She loved her old Scrabble set. The board was sturdy. The trays wooden, like small pews. Whenever she opened the game, she ran her hands through the smooth tiles as certain people might run their hands through money: over and under, around her fingers. Sometimes she scooped up the tiles and let them fall, clicking into a slippery heap.

Now, though, all the tiles were laid out neatly, the board a vast diagram of words. She had only three letters left to play.

"Why do you make that sound?" her husband asked, looking up at her from where he sat on the couch.

"What sound?"

"That high sort of sigh. Like a whinny. Every time you think."

She laid her hand on her flannelly chest. She wore her nightgown even though it was only eight-thirty. She liked to change into it as soon as she got home from work. "Only when I play Scrabble, though, right? I don't do that when I'm thinking about other things." She imagined herself at Davis + Davis, whinnying, as Gordon put it, while she compiled quotes or made copies.

"Mostly during Scrabble. Sometimes when you sleep, too. Or balance the bank account." He thought for a moment, and then added, "When we're, you know...when I'm parking the Porsche in its garage."

She registered annoyance at another of Gordon's weird euphemisms for sex, but said, "Are you serious? Why is this the first I've heard of it?"

He shrugged, mumbled, "Seemed like a small thing. I'm really just curious if you're aware of it, is all," and reached for a handful of cashews from the side table bowl.

She said, "Small?"

"In the big scheme, yes."

She tried to concentrate on her three tiles, but could only hold her breath and try not to emit strange noises.

The faucet dripped. Her grandmother's antique mantel clock ticked. Gordon crunched his cashews.

Then there was the clatter of wooden Scrabble tiles, the soft thud of the board hitting the cushion next to Gordon, the rattle of the pews and heavy, wool-socked footfalls down the hallway. The slam of a door.

Gordon shook his head, wiped salty hands on his pants and stood, letting out a sigh of his own, though this one lower and less earnest than his wife's.

He knocked on the bathroom door. He called her name. He hated when she got like this. Things were humming along just fine. A nice Friday night with a Scrabble game, maybe a large pour of merlot later and the sports section before bed. But now. Now he'd spend his evening trying to appease her. Offering her wine. A foot massage. Specially smoothing out the Op-Ed and Cooking pages for her to peruse while they sat propped against their pillows, twin lamps throwing discs of light across their laps.

And she'd be reticent, reluctant. Making it clear she was doing him a favor by letting him wait on her.

Well, not this time.

He went to the hall closet and grabbed his heavy corduroy shirt, letting the hangers clang so she would know he meant business.

Gordon tramped three blocks to the Hot Spot, a grimy little outfit with a pool table, flashing trivia screens mounted to one end of the bar and rows of gleaming liquor bottles that, he suspected, never sat long enough to accumulate dust.

He drank two glasses of house red: a bitter, young blend of sub par grapes.

When he returned home sometime later, having lost badly at a trivia game to a couple who looked like they'd just ridden in on a truck bed filled with gasoline cans and snarly German Shepherds, he hung up his shirt and went right to the bedroom.

To his relief, she was asleep, whinnying. He turned to go into the bathroom when, in the light of the lamp she'd left on, something shiny caught his eye. He looked back at his wife. He stepped closer. He saw that her slumbering body was surrounded by right side up Scrabble tiles and that, above her head like a parenthesis, was the word, Sex. She'd taken a post-it, too, had drawn on it a long, black exclamation point and stuck it to the sheet to emphasize Sex!

He raked his hands through his hair, paced the creaky floor twice and came back to her. He plucked out the letters he needed and, across his own pillow, spelled, Weary and went to sleep on the couch.

I make my call. Covert. Standing in the laundry room with the dryer doing its airy spin, muffling my voice.

Later that afternoon I glance over both shoulders, then hop quickly into the car. I drive south, find the building along old railroad tracks that don’t get used much anymore.

Head bowed, I stride inside and give my name.

A woman named Tara greets me. She tells me to remove my coat and lie down on a cot, face up.

I do.

She shines a hot light in my face and proceeds to slather wax over the edges of my eyebrows. She yanks hard. I grin. I love the whole process. The warm paraffin, the sting, the cool lotion they rub in afterward. 

But I feel guilty too. The shameful waste of money. The gross connotation of a richy woman with so much time on her hands she can engage in such things. What’s so wrong with tweezers, after all?

Except, with tweezers, there’s no warmed bed, no soothing music or efficient ripping out of all the little hairs I hate. There’s only me, hunched over the sink, plucking under an insufficient bulb.

So I suffer the guilt. Pay with cash. Skulk out, large sunglasses covering my reddened skin, hoping the next six weeks pass quickly so I can do it all again.

Art in unexpected places. 

The wheel of a tractor. 

The way a girl's hair curls under her chin. 

How a boy looks when he, gap-toothed, laughs with abandon.

The reinvigoration of hope and how it surges through you like hot liquid. 

The sound of an acoustic guitar played well. 

The taste and waxy pull of honeycomb. 

Sun hitting the fire-y leaves of a Japanese Maple. 

Gleaming railroad tracks. 

Watching someone do what they're best at.

Art.

All of it.

I took Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat to a pumpkin patch yesterday. The sky was low and gray, the weather nondescript. No breeze. No raindrops. Nothing except a nip in the air.

And my children? They couldn't have been better. More cooperative. More precious.

It was quiet, the pumpkin patch, but there were a few other small groups. One was a mother with three toddlers. She was overwhelmed. Beyond overwhelmed. She reminded me of myself last Saturday. The abundant mud drove her nuts. Her kids could do nothing right. They were too loud, too exuberant, too dirty. While part of me wanted to send her telepathic messages to relax and remember that outside, on a farm for God's sake, was the perfect place for whooping and getting grimy, another part of me understood completely.

There are days (weeks, months) when you're at your limit and attempting an outing of that magnitude puts you over the edge. You do it, because you think the kids will enjoy it and that you should, after all, take them to a pumpkin patch in October. When what you really ought to do is find help so you can sit in a bean bag chair with a giant mug of something hot. Alone.

As I watched her, and listened to her (dear dog, did I have to listen to her) I felt so much on the other side of my foul mood Saturday. Like I actually had a choice to embrace my good fortune or not. Last weekend, there was no choice. I was at the bottom of a well. As close as I ever come to depression.

I've made no secret of the fact that weekends are hard for me. That J. and I often fall into a strange groove of deferring to the other or fighting for control of how the household will run. Last weekend was a little (okay a lot) of both. Less symbiotic and more judgmental and argumentative. That's not how either of us want to be. And then there are the kids, wanting and needing me, when what I crave is a day to move at my own pace.

One thing, too, I never considered about motherhood, when I was young and considering motherhood, was that it would turn me into a nag. Not even nagging J. really. While we have our issues, I don't think nagging is on his list of what bugs him about me. But nagging the kids. To brush their teeth and get dressed and eat and clear dishes and turn off lights and wash their own damn grapes because I'm tired of being in the kitchen. I never thought of myself as nit-picky and annoying, but that's often what I feel I've become. I hate that particular version of myself.

Maybe the woman at the pumpkin patch was thinking the same thing: I hate being like this, yet I can't stop because it's kind of a vortex that sucks you in and how will these kids survive if I don't protect them from the dirt and untied shoes and their own exhilaration?

All I know for sure is that the pumpkin patch did the opposite for me. It helped save me from that Angie. I got to hang with my kids and let them get grungey and yell and run. And I enjoyed every second of it.

I lose it this weekend. It doesn't happen often. But when it does it is ugly and sad and I weep and bury my head in my hands and insist that everything is too much. The kids! The chaos. The someone always needing something.

The animalness of Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat. The curious, babblyness of them. And I start to cry and have to go upstairs. But guilt sets in and I come down too soon and I am still not right. And am I scaring the children? I am scaring J., I know.

Fresh, hot tears and tension and anxiety.

Finally, I agree to drive around Seattle looking at ovens (we need one).

Talking to appliance sales people, one who is insufferable and one who tells me I don't look like I eat much fried chicken (if only she knew), but that if I ever DO want to make some, she has the perfect hood for the job. I feel better. More human. I almost, almost enjoy myself.

Back at home my throat closes in again. I try conversing with J. but have to stop because both kids are all over us. Talking and shrieking and laughing loudly. They're healthy, I think. They're fine. They're just boisterous. They're just 4 and 6. Why am I so ungrateful? Why can't I just enjoy this? Sometimes I do. Sometimes I look at Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat and think I made them. In my body. And I love them. And I'm so proud of who they are and what they've accomplished so far.

I clean bathrooms and we roast pumpkin seeds and this should be enough. But where is my serotonin? and please let this be hormonal and let it go away soon. Because I am not doing this very well and I am scaring everyone. Including myself.

Glitter from Kitty Cat's preschool art project swirled around me this morning as a breeze blew North. And it seemed as if the silver sparkles came from the umbrella I was simultaneously closing. I am dotted with it still. Picking off the tiny, shiny bits.

*****

A man sits next to me at the coffee shop, spreading out across two chairs and a table: Scissors, a spool of white thread and two jackets he has ripped apart and is, presumably, about to sew into something else.

I'm waiting for my friend with her baby. Slightly concerned that this isn't an appropriate place for a mother and her little one. It's hushed, with its laptops up like short walls, people talking quietly about grown up issues.

*****

I keep thinking of these words from a song: What of the wretched hollow, the endless in between? Pretty.

Words words words. I think about them too much. I move them around, pawns in my own personal chess game. I know I'm not the most skilled player, but I can't help myself, can't satisfy my greedy vocabulary and thirsty sentence structures.

The title of this post is an anagram of All Adither. And I thought it was appropriate.

*****

Fruit Bat has made a friend at school. A girl. They click. He even invited her to sit at his nut-free lunch table, something he's never done. She accepted. And they chewed their sandwiches and drank their milks side by side. I couldn't be happier.

To read the first part of this story, Greener Grass, you'll find it in my right sidebar under I Like To Write.

*****

Dave hadn't offered to pick up Tamara at the airport and she wouldn't have accepted anyway. She took a cab to Children's Hospital.

Once it spit her out on the curb in front of the lit, looming building, she stood there for a long time. The night air wreathing her arms and legs was warm. Every so often she heard the automatic doors behind her zip open and closed, saw adults walking slowly to their cars.

Could she even go in? When were visiting hours? But then, she was the other parent, the mother, after all.

She found a metal, backless bench and sat down. She still clutched the plastic bag full of Cornelia's black clothes. She laid her head on it and closed her eyes. She'd come all this way as fast as she could and now here she was, dawdling.

Okay, she told herself. Grow a spine and get in there. The worst they can do is turn you away until morning.

She finally stood, her heart dribbling erratically. The doors shushed open for her and the hard, white lights of the hospital made her squint, made her almost throw her arm over her eyes. She went to the information desk and was directed to the second floor, ICU.

ICU was a nurse's station surrounded by glass-walled rooms. It was all metal railings and rubber tubing and leggy carts on wheels--nothing remotely homey about the place. Tamara's stomach pinch inward until she thought she might double over. At the desk, she whispered "Joshua Marks".

The nurse, an overweight woman wearing a light polyester jacket covered in teddy bears, came around and showed her to the corner room.

And there was Dave, sleeping in a plastic chair, his chin resting on his chest. Next to him, hooked up like a car to a diagnostic machine, was Joshua, her baby. The nurse spoke quietly, telling Tamara they were keeping track of his ICP, Intra-cranial pressure, that so far it was elevated, but not so high that they had to drain it. Yet, she said. Yet.

Joshua's hair was plastered back against his skull, his sweet little skull that contained his sweet little brain that was always thinking about numbers, always wanting her to quantify everything. How many grains of sugar are in that teaspoon mom? How many feet between Earth and the sun? How many miles per hour am I walking right now? What about now?

His skin, it seemed to her, was a golden-green. Maybe it was the lights coming from behind a wooden slab on the wall, but he almost appeared to give off a glow. Radioactive, she thought.

Briefly, she wondered who was taking care of Caitlyn and Eli. Craig, she figured. She was sure they were fine, that Dave had arranged somewhere safe for them to be.

She asked the nurse, who still stood there writing in a chart what, exactly, had happened to Joshua.

"Aren't you Mom?" the nurse responded, looking at Tamara with raised brows.

"Yes, but I've been...away."

After a pause that Tamara felt was heavy with disapproval but was probably just the nurse reading up, she said, "Fall from a play structure. Closed head injury."

"What?"

"He was admitted late yesterday morning."

Tamara glanced up at the massive institutional clock above the nurse's station and saw it was a little after four. A weariness hit her that was so profound and deep she didn't know if she could keep standing. The phrase bone-tired passed through her mind.

Can I just...I need to lean." She propped herself against the wall near Dave, who still hadn't stirred.

The nurse left on her squishy soles, her teddy bears retreating.

Tamara cupped both hands over her mouth and nose, staring hard at Joshua and muttering, "Shit, shit, shit."

Dave grunted. His head lolled to the side. His lips smacked, then his eyes opened, small slits inside thick pouches of skin. "Tammy," he said, his voice sounding like he'd swallowed rocks.

As soon as he fully came to, though, stretching and rubbing the back of his neck, anger hardened his features and pulled down the corners of his mouth. "When did you get back?"

She refused to let herself feel affronted. She deserved this. And worse. "Just a little while ago," she said.

"Finally."

"I know."

"So this is what it took. Your child in a coma."

"Dave," she said, doing her best to keep the plaintive note from her voice. "Not now. Okay?" She went to Joshua's bedside and ruffled his bangs lightly with her fingers. Tears stung hot behind her eyeballs. She wanted to press her face to his, but didn't know if she should, if it could hurt him in any way.

"When?" he asked.

Her only desire right then was to look at Joshua, touch Joshua, absorb all this without Dave haranguing her. She knew she had it coming, but it was too much just then. Far too much.

Inhaling a large, serrated breath, she stared at her husband. She knew her eyes were red and floating and that she, herself, looked awful. She said, "Maybe later. Maybe never. Right now we just need to concentrate on Josh."

A cocktail of bitterness, regret and fear passed over his face and was so obvious Tamara considered going to him, offering him a hug. Or something. But she didn't. She stayed at Joshua's side, trying not to ask how this had happened, how he'd hurt himself so badly on Dave's watch, what the hell he'd been letting the kids do. Because blame, right then, wasn't going to help Joshua. Wasn't going to help anybody.

So she stayed quiet and let the damn tears slide down her face like burning trails of black lava.

Kitty Cat claims she's drawn a picture that's going to "save the world". The picture is actually her normal fare. Some colorful scribbles that maybe, possibly, resemble actual objects or people. Probably not something that's going to bring troops home from Afghanistan or find homes for people who have none. But I like her spirit.

I've been considering my absolute lack of world-saving spirit lately, and feeling like I need to do something about it. Use my powers for good rather than sloth. Once upon a time I thought helping animals was my calling. But then I had kids and, while I still adore cats and dogs and anything furry with big, pure eyes, my interest in plucking them all off the streets and finding them loving homes has waned. Why? I don't know. Maybe it's because I eat them now (just, you know, the livestock, not the pets). Or because I feel inundated with small creatures who need care.

My interest, for some reason, is veering toward teen girls. The haughtiest of our species. But also, I think, some of the most mired in painful confusion. Because if there's anything I remember about being a teen girl, it's confusion. There was no internet for information back then, in the mid-80s. But even with all the websites and forums they have now, being a teen girl has still gotta be hard. Harder?

There's this squeezing burden and they don't yet understand that someday they'll feel more or less okay. That they don't have to be as skinny as the absurdly retouched Ralph Lauren model or have pristine complexions or be the most creative and brilliant to be loved, to love themselves. Because in that prickly maw that is twelve to twenty-two or so, it all seems hostile and a little scary.

Who knows. Maybe, one day, I'll teach a writing class for girls, where they can express their fears and bewilderment. That's what I think I'd like anyway.

*****

I was still a girl when I went to Michigan State 20+ years ago. My first days there were dizzying. I'd come from a tiny town to this giant Big Ten school and I was beyond excited. But also nauseated. Overwhelmed. My roommate, a brash, popular Chicagoan, and I did not, from the get go, hit it off. Still I muddled through a few weeks, a hanger-on, pretending her friends were mine, though I didn't like them in the least.

Then I met Mel, who lived across the hall from me. She was a petite Korean, my physical opposite. But we were drawn to each other and soon developed the kind of familiarity that I think only happens in college, when you live together, when you come back from class, dump your backpack in the other's room and talk and talk about everything. Everything you were too bashful to talk to your high school girlfriends about. And it opens up new worlds. Worlds in which you realize other girls think about the same things, worry about sex and boys and pregnancy and drugs and grades and body hair in the same way. And this in itself is an excellent, crucial reason to go to college and, if you can afford it, live on campus.

Anyway, Mel and I were inseparable through all four years at MSU. And afterward, we still saw each other often.

Our friendship withstood a lot. An unbloggable lot, but eventually began to fray. In our mid-twenties, in the throes of a horrible breakup from my boyfriend, she and I broke up too.

It's been more than fifteen years since we spoke or communicated in any way. During our time apart, I've thought of her almost daily, thought of those long hours, sitting in our warm dorm rooms while Michigan snow swirled and howled around the ugly brick buildings where we lived, talking or, as we called it, bullshitting, avoiding studying, listening to new music, coveting, criticizing, comparing. Growing closer. Until we weren't anymore.

And now, this week, we've reconnected through Facebook. The grand social experiment that is Facebook. We've been emailing furiously, long, long letters attempting to catch each other up on so much missed time.

I'm surprised, I will admit, by how happy it's made me, by how healing this communication is. I'm reminded, too, how important the girls in my life are. I regularly, in this space, slobber all over Tricia and Stacy, whom I love in the non-judgmental, mature way of grown women who've been around the track a few times. Which is to say, except for some stupid stumblings on my part, we respect and admire each other. But even the women who aren't quite so central right now, I learn a lot from them. They make my life a much more hospitable place. And it causes me to wonder if some of those friendships from the days of Depeche Mode and The Cure could be woven into what I have now.

I went to a baptism on Sunday. Which required me to step foot in a Catholic Church and take part in mass (where taking part means standing there with my arms crossed, not singing and not taking the little wafer thingy or drinking from the communal (hello swine flu!) glass of wine.

It was all for a good cause though: a very precious to me family for whom I would attend many masses. And that says a lot.

My imagination was captured by a woman standing off to the side, wearing bright pink. Her hair was white and she wore oval glasses that, when she looked up, turned opaque with the reflected sun coming in through a massive skylight. She took many deep breaths and exhaled through her mouth, as if the whole endeavor was stressful or thought-provoking or tedious.

I chose to believe that someone she loved was ill or hurt and the harder she prayed, the better the chance this person would recover. It was all on her.

What I want to know from you, if there are Believers who read this blog, is how? How can you cast aside science and logic and believe? And what is it you think happens after death and do you have any hard evidence or is your faith a gut feeling? I'm not being facetious. I just really want to know. Because I was in this church and surrounded by people who feel very differently about religion than I do. 

And I don't understand.

Convert me.

Along a street in Seattle sits a hairdryer. I saw it today, as I parked my car. It made me laugh. 

A piece of tape stuck to its base said $10. But before spotting that, I thought the hairdryer was free. And I wished I had the audacity to tug it down the streets by its cord, scooting it up to interesting backdrops (hairdryer in the shipyard, hairdryer outside Starbucks, hairdryer at a stoplight). Of course, I'm not quirky enough to actually do that. Or to, better yet, find a model: someone in curlers who would sit beneath it and read a magazine in all those unlikely places.

There are a lot of things I wish I had the audacity to do. To travel to more exotic locales with small children. J. wants to go back to Africa. I want to do the South of France, parts of Asia. But I can't stomach the idea just now. Michigan, California and New York are hard enough.

To stay out all night, at least one more time in my adult life. The weather a non-entity. Only dark, dark, dark. Maybe a few stars. Possibly a moon. Some cocktails. Music. Lots and lots of music. Coming home and not caring that a six-year-old will wake me in two or three hours.

To, at the age of forty, learn to play an instrument (guitar!). To wear heels (hello doorway, meet my forehead).

To be more daring in general. To not mind who watches, who judges. To do whatever it takes to get the shot, write the book, protect the kids and snatch every moment of joy and fun I can before it's all over.

As of today, I've been married to this man for eight years. 

I love this picture, flawed lighting and all. His expression is so him. Observant. A hint of bemusement. Wheels turning in that head.

Our wedding ceremony was tiny. Just our immediate families amid the red rocks in Sedona. It rained that day, but stopped in time for our small gathering, for us to read the vows we'd written ourselves.

I was so happy with him. So ready to be married.

And he, J., has been unwavering. A rock. A hard worker, committed, compassionate, earnest, smart smart smart without being condescending, and he has these dark blue eyes that, when they're happy, can liquefy brick walls.

Happy Anniversary, J. You've brought me to a place that is incredible in its complexity, delicacy and depth.

Her yellow hair blows forward and back like the long petals of a sunflower. She twirls and bobs, her thin frame dancing to its own music. Music that is the breeze and school children playing and distant wind chimes. Birds peck at her. Ants skitter up her legs. But still she smiles. Sunny and swaying.

I am at the point in my week when I'm weary. I've been with children--a couple of them mine, many others not--for the better part of forever. I've watched Kitty Cat wobble around in high-heeled plastic dress up shoes that make her look both adorable and ridiculous. I've endured many, many outbursts and screams and tears and sibling fights. Maybe a few kicks to the head and elbows in the gut as well.

I've loved Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat with so much ferocity I've feared my heart would rupture and ooze, and detested them with such vehemence I questioned why I had them in the first place. I've baked a few treats for my brood and prepared dozens of meals and snacks.

I've met deadlines. I've gnashed my teeth over my manuscript, always sitting there like a soft corpse, a still warm duck that has just been shot from the sky (and I'm sorry, you must be tired of hearing about it). I've worked happily on my newer projects, trying to ignore the voice asking why I think I can make these ideas fly. Why bother?

I've had a nice dinner out with an amazing friend who will listen to anything I spew in her direction without judging. Or, at least, without letting on that she's judging.

I've engaged in some good conversations with J., sitting on different sides of the living room after the kids have gone to bed, and we've neglected each other as well, two tugboats steering around the other, just trying to get work done.

I've rediscovered the awesomeness that is a rice sock (sock + rice + 2 minutes in the microwave) and how it will keep a person warm for hours.

*****

Fruit Bat has been outdoing himself after school (and sometimes before) lately. Today, I picked him up and I could read him, as we were walking away, and I saw it was going to be one of those afternoons. The kind where he scowls and kicks and refuses all rational pleas to do things like get in the car and come home with us.

I tried all sorts of ploys until I could only come up with starting the engine, pulling next to him and telling him to hop in, hoping to shock him a little by proving that I was serious about getting underway. He refused and ended up running down the side of the road crying and screaming while I coasted into the next pull off. It was ugly.

And now I'm ready for...what? A roadtrip? A chocolate cake? A bottle of champagne, a piece of paper and a pen so I can drink the wine, write a note that says, "I made it through. I'm so happy. I'm so miserable. If you read this, please email and let me know when I can come for a visit." and toss the whole thing into the ocean.

(Seems I'm writing often about tossing things into the ocean. Hmm.)

I spent the weekend in Portland, the land of Quirk, hanging with one of my best friends as she turned 40. Which essentially means we walked around the city eating copious amounts of food, taking pictures (mostly me), ordering expensive bottles of wine (mostly her boyfriend) and buying clothes (mostly her).

They were cheering. But, God, it was eerie–-the rise and fall of so many voices. It reminded me of the Nazi propaganda movies we used to watch in history class. Which is not to say that I'm comparing football to Nazi Germany, but just that the ethereal emission of so many people's approval had the same sound it did in those little films. Those creepy little films.

Back.

Last night I couldn't sleep. It always happens if I go to bed hungry (or if I let my mind hold and fondle certain subjects at a late hour).

So I got out of bed and stuffed myself with Fig Newtons, and maybe a Clif Bar too, and I read one of my favorite blogs, The Rejecter. And on The Rejecter, I heard again how difficult short story collections are to sell. And I imagined myself chucking it all to the wind, tossing each page of my project into the Puget Sound and watching the tide take them. 

Except that realistically I would place my fiction files in a seldom-looked at folder on my laptop. Which is far too boring to befit the symbolic letting-go of my dreams.

Who cares, you say. Just write what you love. Write for yourself. Write for art's sake. Right. Yes. I agree. Except also, screw the fucking art. I want to be published and I want to be read and I want to make at least some money doing it.

So I posted this photo of a cheerily lit alley to make myself feel better. It's Oddfellows in Capitol Hill. And it helps. Just a little.