular skill, that allowing my kids the freedom to do the things they want to do each day is the best thing to encourage a love of learning, that play should be the biggest part of what they do right now, that my job is to answer their questions and find new materials to incite their curiosity and interest, I still can’t help but wonder—how much is enough?

And yet maybe simply asking that question is a start—is enough upon which to build. Maybe keeping it simple and authentic is enough. While I want more for my kids than what is merely sufficient, I want to be aware of what feels like excess.

It’s a delicate balancing act and there is no blueprint. You gotta do it from your heart and your gut. And you know what? I can do that. We can do that.

Oh, one last (unrelated to the current topic) thing: I said I was going to post my short story series on Fridays, but I changed my mind and it will be Thursdays. Someone told me that the best days to blog are Tuesdays and Thursdays and who am I to question the collective unconscious whims of the masses? That would be just plain crazy.

(And my unique crazy is far more interesting!)

who has the time to moisturize?

Who has the time to use hand cream? I would like to meet the lucky lady who does and learn her time-management secrets. I keep hand cream close-by, in eye-shot, so that I will remember to apply it to my flaking hands. But then every time I think I’d better moisturize (usually just after accidentally glimpsing my crispy skin) my very next thought is I don’t have time. I am not even making that up. Seriously.

In the interest of best-utilizing my time and providing you, my dearest readers, with fun stuff in which to bathe your mind, I thought I might serialize some of my short fiction. For the next bunch of Fridays I will post some of my long-ish short stories, a little at a time.

The first story I selected is from a story series I’ve been working on here and there for a few years. It’s loosely based on my childhood. But all events and characters are fictitious. I made them up. That’s what writers do. Those of you who know me might recognize some glimmers of other people you may also know, but I swear I made most of it up. You won’t find yourself no matter how hard you look. Except you. Yeah, YOU. You know who you are.

I’m kidding! (Am I, though?)

Once, after reading a novel I had in progress, the reader (a friend) said, “You need more of the Steve character.” Steve is my husband. (Steve is not his real name—I blog-o-gized his actual name for his protection. From what is he being protected? I have no idea.) Steve was not in that book, though. The husband in that book is NOTHING like Steve. The reader automatically assumed the protagonist (a woman) was me and her husband was Steve. Other readers assumed the sister of the protagonist was my actual sister and the mother my actual mother.

Truth is, some of my characters are hybrids of people I’ve met and some are entirely made up and some are blatantly stolen (but in that case only people I don’t know well and I suppose it’s more an imagining of how I think they think and act, their histories and opinions). The danger in knowing a writer is that something of you might just find its way into her work. You should know this: we artists are thieves. But it’s still mostly a lot of imagined stuff.

Come back next Friday for some short story enjoyment! Unless you are moisturizing. Oh, wait—I have a better idea. Read the story while you moisturize. That is called multi-tasking, a required skill of the 21st Century, and probably how the lucky ladies get it done.

(I might even find the time to moisturize, too. I doubt it, though.)

because i just can’t leave well-enough alone

This week I decorated an old storage chest. I totally do not have time for weird projects such as this, but why allow that fact to stop me? Exactly.

I’ve had this chest for a long time. I bought it at Bostonwood (which used to be called Maverick Something Something) in Allston, Massachusetts (woot woot for Allston!) and dragged it many blocks down Commonwealth Avenue to a sweet studio apartment I lived in when I was 23.

Dead cat scratches on each corner. (She wasn't dead yet when she did the scratching.)

The chest has been painted over many times and served many purposes over the years—sweaters, extra blankets, I can’t even remember what-all. Most recently, it held our winter outerwear in the breezeway. One of the things I like to do periodically is start moving furniture around. It begins innocently enough—perhaps I need to rearrange some storage or something. But then you move one thing and you need to move something in its place to store whatever you emptied out and sometimes when you move something, you see that the paint on the wall needs to be touched up and if you’re bothering, you might as well paint the radiators the same color so you have to go down to Rocky’s Ace Hardware and buy the paint. And then you should really put up a shelf right there—it would look awfully nice—but its color is wrong so just paint that, too. The other curtains would look better with this new furniture arrangement and newly painted wall. They’ll have to be ironed, of course. Meanwhile, this all began because there was one too many sweaters to fit in the bureau. Would a better solution perhaps be to give the offending sweater away? Yes. But why would you do that? Exactly.

This chest project began because I am tired of organizing the girls’ toys. The best thing for kids’ toys is to have little bins (label them if you have a laminator—the best mothers laminate) on shelves at their eye-level, thus making available to them all their stimulating and educational play options. (All your kids’ stuff is stimulating and educationally rich, right?) Then they go to Harvard. If you do this exactly right, they will go to Harvard when they’re 12 and turn out like Doogie Howser, MD. DO NOT get a big toy box (like you had when you were a kid) because then all their educationally rich stuff gets all jumbled together and they won’t be properly stimulated and then guess who’s going to Harvard? No one.

But do you know who organizes all those little toys every stinkin’ day? ME. Thus, I wanted a nice big toy box (like I had when I was a kid) to just toss all the toys in and shut the lid and go downstairs again. So I decided they can just go to college at the normal age to a nice regular university, just like I did, and take 6 years to get a BA at 3 different schools after changing majors twice. I turned out FINE. See?

And here I bring us to the purpose of this blog post: potato paint stamps! (Did you see that coming?)

Once I decided regular college was just fine, I went out to the consignment shops and the Salvation Army Thrift store to buy some kind of toy chest for them. Found nothing. I didn’t want to buy something new or something they would outgrow, so I decided simply to re-purpose my good old storage chest. I shifted a bunch of stuff around, painted a few walls and then tackled potato stamping! First, I got me some little paint samples from Rocky’s Ace Hardware and painted the top purple.

Then I carved little shapes from halved potatoes to fashion simple flowers and voilà! Toy chest! (‘Cause I’m a bad mother.)

There are other things around here I also can’t leave alone. The kids’ tables, for example.

These are those really inexpensive ones from IKEA that lots of people have. And even though they were only $19.99 for a table and 2 chairs, they have held up really well.

These chairs I snagged from a neighbor’s lawn (no one was sitting on them and I love to take free stuff off neighbors’ lawns). I am discriminating about the free stuff I remove from lawns. (That’s what I tell everyone.) I painted the tables with some paint I had around and smoothed contact paper over the tops.

But then the table was too low for the new chairs so I had to fashion special bottoms for the table legs. See how things just snowball?

Anyone can unnecessarily refinish all kinds of things around the house—even you! I promise that you don’t have time for it but why would you allow that to stop you? Exactly.

friday stew—a random collection of unrelated miscellany

When confronted with a wretched mixed pile of Lego bricks and Lego Hero Factory parts, I will know which is which 95% of the time. This is not a skill I intentionally cultivated nor one upon I wish to improve. (But I bet I will.) Sorting these little pieces of plastic represents one of the reasons why writing blog posts and novels and shaving regularly prove to be a challenge. (Good thing I don’t really care about shaving.) It is too cold and I am tired of being too cold. Usually I do not complain about winter but seriously I am D-O-N-E. It’s only early February which is bad news for me since February only means many more weeks of cold in these parts. A blizzard today and tomorrow is promising to deliver 24” plus to my little part of the Earth. Maybe even 30”. Right on my house. The up-side: snow hides a bleak and messy backyard when you are hopeful of selling aforementioned domicile.

Exciting cup news! Remember when I cracked my beloved Starbucks reusable cold cup? Well, it remains cracked, but useable. However, its integrity is becoming more and more heartachingly compromised. But then I heard about this amazing invention on RadioBoston, one of my favorite NPR shows. It is called CUPPOW and it’s a little insert that turns any mason jar into a travel mug! My awesome mail carrier, Brian, brought mine to me this week. You can insert a straw in it. I am going to sew a little cozy for my Cuppowed jar. It is certain to be adorable. Like one of those little sweatered dogs.

Sugar is really pissing me off lately. I mean its pervasiveness. As a result, I have sworn off packaged cereal. Even the "healthy" ones contain a crapload of sugar. So what to leave handy for the little monsters so I can stay in bed just a few more minutes in the morning? Homemade granola sweetened with only natural maple syrup! Here’s the recipe. Combine 3 cups of rolled oats, 3/4 cup of unsweetened coconut, a tablespoon of cinnamon and/or some raisins and almonds—toss the mixture with 3 ounces of olive oil and 3 ounces of maple syrup and bake at 250 degrees F for an hour. Oh, throw in some flax seeds if you got ‘em. The kids think it’s the greatest thing. And they say I am the best and cutest mother in the world (no lie), so I must be doing something right. Sometimes I am the WORST MOTHER IN THE WORLD as well, which is confusing. Either way, this granola does not have refined sugar in it which was the point of this paragraph.

My son likes to watch this BBC series about Cavemen and the animals that predated the dinosaurs and other prehistoric stuff. The other day he walked into the kitchen where I was preparing supper and said, “Mommy, did you know that Australopithecus was the first primate species to mate face to face?” Then he left with no further commentary to return to his wretched mixed pile of Lego bricks and Lego Hero Factory parts (to which he refers simply as Legos and Heroes).

And here ends the Friday stew of random, unrelated miscellany. I hope you have an opportunity to mate face to face this weekend, especially if you are buried in 30” of snow—I mean, what else will there be to do?

things we contemplate while in a demerol-induced stupor

I found my hoard of Sweet Valley High books in the basement. Good judgement whispers to let them go.

(I doubt I’m gonna listen.)

Generally I’m an enthusiastic disposer—just ask Steve. I have been known to remove things directly from his hands and into the donation box or trash in an effort to de-clutter. (He totally loves it when I do that.) I really despise clutter.

But those glossy-covered lovelies I cannot seem to ditch.

I considered naming my twins Jessica and Elizabeth. I was in a Demerol-induced post C-Section stupor, but it seemed like a decent idea. How fun would it be to introduce your twins as Jessica and Elizabeth? Both my girls and the Wakefield twins are identical. Both sets of twins have a handsome older brother. One is bookish and the other can’t resist a rich boy driving a black Porsche.

Elizabeth and Jessica DeLorenzo! Not really—but how awesome would that be?

Imagine my recent excitement when I discovered Sweet Valley High Confidential: Ten Years Later? It picks up the story of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield 10 years after high school. SPOILER ALERT! (Are you really gonna read this book, though?) Steven Wakefield is gay. Lila Fowler is as insipid and spoiled as ever but it’s no longer charming and deliciously catty. Just kind of pathetic. Bruce Patman is in love with Elizabeth. (I can sort of buy that.) They say naughty words (even the big F), have sex (!), drink wine AND caffeinated beverages. It should have been exciting, but it was all sort of a big let-down. None of the innocence or designer jeans. Cell phones and laptops and stuff that wasn’t even invented in the 80s. And yet I could have lived with all of it, but for the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard in my life: Todd and Jessica are a couple. An ENGAGED couple.

Come. On.

What the frickety-frack. There is no way that would have happened in a million years. Elizabeth and Todd are perfect together and Francine Pascal RUINED EVERYTHING! I feel like Kathy Bates in Misery.

My well-traveled plastic box of pulpy 80s literary treasure surfaced this week because it seems we are contemplating a move (more on this as the situation unfolds) and as a result, I am cleaning up and clearing out and packing things and scrutinizing every corner of my house. All those little projects we have neglected these past years will finally get finished just in time to give the house to someone else. My to-do list just grew a mile and my time is more stretched than usual which really draws out my sunny side. The realtor says we must de-clutter (oooh!) and de-personalize (I took down the kids’ art—the walls look bare and devoid of spirit).

I’m excited for this new phase of our lives, but leaving things behind—a home I love, great neighbors, our sweet backyard and lovely neighborhood, a city I have grown to think of as home—won't be easy. Especially for a chick who kicks and screams as much as she can when confronted with change.

I doubt I will read any more of the new Sweet Valley books—I’d rather sink back into the gentle 80s version of life in the perfect Southern California setting. Life was simpler—for me and the Wakefield twins. Everyone needs an injection of that every once in a while, no matter where real life takes you.

(The books are coming with me.)

sickness, sleep (not much), meal-planning

Don’t even try to deny that is the best, most compelling blog post title ever! Yeah, so you’re only getting one blog post again this week, due to sickness (kids’) and lack of sleep (mine). But I do have a small offering and it just might change your life.

(For the better.)

It is meal-planning.

Recently I heard a stat that is completely wackadoo: according to a recent study, Americans throw away nearly 40% of the food we buy. (Think on that for a moment. Okay, continue.) If you want, go ahead and use the Google to find out what this means for water waste, increased greenhouse gas emissions from rotting food in landfills and the amount of money you might be throwing away annually. Also, only 28% of Americans say they can cook.

What?!

100% wackadoo.

I am not being judgy or bossy. (I’m being slightly bossy.) Let’s think of it not as bossiness but as unsolicited helpfulness.

I am really good at meal-planning. There are many things at which I suck. Gymnastics. Swallowing vitamins. Behaving normally in a great deal of social situations. But this chick can meal-plan.

I created a standard grocery list and print a copy every week then cross off and add to it as needed. This is a blank one. I shop at several places, so they’re all on here as well as a little OTHER column for those one-offs. I know—I’m such a dork.

You can totally do this, too. I swear that you do have the time. I developed this skill when I was in graduate school full-time and working 40 hours a week simultaneously. And even though I didn’t possess actual small humans in those days, believe me when I tell you that schedule is something like having 7 newborns with at least 2 of them screaming at all times.

(I am totally being bossy today. It’s the lack of sleep. Or that I’m bossy.)

I promise you, this is quick and easy. Okay, you don’t need a fancy app, but you do need to start with one of two things (or both): a little stash of recipes you like and/or a little list of things that your family likes to eat. Now jot down the days of the week. Choose 5 meals and, depending on what your schedule looks like for the week—when you’ll be getting home and how long each recipe will take to prepare, etc.—decide what meal you will assign to each day. I say 5 because chances are you’ll have leftovers to eat on the other days. If you want to only cook 4 days of the week, choose recipes that produce a high yield and hence a larger quantity leftovers. I do suggest choosing recipes that are quick and easy for weekdays and save those that are more challenging and time-consuming for weekends. And I promise that if you decide to switch things around during the week no one will stop you.

Next, make your grocery list based off the ingredients that your chosen recipes require, plus your usual staples.

I write in my weekly meals plan here as well. This sheet may seem a little much, but it really makes my life easier. I categorize the items by department and also list stuff in order by aisle. (I’m a freak.)
Grocery stores tend to induce the fight or flight response in me—
it’s best for everyone if I get outta there quickly.

If this all seems like, doy, I know—I get it. But before I devised this system, I was one of those people who threw food away every week. Not only do I never throw out fresh produce or meat anymore, I almost never even throw out leftovers. ‘Cause I plan.

Bonus Tips! Freeze those leftovers! If, after a day or 3, it seems evident that you are not going to consume a container of leftovers, label them (don’t question me on this one) and toss them in the freezer. Some night when you don’t feel like cooking, you will rejoice over that container. And if you make a soup, double the recipe and freeze half. Soup freezes really well and doubling is easy since soup is pretty much just a bunch of stuff you bung in a big pan. Double lasagna filling and freeze half. Double veggie or chicken pot pie filling and freeze half. (Use pre-made pie crust—cheat! Who’s gonna know?) Make a double recipe of meatballs and freeze half. (Are you getting this?)

See? Easier than executing a cartwheel. Or carrying on a normal conversation with the cashier at Hannaford.

I have begun to dabble in make-ahead-and-freeze meals (got this book) and once a month cooking (this is an oldie). I’ll keep you posted.

(Expect more unsolicited helpfulness in your future. You can’t wait.)

Notice how WINE is both capitalized and emphasized? Like I’d forget wine... But better safe than sorry.

food is innocent, people—even evil piles of oiled spaghetti

Wanna hear my latest pet peeve? (You do.)

Mean cooking shows. What the hell is wrong with this country?

I don’t watch a lot of shows besides Downton Abbey, Girls, New Girl, Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix (where has that show been my whole life?), One Tree Hill on Netflix (TOTAL crap, but I can’t stop), Louie and (best show ever) Felicity which I only watch on DVD since Netflix uses the wrong songs in some places and it ruins entire episodes. Don’t mess around with my Felicity. You’ve been warned. There may be some shows I am forgetting to remember... Oh! Nashville. So gloriously trashy! So aside from all of those, I don’t watch a lot of shows. I forgot Shameless.

But I totally love cooking shows. They are like delicious white noise. Almost anything on the Cooking Channel or the Food Network—LOVE it. I usually watch a little of The Chew (how much do I LOVE that show?) while I eat my lunch and lately ABC has been advertising a new show called The Taste and it is just all mean. There are other mean cooking shows, too. And they all suck. Not that I’ve watched them. I refuse on principle.

Can we just allow some things to be nice? It’s food, not the giant trash heap in the Pacific. Or global warming. Or malaria. Or the wrong songs in some places on Felicity ruining entire episodes.

(Okay, I’m done with that.)

So, you can anticipate only one blog post from me this week. (Take a moment if you need to. Alright... you okay now? Good.) I am into heavy edits on The Mosquito Hours and very busy scrutinizing every word and examining every theme. And—because what would my life be without freaking out about pretty much everything (I’m exaggerating—it’s only almost everything)—I find myself concerned that not every single thread and theme and thought and metaphor and motif and other literary devices I don’t remember from AP English are not fully realized.

This is a 101,826 word document. Do you know what it that is like?

I can’t even explain it.

(I’m a writer—I should try.)

It’s like an enormous and evil pile of oiled spaghetti—you prop up one area to have a look and the rest droops and slides away. You prop up some other area to have a look and the rest droops and slides away. You prop up some other area to have a look and the rest droops and slides away.

(I think you get it.)

My workspace. Totally overwhelming pile of notes and one of my favorite pens. Yes, that is One Tree Hill on the screen.

You have to try to remember every way you did everything for the sake of consistency, make sure the story doesn’t get bogged down anywhere, too speedy anywhere, make sure the prose is interesting yet clear and the story lines are believable, find and fix all typos (totally impossible), insert/adjust the excellent ideas and feedback from your friends who have graciously read the 101,826 word document.

(Aren’t you freaked out now, too?)

But then I remembered that writing is truly a collaboration with the reader. My readers are smart—I have to allow them space to find the themes and the connections. Find the meaning and metaphor. And that might be somewhat different for each reader. And that will mean the book itself will be essentially different. Each reader brings his or her own perspective and that will shape their experience with my words. And that is really pretty amazing. So, thank you ahead of time, as I know you will find wonders in my book of which I had not even conceived.

It’s gonna be great.

In the meantime while you wait to read The Mosquito Hours, do not watch mean cooking shows. Or Felicity on Netflix. Seriously.

i’m gonna need another bookcase...again

I have these lovely IKEA bookcases—5 of them. FULL. Actually, they were full until I culled back by 2 entire bookcases worth of books. Those bookcases made their way into the kids’ play and create space and house their books, games, art supplies and such.

I won’t tell you how many books I have in the to-be-read pile.

(Including the Kindle, 47. Including books I checked out of the library, 53. Including the book I just ordered from half.com, 54.)

(I have a problem with books.)

I find books in all the usual places—your Barnes & Noble, your Amazon.com. I also love half.com and alibris.com. Also the Salvation Army Thrift Store, the Friends of the Library weekly book sale, paperbackbookswap.com, the consignment store, the Friends of the Library weekly book sale in the town over, the local used bookstore, the distant used bookstore, my sister’s bookshelf when she is otherwise occupied. I have a computer folder full of PDF eBooks I downloaded from different blogs I follow. Did you know that you can borrow eBooks from the library? I do. And you can get practically anything via interlibrary loan. I have 53 books checked out of the library right now. Granted, about 40-something of those are for the kids. They each have a blossoming problem with books.

(My son got a book-light in his stocking. He’s teaching himself to read after he goes to bed. I’m not making that up. All my efforts for naught—he’s just doing it himself. That’s the way they do it, I am learning. Or maybe they are teaching me?)

I am ecstatic to read Dear Life by Alice Munro—she said she was retiring several years ago and hasn’t and THANK THE UNIVERSE for that! Munro tells a story in such a way that you are completely absorbed and in the end you have no idea how she just did what she did but you know it was extraordinary. I received Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver for Christmas and it is sooooo delicious so far. Her prose is an inspiration. I am on a Louise Erdrich kick and if you’ve never read any of her work run to one of the book-getting outlets I mentioned above and GET SOME. I am just about done with Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry and he’s another one who writes in such simple, lovely way that in the end you simply marvel. I’ve got The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman, a bunch of homeschooling books, a book called Gilded which recounts the rise of Newport, RI’s high society and the development of their mansions (or “cottages” as they called them). I have The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields which I have attempted to read a number of times, but it won’t penetrate my brain. I’m giving it one more shot. I just received The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty from half.com—a copy from 1979. Pretty funky! Oh! And The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg from the library which is SO good so far.

Believe it or not, I am a really picky reader. If I start a book and the story isn’t grabbing me, I stop reading—life is too short to read a book you don’t like. If the prose is blah, I quit. If I can see what the writer is attempting to “establish,” I’m done. I know I sound like a jerk. I am snooty about books.

I have been saying for years that I will not buy any more books until I have read the ones I already have. I really mean it this time.

(No, I don’t.)

What are you reading right now?

things about which i just found out AND meet my monkey!

Spotify. What!?

How awesome is Spotify? I could waste endless amounts of time with this. Most likely I will. I tend to discover things 500 years after everyone else has. For all I know, there are people out there getting around with jet packs or in fold-up cars or actually using Jedi mind tricks effectively—right now. Like I’ll bet there’s a whole information superhighway out there. I’m sure I’ll soon find out if it’s happened. (Or maybe I just invented something awesome! I’ll call it “cyberspace”!) But holy crap-a-doodle-doo, I could waste a lot of time on Spotify. And what about Pinterest?! How cool is Pinterest? I totally did not get the point of it and then one day I suddenly totally did and now I am wondering how I ever got by without it.

So, I have been giving a great deal of thought to my writing plans for 2013. I am hesitant to call these plans “goals” because goals are way to pressure-y. Plans on the other hand are malleable. Pleasantly jelly-like. Then instead of failing to meet your goals you adjust your plans. See how that works? (And, no—semantics is not a cop-out.)

I had everything sorted out regarding the publication plans for my novel, The Mosquito Hours. I mean pretty well sorted out—the bones of a plan. (I won’t bore you with the details. That’s what Steve is for.) So, I had these lovely plans beginning to coalesce, merge, jellify. Then I decided to enter a big novel writing contest (more on this as it unfolds—if it does indeed unfold) which sort of threw all my plans to chaos. And last night I stayed up until midnight to enter this contest at exactly the moment they began to accept entrants even though I was so wicked tired and I made the mistake of really reading the contest rules and it was rather confusing and I think I may have agreed to something unspeakable and then if I win I have to go to Seattle and that will involve, presumably, a ride in a plane and I don’t like that and do I even want a book contract in the first place and should I keep editing The Mosquito Hours or move on to one of my other novels-in-progress and this goes on but I will stop now just at the point before your ears start to bleed.

(You’re welcome.)

There is a concept in Buddhism known as monkey mind. Here I present an excerpt from Taming the Monkey Mind by Thubden Chodron (1995):

The monkey mind is a term sometimes used by the Buddha to describe the agitated, easily distracted and incessantly moving behaviour of ordinary human consciousness... Once he observed: “Just as a monkey swinging through the trees grabs one branch and lets it go only to seize another, so too, that which is called thought, mind or consciousness arises and disappears continually both day and night...” Anyone who has spent even a little time observing his own mind and then watched a troop of monkeys will have to admit that this comparison is an accurate and not very flattering one.

Meet my monkey, dear reader! Isn’t she cute? (She’s not cute.)

After my monkey started going berserk last night, I couldn’t settle down. (Really? you say. I totally know you’re being sarcastic.) That stupid monkey tore back and forth around the joint and roosted in the rafters to throw poop down on any reasonable and calm thoughts that might happen to make their way through my vibrating gray matter. I finally fell asleep but had this terrifying dream that I was in a treehouse and was inexplicably filled with dread and doom and my husband had to wake me because I guess I was whimpering. Then I dreamed that I was lost and couldn’t get home and there was some really urgent reason why I needed to get home. Then some kid woke me by climbing into bed and kicking me repeatedly. Then I dreamed I was making out with this really cute boy. That wasn’t so bad. Then some other kid woke me. But that time I didn’t dream anything. And then my son woke me at 7:00 to ask me if I was awake.

I feel better today. My monkey is definitely tamer while the sun shines. The Buddha said to work towards deer mind. “Deer are particularly gentle creatures and always remain alert and aware no matter what they are doing.” So, I will work on my edits, take one moment at a time, see what unfolds and calmly and mindfully respond to whatever it might be. And cultivate deer mind.

And occasionally, when the monkey gets to flinging poop, I will retreat into Spotify. It’s happy in there and very sedate. And you can make playlists of songs from the '90s when you were 20 and hot and one called “old timey mellow mix” with artists like Gerry Rafferty and Seals and Crofts.

Don’t worry. I’ll find what sustains me. We all will.

You've been as constant as a Northern Star The brightest light that shines

"nests"—a flash fiction story

A very short story based on the things left behind in one of my kitchen cabinets.

His wife left behind a mini-muffin tin, an aluminum cookie sheet and a tacky, scratched green metal tray decorated with an artist’s renderings of New Hampshire tourist traps. The Old Man in the Mountain, Clark’s Trading Post, the Kancamagus Highway—all etched in white. The scratches were etched in rust. In the kitchen of their old house, two tall and narrow cabinets flanked the stove, one of which she had forgotten to empty. They intentionally left behind an old upright piano. It was too expensive to move and they had no room for it in their new, small apartment. He had painted that old piano with a creamy white semi-gloss paint. A long time ago. He wondered if the new family kept it. It was very out of tune.

His wife was deeply distraught about the things she left behind. She lamented them and repeatedly expressed her distress to him, to their children, to friends over the phone. It embarrassed him—her bald and passionate grief over a muffin tin, a cookie sheet, a scratched old metal tray. And he couldn’t recall the last time—or any time—she ever made bite-sized muffins.

“You never even used that pan,” he said to her.

She looked at him hard. “Yes. I did.”

“When?” He was sincere, not combative.

“That’s not the point,” she said.

What was the point? In the face of what had been lost, what could these things mean to her. When he considered the missteps that had led to this end, they each seemed small when examined one at a time. But the accumulation was calamitous. A muffin pan? He thought this but had been married long enough not to say more. Who cares about a muffin pan? he wanted to say, but didn’t.

**

Sometimes, on his way home from work, he drove by his old house.

The new family had removed the big juniper bushes and rhododendron from the front of the house. It could not be denied that the plants had been terribly overgrown, but now the house held a naked, vulnerable look.

There were small children in this new family. Once when he drove by, he saw the new woman corralling them, one after the other, faces like bright new buttons, into a minivan parked in his old driveway.

For years, his sons played in the fort they’d built in the backyard. The fort still stood, the weathered wood dulled to a muted gray. His wife spent years worrying that one of them would fall to the ground.

“It’s too high,” she always said, peering out the kitchen window to the backyard.

“They’ll be fine,” he always said.

He was right—no one ever fell. But it was possible they kept the near misses to themselves.

He was no voyeur. Neither was it a kind of intimacy he was seeking. What then?

He gazed through the passenger side window as he drove slowly.

The feeling of what once was—the recovery of a precise sentiment—settling in his deepest tissue. Right down deep in his belly, seeping into his rib bones.

That was what it was.

**

Spring came.

The forsythia bushes that encircled the backyard were in bloom. From the street out front he could see the outer edges—they peeked from around the sides of the house. Pretty and cheerful every year, they made the backyard seem nicer than it really was. The dense foliage hid all the overgrown stuff he never managed to remove from beneath them. The accumulated fallen leaves of many autumns, the vines that had sprung up on their own. Also the discarded and forgotten toys that once belonged to his children with a fierce possessiveness, thought of as lost or forgotten altogether.

Blue jays nested in the forsythia. Not the same birds year after year but seemingly so. Although he knew this could not be true.

Blue jays are ferociously territorial. They have been known to chase cats, dogs and humans away. They mob owls who get too close. They are large, they are noisy. They are smart. And while those qualities could not be denied, his blue jays shared those same forsythia with cardinals. A spill of colors amongst the yellow and green. Bright and bold in the nakedness of winter over the setting of white snow.

**

He began to drive away. He looked at the weathered gray siding of his old house. The new family had painted the shutters a different color since the last time he drove past.

It was just a muffin pan.

All that yellow in bloom now.

Just a pan.

He would not say such a thing.

Who was he to say.

meatball triumph! (...and tragedy)

Meatballs are a pain in the ass. Maybe not to Mario or Giada, but for me, a total pain in the ass. They’re messy and raw meat totally freaks me out and I don’t like touching it. Then when I fry them up in the giant sauté pain (which is also a total drag to clean later), they always seem to stick and I have to chisel them out to flip them over and the olive oil is spitting all over the top of the stove. One giant pain. (Do you ever wonder when you read this blog, Is there nothing about which she can’t find to complain? The answer is no. It is one of my special talents that I share with you. You are welcome.) But everyone eats meatballs with exuberance which makes them little miracle balls. Let me make clear that when I say “everyone,” I mean everyone except my son who only eats 6 things. Wanna guess what they are? If you said boxed mac-n-cheese, pizza, peanut butter and jelly, waffles, nuggets and fries and bacon you win! What do you win? Nothing. It’s just an expression. (And I exaggerate. He eats, like, 8 things.) Everyone knows that when I say “everyone” eats such and such, I am excluding my son. Who is everyone? You know, just everyone. Everyone who eats meatballs. Which is everyone except my son. (Are you following?) At any rate, I had a meatball epiphany the other day. It was more like several different meatball ideas merging to create the PERFECT method for making meatballs. (At least if you are me.)

Here’s what you do.

Make your meatball mix. I always make Giada’s. (Just use white turkey meat if you can’t get dark, which mostly you can’t unless you live near a Whole Foods, which I personally do not. Or you can kill a turkey yourself. Your call.) Grab a nice cookie scoop and a mini-muffin tin.

Let me break here a moment to tell you about my mini-muffin tin.

In my kitchen, there are two skinny cabinets that flank the stove. They are the perfect size for cookie sheets and cooling racks, cutting boards and muffin tins. The people who owned this place before we did lost the house because they over-financed it. I don’t know them, of course—the house was owned by the bank by the time we found the for sale sign on the lawn. One of the neighbors told me about the foreclosure. She told me that she sometimes saw the man who used to live here drive by, which made me feel really sad. I love my house, but like most houses, it contains a history that precedes the footfalls and chatter of its current inhabitants. All the former footfalls and chatter echo.

Well, the day we moved in, my mom and I took to cleaning the kitchen cabinets in preparation for their filling with my stuff. The woman who used to live here forgot to empty out one of the skinny cabinets and I acquired a sheet pan, a tray covered with a flower pattern and a mini-muffin tin. I always wanted one, but never could justify the expense. I mean, who really needs a mini-muffin tin? But it is nice to have it. So thanks to the woman who used to occupy this kitchen—I am putting her muffin tin to good use.

Ok, back to the recipe.

Spray your mini-muffin tin with oil and drop the uniformly-sized (Who doesn’t love uniformly-sized things? Crazy people, that’s who!) meatballs in the mini-muffin tin wells. (Did I really need to articulate that? Were you thinking you would just drop the meatballs on the counter and see what happened? Anyhow, any confusion is now diffused.) Then you BAKE THE MEATBALLS (I know!) at 425 degrees F for 20 minutes or so. Then, because I am a freak who worries about undercooked meat with an insistence that would shock you (or would it?), I drop them in a big pan and simmer in sauce for about 10-15 minutes. Just in case. (If you are normal, I think you can just serve them with warmed sauce.)

Can I tell you the joy I felt when all this came together?

Now, the tragic part of my little story.

I find that one jar of sauce is not enough for a batch of meatballs, but 2 jars is too much. The other day when I was making these meatballs, I happened to find a baggie of sauce in the bottom of the freezer—about half a jar’s worth. Perfect, methinks! I gleefully dumped it into the pan with the meatballs and it smelled wrong. More like misplaced. But I shrugged it off. Until it nagged at me and I took a little taste.

Chipotle!

It was NOT tomato sauce but chipotle salsa. I’d frozen it a while back and thought I would use it in a chili or something. I was certain that I would remember what it was so I didn’t bother labeling it. I did not in fact remember what it was.

Kids won’t eat spicy food. So what would have been several meals joyously consumed by everyone (except, you might recall, my son), now it’s just me and my husband who will eat them. And we’re the least picky eaters in this house so who gives a crap.

Label them baggies, people! I mean it!

This is why you should always label baggies of stuff before you abandon them to the bottom of the freezer. You will not guess right even though you will insist that you will. Trust me.

And this is how I came to have a meatball triumph and tragedy all in the same meal.

I wrote a flash fiction story inspired by the mini-muffin tin. I will post it on Friday for your reading pleasure! Please come back.

(Please.)

is anyone else totally confused about what day of the week it is?

I have no idea. Could be Wednesday; could be Sunday. Actually, I know it must be a weekday from what’s on NPR. Further than that, I really have no idea. Happy New Year! How are you? I’m confused. And a bit untethered.

Newton's First Law of Motion states that a body at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts on it, and a body in motion at a constant velocity will remain in motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an outside force. Resisting motion if at rest or resisting changing speed if in motion is called inertia. (I totally lifted this from the Internet—I could never spew this on my own.)

I never took Physics—and math-y concepts typically elude me—but I think this might apply to me.

This is the long view down my legs to my fanciful slippers. I am firmly ensconced on the couch with my Kindle. I can’t lie to you—I never want to get up again. I mean it. Not for any reason. Oh, but then what about wine? FINE. But that’s my only concession.

I shut down in December and now I can’t seem to get back on track. From Thanksgiving week until now, there was only time for the holidays and doing Christmas-y and Solstice-y things with my kids, and all the stuff that goes along with those occasions, so I just told myself everything could wait until after Christmas and then I would return to real life. Which I think means work. Which I think really means I dropped the stuff I wasn’t sure how to figure out and now I have to pick all of it up again.

Frankly, I do not want to pick all of it up again.

When and how to publish, how to figure out a work schedule that works for both my husband (who is now working from home) and me, what the hell I am going to do for paying work, a homeschooling plan (or not?) for the kids. Blogging. Oh, and my LinkedIn page is a disaster. And I should be more active on Twitter, which is to say I should be on Twitter.

Also, the mess keeps growing. The living room looks very, very bad. Very, very bad. I keep thinking from my perch on the couch, someone has GOT to clean that up. But, unfortunately, I think it’s gonna be me. I really don’t want to inform myself, as I think I will be pretty bummed when I figure it out.

I decided to simply chill after Christmas which for me means reading a lot and not worrying so very much at all about picking up or cooking meals that make nutritional sense. Or showering. And, you know, I sort of like this. A lot. I don’t want to get back into real life. Sometimes in real life, I feel like that poor dude who follows circus elephants around with a bucket and shovel—that poop dude. You might not know this, but there is an endless amount of poop. Metaphorically, I mean. Also literally.

But then again, here and there, I feel the new year excitement creeping in. A purposefulness and hopefulness and energy. I find myself slowly moving back into the work. Reorganizing, writing up lists of household projects and upcoming blog posts. Homeschooling ideas. I bought fabric to sew up some new kitchen curtains. Also I am moving furniture around. I opened a new document today—draft 5 of The Mosquito Hours! I am going back in and these will hopefully be the final edits.

Look at my curtain fabric! Feisty!

I wish you a very happy beginning to 2013. I hope you are exuberant and energized and hopeful. I hope you are excited about your work.

And I hope we can all figure out what day of the week it is. That will definitely happen.

(Right?)

one light

There is so much I could say about the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut and yet so few words can make sense of it. Actually no words can make sense of it. I intended to write about our Solstice traditions this week and then I waffled and thought perhaps I shouldn’t. I mean, I know life goes on, but the reality of that can feel so cruel. Anyone who has known personal loss can attest that life moving forward is one of the most painful aspects of loss—the brutality and heartlessness of that onward movement is nearly unbearable. As I considered writing this week, everything felt selfish as my three children lie safe in their beds. As I sit here attempting to write now, it all feels selfish because before I go to my own bed tonight, I will turn on the hall light as I do every night, and touch their faces and hair gently and feel their breath on my hand. I will take one last look for this day at their sweet faces before I succumb to sleep myself.

But then I thought perhaps it would be good to write about the Solstice, which is a celebration of the rebirth of light. Of hope and warmth. Maybe that is something in which we all need to bask right now.

"Little darling I feel that ice is slowly melting Little darling It seems like years since it's been clear Here comes the sun Here comes the sun, and I say It's all right" —The Beatles

I feel so grateful that my kids are little enough to be oblivious to this tragedy. I want to protect them from the knowledge that this kind of violence is possible in this world into which I’ve brought them. (I know this kind of protection will not be possible forever.) While my children live in blissful ignorance, I know that the children who hid in closets and bathrooms at Sandy Hook Elementary will never be innocent in this way ever again. My hope for them is peace and the knowledge that there is good in this world.

For us, the Solstice is a quiet moment in the midst of the whirlwind that is the Holiday season. A time for my nuclear little bunch to huddle up close and breathe in the quiet and the light. I made a Solstice countdown board for them—animals and plants that populate our part of the world in winter, the sun, the moon, snow clouds. They add one element to the board each day from December 1st until the day of the Solstice, on which the sun is pinned in the sky. My hope is to nurture a connection with the natural world. A oneness with the Earth and all its inhabitants. To help them to witness divinity (whatever form that takes for them) in the turning of the seasons, in the light of the sun, in the delicate strands of the white pine, in the smallest of seashells and most majestic of mountains. Our Solstice board is reminder of the world we share with all living things, the way the Earth moves forward through its cycles, and our place within it.

On this Solstice as we dim the lamps and light a single candle, as we eat our supper of sun pie and wish bread, as we listen to “Here Comes the Sun” and place the felt sun I sewed in its place on our Solstice board, I will hope our one light shines out into the darkness. I will let go of any idea of selfishness and instead meditate on humble gratitude.

Yes, life goes on. The sun will rise again, the days will slowly grow longer. We have no power to thwart it. But what we can bring to this unstoppable, inescapable forward motion is a cultivation of light and goodness. And share the flame when the light of hope dims for another.

"If you light a lamp for someone else, it will also brighten your path." Buddha

Happy Solstice. May you know light in your life and peace in your heart.

how to build a chicken coop

I feel like Charlie Brown this week: “I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming but I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel.”

Everything has kind of gone off the rails. It’s December and everything always goes off the rails in December. Our homeschooling rhythm—loose as it is—has pretty much fallen apart. My work time has been more than disrupted—bombed-out is a better word—utterly taken over by craft projects (which I do because I love to craft) and Holiday parties (which I like but mostly could do without as I am borderline anti-social) and gift buying and wrapping and card-ordering and envelopes that the freakin’ printer won’t address for like 30 torturous and confusing minutes until I make Steve figure it out. (Which he does in 30 quick seconds. Seriously. But can he embroider? No, he cannot.) I have plans for Christmas and Solstice activities to do with the kids and I can see them unraveling a bit and I know without question that I am going to have to pare it all back. I haven’t officially cleaned the house in 2 weeks, just done that panicky oh my sweet lord how long has it been since I ran some cleanser and a brush in there? kind of cleaning.

The other day my sister and I were texting. She asked how I was doing. I said:

"Kind of feeling hopeless-ish and sad and overwhelmed. I’ll be okay. Just down for some reason."

She said:

"That was my whole week last week. So I decided not only to exercise each day which helps me, but also to nurture myself more and I have done that this weekend and feel better. I have also worked on the record player in my head. I love you... You are wonderful!"

(This is why everyone needs a sister. Unless you have a kind of crappy one, in which case no one needs that.)

My sister had been freaking about about her unfinished chicken coop, worried that her girls would freeze or go and eat (more of) the neighbor’s vegetation. She didn’t know how to build a chicken coop, which was the main crux of the problem. This was also the crux of her bad week. And from there she slid into the pit.

The morning of my bad day I’d heard on the radio the Philippines Prime Minister speak in the wake of the devastating typhoon in his country. He tearfully implored world leaders to seriously address global warming, not in the name of political posturing but for the good of the 9 billion people for whose welfare they are responsible. I think that was the root of my hopelessness which just spiraled out as the day grew long. Then I started to think about all the places where I was not quite hitting the mark (in my humble opinion) and from there it was all downhill.

Good grief!

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials. Lin Yutang

As with all months of the year, you do not get time back in December. You use it and it is gone. This is how stupid time works. There’s no way to get everything done, especially when you are special like me and get overly grand ideas about what MUST get accomplished. (That sounds familiar...)

But at the end of the day, I can remember to thoughtfully choose where to give my energy. I can gracefully recall the blessings in my life. So, while it is wise to mindfully leave some things undone, I think the bigger question might be why we slide back into those hopeless places. How to stop the slide?

Today my sister finished her chicken coop—she got it done. She had to wrestle with a great deal of unruly chicken wire and call on the help of a good friend who does know how to build a chicken coop. She sent me this pic this afternoon moments before she jumped in the car to pick her kids up from school.

So maybe we just keep trying and call on good friends and in the face of hopelessness gracefully recall the blessings. Maybe we wrestle with the unruly until we get it done, whatever that might be.